Sexual Harassment Policy, Bureaucratic Audit Culture, and Women's Studies

Abstract

In an era of waning public funding and growing assumptions within the academy that gender has been integrated into curricula, Women's Studies Programs work under the monitoring eye of a corporate model of budget-slicing, bureaucratic, audit-culture accountability. Programs come under increasing assault on the grounds of obsolescence and cost-effectiveness. This article documents the institutional setting of a Women's Studies Program under threat and traces how program faculty have attempted to counter antifeminist obsolescence and individualist rhetoric, using as an example the struggle over institutional sexual harassment policy and its successor at the authors' state university. In participating in re-writing policy, the authors discovered possibilities and blockades in professors' and students' attempts to position the Program as more than a curricular remedy. We reveal the limitations of valuing departments solely on quantitative grounds and insist that feminist work in transforming academic culture is far from complete.