Ethnic, Women's, and African American Studies Majors in U.S. Institutions of Higher Education

LTHOUGH IN THEORY most university courses deal with material that concerns both male and female students, most universities also have specific programs in Like American studies, peace studies, black studies, and now ethnic studies, the women's studies programs came into being primarily as a result of the civil rights movement in the late sixties. But even though these programs were created for political purposes, there are other more subtle but nonetheless significant reasons for their continuing existence and popularity. Today I'll try to concentrate on the educational aspects of women's studies: what purpose other than political do their curricula serve? Most of these programs consist of one or two survey courses, supplemented by courses about women from a variety of humanistic and social science disciplines, not necessarily or even usually offered by members of the faculty who specialize in women's studies. Thus inevitably the women's studies curriculum lacks the structure of scientific or linguistic disciplines, where knowledge generally has to be imparted in a predictable sequence; in many cases, the student herself must determine the focus and structure of studies within the program. I speak of the concentrator in women's studies as a her not simply to be even-handed. At least in my experience, most of the majors in and takers of women's studies have been women, just as the majority of students in black studies programs are black. Clearly these students want to learn about themselves, and their culture. But the courses also let them feel, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that they have an advantage over the minority takers of those courses (that is, males), simply because they are what they are by nature, female. Thus women's studies programs allow women to get together to discuss common interests and concerns. Sometimes these programs are linked with women's centers; at the very least they provide a physical meeting place, usually somewhat informal and homey in aspect. But since women's studies programs also exist at women's colleges, like Bryn Mawr and Wellesley, they New Literary History, 1990, 21: 799-815

Diving (Back) intothe Wreck: Finding,Transforming, and Reimagining Women'sStudies and Sexuality Studies in theAcademy Breanne Fahs We are, I am, you are / by cowardice or courage / the one who finds our way / back to this scene / carrying a knife, a camera / a book of myths I in which / our names do not appear. —Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"1 As a sexuality researcher who has traveled with a formal, institu tional "women's studies" label since the start of college—first as an undergraduate at Occidental College's women's studies/gender stud ies department (1997-2001), then as a graduate student in women's studies at the University of Michigan (2001-2006), and now as a ten ured professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State Uni versity (2006-present)—my formal ties to academic feminism owe much to the work of those who blazed that path for me. Scholars of my generation—those who have always seen women's studies in the academy as possible and available—often forget the hard-won bat tles, challenges, and struggles that gave birth to women's studies as a field of study. As we now embark on the challenge to decide where women's studies and sexuality studies should reside within the acad emy— as separate fields, as joint programs, or as fields tied with ethnic studies and American studies—the privileges and dangers of this conversation deserve assessment. feministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 496 Forum:W/G/SStudies 497 While interviewing radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson several years ago, she advised caution about a formalized association between women's studies and sexuality studies.2 She warned, aptly, that fusing women's studies and sexuality studies too closely could lead to the implicit pairing of women and their bodies (and men and their minds) that feminists had long fought to negate. We had been discussing some shifts at the university—the move from women's studies to gender studies and conversations about further collapsing women's studies into "something else"—and she expressed concern that, even though the political alliances between women, gender, and sexuality studies remained strong, the linguistic connection between the three would create political assumptions about women and bodies that could be difficult to shake. This advice hit particularly hard for me as a sexuality scholar in women's studies, as my entire career has inces santly fused sexuality, embodiment, radical feminism, and women's studies together. The road to renaming, reclassifying, and regrouping women's studies and its allies is fraught with messiness, intellectual and ide ological struggle, personal passions, and hard-earned political strat egizing. With so many having a stake in this process, the priorities of administrators (concerned with cost-cutting, student retention, and numbers), chairs and directors (fighting to keep women's studies and its goals alive), faculty (struggling with pedagogical and political ten sions, particularly about intersectionality, not to mention keeping their jobs), and students (wanting a recognizable, "legitimate," and provocative course of study) too often stand at odds.3 In my experi ence, at least four key areas in this debate provoke the most discus sion, each of which I outline briefly here: (1) the politics of naming; (2) the intellectual risks and benefits of "ghetto" studies; (3) shifting def initions of "social justice" as an umbrella term; and (4) the continu ing risks of institutionalizing radical, activist, or politically significant social movements. Every college and university I have joined has had numerous discussions about name changes in women's studies. At Occidental College, a decision was made to link both women's studies and gender studies, while the University of Michigan (after a heated multi-month debate among faculty and graduate students in 2004) decided to retain the name "women's studies." Arizona State University's Tempe 498 Forum:WIGIS Studies campus recently transitioned their women's studies program into the School of Social Transformation, while West campus (my current home) has embarked on a series of conversations about eliminating both women and gender studies and ethnic studies in favor of a larger social justice program, mostly in the name of "saving" the program from...

In 1977, a decade after the first women's studies courses appeared across the United States, the National Women's Studies Association was founded to promote and sustain "the educational strategy of a breakthrough in consciousness and knowledge" that would "transform" individuals, institutions, relationships, and, ultimately, the whole of society.' Insisting that the academic is political and the cognitive is affective, the NWSA's constitution clearly reflected the influence of the women's liberation movement on women's studies. Research and teaching at all educational levels and in all academic and community settings would be not

One of the most significant changes that occurred in U.S. higher education in the second half of the twentieth century was the advent of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary programs and departments in Studies, Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, and for other ethnic minority groups. (1) One of the unique aspects of this important educational change was that in many places these programs arose as a result of protests and demands coming from the students themselves. Emerging out of social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, these new programs changed the face of U.S. higher education and also informed the educational changes that occurred at colleges and universities in other parts of the world as well. (2) Students, who in the early 1960s played a significant role in the nonviolent direct action protests associated with the Civil Rights Movement, soon turned their attention and energies to the social and educational conditions on college campuses and demanded significant change. The connections between the emergence of the Free Speech in Berkeley, California, and the various campaigns for student and the Civil Rights Movement were direct. Many students who had been active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights groups joined with the members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to bring about the end to parietal regulations (in loco parentis rules), greater choice in courses of study, the end of university participation in military research, as well as the hiring of women and minority faculty members and creation of and ethnic studies programs. (3) The recent scholarly research on gender and the social protest movements of the 1960s, however, has added important qualifications and contradictions to the story as previously told and understood. In particular, the research on the contributions of African American women to the Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, and Power movements has raised a number of important issues about the emergence of Studies and Women's Studies programs that have yet to be fully explained. (4) In this essay I will explore some of the reasons why black nationalists in Studies programs and radical feminists in the Women's Studies movement initially ignored the experiences of African American women and rendered them invisible. I will also examine some of the responses of African American feminists to the racist practices they encountered in the movement in general, and to their invisibility in the Women's Studies curricula in the late 1960s and 1970s in particular. (5) BLACK POWER, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN Sara Evans' Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, published in 1979, was one of the first works to make explicit the connections between the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements. While some feminist critics have pointed to the continuities between the campaigns for women's following World War II and the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement, Evans documented the disillusionment on the part of women who had been active in civil rights campaigns with the overt sexism they experienced in New Left groups and their increasing demands for women's (6) While black and white women assumed prominent roles in the antiwar movement and campus protests, they used these experiences to further the cause of liberation. Aileen Hernandez, former union official and member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, civil rights activists Pauli Murray, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Flo Kennedy, and politician Shirley Chisholm we re among the African American women who served as founding members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966. (7) Beginning in 1967 Studies programs and departments were formed at many colleges and universities and were considered the academic structures that emerged from the various movements for Black Power. …

The call for contributions to this special forum on Studies in 'Other' Locations arrived in my inbox a scant two weeks after I had begun my new job as a beginning assistant professor of English and director of the women's studies program at a relatively small (more than 6,000 students) regional state university in the South. Though only two weeks into the job, I had a sneaking suspicion that I would have much to say on this topic. Now, with one completed semester under my belt, my suspicions have been confirmed. My remarks here will center on some of the issues that arise from directing a one-person program, and will attempt to unpack a statement I have jokingly made several times in the last several months: namely, that I am Women's Studies at my institution. At the institution where I work, the women's studies program is relatively new, having existed for less than a decade. Structurally, the program is housed within a large department called Languages, Literature, and Communication (LLC for short), which is also my tenure home as an assistant professor of English. The program consists of an undergraduate minor; currently, students pursuing the minor must take Introduction to Women's Studies plus twelve additional hours of upper-division cross-listed courses, of which there are nine from which to choose. The Introduction to Women's Studies course was created only two years ago; it was taught for the first time in fall 2003, and was taught again (by me) in the Fall 2004 semester. On my campus, then, Women's Studies is a late arrival, and much work remains to be done in terms of raising awareness of the field in general, and the minor in particular. Now that I have arrived on campus, some of my colleagues can breathe a sigh of relief. The faculty members who served on the committee that hired me, as well as other people who continue to support the program through serving on the program's advisory committee, feel good about the fact that the torch has been passed to a more permanent keeper, so to speak, and that it did not go out while they were tending it. From my perspective, however, hiring a new director is only the first step: the women's studies program is at a crossroads, I would argue. I am eager, and a little anxious, to see what sort of material, as opposed to moral, support I will receive as I settle into this position and attempt to solidify and expand the program. One of the things that I appreciate about my department is that there is a clear sense that the person who directs the women's studies program should be a specialist in that area. To my mind, the fact that the chair of

The personal is apolitical: Neoliberalism and academic capitalism in U.S. women's studies programs

What women's studies programs do that mainstreaming can't

Editors' Note Red Washburn and Brianne Waychoff This issue Solidão hits during a critical moment transnationally. It lands during a global pandemic, with calamitous events from Trump and Bolsonaro worldwide. However, as Arundhati Roy states, "The pandemic is a portal" (Roy 2021). This time has allowed us to reimagine life and solidarity in order to resuscitate them during social isolation. It is a clarion call to reorganize life to repair ubiquitous underemployment and unemployment, inadequate health care, inhumane incarceration, sexual harassment against women, anti-Black police violence, trans dehumanization, totalitarian regimes, environmental destruction, Indigenous genocide, and the defunding of Black, race, ethnic studies; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; and LGBTQ studies. Of particular alarm is the predicament facing Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon—the loss of life, culture, nature, and habitat—as a result of the climate crisis and corporate wealth. The possibilities of the portal include a recentering of marginality, for example, Black and Indigenous women's and trans people's lives and words. The gateway from one way of life to the next demands we move beyond thought to practice freedom, a revolution that begins with decolonizing our minds and curricula as well as a massive restructuring of social institutions that shifts priorities to people over profit. The guest editors of this issue, along with the writers and artists who contributed to it, address many of these topics in-depth, thereby expanding the scholarship robustly. We are grateful to the guest editors for doing this issue, the first issue to come out during our editorship. We want to thank WSQ, including the editorial board, the poetry, prose, and art editors, and editorial assistants. In particular, we want to extend a hearty thank-you the editorial assistants, Amy Iafrate, Alex Johnson, Joe Goodale, and Ivy Bryan, all of whom worked [End Page 12] tirelessly on communicating with the scholars, writers, and artists to make this issue happen. In addition, we want to extend a generous thank-you to Dána-Ain Davis, Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, and administrative staff Eileen Liang and Jennifer Bae for providing WSQ with internships in feminist publishing for graduate students in women's and gender studies at the City University of New York. Our partnership has significantly enriched the quality of the journal for our feminist communities across CUNY and beyond. We are greatly indebted to the Feminist Press for all its help with scheduling, copyediting, and distributing our issues, especially to Interim Executive Director Lauren Rosemary Hook and Assistant Editor Nick Whitney. We also wish to thank Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities Kendra Sullivan, as well as Jordan Lord and Sampson Starkweather for collaborating with us and building a new vision for the journal, including aiding with publicity, administrative matters, and translations for this issue. We acknowledge the support we have received from the National Women's Studies Association, namely President Kaye Wise Whitehead and Interim Executive Director Jen Ash, as well as the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). Lastly, we want to thank each other as general editors of WSQ for navigating a difficult editorial transition during austerity and doing so with feminist generosity. We are looking forward to celebrating the legacy of WSQ, its fiftieth anniversary hitting during our leadership, and creating a sustainable future for it at the City University of New York. Red Washburn Kingsborough Community College Director of Women's and Gender Studies Associate Professor of English City University of New York Brianne Waychoff Borough of Manhattan Community College Associate Professor of Speech Communications and Theatre Arts Gender and Women's Studies Program City University of New York Works Cited Roy, Arundhati. 2021. "The Pandemic Is a Portal." Haymarket Books (blog). 23 April 2020. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/130-arundhati-roy-the-pandemic-is-a-portal. Google Scholar Copyright © 2021 Red Washburn and Brianne Waychoff

This essay explores ways in which multiculturalism is institutionally produced in a small liberal arts college. When the offices of admissions or student life deploy the categories multiculturalism and diversity, they are likely to seek academic expertise from humanities or African American, Latino, or Women's Studies Programs, the disciplines most closely matching identity slots on the college applicationforms. In doing so, they recreate the presupposed categories of person that shape U.S. perceptions of race. This leaves little room for an anthropological perspective that examines the bases on which concepts of person and social identities are constructed.

This chapter explores the tremendous possibilities of coalitions and collaboration between women's studies and women in science and engineering (WISE) initiatives. At this time, with few exceptions, WISE programs tend not to be centrally located in feminist science studies or women's studies programs and departments. Women and gender studies programs, in turn, have too few allies in science and engineering fields. Thus, while all three fields—WISE programs, feminist science studies, and women/gender/sexuality studies—can arguably be said to be thriving, there is little interaction between them. The chapter suggests that WISE programs can yield impressive results if they engaged more fully with feminist work in the social sciences and the humanities.

Recently many women's studies program directors have come to regard nation-wide trend toward revision of curriculum as a threat to health of their programs. The core though its form may vary from school to school, generally consists of those courses a college or university deems necessary for graduation. These courses, which can vary from year to year, decade to decade, reflect political and cultural biases of curriculum committees institute them. The current sweep of curriculum revision is generally conceded to have begun with Harvard's decision in 1975 to institute a new curriculum of general education courses required of all students. The last ten years have seen hundreds of colleges attempting to revise structure and content of required courses; those who did not move to do so in late 1970's or early 1980's are likely to begin contemplating revision in light of February, 1985, report of Association of American Colleges, which found American college and university curricula lacking in coherence. Clearly, if women's studies program directors do not alert themselves to implications of large-scale revision, white, male academic power structure may be tempted to exclude from curriculum those courses are too often regarded as marginal, narrow, supplementary, or clearly elective in nature-for instance, most women's studies courses. Our years of experience in dealing with academic patriarchy should not only alert us to dangers of revision but also reveal to us strategies for turning danger into opportunity. Core curriculum revision does, in fact, present enormous opportunities for women's studies. Inclusion among offerings leads to higher course enrollments from a broader student population. Core inclusion also carries with it a validation within academic community is equally valuable. William Bennett, Secretary of Education, and supporter of revision, has often been quoted as saying such a process represents a return to idea that some things are more important to know than others. Bennett's words can serve as a call to supporters of traditional, elitist, androcentric curriculum-or they can afford curricular revisionists an opportunity to validate newer courses of study that, like women's studies, broaden students' perspectives. Clearly, Bennett, who-while still chair of National Endowment for Humanities--issued a report castigating American colleges and universities for failing to give their students an adequate education in western culture and traditions, finds suspect curricular innovations like women's studies and ethnic studies. His claim American college students are presently being ripped off and his advocacy of a curriculum preserves traditional culture and offers students the best have given a new impetus to conservative, elitist forces who are only too eager to restore glory of standard presixties curriculum, which excluded study of women and their achievements. My recent experience with revision at Eastern Connecticut State University suggests even when statement of philosophy includes noble mission of equipping students to deal with a rapidly changing,

Feminist thought and the women’s movement have had a major influence over most of the disciplines and many institutions of higher education. Women's Studies has matured as a field of study, and programs and departments may be found throughout the United States and around the world that combined high academic standards and critical feminist perspectives. Nonetheless, Women's Studies programs continue to be widely criticized and many are under-resourced. This article describes the successful efforts of one Women's Studies program to develop a rigorous multi-disciplinary curriculum, collaborate with departments and colleges across the university, and build ties with community organization through strategies of expansion, gender mainstreaming, and internationalization.

In the minds of many feminists it is still an open question whether women's studies in the academy is a contradiction in terms.1 For many reasons, one of which is that education is big business, the educational establishment is one of the most conservative of all social institutions in America. Large campuses like ours in the California state university and college system tend to be administered like businesses, accountable to superiors and the taxpaying public for a product turned out with maximum efficiency and minimum cost. The values of the managers-hierarchy, competition, clear vertical chains of command-are quite antithetical to the ideas and practices valued by the second wave of American feminism. Furthermore, many people who teach on university campuses subscribe to the most conservative justification for higher education: that their function is the transmission of static bodies of knowledge to maturing generations. When we moved out of the women's movement and onto university campuses more than a decade ago, we were right to be skeptical about our ability to change the institution of higher education and right to be worried about the institution's ability to coopt us. Bitter as the struggle has been, I think that a number of central issues still have not been resolved. That we have brought significant change to the campus is true, but we have not been permitted to do it our way. We have not sold out, but we have not won, either. In the eighties, our situation has been made even more difficult by the political climate and the difficulty that the women's movement is having retaining its commitment to sexual politics.2 The experience of the Long Beach Women's Studies Program may be idiosyncratic in important ways, but it also raises a number of interesting general questions about the institutionalization of women's studies. As Sherna Gluck and Sondra Hale make clear, from the beginning the university objected to our attachment to collectivity in the governance of the program and in our teaching styles. But administrators and faculty were also extremely antagonistic to the content of women's studies courses, an issue that has received surprisingly little attention and one that I think may be central to our continued development as a new discipline in the academy. Administrators and faculty did not initially seem to consider women's studies subversive, perhaps because they failed to take seriously the intellectual enterprise in which we were engaged. Few of them in the early seventies saw women's studies as anything more than a marginally defensible intellectual exercise. They thought we were disruptive, and consciousness raising quickly became their euphemism for inherent anti-intellectual tendencies in women's studies. As we developed the women's studies curriculum, we found our academic credentials constantly at issue. We learned to develop a bemused tolerance for colleagues on committees who were capable of uncovering evidence of functional illiteracy in simple typographical errors; we smiled through the speeches of colleagues who, in the intellectual vacuum presented by women's studies, were only too happy to offer expert advice. But if we thought that what our colleagues wanted to s e was the development of women's studies, we were wrong. Our most rudimentary efforts to add compensatory information for and about women to university curricula were often met with disdain and open antagonism. Only later, as women's studies grew, was this Hale/Sievers 43

Contradictions, and a glimpse of utopia: Daily life in a university women's studies program

This paper is a response to the problematic relation between men's studies and women's studies; it is also a particular response to Harry Brod's discussion of the theoretical need for men's studies programs in his article “The New Men's Studies: From Feminist Theory to Gender Scholarship.” The paper argues that a male feminist would be more effective in a women's studies program, that the latter already includes research about the experiences of both males and females. Although future research on both genders is needed, the paper argues that there does not currently exist a gap in theory or in practice in women's studies programs, as Brod claims. The paper argues in favor of both men and women working together to strengthen and broaden women's studies programs in existence and encourages the creation of more programs and more study of gender issues.