In Wisconsin, fall, 1984, opened with a very special celebration. Women's studies scholars marked the tenth anniversary of a unique document with the prosaic title, Final Report of University of Wisconsin System Task Force on Women's Studies. In this report were guideposts for building women's studies programs throughout the fourth largest public university system in the United States. What has been remarkable about the difficult task is the way in which women have used the fact of a university system to reinforce one another's efforts through encouragement, trading of strategies, and cooperation, including lobbying for an unprecedented systemwide librarian position in women's studies. In the competitive world of higher education, this is not the norm for new program development. Furthermore, the campaign to secure support for a UW System Librarian-at-Large for Women's Studies had as its goal an office that would not only serve the developing programs but also offer a new means of encouraging and sustaining associations among the programs. The University of Wisconsin System is the result of a 1971 shotgun marriage between the former University of Wisconsin and Wisconsin State University systems, arranged by the governor in response to what he saw as excessive bickering between the two systems--especially at budget time-and ineffective oversight by the state's higher education coordinating commission. Although Wisconsin citizens outside the affected systems remained thunderingly indifferent to the issue of merger, the governor forced through the legislature the abolition of the coordinating commission and the establishment of a single Central Administration over a new federation of public universities. In its current configuration, the University of Wisconsin System is composed of thirteen two-year liberal arts centers, ranging in size from about 295 to 2,036 students; eleven four-year universities ranging from 2,179 to 11,804 students; and two doctoral institutions, UWMilwaukee and UW-Madison, of 26,213 and 44,860 students respectively. With merger a fait accompli, the new Central Administration scrambled to create the means to manage the System. At the same time, a drastic shortfall in projected numbers of students led to a destructive round of faculty layoffs of both tenured and nontenured faculty; and an independent Central Administration foray into cutting moribund Master of Science in Teaching programs inadvertently compounded the feelings of betrayal among faculty. Against this backdrop, women across the new system saw a way to make it work for them. In 1971, the newly established UW-Madison Association of Faculty Women convened a meeting of interested UW System faculty. From this and subsequent meetings emerged the Coordinating Council of Women in Higher Education, a statewide coalition that was forged by, and in turn fostered, faculty-staff associations at System campuses.1 These associations lobbied for women's equality in all phases of university life-as employees, as students, and, notably, in the curriculum. University women in Wisconsin as well as throughout the country had grasped the fact that political activism leading to a revolutionary