The Women's Movement and the Politics of Change at a Women's College: Jill Ker Conway at Smith, 1975-1985 (Routledgefalmer Studies in Higher Education)

ROUTLEDGEFALMER STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION Edited by Philip G. Altbach Monan Professor of Higher Education Lynch Sch...

Author: David A. Greene

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ROUTLEDGEFALMER STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Edited by

Philip G. Altbach Monan Professor of Higher Education Lynch School of Education, Boston College

A ROUTLEDGEFALMER SERIES

ROUTLEDGEFALMER STUDIES

IN

HIGHER EDUCATION

PHILIP G. ALTBACH, General Editor FROM HERE TO UNIVERSITY Access, Mobility, and Resilience Among Urban Latino Youth Alexander Jun

BARELY THERE, POWERFULLY PRESENT Thirty Years of U.S. Policy on International Higher Education Nancy L. Ruther

SCHOLARSHIP UNBOUND Assessing Service as Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure Kerry Ann O’Meara

A CALL TO PURPOSE Mission Centered Change at Three Liberal Arts Colleges Matthew Hartley

BLACK STUDENT POLITICS Higher Education and Apartheid from SASO to SANSCO, 1968-1990 Saleem Badat

A PROFILE OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE PROFESSORATE, 1975–2000 Charles Outcalt

RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN PRIVATE RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES Daniel Rodas A DREAM DEFERRED? Examining the Degree Aspirations of African-American and White College Students Deborah Faye Carter

POWER AND POLITICS IN UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE Organization and Change at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Imanol Ordorika UNIVERSITY AUTONOMY IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION SINCE PERESTROIKA Olga B. Bain

STATE GOVERNMENTS AND RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES A Framework for a Renewed Partnership David J. Weerts

THE CALL FOR DIVERSITY Pressure, Expectation, and Organizational Response in the Postsecondary Setting David J. Siegel

FEDERALISM AND LÄNDER AUTONOMY The Higher Education Policy Network in the Federal Republic of Germany Cesare Onestini

SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION IN AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES External Assistance and National Needs Damtew Teferra

RESILIENT SPIRITS Disadvantaged Students Making it at an Elite University Latty Lee Goodwin

PHILANTHROPISTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION Institutional, Biographical, and Religious Motivations for Giving Gregory L. Cascione

I PREFER TO TEACH An International Comparison of Faculty Preference for Teaching over Research James JF Forest

THE RISE AND FALL OF FU REN UNIVERSITY, BEIJING Catholic Higher Education in China John Shujie Chen

THE VIRTUAL DELIVERY AND VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION OF POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION Daniel M. Carchidi

UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIPS MIT, CAMBRIDGE, AND TOKYO Storytelling across Boundaries Sachi Hatakenaka

IN

THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGE AT A WOMEN’S COLLEGE Jill Ker Conway at Smith, 1975–1985

David A. Greene

ROUTLEDGEFALMER NEW YORK & LONDON

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1/21/04

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Published in 2004 by RoutledgeFalmer 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. . All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greene, David A. (David Andrew) The women's movement and the politics of change at a women's college : Jill Ker Conway at Smith, 1975–1985 / David A. Greene. p. cm. — (RoutledgeFalmer studies in higher education) ISBN 0-415-94832-0 1. Conway, Jill K., 1934– 2. Smith College—Presidents—Biography. 3. College presidents—United States—Biography. 4. Women college presidents—United States—Biography. 5. Feminism and higher education—United States—Case studies. I. Title. II. Series. LD7152.7.C66G74 2003 305.4'0994'092—dc22 2003020802 ISBN 0-203-46369-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-47195-4 (Adobe eReader Format)

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Chapter 1: A Second Century and a New Beginning

1

Chapter 2: New Leadership, New Challenges

15

Chapter 3: A Resistant Faculty

35

Chapter 4: Studying Women’s Lives

73

Chapter 5: The Substance and Style of Leadership

97

Appendix

113

Notes

117

Bibliography

137

Index

143

v

Acknowledgments

This book is based on a study that was conducted for my doctoral thesis at Harvard University. I am indebted to members of my dissertation committee, Professors Judith Block McLaughlin, Patricia Albjerg Graham, and Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, for their wise and judicious counsel. The study was only possible because of the generosity of its participants and their willingness to share their insights and stories. Jill Conway was especially gracious in giving her time and in being open to hearing a range of perspectives on her presidency. My greatest debt is owed to my remarkable wife, Carolyn. Her patience and support seem to know no bounds. If she hadn’t passed on these admirable attributes to our three young children, Madeline, Nora and Declan, this project would never have been completed.

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CHAPTER 1

A Second Century and a New Beginning

AN HISTORIC MOMENT FOR SMITH COLLEGE It took the nation’s largest women’s college one hundred years to hire its first woman president. On June 24, 1974, Smith College named Jill Ker Conway as its seventh president, and the world took notice. Newspapers around the world published stories of the announcement, often leading with the gender angle. Time magazine featured Conway on its cover and, along with Betty Ford, Barbara Jordan, Ella Grasso, Billie Jean King and a few others, named her one of its 1975 Women of the Year.1 Public interest in her appointment continued through the first years of her presidency, with Conway receiving considerable press attention as she visited cities for alumnae events around the country. Jill Conway’s appointment was noteworthy both in the context of changes at Smith and in higher education generally. In 1975 only five percent of all college and university presidents in the United States were women.2 As might be expected, however, among women’s colleges, it had become commonplace for women to lead institutions. Except for Smith, Vassar was the last of the Seven Sisters to appoint a woman president (1946). Others, such as Wellesley, Barnard, and Mount Holyoke, were founded with women leaders. Although it appeared ironic that Smith, a highly visible women’s college, would wait a century to appoint a female president, particularly when, as the Springfield Union pointed out, its “alumnae include Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, high priestesses of the women’s rights movement,” the college’s attachment to male leaders had deep roots. Smith was founded, in the words of its benefactor, Sophia Smith, “to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.”3 In practice, this meant that Smith was modeled after and compared itself most closely to men’s institutions. This was true with regard to the curriculum and to the college’s leadership, which 1

2

The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change

had included male presidents and a predominance of male faculty. Smith’s earliest leaders had strong ties to Amherst College and designed Smith in Amherst’s likeness, of which one attribute was having a male president. This also helped distinguish Smith from some of the other early women’s institutions, including Mount Holyoke, which was founded as a seminary. Having a male president, then, was intended to signal that Smith was a serious college, in line with those elite institutions open only to men.4 A TIME OF CHANGE IN SOCIETY The women’s movement called into question these traditional ideals of leadership and opened a broad discussion about women’s education. The enactment of legislation such as Title IX and the development of networks for women leaders in higher education5 moved conversations about sex equity in education and careers into prominence. The issue of single-sex education was also up for debate, as many men’s institutions became coeducational and the number of women’s colleges dropped from 300 in 1960 to 98 in 1988.6 Indeed, at Smith College, discussions of coeducation peaked in academic year 1969–1970, when the Chinoy Report, commissioned by the College Planning Committee, suggested that coeducation at Smith was both “desirable” and “feasible.”7 At that time, faculty and students supported a move to coeducation, but in 1970 the pendulum had swung the other way, with a majority of faculty, students, and alumnae supporting Smith’s remaining a women’s college. In 1972, the faculty and the trustees approved a recommendation for Smith to remain single sex, but the coeducation issue continued to be a topic of debate at Smith in the decade that followed. These debates took place in a highly politicized environment, in which the college faced sexual discrimination lawsuits from faculty who had been denied tenure and academic departments were divided over questions of affirmative action and the legitimacy of feminist scholarship. Conway recalled her initial impressions of Smith: “All the discrimination suits had different groups of faculty absolutely at loggerheads with one another— not speaking to one another…. We had faculty suing faculty, students suing faculty. It was really very contentious.”8 A NEW KIND OF PRESIDENT In this context of substantial change in society, higher education, and at Smith, Jill Conway assumed leadership of the nation’s largest women’s college. Her personal and professional experience, intellectual interests, and vision for women’s education seemed emblematic of these larger changes. Jean Higgins, a junior member of Smith’s Religion Department in 1975, reflected on Conway’s appointment: “I’m not quite as sure that the board of trustees chose her as that she chose them. Because Jill was a very remarkably able woman, and she had other choices. She chose Smith to convey, I


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think, some reasons that had to do with her very essence—with her professionalism, with her vision of life, and with her hopes for the future.” Conway’s life story, from growing up on a sheep farm in Australia to earning her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, reflected the image of a strong woman, capable of overcoming great obstacles.9 As a vice president at the University of Toronto, she focused on sex bias in faculty salaries and promotions in Canadian universities.10 As a faculty member, she was a self-described “historian of feminism” and deeply committed to feminist scholarship.11 Katherine (“Kay”) Hanson, who, as leader of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE),12 interacted with the presidents of leading colleges and universities at the time of Conway’s appointment, recalled that Conway stood out among women’s college presidents. The then president of Wellesley was still almost the white glove type, and Jill was not. She had that outspoken, free spirit, so she was not only a woman, but she was a different kind of woman. Women’s colleges had been run by women who were sort of like the head mistresses, either the no-nonsense brown tie shoes spinster types or the very gracious, we serve tea in the afternoon type. And Jill was foreign, stylish, outspoken.

In appearance, intellectual interests, temperament, and administrative style, Jill Conway represented an emerging model of college president. As representative of this new model and as a president with strongly held views about the future of women’s education, Conway bumped up against a very traditional culture at Smith. This study focuses on her struggles to change this culture and to implement programs that would signal a new direction for Smith. A NEW FOCUS FOR A VENERABLE COLLEGE From her first days at Smith, Conway stated that she intended to turn Smith’s focus toward the changing roles of women in society. In her inaugural address, she asserted that her own presidency “must be played in a manner which gives visible example of the way women assuming new roles in society should live.”13 She said, “we must take our mission to educate women even further by trying to foster research and the creation of new knowledge about matters of central importance in women’s lives.” She argued for “counsel[ing] our students and alumnae better about the typical career experiences of women, and about the typical turning points in women’s lives.”14 In a document she wrote in her first year at Smith, she described her hopes of creating “a small research institute dedicated to the examination of questions which are of key importance in the lives of women.”15 Conway tried to reshape Smith’s institutional culture in several ways. She sought to change the composition of the faculty from a predominantly male teaching staff to one that was gender balanced. Another focus of her

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long-term effort was reconfiguring the college’s governance and decisionmaking structures. These changes were intended to break down what she described as a culture of “cronyism”16—a system of patronage that benefited those already in positions of influence, particularly senior male faculty members. This informal system of decision making also influenced campus hiring; endowment and fiscal management; curricular priorities; and the system of tenure, promotion, and rewards. This repositioning of Smith did not meet with universal support. Many faculty members, particularly those who helped perpetuate or were acculturated into Smith’s traditional ethos, were concerned about the direction Conway was suggesting for Smith. In A Woman’s Education, Conway described the group of faculty, known on campus as the “dinosaurs,” who expressed the greatest concern: In its first century, Smith had prided itself on having male presidents as guarantors of intellectual standards. Nothing seemed more logical to the products of the Ivy League or Oxbridge who stepped into the guarantor’s role than to recruit their old friends (naturally all male) from graduate school to the Smith faculty. So my ideal intellectual community was taught by a faculty almost 70 percent male, many of whom saw themselves as custodians of the great Western tradition of humanistic learning, which they handed down to young women in decidedly patriarchal style. Because of their location within a women’s institution, their male identity was decidedly fragile and they needed to fight feminist ideas of the academy much more than their conservative colleagues in coeducational settings. Making sure that a new woman president didn’t introduce ideas subversive of the Western male tradition was a life-and-death matter for them, and they acted accordingly.17

By “acting accordingly,” these faculty opposed Conway’s efforts to enact the initiatives they saw as most directly altering the traditional priorities at Smith. These included efforts to encourage feminist scholarship through the establishment of a research program on women and social change, to recognize feminist scholarship in the tenure and promotion process, and to create a more hospitable climate for women faculty in an effort to attain gender balance. According to Peter Rose, who joined the Smith faculty in 1960 from Goucher College, these efforts to “feminize” Smith were more radical than it might appear: “In the 1950s and ‘60s, to me, Goucher, Mount Holyoke and Vassar were ‘women’s colleges,’ where there was considerable emphasis on the role of the woman in the modern world. Smith was a college whose students were women, but it wasn’t a particularly feminist institution. It prided itself on having the best students, the best faculty, and best curriculum.” Although the resistance to these initiatives was great, there were faculty who supported Conway’s agenda. These were often junior faculty members, and most typically junior women faculty who cared deeply about feminist issues and who saw in Smith the potential to advance feminist


5

ideals and scholarship. A core group of these faculty became a de facto “support group” for Conway, taking dinner with her regularly, encouraging her, and advising her on the complicated politics of the college. As crucial as this support was in Conway’s first years as president, it waned in subsequent years as members of the group disagreed with Conway’s opposition to the establishment of a women’s studies program. The schism that developed between Conway and her natural allies at the college provides an interesting look at how a potentially powerful group, committed to bringing about change within an organization, can become weakened by its internal disagreements. As is often the case with academic leaders, Conway’s presidency was defined largely by her relationship with her campus constituencies, particularly the faculty. Yet these relationships were often tested as she sought to implement her vision for the college. In her inaugural address, she foreshadowed the difficulties she anticipated in these relationships. For anyone whose career has been devoted to the study of social ritual and the analysis of social institutions this has been a remarkable ceremony. I have been struck for instance with the degree to which the preparation for this afternoon’s ceremony has evoked recollections of the preparations for that other great occasion of public ritual in my life—my wedding. Here are the friends gathered together to witness that somehow or other—by some operation of grace and human wisdom—this community and its new president must for some significant portion of their lives struggle together to meet the challenges of the future. In the process we must learn to tolerate one another’s failings and take comfort from our mutual strengths. There is no escaping the solemnity of such an occasion just as there is every reason to regret that the ingenuity of modern culture has yet to produce the equivalent of marital counseling for such a relationship, which, like marriage, is bound at times to be fraught with tension.18

Her challenges were made more difficult by a number of internal and external factors that had to be managed or overcome if she was to be successful in meeting her primary objectives. Among these was the need to attract the support or at least neutralize the opposition of faculty and alumnae whose view of Conway suffered by comparison to their view of her predecessor, Thomas C. Mendenhall, particularly when it came to personal and stylistic attributes.19 Where Mendenhall had been warm, friendly, and familiar, Conway was terse, erudite, and aloof. These differences were apparent and even exaggerated for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the role of the president at Smith was changing, as it was at other institutions. Less involved in the daily life of faculty and students, college presidents were becoming more like CEOs. They had to preside over increasingly complex organizations, shaping the public perception of their institutions, and managing financial matters, including resource allocation, fundraising, and the endowment.

6


Conway also had to deal with enrollment projections made uncertain by changing demographics and the difficulty of forecasting the attractiveness of women’s colleges to high school graduates at a time when the dominant paradigm of elite, private higher education was shifting from single sex to coeducation. Further complicating factors were that the mid-1970s were a time of rapidly rising inflation and a severe energy crisis. In general the economic environment forced many colleges and universities into retrenchment and called into question whether resources would be available to support new initiatives or even ongoing commitments, such as faculty salaries. Conway’s transition to Smith took place in this complex environment of change. In Chapter 2, I explore the context in which Conway was leading. As Clark Kerr and Marian Gade argued, “to understand the presidency, it is necessary to appreciate the context of each individual presidency—to comprehend the tyrannies of time and place, but also to appreciate the vagaries of human behavior in approaching decisions.”20 The “tyrannies of time and place” that influenced Conway’s transition included the difficult fiscal and enrollment challenges that faced Smith, and many other colleges, in the mid 1970s. Conway was also expected to help redefine the mission of a women’s college in an era of coeducation, and to do all of this when the campus had mixed reactions to having a woman leader, and in particular a woman leader who was such a sharp contrast to the long-time president who preceded her, and when the expectations and role of the college president were evolving rapidly. Chapter 3 takes a deeper look at Conway’s relationship with the faculty. It begins by describing the immediate resistance she met from some faculty, and the many interpretations for the causes of that resistance. It also examines the taxing resolution of discrimination suits brought against the college by faculty who had been denied tenure. These events set the backdrop for Conway’s efforts to recruit and retain women faculty, even when internal campus studies suggested that the climate for women was chilly indeed. Her efforts to alter this climate by shifting the gender balance in the faculty, placing women in informal and formal positions of power and authority, and asserting her own ideals on the traditionally faculty dominated tenure and promotion process, brought about a number of changes as well as faculty efforts to limit her span of control. Chapter 4 focuses more directly on Conway’s involvement in initiatives that represented what many understood to be Smith’s new feminist mission. These included establishing a research program on women’s lives and bringing the study of women’s lives into the curriculum. Just how to accomplish these—and whether or not they were even appropriate objectives to advance—was a subject of considerable controversy on the Smith campus. Conway was intent on developing a research center on the study of women, similar to those that were emerging at other colleges and universities at that time. This chapter investigates why this initiative generated such vigorous debate and how, through scaling it back significantly, a more


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modest program took hold. On a parallel track, a group of faculty worked to create a women’s studies program, without the support of the president. Although they were ultimately successful in doing so, their efforts, and their opposition to the president over this issue, divided the feminist faculty and diminished support for the president. The concluding chapter hints once again at the importance of “time and place” in a president’s tenure. By the 1980s, the women’s movement and the rise of feminism were cast into the shadows of the policies and philosophies of Ronald Reagan and the New Right. This conservative social, economic and political movement had a long reach, even to a campus in Northampton, Massachusetts. Conway’s public row with two of the New Right’s most visible women—First Lady Nancy Reagan, a Smith alumna, and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, an invited speaker and honor and at Smith’s commencement—led to further complications for Conway, particularly in her relationship with the board of trustees. More than just providing a context for leadership, these incidents, as well as how Conway dealt with other issues detailed in this study, provide insight into the style and substance of leadership. THE LIMITS OF THIS STUDY There were a number of initiatives not included in this study that Conway encouraged or originated, and which had the effect of redefining the college’s mission and more closely identifying the college with women’s issues. The most significant of these was the establishment of the Ada Comstock Scholars Program, a highly successful enrollment initiative designed to attract women back to college who had had their education interrupted. A college press release dated August 1, 1975 quoted Conway as saying, “What excites me the most about [the Ada Comstock Scholars Program] is that it is one of the first steps toward redefining the mission of the college as a women’s institution.” Conway poured an enormous amount of energy into this program, drafting its policies and publicity materials, raising funding for it from both individual donors and foundations, driving its growth in enrollment (typically about 10 percent of the student body), and bringing national recognition to its underlying philosophy and to the program itself. Although the Ada Comstock Scholars Program was actually established prior to Conway’s arrival, her involvement in and support of the program helped make it a model emulated at many other colleges and a signature program for Smith. Other initiatives that Conway supported and that furthered her central agenda included strengthening the athletics and career development programs. Under Conway, Smith was the first women’s college to join the NCAA. This step to competitive intercollegiate athletics represented a giant stride from the era of posture studies, “play days” and physical education. Conway was a strong advocate of fitness for women and for pro-

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viding women with the opportunities to compete at high athletic levels. She named a long-time faculty member, Larry Fink, as Athletic Director and provided him with considerable support to build an intercollegiate athletics program, including the financial support to greatly expand and improve the college’s athletic facilities. Her efforts to modernize the career development function were similar, with increased resources, new expertise brought in to oversee the program, and more recognition for its activities. A full biographical account of Conway’s years at Smith would analyze these efforts in some detail. In this more limited study of Conway’s efforts to reposition Smith as a women’s college, I sought initiatives that engendered considerable diversity of opinion, allowing for a full examination of the strategies and idiosyncrasies of decision making and leadership. I was also interested in looking at initiatives that revealed the interplay of various constituents, thereby illuminating the reaches and limits of presidential authority in different domains. It is important to note that using these criteria necessarily colors this study by focusing on the more controversial aspects of Conway’s presidency. On a more practical level, I only chose to include in this study initiatives in which Conway was an active participant, and for which there was substantial documentation from different sources available. Although the book’s primary contribution is to the substantial literature on presidential leadership in higher education, it also adds to the increasingly important research on presidential transitions, especially transitions that are marked by significant change. Insofar as Conway’s presidency was shaped by her appointment as the first woman to lead Smith, the book illuminates issues of gender and leadership. It also adds a new perspective on Jill Conway, whose life has received much public examination, primarily through her three autobiographical accounts. PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP Do presidents matter? Can college presidents envision and enact an agenda for change? At the time Jill Conway was assuming the Smith presidency, Cohen and March’s classic study of academic leadership, Leadership and Ambiguity, painted a dreary picture of the potential for presidents to exert influence. The presidency is an illusion. Important aspects of the role disappear on close examination…. Compared to the heroic expectations he and others might have, the president has modest control over the events of campus life. The contributions he makes can easily be swamped by outside events or the diffuse qualities of university decision-making.21

Clark Kerr, in an earlier work, supported the notion that, at best, an academic leader can hope to bring about only marginal change: “The president of a multiversity must be content to hold its constituent elements loosely together and to move the whole enterprise another foot ahead in


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what often seems an unequal race with history.”22 Other studies have suggested that “the data supporting the assumed relationship between leaders and organizational performance is tenuous at best.”23 However, these conclusions are hardly uncontested, particularly by studies of individual institutions and their leaders.24 McLaughlin and Riesman, in their study of presidential searches, argue that “the difference between an effective and ineffective president can matter a great deal.”25 One study of twenty-six colleges and universities undertaking significant change initiatives concluded that successful change strategies depended on the leadership provided by “institutional leaders,” such as college presidents.26 This study, by examining the successful if difficult work of Jill Conway, is a useful complement to case study research on college presidents and the changes they have enacted.27 The depth of the study promises to extend that work, however, most notably with regard to how decisions were made and perceived by various stakeholders. Its focus on leadership and decision making also distinguish it from biographical studies of college presidents, including those focusing on the presidents of women’s colleges.28 PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITIONS Much excellent work has been published on presidential transitions and the challenges faced by new presidents.29 Little work, however, has been done to understand the opportunities and constraints faced by college presidents who are significantly different from their predecessors with regard to gender, race, or educational philosophy.30 The salience of this work is increasing as the number of women and minority presidents rise. In 1986, for example, only 9.5 percent of college presidents were women; by 2001 this percentage rose to 21 percent. During the same time period, the percentage of presidents from minority groups also rose, although at a considerably slower pace (from 8.1 percent to 13 percent). Of all the newly appointed presidents in 2001, 24 percent were women, a statistic that suggests that, while there is progress in diversifying the presidency, women are still underrepresented in these leadership positions.31 The changing face of the college presidency suggests a growing need to understand the obstacles and challenges encountered by these “firsts” (i.e., the “first” female president, the “first” African American president, and so forth). This study provides an opportunity for examining how status as a “first” can be an opportunity or a liability in shaping a leadership agenda. GENDER AND LEADERSHIP The body of literature on women’s and men’s ways of leading is growing, but little consensus is emerging about gender differences in leadership.32 Much attention has been paid to the notion that women leaders develop less hierarchical models of leadership33 and are more likely than men to

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forge relationships and share decision making to move an organization forward.34 Florence Howe expressed a related view at the time Conway took office. Howe argued that women’s consciousness was raised by the women’s movement, leading to a form of “feminist leadership” that was “low-key but firm,” with a premium on shared authority and “public decision making” (emphasis in the original).35 Others found no relationship between gender and leadership styles.36 For this study, whether men and women exhibit different leadership traits is less important than whether individuals have different expectations for leaders based on their gender (see Chliwniak, 1997, for a discussion of stereotypical expectations of male and female leaders in the academy).37 How did Conway navigate the expectations she perceived faculty, staff, students, and alumnae to have of her because she was the first woman to lead Smith? What were those expectations? Through interviews, I explored the expectations that different members of the Smith community had for their first female president. Nevertheless, it is difficult to tease out whether expectations are, in fact, gender based. The evidence, in discrete pieces, is often anecdotal or impressionistic. But on the whole, themes and patterns of behavior emerge that begin to suggest how gender expectations, gendered perspectives, and perhaps more importantly, sexual politics influenced Conway’s presidency. THE RESEARCH METHOD: CREATING A PORTRAIT IN A HISTORICAL CONTEXT The research, analysis, and writing were guided in large part by “portraiture,” a method of social science inquiry developed by Sara LawrenceLightfoot.38 Portraiture “combine[s] systematic, empirical description with aesthetic expression…. designed to capture the richness, complexity, and dimensionality of human experience in social and cultural context, conveying the perspectives of the people who are negotiating those experiences.”39 This portrait captures the role and actions of a college president in a particular historical context. DATA SOURCES Numerous and rich sources of data have formed the basis of this work. The Smith College Archives house forty linear feet of Conway’s presidential papers.40 These include her annual reports, correspondence, meeting minutes, notes, reports, governance documents, press accounts, policy statements, official college publications, and speeches. The Archives also house related documents, such as faculty meeting minutes and correspondence from other offices, which provide an important perspective on the core initiatives examined in this study.41 A second significant source of data is Jill Conway herself. She participated in this study through semi-structured interviews. These interviews, averaging ninety minutes in length, were held throughout the research pro-


11

cess. There was an interview in the early stages of research, one as the research progressed, and a final interview near the conclusion of the study. The first interview, which began after a thorough review of archival documents, was designed to identify the issues of greatest importance to Conway. I also sought to understand her perspective on the opportunities and constraints she faced as president, her vision for Smith at the time she entered the college and how that changed over time, and how she set and articulated priorities. Other important topics were how her relationships with key stakeholders hindered or facilitated her ability to enact change, how external pressures offered new opportunities or limitations to changes she pursued, and how she saw her gender playing a role in the way she was perceived and treated. The middle interview allowed me to follow up after I conducted interviews with other stakeholders and had begun to identify key themes of her presidency. It provided an opportunity to test developing theories. The final interview was an opportunity for Conway to review my central findings and comment on them, and for me to address lingering questions. My third major source of data was interviews with Conway’s various constituents: trustees, alumnae leaders, key administrators, and especially faculty (see Appendix for a complete of list).42 I talked with those who played a significant role in the issues relevant to this study, deliberately seeking those who represent a range of views on the issue. These interviews focused on the individual’s involvement in the initiative, the ways that s/he understood Conway to have provided leadership on the initiative, their support and/or objections to the initiative itself and the way it was implemented, and their perceptions of how gender played into the issues Conway addressed. My fourth source of data was Conway’s contemporaries; that is, leaders of other institutions and organizations who could provide a useful perspective on Conway’s efforts and place her presidency within a larger context of higher education. Mary Patterson McPherson is a Smith alumna and President of Bryn Mawr from 1978 to 1997. Elizabeth T. Kennan was president of Mt. Holyoke from 1978 to 1995. Mary Maples Dunn, Conway’s successor as president of Smith, was a dean and faculty member at Bryn Mawr during Conway’s term. Kay Hanson was the executive director (later president) of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), a consortium that includes Smith and, at the time of Conway’s presidency, twenty-nine of its peer institutions. Ted Bracken was Director of Policy at COFHE. The final source of data was non-Smith-related historical sources that provided key information on the context in which Conway was working. These included both primary and secondary sources, such as reports and actions from higher education associations, news accounts, statistical information on trends in higher education from 1975 to 1985, and historical studies of higher education during that period (see Bibliography).

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EMERGENT THEMES During and following my data collection, I identified emerging themes. My search for these themes began with the forming of “impressionistic records” after interviews or other means of collecting data. LawrenceLightfoot describes an impressionistic record as “a ruminative, thoughtful piece that identifies emerging hypotheses, suggests interpretations, describes shifts in perspective, points to puzzles and dilemmas (methodological, conceptual, ethical) that need attention, and develops a plan of action for the next visit.”43 These impressionistic records are roughly analogous to what Miles and Hubberman44 call “memoing” and Bogdan and Biklen call descriptive and reflective field notes.45 The impressionistic records, which included my questions to be addressed through ongoing research, allowed me to continually test and refine emerging themes and theories. To identify themes, I followed Lawrence-Lightfoot’s “five modes of synthesis, convergence, and contrast.” These include listening for “repetitive refrains,” “resonant metaphors, poetic and symbolic expressions that reveal the ways actors illuminate and experience their realities,” and “themes expressed through cultural and institutional rituals.”46 Using these modes also involved triangulating data by identifying themes that emerged from several sources of data, such as those identified by more than one interviewee or archival document.47 The fifth mode involved seeing patterns in “perspectives that are often experienced as contrasting and dissonant by the actors.” The importance of listening for the alternative and often conflicting viewpoint is noted in most qualitative research source books,48 with Maxwell providing a particularly strong warning about this practice: “The most serious threat to the theoretical validity of an account is not collecting or paying attention to discrepant data, or not considering alternative explanations or understandings of the phenomena you are studying.”49 CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATIVE Taking a page from fiction writers, Lawrence-Lightfoot describes a series of “processes that must be synthesized in constructing the aesthetic whole:” First, the portraitist must identify the conception, the overarching gestalt, the big story that will frame, focus, and energize the narrative. Next she must build the scaffold that structures the narrative….[structures that] reflect the emergent themes that have been documented in the research….the flow of the narrative…gives the piece texture, nuance, and emotion….Finally, unity is developed through the aesthetic sequencing of events…50

It is important to note that the “aesthetic sequencing of events” refers to the development of a coherent narrative (“an orderly, logical, and aestheti-


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cally consistent relation of parts”51), but it does not imply massaging the data to fit the story being told. Indeed, the goal in portraiture is to “construct a credible story—putting pieces together to create a logical coherence, but being careful not to impose a facile consistency or a simplistic logic that will misrepresent the complex reality we are documenting.”52 This notion of credibility is what Maxwell53 refers to as “validity” and Miles and Huberman refer to as “truth value” in qualitative inquiry.54 Validity can be an ephemeral concept in the most carefully structured qualitative studies, but it can be particularly elusive in a study such as this, when interview subjects are being asked to recall events and perspectives from twenty or twenty-five years ago. Memories fail, and we are destined to view historical events through lenses that suit our own needs, whatever those might be. In practice, this meant that I needed to be especially vigilant in triangulating data, listening carefully for themes, and relying on multiple data sources, especially documents from the Smith College Archives that were written during the Conway presidency. In the end, the standard for a portrait is “authenticity,” which Lawrence-Lightfoot explains as “capturing the essence and resonance of the actors’ experiences and perspective through the details of action and thought revealed in context.”55 She invokes Kidder’s56 concept of “‘face validity’” to describe the ‘click of recognition’ that one feels in reading the narrative—a ‘yes, of course’ response instead of a ‘yes, but’ response.”57 NAVIGATING THE TERRAIN OF RESEARCHER BIAS In 1967, Schutz argued that it was possible for a researcher to systematically understand his or her biases and simply set them aside.58 This concept, called bracketing, has been disputed by qualitative methodologists. Lincoln and Guba, for example, argue against trying to set aside all preconceived notions and instead embrace the idea of the researcher as instrument of inquiry: …in in-depth interviewing we recognize and affirm the role of the instrument, the human interviewer. Rather than decrying the fact that the instrument used to gather data effects this process, we the human interviewer can be a marvelously smart, adaptable, flexible instrument who can respond to situations with skill, tact, and understanding.59

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s portraiture is built on the premise that “portraits are shaped through dialogue between the portraitist and the subject, each one participating in the drawing of the image. The encounter between the two is rich with meaning and resonance and is crucial to the success and authenticity of the rendered piece.”60 In this study, I faced some unusual challenges. As I began, I worked in the office of the president at Smith College,61 which provided me with extensive knowledge about the institution and access to information and individuals that might not be available to other researchers. At one level, this

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put me at risk to what Miles and Hubberman (1994) call “going native,” which means “being co-opted into the perceptions and explanations of local informants.”62 The risk for me, since I was already “native,” is that I would see things as plausible because they resonated with my own experiences. This is a bias I confronted regularly through self-criticism, by asking questions even when I thought I knew the answer, and through reflective pieces I constructed after I collected data. The second risk I faced is that individuals I interviewed would respond to me in ways that reflected my position at the college instead of my position as a researcher conducting a study. To avoid this, I was clear about my purposes in any requests for interviews or information. This potential problem was also mitigated by the fact that many of the faculty, administrators, and trustees who were key decision makers during Conway’s term were retired when this study was conducted. THE SCOPE OF THE PROJECT Jill Conway’s years as Smith’s president provide a wealth of data to expand understanding of leadership transitions and the college presidency, the influence of social movements on higher education, and governance and politics in the academy. Yet this study has a very narrow scope, focusing only on challenges that Conway faced in implementing a small number of initiatives, and in particular the challenges that originated from her relationships with the faculty. This research leaves untouched a number of fascinating questions about Smith during Conway’s years and about Conway herself. For example, Conway’s success in fundraising and the extraordinary organization of Smith alumnae in support of this effort provides a model that would be useful to explore and possibly replicate. The governance changes that were enacted during Conway’s years provide an opportunity to investigate in a broader way the changing conception of shared governance in private colleges in the latter part of the twentieth century. And Conway’s life, as told through her three memoirs, offers the biographer an unusual opportunity to cast a new eye on territory that has been explored extensively but only introspectively.

CHAPTER 2

New Leadership, New Challenges

Perhaps it is inevitable that leaders are defined, in part, by comparison to their predecessors. Indeed, the process of choosing a leader is often informed by the failings and successes of the previous leader. When selecting a college president, search committees typically consider which candidate can best meet the challenges that are thought to be ahead, but overlaid on that seemingly rational process might be the desire to replicate individuals or attributes they admire. Alternatively, especially during difficult times or following a troubled presidency, the search might be more reactive, with search committee members preferring candidates as different as possible from the most recent incumbent. In some cases, the selection of a candidate can be symbolically important, suggesting a new direction for an institution or even pointing to a larger change in society. We see this most clearly when a “first” is appointed—the first person of color, the first woman, and so forth—because it leads to discussions of gains made by a particular group, persistent social and economic inequalities, and the like. Former Smith trustee and alumnae leader Kathleen Bell recalled that, although the search that resulted in Jill Conway’s appointment was seen as just such a symbolic appointment, the trustees never focused specifically on identifying a woman to lead the college. That didn’t mean that for many alumnae there wasn’t a sense that the time was right for a woman to lead Smith: “When Jill became president, everybody was so relieved because we didn’t want a man president…. I think we would have been glad when any woman took over, but nobody would have been as good as Jill.” She said that it was a priority to find a president with experience “organizing a business…we figured that we needed that…I think we felt that we had let the business of making money pass us by, and that it was time to make up for that.” In Jill Conway, the search committee found a president who had a very professional approach to organizing the “business” of Smith. This ap15

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proach became apparent in her efforts to position the institution to deal with a changing environment, including the possibility of declining enrollments brought on by demographic factors and the shift in private higher education to a predominantly coeducational model. She also demonstrated her managerial skills in overcoming financial exigencies, raising money, and managing the endowment. Conway’s business acumen was only one of many attributes that set her apart from Smith’s previous president. A CONTRAST IN PERSONALITY AND STYLE Those who worked with Jill Conway’s predecessor at Smith, Thomas Mendenhall, remember him as outgoing, warm, highly social, and most comfortable in the company of others. As economics professor Andy Zimbalist explained, Conway wouldn’t have been described as having similar attributes: “Jill was uncomfortable with people. Where Tom Mendenhall and Mary Dunn [Conway’s successor] were jolly and gregarious, Jill was very stiff and formal.” Jill Conway acknowledged in A Woman’s Education that the public demands of a college presidency almost dissuaded her from considering the Smith appointment. I was by nature solitary. Born on an isolated sheep station, virtually an only child while my brothers were in boarding school, I needed the quiet of libraries and the comfort of losing myself in some research project. The sounds I liked best were the subdued rustle of manuscripts and papers in an archive, and the hushed background voices of a library staff careful not to interrupt. I could manage being with people constantly, but I found it exhausting, an inheritance of a childhood where we could go months without seeing another human being come by the homestead.1

As president, Conway was an introvert in a public role. And her social discomforts were brought into sharp relief through comparisons to the amiable, jocular Mendenhall. Ann Shanahan, director of public relations under Conway, said that “Tom Mendenhall used to amble around College Hall and come in and sit down and talk, but there was this total relaxation and nothing very serious was going on.” She saw Conway as “rather formal, she has difficulty with small talk. She has a good sense of humor but she’s very reticent in some ways. I think that a lot of people never warmed up to her very well and a lot of those people…were very skeptical about … this woman … especially after Tom Mendenhall, whom they loved, and who had an entirely different style.” Professor of Education Larry Fink remembered that Mendenhall connected quickly and easily with people by demonstrating his sincere interest in their academic work (even the thesis research of very junior faculty) and their life outside of the academy. “Tom Mendenhall would come to the faculty club to get his food and he would just sit at a table with junior faculty members. Within a minute and a half, he would be talking about something of importance to that person.”2 Professor of religion Jean Higgins de-


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scribed Mendenhall as “a real sort of academic gentleman [who] took life quite easy.” If Mendenhall was quick to befriend faculty, Conway was taciturn and unlikely to develop close relationships with colleagues. Bryn Mawr president Pat McPherson described it this way: “Jill is a very admirable person and I liked her hugely as a colleague, we were presidents together and all the rest of it. All those years I don’t believe I can say that we were friends. I think the only friendship she had was with Liz” (Elizabeth Kennan, president of Mount Holyoke College). From the Smith faculty, I heard similar sentiments expressed about Conway’s relationship with their colleagues. Several reasons were offered for why Conway had few close relationships with her professional colleagues. For some, Conway’s proper British style and the visible way she wore her intellect were distancing, even intimidating. Former trustee Nancy Lange remembered that Conway “never ate a canapé at a cocktail party because people would come up and speak to her and she never wanted to have her mouth full. But she always had a little handkerchief and made sure that she was impeccable.” In contrast, she said, Tom Mendenhall was very “old shoe” and very comfortable with people…. So everybody loved Tom. Jill was and probably still is quite different. I think she’s much more of a private person and she is so bright and can talk on any subject. But she’s not a chit-chatter. And also she’s so awesome you know, with her British accent, her impeccable accent and her beauty. I mean she was, she still is a lovely-looking woman. But you know, in 1975 she was really a very beautiful woman. And she was so perfect that she made people feel I think a little bit uncomfortable. She certainly made me feel like a clumsy fool. She was not as easy to feel close to.

Yet those who were closest to Conway described her as warm, generous and sensitive, even if those traits were not readily apparent. Professor of Government Susan Bourque suggested that a combination of sexual politics and an inability to see beyond the veneer kept some from seeing this side of Conway. Jill’s a product of the British Empire and there are certain ways she’s always going to be more reserved. She’s also an intellectual. And so she enjoys talking about ideas and she likes people around her to talk about ideas or she likes talented people. Tom [Mendenhall], I think, was totally accepting… … I don’t think there was a person who went into [Conway’s] office with a problem who didn’t feel the kind of individual warmth and connection that is so clearly a part of [her] personality. The depth of her sympathy to the human dilemma is very profound and people recognized that and understood it and came to appreciate it, I believe, with the exceptions of [faculty] who always found her just too aggressive for them, and too intellectually aggressive and too much her own woman…. I think there’s a lit-

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change tle bit of lack of appreciation for the cross-cultural component of Jill. Because she’s forced herself to be a public person, because that’s what the job required, there was little appreciation of how hard that was and how exhausting that kind of public persona can be to somebody who is fundamentally very happy on her own, and quite contented not to have to be a public person.3

The personal characteristics of leaders are not viewed in isolation, of course; they are often understood as reflecting the leader’s perspective on self and others. And they often shape the view others have of the leader’s institution. Examples from the corporate world are cited frequently, and in some circumstances we have come to see major, multinational corporations as embodying the characteristics of an individual leader. Jack Welch of General Electric and Bill Gates of Microsoft are two such examples. The diffusion of power through shared governance in colleges and universities makes it more difficult for a president to impose her or his personality on the institution. However, it is also the case that presidents are often chosen because they reflect the characteristics of an institution at that point in time. Over time, as a new leader is acculturated into an institution, those characteristics might become even more apparent and the president might adopt other characteristics that are seen as representative of the values of the institution. When Professor of Government Martha Ackelsberg visited Smith in 1972 as a prospective faculty member, she was interviewed by Tom Mendenhall. She remembered that his affect and perspective seemed emblematic of Smith’s culture and mission at that time. President Mendenhall was that sort of old-school, old-boy kind of person. When I came for my job interview and met with him…. he went into this whole thing about Smith as a women’s college had made this great contribution to the world because the students who had been here had all the opportunities to participate in house governance and the student government association and they had gone on to take leadership in all kinds of voluntary associations…Smith was training a volunteer corps for the country. And I remember thinking at the time, “Hmmm, you know it’s not a bad thing, but it’s not what I would have put forward as Smith’s main contribution to the world,” but that’s the way he saw it. That was to some extent, I guess… the college’s image. I think I saw [Smith] as probably one of the most conservative of the Seven Sisters and that was left over from my own days as a student. I don’t think I ever, not for a second, considered coming here…. [because] it just was sort of conservative, WASP, elite.

The appointment of Jill Conway in 1974 suggested to Ackelsberg that Smith’s image was about to change. …we were certainly aware that she was an historian of women; that she took women’s education and the study of women seriously—that was enormously important and she took women seriously as professional colleagues and as students. There were some people when Jill first came who were—and maybe remained that way through the whole time she was


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here—who were sort of concerned that she was too professionally oriented, you know that she was too corporate or whatever. But she would never have said to me, for example, the kind of thing that Mendenhall said about training the next generation of volunteers. She saw Smith graduates going out there and taking their places in the world of paid work as well as unpaid.

THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE PRESIDENT In describing the way Tom Mendenhall approached the presidency, several faculty members described him using familial terms: paternalistic, fatherly, and so on. Ruth Solie, who was both a student and a faculty member under Mendenhall, put it this way: “I think that he [was] a sort of benevolent, paternalistic character [who] treated the faculty all more or less like children. He was amusing, he didn’t ever get in anybody’s way, he just kind of read funny stuff at faculty meetings.” This was not to say, however, that Mendenhall took casually the role of president or his responsibility for making decisions. In fact, as a sort of father figure in an informally run system, Mendenhall held considerable power. Louis Cohn-Haft, a member of the history department for more than thirty years, remembered his own futile efforts to curb the president’s authority. The Smith faculty is always recalcitrant. I mean it thinks that presidents are there to be pitted against. And Mendenhall had the perfect formula. He just smiled sweetly and did what he damn pleased, which is one of the reasons I had occasion with other people to go up to his office and put on a long face and say, “Mr. Mendenhall, do you realize that you do not have the authority to put a person into X department without consulting the people in that department?” And he’d say, “Oh, yeah—but they’re not going to complain—he’s a nice guy and they all know him.” And I’d say, “But it matters, these things matter!”

The college president had considerable prerogative during Mendenhall’s tenure. Sociology and anthropology professor Peter Rose recalled, “joking that the college was run out of Tom Mendenhall’s back pocket.” That wasn’t to say that President Mendenhall acted unilaterally on all decisions or without input from the faculty. But the governance system was organized more informally than we would see today, providing the president with latitude to consult with hand-picked advisers. College treasurer Robert Ellis recalled how many decisions Mendenhall made: At that point in the college’s history and when I came here, the president was a strong president and ran the college. You had an assistant to the president who came out of the faculty for [appointments lasting] three years... You had a dean that came out of the faculty for [a term of] three or five years,... and you had the treasurer, and those were really the people that made the decisions on where the college was going.

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Both in style and in span of authority, Mendenhall represented the last of an era, what Ted Bracken called “the days of the tweed jacket with the leather patches on the elbows.” He recalled his first meeting with Mendenhall, whom he described as “a quintessential absent-minded professor sort of guy.” His office—he was famous for this—was filled with sheaves of paper and books all over every possible horizontal surface in the room. And all of the bookshelves were cluttered and as he expanded on this or that issue that he was interested in talking to us about he would rummage through one of the piles and three inches down he would pull out a folder and slip out a piece of paper that was relevant to the discussion at hand….Even though the…room looked like chaos to us it was apparently quite well organized in his own mind….That experience just symbolizes to me the way a school could have been run in those days, where a president had his hands on everything. He could just dip into his personal file and find the piece of paper he was looking for. He had total control. And it was all there for him. You simply can’t run a college or university like that anymore. And it was during the transition to Jill’s time when that style became outmoded.

The responsibilities that faculty today seem to associate most closely with Mendenhall were his interviewing every faculty candidate and his determining how to allocate college-owned housing to faculty. Larry Fink remembered his own interview for a faculty appointment at Smith: “Tom Mendenhall used to interview every faculty candidate. When I interviewed with him at 2:00 o’clock, we spoke for an hour and forty-five minutes and we agreed on nothing.” Later that day, Fink was surprised to receive a call from the president inviting him to join the Smith faculty. Mendenhall’s leadership depended on his own personal involvement in issues and the relationships he built with people, beginning with the job interview. New faculty learned quickly that access to resources came about through personal appeals to the president. As former professor and dean of the faculty Fran Volkmann suggested, this system often worked reasonably well, largely because of Mendenhall’s generous spirit and caring nature. He was a benign father. I thought he was very nice. I remember going to him very early on. We lived in South Hadley because my husband Jack taught at Mount Holyoke; we had two little boys. I remember saying to Jack, I don’t think I can do this…. So I made an appointment with Tom Mendenhall and I went and said we need to live in the Fort Hill Apartments, which are these places for junior faculty members with kids. And I guess there was a waiting list there…but I heard that he decided who got to live [there]. So I went to plead my case. He agreed that in fact I should be able to live in the Fort Hill Apartments because there was the daycare center right there.


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Jill Conway transformed a lot of those policies into something much more systematic and egalitarian. But Tom wanted to encourage young women faculty members. He wanted to help us make it work.4

Susan Van Dyne joined the Smith faculty in 1973. Her experience points to one of the problems in a system of presidential decision making that extends into the personal lives of faculty. “My first and last memory of Tom Mendenhall was that you had to be interviewed by him to get faculty housing. And I was, at the time, living with a man with whom I was not wed, and I had to explain why I needed a bigger house. It was just humiliating. I had to sit and explain my sex life to Tom Mendenhall.” Decision making that relies on benevolence and personal relationships instead of documented procedures and criteria is prone to favoritism, or, at the very least, perceptions and allegations of favoritism. Susan Bourque said that she took “an instant liking” to Mendenhall, who “was absolutely a wonderful guy.” They took breakfast together and the president, who wrote on the history of crew, taught her to row. But as a woman and a feminist, she didn’t see room for herself in the president’s inner circle. “There was a relatively small group of men around Mendenhall [who] seemed to be the kitchen cabinet, and everybody knew who those folks were. Women on the faculty were very few in number and not a feminist in the bunch.” As I describe in Chapter 3, Conway’s appointment changed the relationship of feminist faculty to the president, but it also seemed to signal a change in the way the college would be led. Fran Volkmann said that Conway’s appointment had a tremendous symbolic meaning. And I don’t think it was because people hated Tom at all. He was very easy to like in many ways. But I think it coincided with a time of change in higher education management too, where so many institutions had really been kind of run by the president. The president had not had to do all that much fundraising; didn’t have to be on the road all that much. He hired the faculty, had a lot to say about the curriculum, sort of set the tone of the place. You saw colleges all over America like that. Presidents were presidents for 20 or 30 years. A lot of records weren’t kept very well. It was a time when a lot of that was changing. First of all, money had to be raised. Presidents became people who had to be out there on the front line [raising money]….Jill was bringing us into the twentieth century in a certain way. Not only from the point of view of being a woman, but so that many decisions that had been made just by the president were now systematized; you know, you didn’t just ask the president for college housing.

The changing responsibilities of college presidents, including an increased emphasis on fundraising and more systematic administration of the institution, were not unique to Smith. 5 Kay Hanson of COFHE said that when she first visited Smith in the 1970s, there were few “people who were truly professionally trained for their job.” This began to change at all institutions of higher education because of financial pressures, new de-

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mand for services from students and faculty, and more government regulation. There was a growing expectation that college administrators would have the expertise and the modern management skills to oversee increasingly complex institutions. CONWAY AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THESE CHANGES Unlike Tom Mendenhall, the folksy, paternalistic president, Conway, said Hanson, was an “executive.” There…are people who you don’t see…very much and they’re…moving people in front of them. They’re sort of herding. Other people are somehow in the middle and they lead from there. And people don’t feel as though they’re being led. Jill led from the front. Jill was the executive. She was much more the general.

Conway assumed the Smith presidency at a time when presidents were expected to have the managerial savvy to deal with increasingly complex organizations while possessing the social awareness and sensitivity to deal with the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, the fight for civil rights, and other social changes that were transforming campuses. Whenever the demands for leadership are changing, there is always a risk that the criteria by which a leader is judged will be unrealistically broad or diffuse. Some people have expectations rooted in the traditional model, others evaluate a leader on the emerging model, while another group expects the leader to embody all that they view as essential from both models. One could imagine an “ideal” leader at such a transitional time combining the attributes most favored in the outgoing model with those most sought after in the emerging model. At Smith in 1975, this hypothetical leader might have had the warmth, charm, and highly refined interpersonal skills of Tom Mendenhall as well as the managerial skills, egalitarian professionalism, and vision of Jill Conway. But the reality was that Conway represented a stark departure from her predecessor, so it was less of a smooth transition than a jolt forward. Many challenges would test her leadership abilities and demonstrate in more substantive ways her performance as president. One question Conway had to confront early on in her tenure was whether Smith should consider coeducation. The coeducation debate was sparked in part by concerns over Smith’s ability to maintain the size and quality of incoming classes when the number of 18-year-olds was shrinking and opportunities for female students were increasing, as formerly all-male colleges and universities began admitting women. Second, budget deficits, a significant drop in the value of the endowment, and pessimistic financial projections threatened to force Smith into retrenchment. And third, there was a growing sense that Smith had become an inhospitable place for women faculty.


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A WOMEN’S COLLEGE IN AN ERA OF COEDUCATION In the middle of the twentieth century, the Seven Sisters stood alongside the Ivy League Universities and a select group of elite men’s colleges as the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher education. Ruth Solie, a 1964 graduate of Smith, recalled her perception of the best-known women’s colleges in the 1950s: I grew up in Westchester County [New York], and for the people on the Eastern seaboard in those days, there was no such thing as coeducation. [Coeducation] meant going to a state university or some place in the Midwest. You just didn’t even consider it. And we saw the Seven Sisters as being part of the Ivy League. Everybody focused on them that way.

Two decades later, coeducation had swept through and transformed previously all-male campuses. The opportunities had increased dramatically for women to attend a range of high-status institutions. As Mendenhall explained in 1969, “This is…a time when almost precipitately a large number of separate colleges for men in our part of the country (among them Trinity, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale) and a smaller number so far of separate colleges for women (Connecticut College, Bennington and Vassar for instance) have formally put themselves on the road to coeducation….” 5 This trend toward coeducation would inevitably affect enrollment at the women’s colleges, forcing them to reexamine their mission and identity. At Smith, discussions of coeducation began in earnest in the late 1960s and continued through the first part of the next decade. The first systematic look at whether Smith should itself become coeducational occurred in 1969 through a study conducted by Ely Chinoy, professor of sociology and anthropology, on behalf of the College Planning Committee. In his introductory memorandum accompanying Chinoy’s report, President Mendenhall described the purpose of the study. To review the alternative of coeducation has in recent years become a necessity for every separate college for men or women….Any separate college must therefore be asking itself: for what reasons does it find itself a separate college? Do these reasons still hold? What forms of coeducation, if any, would be the most desirable, practicable, and financially possible in its particular case?

Professor Chinoy’s report cited survey data that suggested both faculty and students favored a move toward coeducation.6 In a survey carried out during the spring of 1968, 56 percent of 209 faculty members who responded said that they would prefer to teach coeducational classes… In a survey of students in the fall of 1967, almost 70 percent of 777 randomly-selected students felt that Smith should introduce some form of coeducation…7

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After examining a number of factors, including anticipated enrollment trends, the prospects for attracting outstanding faculty, and the estimated costs of admitting men, Chinoy concluded, “These answers to our questions concerning the desirability of coeducation at Smith clearly point toward the admission of men as full-time undergraduate students…. This summary suggests that coeducation at Smith is feasible if the necessary capital funds can be raised.”8 In the academic year following release of this report, Vassar, having ended its courtship with Yale in 1967, began admitting men, offering Smith an opportunity to test at a safe distance the hypothetical challenges of moving to coeducation. The early news from Vassar was not promising. In the fall of 1974, The New York Times reported that Vassar was having difficulty attracting enough qualified male applicants and was receiving fewer applications overall at a time when other women’s colleges were experiencing increases in their applicant pools.9 In addition, the move to coeducation coincided with a decline in the percentage of women on the Vassar faculty; this at a time when the gender imbalance in the Smith faculty was receiving increased scrutiny.10 Such reports quieted some proponents of coeducation, as former Smith president Mary Dunn remembered: “Vassar was a big help in minimizing this issue. The early years of Vassar were very tough, which illustrated for people the difficulty of trying to go coed.” In academic year 1970–71, the College Planning Committee was expanded to ensure full representation of all segments of the college community as it considered the Chinoy report and the possibility of Smith becoming coeducational. In the end, the Committee recommended that Smith continue to admit only women as candidates for the bachelor’s degree. The primary reason given by the planning committee for remaining single sex was to remain true to the college’s historic mission and to continue to provide women the option of attending “a college of the highest caliber in which women are unquestionably first-class citizens.”11 A second reason cited was the capital costs associated with the transition to coeducation, as outlined in the Chinoy report. Smith, which was among the largest of the liberal arts colleges, did not want to reduce the number of women enrolling, so any additional male students would have necessitated a significant campus expansion. Committing the resources for such a project was especially unwelcome to a faculty concerned with the competition for what they viewed as limited resources, including the resources available for salary increases during a period when there was growing concern about faculty salaries not keeping pace with other professions and inflation. In October 1971, the faculty endorsed the recommendation of the Augmented College Planning Committee. The board of trustees did the same in February 1972. The announcement of the trustees’ action indicated that this would not be the final word on coeducation at Smith: “Smith plans to keep the question of coeducation under review and will be prepared from


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time to time to modify its policies if this seems indicated by future changes in society, the educational system, or the college’s own circumstances.”12 The possibility that the coeducation question would be reopened had lingering effects on the college and on Conway’s presidency. Some of Conway’s staunchest opponents on the faculty were the strongest supporters of coeducation. They correctly saw Conway as an advocate for Smith remaining a single-sex institution. According to Conway, as long as she was president, Smith would remain a women’s college: “I wouldn’t have been interested in coming if the alumnae and students hadn’t already voted to remain a women’s college. I’d stay and be president of the University of Toronto. Why swap coeducational schools? I was only interested in Smith because it was a women’s college.”13 Several faculty interviewed for this study described their most visible pro-coeducation colleagues rising at one faculty meeting after the other to call for a reconsideration of the 1972 decision.14 In the years that followed, there is evidence that faculty proposed revisiting this question, but they found little support for reopening the discussion among the administration and trustees.15 Some faculty argued that, had they known that the decision they were taking in 1972 was, in practice, a permanent one, they might have rethought their vote. Professor Peter Rose explained that for him and some of his colleagues, the timing of the coeducation vote helped determine their position: “The issue of coeducation came up during the fight…to establish a department of Afro-American studies. When the coeducation vote came to the faculty, we voted to stay the way we were but to revisit the issue in five years. Many of us agreed with this course because we were told that going coed would be very expensive and that it would divert resources from minority students.” Elizabeth Kennan explained that Mount Holyoke also made it through the 1970s without much dissent on the coeducation issue. After major debate on the issue in the early 1970s, the issue of going coeducational had become virtually moribund. In 1987, Conway and Kennan teamed up to plan a major conference at Mount Holyoke on women’s education. Kennan recalled that, following that conference, a few senior members of the faculty began a more public debate about moving the college toward coeducation. In terms that echoed Conway’s analysis, she described these faculty as trying “to change the nature of the college and change it back into a more conservative institution that would be more comfortable for them.” Conway’s own insistence on Smith staying the course as a women’s college provided additional fuel for her detractors among the faculty to cast her as an ideologue whose feminist bearings were leading the college to ruin.16 The evidence typically cited was the declining quality of entering students and the growing number of lesbian students on campus.

26


ENROLLMENT CHALLENGES The enrollment picture for women’s colleges was uncertain in the 1970s and 1980s. The baby boom had ended by the early 1960s, with the number of U.S. births hitting a low in 1975.17 While all colleges and universities had to develop strategies for coping with a smaller traditional college-age population for the coming decades,18 women’s colleges had a special problem. They faced the additional burden of needing to rethink the way they positioned themselves in the marketplace, given the breadth of opportunities available to female high school graduates. Jill Conway took this issue very seriously, crafting messages about the success of women’s colleges, speaking and writing publicly on the value of single-sex education for women, and hiring a consulting firm to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy for the college.19 There were signs that Smith was maintaining the size of its applicant pool. In fact, in 1975, Smith received 2,774 applications for admission, the largest number in the history of the college at that time. During the next four years, the number of applications fluctuated between 2,603 and 2,380.20 Conway, while on leave in 1981, wrote to the Smith trustees, “Our admission picture continues to improve slowly but steadily. We are back to roughly the same percentage of entering students ranked in the top 10% of their classes as we had at the beginning of the ‘70s and our yield on the best qualified academically is continuing to rise steadily and appreciably.”21 It was also clear, however, that the academic qualifications of students had declined on some measures from the classes that were entering in the late 1960s. For example, the median verbal SAT score for those entering in 1975 was 613; by 1979, that score had dropped to 595. A decade earlier, the median verbal SAT scores were consistently higher: for those entering in 1965 it was 669; in 1966 it was 679; and in 1967 it was 681. The median math SAT scores followed a similar pattern.22 The drop in SAT scores at Smith reflected a national trend. A 1982 report at Mount Holyoke noted the impact of this trend on women’s colleges: The number of women with scores of 700 or above dropped steadily and precipitously from 8,000 in 1967 to 4,800 in 1981. The number with scores of 600 or above peaked in 1971 at 51,000 and dropped to 21,900 by 1981. In this same time period approximately 11,000 places became available for women in the newly coeducational institutions in the COFHE and Twelve College Exchange groups. This is almost as many places as the approximately 12,000 places already existing in the sister colleges, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellesley.23

Statistics such as these provided ammunition to the self-labeled “dinosaurs,” like history and religion professor Robert Haddad, who argued:


27

“We have students here who would not have had the temerity even to apply to Smith in the old days, say before the Ivy League and its satellites went coed.” But more incendiary than declining test scores was the increased visibility of lesbian students on campus and the growing fear among some that Smith, with its heightened feminist image, was becoming a “lesbian school.” By the start of her second year in office, Jill Conway said this issue “was rumbling around under the surface,”24 and she began addressing it directly. She crafted a “Statement on Lesbianism”25 that included a prelude stating that it “should only be used, and only by the News Office, if there is some incident involving lesbianism on campus.” In part, it read: Historically the charge of lesbianism in women’s communities, whether true or false, has been used to undermine the integrity and the vitality of women’s social life. The claim that educational communities for women foster lesbianism is a false one…. No evidence has come to the attention of the College administration which would suggest that there is any more lesbianism on campus now than in the past. In line with national trends about sexual behavior there is indeed a more open avowal of lesbian orientation than has occurred in the past but this should not be mistaken as a sign of an increase in the activities of a small minority group.26

The association of lesbian students with women’s colleges and feminism was hardly unique to Smith. A 1982 story in Newsweek detailed the increased visibility of gay and lesbian students on campus. The story included reports from Smith, Mills, and Wellesley, as well as from coeducational universities. But the article also suggested that, at Wellesley, “acknowledged lesbians are a tiny—and uneasy—minority,” whereas at Smith lesbian students were “leaders in every aspect of campus life.” Newsweek reported that at Mills and Smith there was “a climate of tolerance at the college and in the surrounding community that makes it easier [for students] to examine their sexuality. Northampton and Oakland both have thriving colonies of lesbian artists and intellectuals.” The article went on to describe a “former debutante” at Smith who saw her homosexuality as an “experimental phase” and “some straight women” who had “an aversion to describing themselves as feminists for fear of being labeled lesbians.”27 For some alumnae, parents of students or prospective students, and faculty, the ties of feminism to lesbianism and the idea that Smith and its surrounding community provided an environment conducive to experimenting with homosexuality were significant concerns. Parents were concerned that their daughters would become lesbians while at Smith, alumnae worried about the reputation of their alma mater, and faculty thought that the quality of Smith’s applicant pool would decline. Robert Haddad offered the following:

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change In some ways, Smith gets a bit of a bad rap because of its lesbian reputation, but we know it’s there. We know it has been very destructive in terms of student applications or admissions applications…. There is not a heterosexual faculty who cannot cite instances where colleagues, friends, relatives of theirs have said, ‘I would not let my daughter attend a place like Smith.’

Leaders of the Smith Alumnae Association heard similar sentiments expressed by alumnae. Trustee Nancy Lange recalled that “Many alumnae were saying they would not send their daughters to Smith, that it was threatening to their children and it was a bad image.” She described the anxiety about lesbian students on campus as so great that some inquired if it were possible to identify lesbian students through the admission process in an effort to ensure that they remained a minority on campus. She recalled, “The head of admissions…said that technically it would be possible to look at applications and be able to do a sort between those people who were lesbians and those who weren’t. But nobody ever wanted to do that.” That such an unethical, if impractical, scheme was even contemplated suggests the level of discomfort some had with this issue. Although many were concerned about changing sexual mores and their impact on campus, there is no evidence that the applicant pools declined (at least not in size) because of these changes. Nevertheless, the issue had other implications for Conway. In particular, it shaped the context for discussions on items that were understood to have a feminist undertone, whether it was curricular or research initiatives or the difficult environment at Smith for many women faculty. But before those challenges could even be contemplated, Conway had to overcome a significant budget deficit and confront warning signs that any changes she anticipated enacting would be constrained by tight budgets in the coming years. THE FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS FOR CHANGE Jill Conway took over Smith at a time when the market value of the endowment had not yet recovered from a sharp decline in 1973–74. On June 30, 1973 the market value of the endowment was approximately $97 million. The following fiscal year closed with an endowment market value of only $77.4 million, which climbed to approximately $82 million by the time Conway took office.28 The result was that a planned surplus of nearly $235,000 in 1974–75 turned into a deficit greater than $1 million in Conway’s first year. This deficit was on an operating budget of approximately $23 million in 1975–76. The financial difficulties that Conway faced when she took office were foreshadowed in the treasurer’s report of 1974–75: …the winds of change are upon us. In a very short time higher education has moved from a growth enterprise to one of zero growth and perhaps some contraction after 1980. These changes began to occur in 1968. Since


29

1968 there has been a quantum increase in the inflation rate combined with unprecedented energy cost increases. At the same time new facilities, replacing obsolete and outmoded structures, have come on line adding greatly to annual operating costs. This combination of inflation, energy cost increase, and larger facility operating expenses are bringing unprecedented pressures to bear on independent institutions like Smith.29

In the early and late 1970s, double-digit inflation was fairly common.30 Between June 30, 1969 and June 30, 1979, the Consumer Price Index rose 97.5%.31 This was driven in part by rising fuel costs and the drop in the value of the dollar overseas. Colleges were forced to find ways to enhance revenue streams in order to keep pace with inflation.32 A major source of unrestricted revenue for most private institutions is tuition and fees. Not surprisingly, then, tuition and fees rose sharply during Conway’s term. The annual comprehensive fee for Smith students was $4,980 when Conway took office in 1975–76; in her last year (1984–85) the charge for a year at Smith had risen to $12,740. The support for undergraduate scholarships had to increase at an even faster rate to keep pace: in 1974–75, undergraduate scholarship grants at Smith totaled $1,653,244, rising to $6,070,354 in 1984–85.33 At colleges like Smith, where sponsored research does not provide a significant revenue stream, there are two major sources of funding beyond tuition and fees: fundraising and endowment income. For college presidents in the 1970s, the pressure was acute to raise funds and manage endowments effectively. FUNDRAISING AND ENDOWMENT MANAGEMENT By all accounts, Jill Conway was a tireless and effective fundraiser. Her staff and alumnae leaders recalled the unending visits Conway made to alumnae clubs and corporations and foundations, especially during a fundraising campaign.34 Conway said that she expended this effort on fundraising for both symbolic and practical reasons: I think what I had wanted to do was change the mindset of the place from fear that it was going to go under because it wouldn’t be able to attract good students, it wouldn’t be able to pay its faculty, it wouldn’t be able to attract interesting scholars, and it certainly wouldn’t be able to do anything new and just fighting to keep the sometimes calcified notion of the quality of its past. I think the realization that if anybody had a good idea, you could raise the money for it changed the way the faculty thought about themselves, or at least the younger faculty.35

It is also possible that, like embattled U.S. Presidents who leave Washington, D.C. to find adulation and respect while traveling abroad, Conway found the support of alumnae groups a welcome change from her sometimes difficult relationship with the faculty on campus. Her relationship

30


with alumnae, she said, was so strong because she shared with the majority of them a “personal style” and political philosophy. I looked like one of them, dressed like one of them, was married to the kind of husband they all would like to have, and I think that’s very, very important…. Those words are coming out of the mouth of someone who dressed like them, looked like them, and seemed to have values that were quite congruent with theirs, but was presenting them with a reality they could actually see. Now if I had an Afro and dressed in batiks or something it would be different.36

In the same way that Conway’s differences with the majority of the faculty made it more difficult for her to establish a relationship with them, her similarities to alumnae facilitated a comfortable relationship. The result was a number of exceptional fundraising years. Table 1 summarizes the fundraising totals and endowment performance at Smith during Conway’s presidency. By her fourth year in office, Conway was regularly setting new fundraising records at Smith.37 By 1979–1980, Smith had entered an elite group of institutions with regard to its development efforts, with only Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Case Western, and MIT reporting a higher fundraising total from alumni that year. The fundraising efforts of that year also resulted in substantial gifts from foundations.38 As Conway reported to the trustees in October, 1979, the college “had just concluded the most successful year ever in the history of Smith fundraising.”39 In February of 1981, Conway announced that a campaign she had begun, with a goal of $40 million, had been concluded successfully. Table 1: Fundraising and Endowment Performance at Smith College, 1975-1985 ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Year 6/30

Fundraising Total

Total Endowment Return Smith

NACUBO*

Endowment Mkt Value

1975-76

$5,550,248

3.97%

9.93%

$81,842,781

1976-77

$10,018,291

1.92%

5.07%

$83,077,028

1977-78

$11,219,403

4.78%

2.49%

$87,157,957

1978-79

$12,172,214

13.15%

10.8%

$97,691,557

1979-80

$17,015,388

13.42%

11.9%

$111,159,693

1980-81

$17,399,499

16.43%

14.6%

$130,919,890

1981-82

$15,395,078

-1.48%

-0.9%

$126,948,161

1982-83

$16,892,181

43.9%

41.34%

$183,294,265

1983-84

$19,920,777

-1.9%

-2.24%

$178,791,917

1984-85

$20,695,859

28.6%

25.5%

$222,378,161

*The average rate of return for college and university endowments included in the annual National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) Comparative Performance Study.


31

The support provided by Smith alumnae became crucial to Conway’s presidency: I never worked with alumnae volunteers before and I was just blown away by the Smith Alumnae Association. Its efficiency and…I realized that once I got to know them…nothing will stop them. And I think that’s true. They were 100 percent behind me. That shifted after the New Right came along...but 1975, high peak of feminism then, they were just raring to go and they’d been dying for somebody to make Smith more relevant…. They were just waiting for it. So, that was the huge opportunity. I realized that they’d raise money for anything. That really fit with making Smith …absolutely compelling and competitive. And I just never worked with anything like that before. The staff in the Alumnae office were very hostile because they were very much committed to the old genteel Smith. But I just made friends with the president of the Alumnae Association and we even shook hands on what we were going to do and away we went. So they were terrific. In one of these private institutions you don’t have to have the faculty on your side if you got the alumni on your side. But you better have one of them very solidly behind you.40

Conway paid considerable attention to building the revenue streams from corporations and foundations.41 She described the attention she paid to this as “sort of serendipitous.” I wasn’t planning on it, but shortly after I got there, because I’d been at the University of Toronto and between 15 and 20 percent of our operating revenue every year came from corporate contributions—there were none at Smith and it had a major operating deficit at the time—so I looked around and got together a group around me and said, you know, ‘Find me the twenty corporations that give most to higher education and get me an introduction to the CEO or Chairman and I’ll go call on them.’ Which I did. Curiously, and this is something that might not easily be apparent, that long series of male presidents never worked at the full spectrum of fundraising. I guess they must have felt shy about going to CEOs of major corporations or going to testify before Congress or whatever. They seem to have been very inhibited. They raised money only from alumni.42

As COFHE’s Kay Hanson pointed out, it was not common in the 1970s for college presidents to approach corporations for gifts. She described Conway as being “among a leadership group of presidents” who developed relationships with corporations.43 By the time Conway stepped down as president, Smith was attracting over $1 million per year in corporate support, an amount that accounted for approximately 5 percent of Smith’s fundraising total in 1984–85.

32


Conway was also successful in restructuring the management of the endowment. When she arrived, the college’s investment portfolio had been managed almost exclusively by Morgan Guaranty, with the investment committee run by, as Robert Ellis remembered it, a classmate of Tom Mendenhall’s from both Andover and Yale. Ellis recalled that little business was conducted at the early investment committee meetings, and this resulted, ultimately, in the college severing its relationship with the bank: “We’d go to meetings at Morgan Guaranty and they’d have a nice luncheon. We’d spend more time talking about lunch than we did about what they were doing on the portfolio…” In an undated memorandum that was shared with the Committee on Planning and Resources on January 28, 1977, a number of questions were raised about the investment performance of Morgan Guaranty.44 These included concerns that the returns on the college’s investments over the previous seven years had averaged 4.42 percent, below the rate offered at that time in bank savings accounts. It also raised questions about Morgan Guaranty’s strategy of investing in “smokestack equities” and the college’s practice of limited diversification of the investment portfolio. In May 1978, the investment committee restructured the way it managed the endowment, moving away from relying on Morgan Guaranty as its primary investment house. Instead, using investment consultants, the investment committee began to pick fund managers and move the portfolio from primarily fixed assets to a combination of equity funds and fixed asset funds.45 Conway tutored herself in financial management and joined the Board of Directors of Merrill Lynch, a move, she said, that helped her to obtain a better understanding of financial markets and investment strategies. Although it is difficult to determine the exact impact of Conway’s investment expertise on the endowment returns, it does seem clear that the move to restructure the management of the endowment paid dividends. Table 1 lists Smith’s total return on investments during Conway’s tenure as well as the average returns on endowment investments at colleges and universities included in the NACUBO comparative performance study. Smith’s returns exceeded the average return of the college and university group in every year but one following the restructuring of Smith’s endowment investments until Conway’s departure. On June 30, 1985, the day that Jill Conway left office, the market value of the endowment stood at $222,378,161, up from $81,842,781 a decade earlier, when she assumed the presidency. Table 2 shows these figures held constant in 1975 dollars. Even taking the rapid inflation of those years into account, the endowment grew by 44 percent in real terms during Conway’s presidency.


33

Table 2: Fundraising Totals and Endowment Values at Smith College, 1975-1985, in Constant (1975) Dollars ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Year

Fundraising Total

Endowment Market Value 6/3 0

1975-76

$5,247,759

$77,382,349

1976-77

$8,894,239

$73,755,785

1977-78

$9,370,445

$71,922,746

1978-79

$9,019,611

$72,389,444

1979-80

$11,109,347

$72,576,164

1980-81

$10,298,763

$77,491,483

1981-82

$8,582,756

$70,773,600

1982-83

$9,125,156

$99,015,562

1983-84

$10,314,978

$92,578,455

1984-85

$10,347,930

$111,189,081

This success in fundraising and endowment management mitigated the financial constraints that Conway encountered. Costs were associated with this success, however. For example, the time and effort Conway put into fundraising and changing the endowment investment strategy was time that could have been used on other issues at Smith that needed attention. As it happened, dealing with these issues also meant expending political capital with both faculty and trustees by taking on some of the conflicts of interest and “cronyism” that she found to be so prevalent when she arrived. One of the first things I had to do when I got there was fire the director of development and get a professional one. The director of development was the virtually unemployable spouse of a faculty member. Likewise to fire the bank that had been managing Smith’s endowment for 40 years and get professional management. Those were…some of the major battles I had.46

These battles, though, were insignificant compared to the difficulties she faced with the faculty. But even there, the resources she secured were helpful in smoothing the way to support initiatives that were highest on her agenda, including new resources for faculty support and scholarship.

CHAPTER 3

A Resistant Faculty

A college president’s term is shaped and sometimes defined by her or his relationship to the faculty. In an institution that practices shared governance, the president’s authority is circumscribed to allow the faculty significant control over academic decision making, whether it has to do with faculty appointments or the curriculum. The result, says Henry Rosovsky, Harvard’s long-time dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is that “A university president cannot govern without faculty cooperation.”1 William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, described how the power of the faculty limited presidential authority: “It is absurd to suppose that any president, however strong or willful he may be, can force a faculty, made up of great leaders of thought, to do his will. The president, if he has the power of veto, may stand in the way of progress, but he cannot secure forward movement except with the co-operation of those with whom he is associated.”2 Occasionally a strong-willed academic leader makes a notable effort to implement significant changes without the cooperation of the faculty. John Silber’s presidency at Boston University, which lasted from 1971 to 1996, was among the more visible, controversial, and protracted examples of such an effort in recent years. Announcing his decision to step down in 1996,3 the Boston Globe wrote that Silber arrived at Boston University and . . . immediately began a no-holds-barred battle with faculty, staff and students to reshape the university and purge it of what he saw as trends ‘ideological in character and inhospitable to free intellectual inquiry.’ He described the battle as ‘intense from the time I came here.’ His relentless efforts alienated many professors, students and members of Boston’s liberal establishment, but he unquestionably succeeded in putting the university on sound financial footing and improving its academic standing.4

35

36


Silber’s fights with faculty led to strikes, unionization efforts,5 and damning reports by representative committees of the faculty alleging that Silber and his administration improperly interfered in academic matters.6 It is rare that presidents thrive or even survive when their opposition from the faculty is so strong and persistent. Conway faced such opposition from some segments of the faculty at Smith. Conway argued that it was possible to overcome faculty resistance by securing outside funding for initiatives. However, the limitations of this strategy become apparent when resources are not available or are unrelated to the outcome of a decision. This chapter explores Conway’s leadership on issues over which the faculty has significant influence, such as faculty composition, the climate for faculty, and faculty appointments and tenure. Chapter 4 is an in-depth look at Conway’s leadership on the defining curricular issue of her presidency; here, then, curricular discussions are discussed only briefly. When Conway assumed the Smith presidency in 1975, the battle lines within the Smith faculty were already forming over a number of highly politicized issues; among these was the gender balance of the faculty. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Smith faculty moved from a predominantly female faculty to a predominantly male faculty. This was due, in part, to a spike in the number of men earning graduate degrees after World War II.7 Another factor was the increasing competition for faculty positions in the leading women’s colleges, such as Smith, which adopted faculty salary structures more in line with men’s institutions. The growing gender imbalance in the faculty moved to the foreground of campus discussions as the women’s movement raised awareness about the changing role of women in society and the need for women as role models; as the shift to coeducation became the leading paradigm among private colleges, thereby increasing the need for women’s colleges to create a niche as “women-first” institution; as people began to question the model of excellence that was tied to men; and as sexual discrimination lawsuits from faculty members exposed the climate for women in the faculty and raised questions about the validity of feminist scholarship, and the informal decision-making structures for promotion, tenure, and other rewards for faculty. Conversations about these issues had begun with some vigor at Smith before Conway’s arrival. As the first woman president, a feminist scholar, and an administrator who had built her reputation on fighting for sex equity in faculty pay, Conway entered the conversation with her positions well established and well known. She intended to recruit, retain, and tenure more women faculty and to reward those who studied women’s lives. To do that, however, she had to confront a series of challenges, including a powerful and resistant senior faculty group and a climate for faculty that was exposed by an internal study as being inhospitable to women. Other problems were the potential for stasis because of the demographic characteristics of the faculty, a change in legislation that removed the

A Resistant Faculty

37

mandatory retirement age, a trustee-imposed tenure cap, and fiscal constraints that limited the possibility of faculty expansion. How Conway took on those challenges is the focus of this chapter. EARLY RESISTANCE FROM SENIOR FACULTY Jill Conway met stiff resistance very early in her tenure from a group of senior faculty. According to a number of people I interviewed, this resistance was public and unrelenting. It made for a challenging transition for a young president. Although I found little dispute about the nature and source of this early resistance, its cause is subject to varied interpretations. For Conway, the resistance was the result of a group of faculty losing power and control with the arrival of the new administration. I had zero honeymoon because there was a bunch of senior male faculty there who didn’t give me ten days. They had been a kind of kitchen cabinet [under President Mendenhall] and they expected to keep on running the place. Because his style of management was, he just had a bunch of cronies that he got together with and they decided. Faculty meetings and committee meetings were a bit of a façade. I wasn’t having any cronyism and insisted on making a performance structure work, which enraged a lot of faculty. I used to call [some of the senior women faculty] the ladies. They were women whose accommodation to that male power group was to be extremely genteel, to try and negotiate things with them and to keep the junior faculty very, very strictly in line. Some of them had been used to being top woman and didn’t like there being another one, especially a much younger one. So they were as big a pain in the neck as the male faculty.8

Jean Higgins, a faculty member and assistant to the president under Conway, viewed Conway’s arrival as a threatening change to the most powerful members of Smith’s faculty. She said that the number of ways that Conway differed from her predecessors suggested to the senior male faculty that their influence would be diminished with this new president. I guess that would be the same for most new people coming on, but of course with Jill it was the breaking of the tradition. The male “dinosaurs” came out of the same Ivy League colleges that the presidents they knew had come out of. For example, if you look at [the former presidents] of Smith College, Seelye is from Amherst College, Neilson is from Harvard…Davis is from Oxford, Wright is from Harvard, Mendenhall is from Yale. And here’s this woman coming out of one of those newly fangled urban universities [the University of Toronto]. The senior male faculty members came out of the same places [as previous presidents had], and that’s what reality was: It was males running a place, academic males

38

The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change with this very fine old tradition, particularly in New England…. And they wanted to control it, a small group of them.

That some of these senior faculty were also the most vocal proponents of coeducation at Smith, a direction that Jill Conway demonstrated no inclination in taking, suggested to many that this was a core motivation for their opposition. Professor Martha Ackelsberg recalled that opposition came from “people who wanted the place to be coed, people who [thought] that educating women was absolutely no different from educating men, who didn’t think that the study of women was a worthwhile endeavor.” Others argued that the coeducation issue was emblematic of a deeper concern of the most visible supporters of this option; namely, that they considered teaching women less prestigious than teaching men. Thus, holding a faculty position at a women’s college had negative implications for their own status, and, as Jill Conway offered, for “their own sexual identity:” My sense was that the most dyed-in-the-wool proponents [of coeducation] were the very senior male faculty... The most vocal faculty in that school when I got there on the feminist side were junior women faculty. Many of them just got tenure and were very strong feminists and very committed to keeping Smith a women’s college. But the constant barrage of complaint about remaining a women’s college, in my perception, came from senior male faculty. They were always buttonholing the trustees, telling them the quality of the student body was collapsing and it wasn’t like what they taught twenty years ago; the place was going to hell in a hand basket. I think it is because those men are very threatened in their own sexual identity by not having made it, didn’t get to Harvard, didn’t get to Yale. To the extent that this is a women’s college they feel demeaned, so they would rather teach third-rate male applicants than bright women who question them.9

Ruth Solie reinforced the notion that Conway’s earliest critics were driven by their own sense of failure: “I think the faculty was filled with men who never expected to spend their career here. They actually expected to be summoned to Yale, or Harvard, mostly Yale, most of them came from Yale. The idea that they were stuck in a women’s place was kind of galling to them.” The timing of Amherst College’s 1974 decision to become coeducational—just before Conway’s arrival in Northampton—fed into the critics’ growing distress about Smith’s identity, as well as their own, according to Susan Bourque. [Jill Conway was] this elegant, intelligent woman who was very committed to Smith being a woman’s college, and of course at that moment

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Amherst had just made the decision to go coed… Jill comes in with this firm commitment, which was wonderful for those of us who believed in women’s colleges and had a commitment to women’s education, a unique niche and purpose…. I think it was very bad news for that part of the faculty that had always justified there being a Smith on the basis that women couldn’t go to Harvard or Yale or Williams or Amherst, and so therefore they were still teaching the very best of the best. That the call hadn’t come from Harvard or Yale didn’t really smack so much because they were still teaching the elite of the elite. Well, all of a sudden that was no longer the case and there was that group that really felt very strongly that we should quickly do what Vassar was doing, just turn ourselves into a coeducational place—forget our tradition and get on with it.

Another aspect of Smith’s identity that Conway’s critics worried she was jeopardizing was its strict adherence to a liberal arts curriculum. In her inaugural address, Conway spoke of the “human potential of women,” which included a “commitment to the life of action or to the life of the mind.” She argued for “develop[ing] the resources to counsel our students and alumnae better about the typical career experiences of women.”10 In speeches and in her writing, she regularly referred to the research of M. Elizabeth Tidball, particularly the work that analyzed how women’s talents were developed and how their career achievements became manifest.11 Professor Howard Nenner recalled that, for some of his colleagues, these statements were antithetical to Smith’s tradition: “The criticism of Jill was that she was seeking to professionalize Smith. She was talking about women in careers, women in the workforce. Senior faculty thought this was a betrayal of the liberal arts tradition. They would say things like, ‘She’s trying to make this into a trade school.’” Martha Ackelsberg heard these same concerns, and placed them in the larger context of societal change and the concerns those wrought. There were some people when Jill first came who were, and maybe remained that way through the whole time she was here, who were sort of concerned that she was too professionally oriented—or too corporate or whatever. She would never have said to me, for example, the kind of thing that Mendenhall said about training the next generation of volunteers. She saw Smith graduates going out there and taking their places in the world of paid work as well as unpaid. I think maybe some…thought that even thinking about encouraging women to take their places in a more corporate, business world was just dirty and inappropriate and below us.

Yet Conway’s speeches and her regular defense of the liberal arts suggests that she was somewhat of a traditionalist in this respect. Louis CohnHaft indicated to me that he understood Conway’s commitment to the liberal arts to be unwavering. His sense was that the concerns of his fellow historians had more to do with personality and sexual politics than disagreements about the institution’s mission.

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change She … was very sensitive to old-fashioned scholarship and the old-fashioned values of a liberal education. But she had in many ways a personality that does not endear her particularly to the people who call themselves the dinosaurs…. Their hostility to her was permanent and firm. Most of these people I think she tried to pacify by giving them rewards, which they gladly accepted, and still bad-mouthed her. I think there were senior members who tried everything they could to undercut everything that she did, to put it bluntly…. I think they resented the fact that they were working for a dynamic and forceful woman.

The opposition to Conway by some faculty was in part a function of personality and sexual politics, but it also stemmed from the fact that Conway was seen as symbolic of and a supporter of larger, progressive social changes that were taking hold in a variety of ways in colleges and universities. Professor Susan Bourque noted the dissonance between how some faculty expected Conway to act and what they actually witnessed when she arrived on campus. I think they were worried about a woman coming in and they got increasingly worried as they saw that she was an iron woman. She was a feminist and smart and tough. I think they were genuinely puzzled at first because they expected her to be like all the other senior women they saw about them—and that was really not very tough underneath and not really able to stand up to them—and she did! They kept expecting this velvet-glove treatment, and she was tough as nails. She was a very hard-headed administrator, and didn’t put up with a lot of foolishness, yet at the same time very committed to change. They got very nervous about the kinds of changes that she was interested in…. Her own commitment to research on women was like waving a red flag in front of them…

THE ORIGINS OF DISTRUST Professor of religion and history Robert Haddad, who described himself to me as Conway’s “nemesis,” was one of the president’s most visible opponents. Although he had concerns about the college remaining single sex and the emergence of new areas into the curriculum, he described his opposition as resulting primarily from his distrust of the new president. In dealing with Mrs. Conway, there was a problem. I was chairman of the Department of History during President Mendenhall’s last year and during Jill Conway’s first year. With Mendenhall, you know, a word, a handshake was sufficient. With Mrs. Conway, I quickly concluded that after the conversation with her, I mean a conversation involving departmental matters, I’d best go back to my office and write a memo embodying my understanding of what had transpired and even that didn’t always work…. [President Mendenhall] was not at all dictatorial. I had to admire and respect his directness, honesty, integrity, and I can’t say that I found these conspicuously present in Mrs. Conway.

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Most faculty came to distrust her. The president losing the trust of the faculty is in trouble. I didn’t have much to do with her and you couldn’t quite take her word.

Professor of Education Sue Freeman said that departments were often split along gender lines in their views on the president. In some cases, the women would support Conway, while the men would be vocal in their disdain for her, claiming that she lied or questioning her competence. When I pushed on the claims of dishonesty, faculty provided few specifics to support these damaging assertions. The anecdotes that I was told to bolster these claims often described Conway’s stormy relationship with Ken McCartney, dean of the faculty. In Conway’s second year, the dean, George Mair, passed away. She appointed Ken McCartney, a senior faculty member, to succeed him. McCartney remained as dean until 1982, when he was succeeded by Fran Volkmann. Conway’s difficult relationship with McCartney provided fodder to faculty who saw in that relationship a reflection of how she treated faculty and led the college more generally. Robert Haddad said that Conway would “pull the rug out from under him publicly,” and others indicated that she would dismiss him or contradict him in front of other faculty. Andy Zimbalist indicated that Conway seemed to have approved an inaccurate press release announcing that McCartney was being named to an endowed professorship as he was leaving the dean’s office. The press release, Zimbalist said, inflated McCartney’s scholarly achievements, and this was symptomatic of Conway’s leadership style—”It sometimes seemed that when she wanted things to be a certain way, she simply declared them to be that way,” he said. When Fran Volkmann was tapped by Conway to succeed McCartney in the dean’s office, she was concerned that her relationship with the president could become as problematic as that of her predecessor. Ken [McCartney] had a lot of trouble with Jill, a lot of trouble. There were many things that just hadn’t gotten done. It seemed to me that we could move ahead, and he was so locked in some kind of a personal, in his head, conflict with Jill, that he couldn’t seem to move anything….He said that she undermined him at every turn, that he would make a decision and she would change it without even telling him. There was clearly not a clear demarcation of responsibility there. Also, there was a huge timeline in the Dean’s office: Nothing got done for weeks and months. It was a terrible thing to walk into in a certain way. …It was sufficiently discomforting to me that when I came back to be dean with Jill, and Jill pronounced this to be rather like a marriage… I remember I went to her and I said, “Listen, I have to tell you, Ken says that you undermine him and you take decisions after he’s taken them,” and she said, “Well, it’s all correct.” She said, “I sit down with him and we go over

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change what needs to be done and how and what the timeframe is going to be and what the expectations are going to be, and nothing happens. And I wait and I talk to him and I wait and I wait and then I do it.” I remember this ruthlessly frank discussion with each other. I found her to be just fabulous to work with, just wonderful. I’d go in there with an idea and she would attack the content of the idea. If at the end of the day she thought it was not a good idea, she’d say, “I really don’t think this is a good idea for this and this reason.” And I could almost always accept that; I felt as if I had really been heard. Or she would say, “This is great; I’ll get the money.”

Another reason that this issue of trust arose was that Conway was reported to give informal public presentations that contradicted what she had said in other circumstances or seemed not to be based on the facts as others understood them. This is surprising given the control that she seemed to exert in most situations. For some, this was an indication of her desire to please everyone or to will things to be a certain way. It might have also been an indication of how she prepared for presentations. Her staff recalled that when she spoke publicly she nearly always spoke extemporaneously. Her secretary, Judi Marksbury, said that she “spoke off the top of her head…. She might have note cards with points but she never had a speech typed out.”12 A member of Conway’s staff told me stories of how Conway could adapt her remarks to any crowd and make her talk “meaningful,” even when the audience was very different from what she had expected. She was successful at this in part because she tended to “freelance” when speaking to groups, but this was a practice with a clear downside, I was told: Sometimes some of the actual facts suffered quite a bit. I would go with her to varied places and she would give these talks and I would think, “Whoa, I hope nobody hears this!” because she would say things that either hadn’t happened or were not going to happen or she wished would happen or—and they were wonderful, they were perfect things to say but they had…no basis in reality…. I think she is a wonderful person, but… I was present when she would glamorize something or she would dress it up in ways that I knew sounded great to the audience but weren’t entirely true.13

Some suggested that it was Conway’s reticence to share her plans or her intentions that incubated this distrust. The treasurer, Robert Ellis, enjoyed working under Conway, but he didn’t always know the direction she was taking: “But in all of the years with Mrs. Conway, never, never ever any words, any differences, anything. It was always good. Now, I think that she always had her own agenda, which she held to herself. I don’t think she told the dean; I don’t think she told anybody.”

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Professor Jean Higgins, herself originally foreign to Smith’s and the larger U.S. culture, saw this distrust as being derived from difficulties in cross-cultural communications. She was also British, which I am. And that had its advantages…. But it had its disadvantages. One of them is that there’s a certain politeness to you, and when you’re talking to someone and you’re wanting something from me, I’m more inclined from my background to say yes to you, to want to say yes and to be very gracious about it. And to [decline] in nice terms. I’ve been here 32 years so I don’t do it anymore in the same sense, but that would be my natural tendency. And Jill did that. There were some, and especially her critics, who thought she wasn’t always straight with them, and it wasn’t true. I could see that in being British myself. It was just her way and sometimes a...way of answering the question, not just pleasing the person, but also wanting time to think about the matter that was put before her, and then to give us an answer. In that way, there were some people who gave her a hard time on that matter. If they’d understood where she was coming from, it would have been quite different.

In many respects, the origins of this distrust and whether or not it was a legitimate concern is less important than the fact that faculty saw it as an issue. Trust is a key weapon in the arsenal of college administrators, whose formal authority is often limited by arcane governance structures. Successful leadership under such circumstances depends heavily on persuasion, and persuasion, in turn, is predicated in part on trust. In addition, because administrators, and presidents in particular, often have greater access than faculty to information related to decision making, trust and transparency are core elements of any shared governance system. When trust becomes an issue for faculty, they might look for ways to limit the president’s authority or to assert their own influence. This can be done by resisting a president’s initiatives or through more formal mechanisms, such as seeking direct access to the board of trustees. The Smith faculty explored both of these avenues during Conway’s term. THE FIGHT FOR GENDER BALANCE IN THE FACULTY By the time Conway had settled in Northampton, campus discussions about sex discrimination in the faculty were at least a decade old. In 1966, President Mendenhall addressed those who expressed concern about the diminishing number of women on the Smith faculty by providing an historical perspective on the topic. From the very start President Seelye tried to have both sexes well represented in the faculty; indeed in 1875 the first nine (full-time and parttime) included five men and four women. Every president has subscribed to this ideal and tried to maintain it. Marriage has always rendered the women’s tenure “uncertain,” in President Seelye’s phrase, although Smith’s old and generous practice of welcoming both the qualified hus-

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change band and wife to the teaching faculty, even into the same department, have very much worked to the College’s advantage. A half-century ago when higher education was expanding more slowly and there were fewer opportunities for the woman professor, the percentage of women on the Smith faculty rose as high as 75% in 1910. This represented an imbalance of sorts, one might argue, which is underscored by the fact that the present chairman of Mathematics was in 1931 the first man ever appointed to that department. Since World War II the percentage (which was still 63% in 1939) has declined steadily until it stands at 35% this year (excluding Physical Education). These days a woman may teach at a steadily increasing number of institutions besides Smith; yet there is no excuse for Smith not to halt this decline in its own best interests.14

Four years later, Professor Emeritus Myra Sampson encouraged the president to reverse this decline and made clear that, from her vantage point, the president, through the direct role he played in the appointment and tenure process, was the only person in a position to enact such change. She sent Mendenhall a report she drafted on the status of women faculty at Smith in 1969–70. She prepared it, she wrote, “because of the low number and percentage of the women faculty, especially in the ranks of Professor and Associate Professor; and their continuous decrease since 1960. In the future, there will be no women faculty in academic departments in Smith College if this decrease continues.” 15 In the report she enclosed with the letter, she highlighted several aspects of the faculty’s composition. She noted that while women made up 30 percent of the faculty, there were a number of all-male departments, and the number (from 97 to 66) and percentage of women on the faculty overall (from 44 to 30 percent) had decreased significantly within the decade of the 1960s.16 By choosing this period to assess the change in the faculty, Sampson emphasized that the decline was taking place on Mendenhall’s watch. She also pointed out that, as chair of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion and as the officer who recommended faculty appointments to the trustees, the president was uniquely situated to reverse this trend. History professor Louis Cohn-Haft was on the Committee on Tenure and Promotion when Professor Sampson’s unsolicited report was made available. He recalled that it raised his own awareness of the issues, but that it was not taken especially seriously by other members of the committee. When I came to Smith…I was on the Committee on Tenure and Promotion and it was very clear that there were very few women coming up for anything and those that did were fairly weak sisters and it was rather difficult to get them tenure…. And there was a feeling, which I heard when I came to Smith, even among the women, that the place was too womanly—that we needed more men. So we got enough men so that finally the situation was reversed and we had a situation in which the men would never hire a woman. I only know the history department, but I can re-

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member case after case of a situation in which we were down to two candidates, one a gentleman and the other a dynamic woman. And the gentleman always won because he was obviously not going to cause any trouble, he was well prepared, he was good at his business and was clearly not a pain in the ass and the woman [they would say] was too forceful. You know, who wants a forceful woman? I mean she’s just too masculine and all that stuff…. But when I came to Smith almost all the top-notch people were women—and they were powerhouses. They published, they ran things, they were presidents of their professional organizations… but it was hard to replace them in the fifties and into the sixties and it really was only early in the seventies that you could begin to get women.

For many, it was especially troubling that Smith had difficulty attracting and retaining women faculty when, for many decades, its reputation was burnished by a powerful group of senior women faculty. Ann Shanahan, who was a student at Smith in the 1950s, described “an era where some of the most prominent Smith faculty members were women…Gwendolyn Carter and Elizabeth Drew…and Eleanor Duckett and Mary Ellen Chase and all those people who had a national prominence and were here in great numbers.” Mary Dunn described this era in similar terms, adding that the men who replaced and ultimately resented these important women saw their role as resisting many of the ideals these women represented. A lot of the men who were full professors at Smith when Jill arrived had replaced very powerful women, and they resented those women. It provided extra fuel for them to fight feminist issues on campus. There had been amazing women at Smith in the 50s and 60s, and the men who replaced them hit their peak when Jill Conway took office.

If, in fact, these male faculty thought of themselves as fighting against feminist faculty and feminist ideals, it may be because, as some suggest, they were recruited to Smith to make the faculty more “masculine.” Professor of History Howard Nenner relayed a story he had heard from his colleagues about a deliberate campaign to increase the number of male faculty in an attempt to elevate the status of the college. I served on an ad hoc committee that was charged with looking at why Smith was unable to attract or hold onto young women faculty…. We invited anyone from the faculty who wanted to speak to us to do so. Helen Chinoy told us that she came to Smith because her husband, Ely, was recruited here. He was the great attraction. He was recruited as part of a campaign to bolster male faculty. Smith was becoming identified with matronly women faculty. There was a perception that Smith was turning into a young women’s seminary.

Nearly a century after its founding, there remained lingering concerns that Smith would be identified as a “seminary,” instead of a college—just the distinction Smith’s founders worked hard to make clear. For some,

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modernizing Smith and building its reputation hinged in part on attracting men to the faculty, despite the women of national prominence who had led the Smith faculty in decades past. Susan Bourque shared an anecdote that demonstrated how this unofficial approach to changing the composition of the faculty was enacted. I’ll tell you a story that [a colleague] told me. When he was hired up from Columbia, Mendenhall had said to him he wanted the…department remade and that meant, as [he] explained to me, getting rid of the old biddies… But all those distinguished women that led the college so well for all those many years, I think, were as subject to the cultural shift of the late 40s and the early 50s as any other group, and of course remember they got male presidents at this point as well, and no obvious feminist movement to keep things clear…. It was the time after the war so the pool is shrunk just as the GI bill brings more and more men into the pool but also these jobs become worth competing for. The salaries start improving at the women’s colleges and so men are willing to compete for those jobs, and if you’ve got an atmosphere that is saying that if you really want to make this place go what you’ve got to do is hire men. I also had it explained to me…by one of my senior colleagues whom I liked very much, but he said to me, “Now Susie, you have to understand that the point at which Smith really took off and began to excel, vis-àvis…Mount Holyoke [was] when we started adding more men to this faculty. So when the faculty was 75/25, that’s when things really turned around and we really knew we were on our way to being a first-rate institution, leaving all the others in the dust.” So it was clear that [some believed] the way to improve things is to hire men.

At one level it seems inconceivable that many at Smith, which today holds regular celebrations of women’s achievements and markets itself under the tag line, “Where women’s minds matter,” would have so recently tied the concept of excellence to masculinity. Yet in many respects it was the women’s movement, which coincided with these discussions at Smith, that raised questions about the validity of intertwining male teachers with educational excellence. The institutional culture at Smith reflected the norms in the larger society. THE BATTLE MOVES TO THE COURTS As social mores and legal statutes evolved, the gender composition of the Smith faculty and the reasons behind the shift to a predominantly male faculty became a matter of public and legal concern. By the early 1970s, the college faced five sex and race discrimination suits from individual members of the faculty. The three cases that received the most attention on campus involved members of the English Department, Maurianne Adams, Mary Carruthers, and Ron Banerjee, each of whom was denied tenure. Adams’ and Carruthers’ cases alleged sex discrimination and were heard by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) in

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Alumnae House in the center of Smith’s campus (the Banerjee case alleged discrimination based on race). The cases were initiated before Conway was appointed president and they divided the faculty. Many faculty attended the hearings between classes and watched as the college’s tenure process, its apparent emphasis on recruiting male faculty, and the denigrating way in which some senior male faculty treated their junior women colleagues, were held up to legal scrutiny. Professor Louis Cohn-Haft, who attended the hearings, thought it was especially damaging to the college’s case and to the relationship between junior and senior faculty when a Smith faculty member produced “evidence” that Smith purposefully and deliberately increased the number of men on the faculty: Well, it did tremendous damage to the faculty, which was split. Most of the junior faculty had simply lost complete confidence in their senior people, whom, of course, they were always depending on for their promotions and ultimately, tenure. It was a really bad scene….the great moment in the hearing came when [a female member of the English Department] says, “May I read from the Smith catalogue [from the 1950s]? What she read was, ‘Smith is proud of the fact that over 50% of its faculty are men.’ Well, that sort of gave the show away…

The testimony became a regular topic of conversation on campus because it laid bare what many had suspected to be the case—that some departments treated women unjustly and there had been little effort on the part of the administration to correct this behavior. Martha Ackelsberg arrived at Smith in 1972, the year the hearings took place. As a junior faculty member, she learned a number of lessons from the testimony she heard. She learned that “there was a clear and admitted double standard in terms of the way [the English Department] treated women colleagues and male colleagues.” It caused her and others to begin looking closely at the practices of other departments. Some departments clearly were, it seemed to me, blatantly discriminatory, and the college was not willing to hold them to account…that certainly didn’t make me or most of the junior women faculty I knew feel particularly secure here. One certainly didn’t have the sense that the college…or the administration was willing to take a stand—not in favor of women anyway. In favor of a senior male, a senior faculty colleague, yes.

The hearings included considerable discussion and analysis of how the gender composition of the faculty at Smith changed over time. Peter Rose, who had voted in favor of one of the women in the English Department as a member of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion (T&P), remembered the testimony of an expert witness for the plaintiffs. This person claimed to show a pattern of discrimination at Smith by comparing the college’s faculty composition to Mount Holyoke and other women’s colleges, which had a majority of women on their faculty.

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change In a sense, they were discriminating by limiting the number of men on the faculty. We [at Smith] weren’t. During the debates over the English Department’s tenure cases, as far as I could tell, on T&P, gender was not an issue. As I remember, the MCAD charged the department with committing acts of gender discrimination, while they did not argue this point regarding the T&P’s deliberations. Instead, they seemed to imply that we [T&P] were guilty of an act of omission, that we should have taken gender into account in our deliberations.

Robert Haddad struck a similar tone: “…consider the situation, there were so many more male Ph.D.s being produced in history and most other disciplines than women. I mean, the odds were against women candidates, not because of any bias on the part of those doing the hiring.” By the time Jill Conway arrived at Smith, the campus was in considerable turmoil over the discrimination suits and the general discontent brought about by the charges and the issues made explicit by them. In her first semester as president, Conway appointed “a new ad-hoc committee created to consider the advisability of setting up a permanent committee to adjudicate internal disputes between individual members of the College.”17 It is unlikely that she knew then that developing procedures to settle grievances and to set a fair process for faculty reappointments, promotion, and tenure would become a major preoccupation for her and the college community. In the years before Conway’s arrival, the faculty had taken up the codifying of procedures for reappointment, tenure, and promotion.18 Dubbed the “Yellow Document” because of the color of its cover, the Policy of Appointment, Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure was a work in progress throughout Conway’s term. Each year, several faculty meetings were dedicated to discussions of changes or additions to the document.19 Ruth Solie recalled an “endless process of revising this Yellow Document. It was an excruciating process, [involving] every sentence, every paragraph.” [The] intent was to protect junior people from various kinds of highhandedness which were rampant in those days… For instance, tenure candidates would have the right to choose some of reviewers, would know who the reviewers would be, would have a right to read the letters, would be entitled to communicate directly to the committee. I mean none of that was in place, and there were no standard procedures in place, and everything was very ad hoc and people were just told, we like you, you can stay.

The “high-handedness” that Ruth Solie referred to became manifest in a number of ways. Fran Volkmann remembered how, for a junior woman in particular, there was little protection from her senior colleagues, even in her own department: There were some departments in which it was just horrible to be a junior woman.…partly because the senior men in the department seemed to have no clue about the scholarly work that women were doing and tended to

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deprecate it without even having read it. So there’s that kind of judgment, but also a complete lack of mentoring and acculturation and inclusion in the department or in the intellectual life of the college. There were some other departments where women did better; and they weren’t always departments with more senior women in them, although they often were. But I have to say, some of the senior women were not the friends of junior women either.

Sex discrimination can come in many guises; often insidious, it can be difficult to detect when it is built into the system of rewards. But it can also be explicit, even blatant. This was the case in Smith’s history department, according to Louis Cohn-Haft. Some faculty, he said, freely expressed their unwillingness to even consider appointing women to the department: I remember one time when we were hiring someone in the history department . . . we had two candidates, a man and a woman—and this was back in the days when it was hard to get women candidates because they just weren’t going to graduate school—they were producing babies. One guy in the department said, “No! Absolutely, this woman cannot be appointed.” I said, “Why, why?” He said, “Because she’s no good.” “What’s no good about her? Look at her record and this and that. She’s appeared here, she gave a talk, she’s very good.”… Finally, he said, “I don’t want a woman colleague!” And there were a couple of women sitting there— there weren’t very many but there were a couple. He went on, “I don’t want a woman colleague. She’s forceful and I don’t like forceful women.”

Insofar as this attitude reflected more general sentiments in the history department, it might help to explain what many describe as the strong opposition Conway faced in this, her home department at the college. That Mendenhall was also an historian and had close relationships with senior members of the department could have also contributed to this opposition. Conway, as an historian of women, represented an emerging area in the discipline; this, too, was likely to be frowned on by the conservative members of the department.20 These intradepartmental conflicts set the backdrop for ongoing deliberations in the faculty on how to deal with charges of illegal discrimination and how to implement policies that would comply with antidiscrimination laws. Title IX of the Federal Education Amendments, enacted in 1972, prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex “under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on race, color or national origin “under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”21 The trustees later approved an expanded mandate of the Committee on Grievance “to consider petitions alleging unlawful discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, sex, age or national origin…”22 While Smith was in the process of codifying faculty rules and procedures, the MCAD commissioner found in favor of the plaintiffs, and in December 1975, the college learned that its appeal of the case to the full

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Commission had failed. Conway announced to the faculty on December 3, 1975 that the college would appeal again, this time to Superior Court.23 It is clear from the minutes of the faculty meeting at which this decision was announced that many faculty were uncomfortable with the college’s pursuit of this issue through the courts. A senior member of the faculty, Philip Green, argued “that it ill-behooves a college for women to challenge [the] principle” underlying the MCAD’s decision. Others raised concerns about the way President Mendenhall had handled the case. Susan Bourque recalled her own discomfort with the new president’s stand on this issue: “But Jill arrives in 1975 and that court case is still a live thing, and the first thing she says is, well, I agree with the… position [that] we didn’t discriminate. Well, the junior members of the faculty—we were sort of disappointed with that.” Louis Cohn-Haft, a senior member of the faculty at that time, also expressed his disappointment with the president’s support of the previous administration’s position: “Mrs. Conway had become president and I would say as part of taking the job took the college’s position on this matter. She wouldn’t know what had actually gone on the way the rest of us did—and I think she made a mistake. I think she should have made herself neutral but she felt, I guess, that she had to stick by the official position of the college.” Indeed, in an interview, Conway said that she maintained the official position of the college until she had the opportunity to better understand the campus climate and the particulars of the cases. When I first arrived I didn’t have a clue who was right and there are something like 27 volumes of evidence within the MCAD, and it took me a long time to really sift through that…It seemed to me that that was a fight that I had to be sure I was right on, and I didn’t know until I read the scholarly works and really came to a judgment myself. Just because everybody said that these were terribly biased decisions, if you just walked into a place you can’t afford to take that on people’s say-so. You have to decide for yourself. And while I was deciding I certainly stuck with the college line because it would have been silly to do anything else. 24

She says now that “I have no shadow of a doubt in my mind that there was real prejudice operating here, not a shadow of a doubt.”25 Nevertheless, on July 18, 1977, the Massachusetts Superior Court released its opinion on the appeal of the MCAD case, and this time the college was victorious.26 In her annual report, Jill Conway stated the college’s position: “In appealing the MCAD decision the College was confident that its procedures for reaching tenure decisions were free from improper bias and expected that they would be upheld by the courts.”27 The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination decided to appeal the decision to the state supreme court. The court’s decision may have been a victory for the administration, but many faculty continued to find fault with the college for the treatment of

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their former colleagues. Some of those who criticized the administration noted that the college was defending a set of procedures for tenure review and grievance mediation that had been the subject of considerable review and change in the intervening years. On November 30, 1977, Louis CohnHaft addressed this issue at a faculty meeting. Mr. Cohn-Haft said it is fortunate that the court was not asked to uphold the College’s ‘traditional procedures,’ for those procedures were so bad that we ourselves condemned them by adopting the ‘Yellow Document’ and the Committee on Grievance. He then expressed his frustration with the paradox of the College’s public position of maintaining total virtue of the discredited procedures and the private position of thoroughly revamping the procedures. Mr. Cohn-Haft disagreed with the College’s claim that sex discrimination on account of sex did not occur in these cases, for he believes that sex discrimination was only one of a number of abuses and injustices that played a part in the cases of Ms. Adams and Ms. Carruthers. He concluded by saying that these women and those members of the Faculty who sympathized with them should be given the dignity of having had something in the way of a cause and, he said, they should not be regarded as cranks and malcontents...28

It wasn’t until two and a half years later that the case was finally resolved. The official version of the resolution appeared in the annual Report of the President. On its reconsideration, the MCAD found that the college had not discriminated unlawfully in denying tenure to the two faculty members in question. The college and the complainants issued the following joint statement after receiving the decision: …Since the parties agree upon the long-range goal of full equality for women, and [on] Smith’s major role in educating women for those tasks which will ensure the goal of equality for women, they have agreed that further lengthy and expensive litigation now would serve no useful purpose…. Thus, the case is now closed. After extensive discussions, the parties have now agreed to put the matter of this long case behind them in an amicable manner…. This extended period of litigation, during which the courts clarified the standards for determining unlawful discrimination decisions regarding faculty employment, had its own internal benefits for the College, since it encouraged us to develop and refine our own internal grievance procedures and to give sustained attention to procedural fairness in the work of all our personnel committees.29

The following year, 1981, Conway reported that the race discrimination suit brought by Ron Banerjee was ultimately decided in favor of the college and upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals. This brought to a close the litigation that had distracted the college throughout the 1970s. It also, she wrote, “brings formal confirmation to the Board of Trustees that past

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administrations and past Committees on Tenure and Promotion of the College had pursued their work in a manner found by the courts to be free of unlawful bias.”30 Despite Conway’s public support for the College’s position in the discrimination cases, she says that she, too, was sympathetic to Adams and Carruthers, and ultimately agreed to a monetary settlement. I got in touch with the women who were suing through the Commission Against Discrimination and told them I understood why they were [suing the college] and that I thought there was every reason for them to bring charges. But I also said that it was damaging the college to carry on a suit that could be settled out of court, and they were perfectly willing to do so. In minutes they saw somebody in charge who respected and understood what they’d been up against. So they went away. They never had the problems that many people were anticipating and then of course in Ron Banerjee’s case I thought that had to be litigated all the way to the top because it was a very different story. And we won that. Those two things—I settled the MCAD case and we won the Banerjee case—that changed the mood a bit.31

There is little doubt that putting an end to these visible and disruptive cases was good for Conway and for the college. But she expended political capital in accomplishing this. As a new president, she says she felt compelled to hold the college line on the cases, especially when she had not been immersed in the details of their origins. This position alienated her from the more liberal members of the faculty, who viewed the college’s official position as hypocritical and unjust. With time and more experience with the cases, she came to understand the Adams and Carruthers suits as resulting from real discrimination, and it was at that point, she says, that she offered to settle the cases. By that time, however, any settlement offer was going to be perceived as a late if welcome proposition from the left and a capitulation by Conway from the right. The anger that these suits generated and the fissures they exposed within the faculty foreshadowed the difficulties Conway would face in her future relationships with the faculty. A NEW KITCHEN CABINET For presidents to face challenges from their faculty is hardly unusual, but in the 1970s these challenges seemed particularly prevalent. They usually stemmed from disagreements about whether the leadership for the institution resided in the faculty or the administration. It wasn’t uncommon, as COFHE leader Kay Hanson noted, for such disagreements to shorten a president’s term in office. Presidents in that era confronted such faculty, not just in single-sex institutions. Amherst went through the same thing….it was the issue of the

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identity and the role of the president in leading the college, versus the college being run by and the direction of the college being led by a small group of long-term senior faculty. At Amherst, there was a cadre of resistant faculty when they got a new president. There were battles . . . fundamentally, over who is running this place and do you have an executive or not?

This willingness to challenge the president was also rooted in larger changes in society. The counterculture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s helped mainstream the idea and practice of questioning authority. Smith’s Treasurer Robert Ellis recalled that the genteel decorum of faculty meetings changed in the late 60s and 70s, with faculty increasingly feeling “free to get up and be real sassy” toward the president. In an environment in which faculty are openly and publicly critical of the president, there is a strong incentive for the president to identify or even embolden a group of supporters. Conway met this challenge initially by empowering a small group of junior women faculty. If Jill Conway met strong resistance from the campus’s most powerful group, the senior faculty, then she found comfort, camaraderie and counsel in the small and seemingly powerless group of junior women faculty. She described how a group of junior women came to replace the powerful senior males who had advised her predecessor: …After I’d been at Smith about a year or maybe a year and a half, some of these junior women faculty had observed the good old boys in faculty meetings. They put together about ten of them and said, “We want to invite you to dinner, and we want to just tell you what we know about the place and the politics of outmaneuvering these guys.” And they did. They were another kind of kitchen cabinet, if you like, but they were very—not only junior people, but very savvy. They were terrific, and they knew more about the specific nuts and bolts of this piece of curriculum change or that piece of something or other. They were a wonderful resource and very funny. And I knew that I could trust them and that…anything I said would be in confidence. So they were tremendous and a great resource. They stayed around doing that for two or three years until we all thought things were fine. We would still get together but it would be much more of a social occasion.32

Susan Bourque, who eventually collaborated on research with Conway, team-taught courses with her, and became one of the president’s strongest allies, was a member of this kitchen cabinet. She said that the original intent of this group was to support the new president in an environment in which sides were being chosen. Along about the spring of that year, I think it was Jean Higgins who came up to me one day in College Hall, saying something like, “You know, those guys are being really nasty to President Conway. We really ought to be supportive. We may not like everything that Jill does, but look at who

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change the enemies are! Which side of this place do we want to be on?” So that was a no-brainer. We just conceived of the idea of having dinners . . . where we would provide a safe environment. No telling tales out of school, you could let your hair down—she could—and…we could tell her our sense of what was going on around, what was being said, etc. It served as an informal feedback system for her in a way that she wasn’t getting information otherwise…. Nobody was making policies, nobody was really thinking about policies.

Although these dinners may have been largely social events, they were conceived to demonstrate clear support for an embattled president. Professor of Education Sue Freeman, a participant in the dinner group and a newcomer to Smith herself at that time, said that the dinners took place every four to six weeks, “and we talked about personal stuff. Jill talked a lot about her life. It was pretty social—it wasn’t a discussion of college policies. We saw ourselves as supporting Jill in this very chilly climate. We were flattered to be in her company. This wasn’t a policy group at all.” These dinners gave this small group of junior faculty unusual access to the president. It allowed them to articulate to set of views different from those typically propagated in campus committees and other official venues. Martha Ackelsberg also participated in these dinners, but she didn’t think that the dinner group could fully replace the access available to her more senior colleagues: “…we decided a woman was coming and we wanted to try to make sure she talked to the right people, who were going to be at least a kitchen cabinet. We figured these guys who always had access to the president would continue to do that, but we wanted to try to have another funnel of information.” These gatherings provided an opportunity for feminist faculty to stand behind their feminist president and, in the latter part of Conway’s term, their feminist dean of the faculty, Fran Volkmann. But the group’s special access to the senior administration and the emphasis on supporting the president made it awkward for some members of the group to publicly disagree with the president. Susan Van Dyne thought that the group’s relationship to the president left little room for dissent. I think a lot of people looking at Jill’s reign would say that there was a kitchen cabinet of feminists. I don’t think there was. I think we had some entree to her…but we were expected to behave; insofar as feminist things were supported we were to fall in line behind Jill on every issue. We used to have reasonably regular meetings with her…dinners, off campus. [We’d ask,] “How are you doing? What do you want from us?” Those kind of things. The whole point of having those dinners was to say, “We are here for you, we’re behind you. We’re on the same team. Who is giving you trouble?” And there were huge troubles. I mean, with Fran [Volkmann’s] deanship, there were huge backlashes against…there were lots of very conservative reactions to Fran’s initia-

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tives. And it became very polarizing that way, so that Jill and Fran were under attack for being too feminist, too far out ahead, and so as dutiful feminists we supported them. Jill and Fran did a lot of good, too, for us. But I think that our ethic was to say, “As feminists we support you, and we’ll try to support you no matter what, though thick and thin.”

The implicit expectation of “falling in line” is only one of a number of potential drawbacks to a president’s having such close and personal relationships with faculty over whom she holds some formal authority. Faculty who have such a close relationship to a president can feel betrayed by and become alienated from the president over disagreements about substantive issues. Additionally, outside observers of such groups tend to be suspicious of their purpose and deliberations, just as many of the junior faculty had been suspicious of Mendenhall’s close cadre of senior faculty. Faculty members I spoke with saw the group meeting with Conway as circumventing the regular governance procedures at the college. Their understanding was that this group did indeed discuss policy issues and acted, as one faculty member said, as a “hand-picked, intimate group of people who had influence and access.” Professor Peter Rose suggested that it wasn’t uncommon for Smith presidents to have an informal group of advisers, but the extent of their influence determines whether others see the relationship between the president and these advisers as legitimate and appropriate in a context of shared governance. “Every president has confidants,” he said, “and there is a thin line between confidants and a kitchen cabinet.” It is clear that many on the faculty thought of this dinner group as exclusive, powerful, and threatening; it ultimately became for some a defining characteristic of Conway’s presidency. Its effects on the faculty at large were described in some detail in a 1983 report by a committee charged with examining the college’s failures in recruiting and retaining women faculty. The junior women who joined together to support the president saw themselves as a relatively powerless group in comparison to their senior male colleagues who seemed to hold sway of nearly all important college decisions. Eight years later, they seemed to have become the equal of the adversaries, and in the eyes of many of their colleagues at least, to have fully assumed the role that a group of senior faculty had appeared to play with President Mendenhall. For the committee looking at faculty recruitment issues, such an informal advising system and power structure diminished faculty morale and further confused a governance system that was already unclear to many. One view of the situation is that the College is run by the senior male faculty, by virtue of their majority standing in departments and major College committees. Women, and junior women in particular, feel excluded from and threatened by this governance system. They feel that they have little influence over the way things are done, or over the individuals who control many portions of their professional lives. This is especially true within departments where decisions about course load are made and the

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change criteria for reappointment are formulated and applied. Another view is that the College is controlled by the President with a small group of advisers, mostly women. Not surprisingly, this view is held by a large number of men on the faculty, and it is threatening to them. However, it is also held by some women who feel, for various reasons, that they have been excluded from the advisory group. These women find this exclusion to be both professionally and personally threatening. Yet another view is that the governance of the College is beyond comprehension, and is thus arbitrary and capricious in the way it affects individual faculty. Needless to say, this view generates its own kind of anxiety. It is possible of course that there is some truth in each of the three views. The perception by some senior faculty that they have less control over the governance of the College than they would like, or than has been true in the past, may lead them to guard that much more jealously the power that they do have in departments and on College committees. Since the threat is perceived to be from a clique of women, these faculty might resent those women whom they perceive as potential members of the clique, and even to obstruct the further accumulation of power by women by obstructing their progress toward a permanent position at the College. On the other hand, this kind of discrimination against women faculty at the College is likely to produce the kind of intervention from the administration that the senior faculty feels most threatened by.33

Conway appeared to establish her kitchen cabinet as both a survival mechanism and as a way of shifting power within the institution. It is difficult to discern its effectiveness as a survival mechanism. Her reading was that the opposition to her from the traditional power groups on the faculty was absolute, and that nothing short of diminishing the power of those groups would allow her to function as president. From everything I heard from faculty, this was not an unrealistic interpretation of the situation she was entering. It is reasonable to consider whether, over time, she might have been able to chip away at that opposition. Her ability to make progress in that area was likely limited by her social skills—she didn’t charm the “old boys,” she simply took them on directly and engaged them in a battle that extended through her presidency. As suggested in the report excerpted above, it is clear that she was successful in shifting the power dynamics in the faculty. This was no simple task, given the climate for women faculty at Smith in the 1970s. EXPOSING A CHILLY CLIMATE FOR WOMEN FACULTY One of Conway’s goals was to reverse a decades-long trend by increasing the number of women on the Smith faculty. To do that successfully, however, demanded addressing issues beyond recruitment, an area in which Smith appeared to be doing relatively well. Just which issues needed to be addressed were revealed in a study commissioned by Conway and the

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board of trustees in 1982. This study, conducted by the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College, exposed the underside of life in the faculty for junior women, and in doing so, created an opportunity for Conway to assert more forcefully her vision for the Smith faculty. The formation of the Ad Hoc Study Group was announced to the faculty through a memorandum from Conway, in which she described the impetus for the study. During the 1981 cycle of promotions, it was noteworthy that a significantly larger group of men faculty were being promoted than women faculty. This prompted a study of the continuing size of the pool of temporary and permanent faculty eligible for promotion. Preliminary study revealed that, although we have hired approximately equal numbers of men and women in the temporary ranks of the faculty during the last decade, the number actually remaining to consideration for tenure and eligibility for promotion to the senior ranks of the faculty was significantly higher for males than females. When this information was reported to the Board of Trustees, along with the recommended promotions for 1982–83, the Board requested a more detailed study of the factors bearing on this differential experience of women and men faculty at Smith….34

The “Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College” was released in August 1983. The report contained damning statistics and equally devastating qualitative data on the experience of women faculty at Smith. Perhaps the most noteworthy statistical finding was that “Of the thirty resignations from the junior ranks in the last five years, twenty-four have been submitted by women.”35 This, despite findings demonstrating that women were the equal of their male counterparts in terms of incoming qualifications and research production during their stay at Smith. The research showed that from 1976 to 1982, 80 men and 66 women were appointed to the faculty. During this period, men and women were terminated at approximately the same rate, but more than twice as many women resigned voluntarily.36 The report cited a number of reasons for women leaving Smith prior to their tenure review. It was clear, for example, that many junior women faculty felt isolated and without support or mentoring from their more senior colleagues.37 …junior women seem to receive a disproportionately small share of the little mentoring which takes place [in departments]. People offered a variety of explanations for this. One, in some departments it is felt that women are in revolving door positions. This makes it easy for senior faculty to ignore them. Two, we have heard that some senior men devalue junior women as a group, talking about and treating them as ‘girls.’ Three, senior men and junior women are reluctant to initiate closer collegial relationships lest they be perceived as proceeding from sexual rather than professional interests. Fourth, some senior women, who rose through the

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change ranks in a different era, were perceived as unwilling and/or unable to be supportive of junior women colleagues.38

Not surprisingly, this isolation caused some junior women to seek support from their students, a move that only separated them further from members of their department. The report noted that “some of the older male faculty are seen as having a generally low opinion of Smith students, to regard them as ‘girls,’ and furthermore, to see the junior female faculty in much the same way.”39 A number of junior women reported finding their students as more stimulating than their faculty colleagues. However, the time spent with students took time away from the activities that were rewarded through the tenure and promotion process. This had become especially problematic because the requirements for tenure and promotion were seen as becoming increasingly rigorous, particularly in the expectations for research productivity. Although many women were cited as excellent and popular teachers, this, too, had its drawbacks. Good teachers were seen as “pandering to students, perhaps by including material of a less scholarly nature, or by offering a less rigorous course.” 40 This attitude was directed mostly at junior women who taught courses about women’s experiences. The distrust and disconnection that apparently defined the typical relationship of junior women faculty to senior faculty created another set of concerns when it came time to assess scholarship and teaching. The evaluation of one’s teaching prowess is an emotionally charged situation for everyone, but the women feel they are being judged by senior colleagues who have shown little interest in them since their arrival, either professionally or socially. As a result, there is no rapport from which to build a constructive dialogue, and the women report having little in the way of feedback from this demoralizing process. They perceive their junior male colleagues as having social and sporting connections with senior faculty which help to defuse the anxiety of the evaluation and provide more opportunity for informal feedback and lines of communication.

The report attempted to place some of the challenges facing junior faculty and the college in the larger context of societal change and trends that were affecting higher education. It noted, for instance, that “the role of women in American society, and women’s own expectations concerning their ability to combine their personal and professional lives, have changed markedly over the past twenty years. Academe is not immune to these changes, and Smith can not afford to go on as if these expectations had not changed.”41 In particular, it cited “women’s changing career and private expectations,” and reported that “Many women…felt that they shouldn’t have to choose between professional careers and families, but ought to be able to do both. Some women stated that such expectations differentiated them from older cohorts of professional women and tended to make communication and empathy difficult.”42 These tensions were exacerbated by

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the perception that the market for academics would be tight for some time to come. This insightful and candid report explored how “the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism on campus seemed to leave the community deeply conflicted about its values and the college’s identity.” We have heard many different perceptions of the way in which the College operates, and of its impact on women, some of which seem entirely at odds with others. Whether the problem of social isolation is felt more acutely by the heterosexual or homosexual woman is difficult to determine. Both have testified to the deleterious effects of this isolation upon them. Vigorous assertions of lesbian exclusiveness, which we heard repeatedly, have been balanced by equally frequent and passionate assertions of community homophobia. The result seems to be a college society that has become polarized on the subject of lesbianism and, by extension, on the subject of feminism… In roughly equal numbers we have heard from those who believe that Smith supports lesbianism in the faculty and thereby encourages it in the student body, and those who believe that community distaste for female homosexuality has operated effectively to incline college policy toward an anti-lesbian stance.43

This statement about the ambivalence in the Smith community regarding lesbianism hints at the tightrope Conway walked on this issue. The concerns about the growing presence of lesbian faculty mirrored the concerns about the appearance of an greater number of lesbian students. In both cases, the more visible presence of lesbians was associated with the rise of feminism on campus, a trend that Conway herself supported and represented. Yet she appeared to distance herself from lesbianism in some respects. Her official statements on lesbianism seemed designed to pacify those most concerned about it by asserting that there was no evidence of an increase in the number of lesbians on campus. And over time she became separated from those who were seen as the radical feminists on campus, who were more closely associated with lesbianism, over the issue of women’s studies. To be fair, her opposition to women’s studies was stated publicly before she came to Smith, and there is no evidence that it had anything to do with concerns about lesbianism. It would also be problematic to impose a present-day critique on statements about lesbianism in the 1970s, given how sexual mores have changed over the last twenty-five years. Nevertheless, it is worth noting how homophobia within key constituent groups might have complicated Conway’s efforts to “feminize” Smith. Pushing too hard on a feminist agenda—whether that meant recruiting more women to the faculty, supporting feminist scholarship, or advocating increased professional opportunities for women—elicited criticism and resistance from a

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strong and vocal contingent, some of whose concerns reflected the growing tolerance and presence of homosexuality. CHANGING THE CLIMATE FOR FACULTY Changing the climate for faculty can be a long process, particularly at a college like Smith with a highly tenured faculty and a correspondingly slow rate of turnover. Conway attempted to address the climate issue by chipping away at the gender imbalance in the faculty. As Barbara Solomon noted in her study of women’s education, “equity in faculty appointments cannot be achieved rapidly. Many problematic elements impede this process, including internal prejudices and the general crisis in academia because of changes in the economy and the national demography.”44 Conway employed strategies at both the appointment and tenure review stages to increase the number of women on the faculty. These strategies, which I discuss below, were hampered by the demography of the faculty and the desire of the trustees’ wish to control the tenure ratio. Tenure-track faculty lines had to open up if there was to be any chance of making lasting change in the faculty. The greatest impediment to changing the faculty was the low number of anticipated retirements. The year Conway was named president, the college expected only thirteen retirements throughout the decade of the 1980s.45 In addition, Conway inherited a trustee mandate that the ratio of tenured to non-tenured faculty not go above 50 percent. With few faculty retiring and a tenure cap in place, the outlook was grim for young scholars and for Conway’s plans to increase the number of women on the faculty. In her first year of office, Conway was successful in persuading the board of trustees to lift the tenure ceiling from 50 percent to 66 percent, with the proviso that the tenure ratio would return to the 50 percent level by 1990. In March 1978, Congress adopted legislation that moved the mandatory age of retirement from 65 to 70, beginning in 1982. This, of course, made it appear even less likely to junior members of the faculty that positions would be available to them when their probationary period ended. The long-term implications of this legislation were clear to Conway, particularly with regard to the limitations it placed on addressing faculty quality and faculty composition with respect to gender. In academic year 1978–79, she was again successful in convincing the trustees that a strict adherence to a tenure ratio placed harmful constraints on the college.46 She argued that the tenure ratio did “not allow for the exercise of judgment in building the quality of the faculty,” would hurt small departments that would face a large number of departures in a concentrated period, and would have a detrimental impact on affirmative action efforts. The tenure ratio became a driving concern because one obvious option for providing relief, expanding the size of the faculty, was not considered a viable alternative by the trustees or the president, who recognized the diffi-

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culties in balancing the budget. One of the growing pressures on the budget was the need for substantial increases to the faculty salary pool. In her Report to the Board of Trustees, dated October 2, 1979, Conway called attention to this issue: Given the current rate of inflation of 12.7%, the very steep rise in heating costs, and our 7% salary increase for 1979–80, the issue of salary levels will properly be of deep concern to faculty and staff…. The need for some salary increases which help faculty, whose compensation relative to other comparable groups is rapidly declining, catch-up comes at a time when general increases in operating costs present us once again with a serious operating short-falls 3 and 4 years ahead. To maintain morale it will be necessary a) to give sizeable salary increments, b) cut operating costs (now possible only through program or personnel reductions) without serious harm to the institution and c) step up current efforts at annual fund-raising.

At Conway’s urging, the trustees adopted a more flexible tenure ratio policy. It moved away from a 1:1 ratio of tenured to untenured faculty to a longer-term goal of 3:2. Conway was successful in persuading the trustees that there should be even more flexibility in the near term, with the trustees agreeing to a 2:1 ratio as long as a strategy was put in place to reduce the tenured ranks of the faculty by one position a year once that ratio was achieved.47 One strategy developed to reduce the tenured ranks of the faculty was the implementation of an early retirement plan, providing faculty at the age of 60 with the option of retiring and receiving 75 percent of their salary for three years.48 The President’s Report to the Board of Trustees, May 1983, reported that nine faculty members were participating in the early retirement program that year, with four more scheduled to participate the following September. Conway explained that this plan had the added benefit of moving some faculty, who had ceased being productive, to retirement. We had initially, until the Congress changed the law, the problem that we had a highly tenured faculty, all of whom would have reached 65 in a seven- or eight-year period. So it was obvious that we had to let the tenure ranks go up in order to have any leadership and continuity in the institution. Then of course Congress changed the laws again, so we had to raise more money to retire faculty early to get some of the dead wood out. I think you could say that, given that there were those constraining problems, the objective all the time was to build the quality of the faculty. In those small or medium-sized colleges, if there isn’t constant pressure on that score, people do retire on the job.49

Other colleges and universities faced similar issues with their faculties, and many of them implemented similar programs to encourage retirements. One of the great advantages of these programs is the effect on the

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bottom line. Those eligible for the special retirement programs are typically the most senior, highest-paid faculty members. Their replacements, if recruited at the most junior level, demand salary that is often only a fraction of what had been previously budgeted for that position. The early retirement plan was a beginning, but Conway kept the pressure on the faculty to devise other strategies for relieving the pressure imposed by the high percentage of tenured faculty. In 1981, she presented the faculty with the following statistics: At present, the faculty is 60% tenured. 106 are males and 48 are female. There will be 1.5 retirements from the tenured ranks this year and there will be ten tenure candidates. If all the candidates who are being considered for tenure this year are granted tenure, 63.4% of the faculty will then be tenured….In the next five years (1981–1985), there are openings for 20 of 37 candidates eligible for tenure consideration. If all 20 openings are filled, the college will have reached the tenure ceiling of 66% at that time.50

With projections showing that the new tenure ceiling would be reached in only five years, the pressure was on to develop a more detailed plan for managing the tenure ratio. The following spring, the president’s report to the faculty consisted of a five page statement on the trustees’ expectations that the faculty would submit recommendations to the board for ways in which to achieve appropriate ratios of tenured and non-tenured positions.51 Her report also recommended to the faculty and ultimately to the trustees that the college adopt a target-of-opportunity program to attract tenured women to the senior ranks of the faculty. Of course, this would help address the gender imbalance on the faculty and some of the climate issues that had been made apparent, but it would further exacerbate the problem of a highly tenured faculty.52 To help minimize this problem, she argued that the slots should be net additions to the faculty and not counted when determining the tenure ratio. I persuaded the trustees that we should authorize the hiring of senior women professors with tenure and told everybody that any department that could find and attract a top-flight woman scholar could have that slot added to the department. So we brought some senior women in that way…and then I just beat on the deans and I refused to approve appointments until I was satisfied that competent women had been considered. Over time that helped, but a lot of the brightest and ablest left because they couldn’t stand the departments. They just left, because in the history department, the English department, the chemistry department, the biological sciences, people just wouldn’t stay. If you were a strong woman scholar with a good publishing record, which those people had, then you’d have dozens of offers. There was no reason why they should stay, which was one of the reasons why I [began] recruiting senior women with tenure… They didn’t have to deal with the departmental harassment, and usually they were people with a settled family life and so they could shrug

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off the department, whereas for younger people, especially single women, it was just a miserable life.53

On September 15, 1982, the faculty considered a report of the Ad Hoc Group on Tenure Guidelines. It recommended the authorization of up to twenty non-tenure-track appointments “for use, principally, in heavily tenured departments, as a part of the overall effort to place limits on the proportion of faculty who may be tenured, and to moderate the rate at which the proportion of tenured faculty rises.” The faculty approved the report’s recommendations.54 At the direction of the president, the report also considered the role of affirmative action in faculty appointments. The faculty studying this issue reported that there were few women and faculty of color in the senior ranks, and while the college had done reasonably well in attracting both of those groups at the assistant professor level, they tended to depart from the faculty at an unusually high rate. The report concluded from this that there was no need to tinker with the appointment process at the junior level, and they “rejected the idea of preferential treatment for women and minorities in reappointment and tenure decisions as unfair and counterproductive.” They did, however, “endorse the President’s idea of appointing senior women and minority scholars, with such appointments being understood as outside the roster of the 256 regular faculty positions.” The report may not have been a ringing endorsement for affirmative action, but it provided the president with enough encouragement to enact the target-of-opportunity program. The following month, she announced that she had “invited several departments to search for distinguished women scholars who might be interested in teaching at Smith.” She added an attractive incentive: “Should a senior appointment prove desirable, the added cost would not be charged to the existing faculty salary pool.”54 The following month she announced that the trustees had approved up to six appointments in this special hiring category for “especially distinguished scholars,” with the positions not counting against a department’s count of tenured positions.55 For Conway, this program offered the promise of an expanded group of tenured women faculty who could play key leadership roles, particularly with regard to mentoring junior faculty. She hoped that this would help with Smith’s efforts to retain more of those junior faculty, as well as “present the best possible model for an undergraduate teaching institution, a faculty in which substantial numbers of men and women are represented in all specialties and ranks.”56 Conway found little resistance to the target-of-opportunity program. The trustees, she said, supported the program because they “were all appalled by the behavior of those departments to the extent that they knew about it and could understand it, [and they] couldn’t see any other way around it.” She added, “Most departments, because of the tenure issue,

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were happy to have these people.” Even those most opposed to affirmative action “really couldn’t complain about it. They got some really recognized scholar added to their department, and unless they wanted to announce that they had absolute prejudice they couldn’t do much about it.”57 Andy Zimbalist was chair of the Economics department when the program was announced. “I was chair of my department when she brought together all of the department chairs and she told us that if we wanted to increase the size of the faculty in our departments then we should find excellent women who can come to Smith as chaired professors.” He identified Cynthia Taft Morris, who was ultimately appointed to an endowed professorship. “At that time, we didn’t bring in full professors, and it was even more against the culture to bring in chaired full professors. Senior faculty felt they were bypassed for professorships when this happened.” The target-of-opportunity program clearly ruffled some feathers. As Martha Ackelsberg recalled, some faculty said, “Who needs this?” Even those who supported the program were concerned about the level of expectation placed on the new senior women faculty recruited to the college. For the program to succeed entirely, the newly recruited faculty would need to be distinguished scholars, strong teachers, and willing to undertake the work necessary to transform some calcified departments. Conway was wise not to try and impose this recruiting strategy on departments unwilling to move in this direction. As it turned out, she didn’t need to force the issue. The discrimination suits, the candid internal reports on the status of women, and the informal campus conversations about these issues raised awareness about the need to be more assertive in changing the climate for women. As Peter Rose said, departments that had been predominantly male “became increasingly sensitized to the imbalance and began to actively search for women scholars.” During my interviews with faculty, at least seven senior faculty, in a range of programs (e.g., Psychology, Physics, Philosophy, History, Economics) were identified as being appointed through this program. Of those, five were women and two were men, both of them spouses of women hired through the program and distinguished scholars in their own right. Although done at a limited scale, this program brought to Smith scholars who became permanent members of the community and have helped lead the faculty for the last two decades. THE COMMITTEE ON TENURE AND PROMOTION AS A LEVER FOR CHANGE It appears that the target-of-opportunity program was a relatively uncontroversial initiative because of its general support from faculty, its modest scope, and the transparent process through which it was vetted. In contrast, the role Conway played as chair of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion (T&P) was a matter of considerable debate. At many colleges and universities, the tenure and promotion committee deliberates indepen-

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dent of the president, and then makes a recommendation to the president, who in turn submits a recommendation to the governing board. The Smith president is a voting chair of the tenure and promotion committee and makes the final recommendation to the board of trustees. This gives the president considerable influence over the highly confidential process. Conway’s actions as chair aroused great suspicion among many faculty, who had limited information about the committee’s deliberations but who questioned the decisions the committee made under her leadership. Her actions seemed more remarkable to many because she seemed to view her role as chair very differently from Thomas Mendenhall. Peter Rose, a member of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion in the early 1970s, recalled that “Tom Mendenhall rarely weighed in on a tenure or promotion decision. He was not entirely passive, but he did see his role as conducting the meetings, not dominating them. My understanding is that that was not true for Jill.” Louis Cohn-Haft expanded on this idea with a story about serving on T&P under Mendenhall. Mendenhall…was certainly quiet [on T&P], but if the committee was seriously split—I remember one glorious case in which the committee really was, I mean really, really badly split…. There were six people voting, and they would all speak vigorously and willingly—the most vigorously and willingly of all in my time. . . . It went banging back and forth, and we took a vote, and then we took a second vote, and then a third vote, and each time it got closer. It started out four to two. And then it was two to four. Anyway, it ended up three to three, and people were almost at each other’s throats by this time. Finally it occurred to somebody to say, “Mr. Mendenhall, you’ve just been sitting there. What would you do? What would your vote be if you had to vote to break this tie?” which he could do. Normally he didn’t vote as I recall. He said, “I would vote for tenure.” So we had to have another vote. We thought really that it was the proper use of his position.

Jill Conway took over as chair of the committee with strong biases about the functioning and purpose of tenure and promotion processes, and she intended to put her imprint on Smith’s process. While vice president at the University of Toronto, she had handled all of the appeals on tenure decisions. This experience revealed to her the many flaws in the tenure process, particularly with respect to how faculty in emerging fields of scholarship were treated by conservative members of the faculty who sat on the tenure committee. In her view, the tenure process is “infantilizing. People are on probation for an exceptionally long period of time for tenure and then they get into this committee system that is really ritual and doesn’t work and has no power. They perceive, really, an inability to influence the outcome of things, unless they suck up to one of those cronies.” When she became president, she wanted to ensure that the tenure committee was open to vigorous debate and to hearing different perspectives on the value

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of academic work. She said that she was “determined to make the faculty representational system really work.” Conway understood that her more assertive posture as chair of the committee would concern some faculty, particularly those who had dominated the committee in the past. Her view was that the faculty “elected the most conservative and the most rigidly traditional scholars. They seemed to live in a little world of their own because they would be worried about the appropriateness of the kinds of scholarship that was totally accepted in the universities. . . . You can’t run a very good college if you’re teaching what students aren’t interested in learning.58 Fran Volkmann explained how Conway exerted influence on this committee, in which the faculty traditionally exert their authority. She played a very activist role [on T&P] in a rather a remarkable way. She didn’t just pass her judgment with people at all, but she asked unrelentingly probing questions. And she asked them of members of the committee who would say, “Well, you know, so and so’s scholarship is really not up to snuff.” Jill would start in: “In what ways was this true? How would you compare this scholarship with that person’s scholarship?” She was so knowledgeable and so smart that it was quite a wonderful thing to watch. She turned some tenure decisions around, I think, by this. Not by saying, “I think we should tenure this person or not,” but by raising the level of conversation so that the issues really had to be addressed. I watched her do that many times.

Conway said that her knowledge of other disciplines gave her an advantage over faculty members on the Committee. “I knew much more about all those subjects than they did, and it would make them look pretty stupid. Every time somebody would question the credentials of a referee or something, I would know the journals in which they’d published and the work that they’d done, and the people on the committee didn’t.”59 The tenure process is a high stakes game for both individuals and departments. Individuals risk having their contract terminated if they receive a negative tenure decision, which can be very damning professionally. For departments, the stakes are high because a positive tenure decision is an offer of permanent employment. In practice this means that a department might be extending an offer of employment for thirty years or more. This makes for a big decision, particularly in small departments where making such a commitment effectively closes the door to other opportunities that might come available. The suits brought against the college by those who had been denied tenure raised the stakes at Smith for controversial decisions. This was especially true for decisions involving women and the English Department, which had been the subject of the cases heard by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Susan Van Dyne was a junior member of the English department and a feminist scholar when her case came before T&P, with Conway in the chair. Her department had submitted a negative

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tenure vote to the committee, but the committee overturned that decision, recommending to the president that Van Dyne be granted tenure. She says now that “It was a huge deal, and the department sat by the phone when the trustees were meeting, hoping the trustees would not let it happen. Huge. It was the first time in a long time the department had been overturned. So that kind of support was really unbelievable…a president coming in and pulling somebody out of the fire. I owe her my life.” There was general agreement on the Smith campus that there needed to be structural changes that brought order, transparency and fairness to the tenure process. This was advanced through the development of the Policy on Appointment, Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure (the Yellow Document). For Van Dyne, the development of this policy represented “a huge change in faculty governance—instead of it being the old boys’ network, which determined tenure and you never knew how it happened…it was hidden from you. It was a huge democratic move for untenured people.” Similar tenure battles were being played out in colleges and universities around the country, with feminist scholars and faculty associated with women’s studies efforts at the center of these fights. As Catharine Stimpson said, “In the 1970s antagonism to women’s studies was expressed through tenure and budget decisions. There was a marked reluctance to give tenure to people who specialized in women’s studies.”60 This antagonism concerned Martha Ackelsberg, whose feminist scholarship came under review of the tenure committee. Although she was not privy to the deliberations that ultimately resulted in her receiving tenure, she says today that she believes Conway’s presence on the committee made a difference in the decision. But like Van Dyne, she saw the development of a fair tenure policy as being the most important factor in focusing the committee’s deliberations on issues relevant to the tenure decision. The policy made it possible for people to get a fair hearing who might otherwise been dismissed summarily. Of course, there were those who were less sanguine about these appointments. Andy Zimbalist said, “By many accounts Jill exercised an inordinate amount of influence on T&P.” He stated that a significant number of faculty members believed that some women were granted “tenure who didn’t merit it. They got tenure because Jill twisted arms on T&P.” Robert Haddad had a similar perspective, but he questioned whether the president had as much influence as others thought. I think that women were given tenure when some of them didn’t deserve it, but I think the same thing happened under Mrs. Dunn and not simply because of the proclivities of the presidents. Because the Smith system gives the faculty enormous authority on the committee on tenure and promotion. But, of course, it’s in the air, affirmative action and all that rubbish, women slipped by…but, again, it’s not all the president. With the president, you can set a tone and so on but it’s not the president [who] is really decisive on the committee on tenure and promotion...

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Jill Conway dismissed the notion that standards had been lowered while she chaired the committee. “Oh, I think that’s simply idiotic,” she said, laughing. “And the record will show it. Tom hired most of his buddies from Yale. And to pretend that some of those people were the best to be found is just absolutely ludicrous.”61 Fran Volkmann sat on T&P in her role as dean of the faculty under Conway. She remembered that, as the controversies over tenure decisions grew,62 so did the politics of being elected to the committee. I believe we were gradually getting enough women tenure so that some of them could serve on the committee on tenure and promotion, which helped a lot. It was [a deliberate strategy], but the men had a strategy too. There were a group of men who I think wanted to be sure that we upheld our standards. You can translate that in various ways, but a lot of upholding of standards had to do with their judgment of women’s scholarship and also, I think, the scholarship of other ethnicities and other kinds of folks.

The board of trustees, like most governing boards, gave Conway considerable latitude when it came to tenure decisions. Trustee Nancy Lange said that the board “respected her professionalism in terms of tenure issues.” The trustees recognized that the president was in a better position than they were to exercise judgment on academic issues. If the trustees kept their distance from individual tenure decisions, they joined with the president in pressuring the faculty to develop a means for taking into account “institutional considerations” in the reappointment and tenure process. In essence, this meant having the option of denying reappointment to qualified junior faculty when the tenure ratio in a department was too high or fiscal or curricular considerations suggested moving in another direction. The president reported on the progress in developing these procedures in the spring of 1984. Regrettably, we have not made quite so much progress in developing a smoothly functioning system of reappointment procedures that incorporates both the institution’s needs and the faculty’s career aspirations. This has not been for lack of diligence and study of the matter by the faculty…. We are still seeking the best mechanism for developing and evaluating information which links the curricular needs of the College and the performance of individuals at the stage of reappointment when commitment to consideration for tenure must be made. It is clearly valuable for the college for tenure reviews to be based on the individual’s scholarly, teaching and institutional service. Such a system must, however, rest on the introduction of the institutional planning perspective earlier in the evaluative process. This matter is now being studied by the dean of the faculty; in 1984–85 she and I will present for faculty comment and trustee action a set of recommendations for achieving this objective.63

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The minutes from the faculty meeting of October 24, 1984 indicated that the president led a “heated discussion” on this topic. She introduced the topic by saying, “The board was very concerned that the needs for fiscal soundness and curricular planning be considered somewhere in the appointment, reappointment, and tenure system.” Much of the discussion focused on the role of the president in any process for determining when “institutional considerations” would be considered and in developing the actual procedures for implementing this review. It appeared that in both instances members of the faculty fought to limit the president’s role. During the faculty meeting, Conway “reported that in the board’s opinion, the…recommendation for restricting the applicability of institutional considerations and for largely removing the president from the reappointment process do not adequately addresses these needs.” Conway proposed that she and the dean review the policy on appointment, reappointment, tenure and promotion policy. “The aim is to identify the problems which have surfaced in the past decade, to balance the imperatives of individual fairness and institutional need, to find a place for institutional considerations without resorting to quotas, and to devise recommendations for a simpler policy document than the present one.” The minutes recorded that “a long and lively discussion” ensued. There was considerable discussion of the faculty’s role in the formulation of these policies, with one faculty member speaking of “faculty disenfranchisement” and others clearly supporting this perspective.64 FACULTY EFFORTS TO LIMIT CONWAY’S POWER The larger issue of where the line was drawn between the administration and the faculty for the purpose of decision making became a growing topic for debate during Conway’s tenure. The disagreement over presidential authority in setting tenure policy seemed to be the final catalyst for the faculty to develop structural mechanisms that would limit Conway’s influence. But to Susan Bourque, the motivation for some faculty had more to do with their diminished access to the president: “I think some of the men about my age who thought that they would share the same kind of access that they had in the past felt a little bit pushed about. They saw Jill developing a new leadership group in the faculty in which they weren’t necessarily the leaders.” This was especially true when Conway appointed a number of women to administrative posts, including junior members of the faculty. “I knew that what Jill was trying to do was to develop a much more coeducational structure to the faculty,” said Bourque. “She had this ideal that what she wanted to model in the college’s leadership was what was really possible in the world, and that was men and women working together productively and not a situation in which gender determined who had the predominant preponderance of power.”

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Power struggles such as this often arise out of faculty distrust for the administration. Faculty are less likely to cede authority to a president they don’t trust fully. The implementation of “institutional considerations” in the tenure process raised the trust issue again because it provided the president with authority over issues that had typically been the province of the faculty. Even Conway’s fundraising success concerned some faculty, because her ability to raise funds for projects she supported allowed her in some cases to circumvent the faculty approval process. As she explained to me, this was a deliberate strategy: “Well, people could put roadblocks in my way through the various college deliberative processes, but if in fact the money was always there to do something a group of faculty wanted to do, you could go right ahead and do it…So I used it in a way to bypass the formal faculty deliberative procedures.”65 THE GOVERNANCE DEBATE AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FACULTY COUNCIL The faculty undertook a formal review of the governance system in 1982–83, guided by the principle that they would maintain direct access to the trustees. They had this access before the review through the Faculty Conference Committee. The Annual Report of the Faculty Conference Committee, 1979–80, written by professor and committee chair Thomas Derr, made clear that the faculty wanted to keep a direct line to the trustees: “We continue to believe that the Conference Committee is essential to represent the faculty directly to our ultimate employers, the trustees, on such matters as are typically the subjects of employee unions, as well as wider concern for all matters touching the welfare of the college, as our formal mandate requires.” It is unusual for a faculty like Smith’s, which plays such a central role in governing the institution, to think of itself as employees or to invoke the union comparison. Perhaps this was a defensive posture as well as a way to send a message to the president that their collective authority could not be ignored. On 26 January 1983, the faculty group working on the governance changes gave a preliminary report on their work. Although there is a proud tradition of faculty self-governance at Smith, that tradition has imposed a considerable and increasing cost on faculty members in terms of time and energy diverted from the primary responsibilities as teachers and scholars…. there has been rising discontent with the number of committees (now close to forty), with the number of functions assigned to faculty committees, and with the detail and “triviality” of much committee work.66

The next month, the group made its formal recommendations, including that “an elected Faculty Council be established with representation from four or more principal committees.” The charge of the Faculty Council would be to “take an overall institutional view for planning, communicat-

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ing with the board of trustees, and for reviewing and integrating the policy decisions of faculty committees and administrative offices…. It will also be charged with the review of administrative practice, particularly in areas where faculty have been withdrawn from direct participation.” (emphasis in original).67 These governance changes were approved by the faculty on March 30, 1983. The language of this charge made clear that the faculty was unhappy with where the president had drawn the line between faculty and administrative responsibilities and they were seeking to assert their authority relative to the president. A number of faculty with whom I spoke, such as Sue Freeman, made just this point: “Faculty Council was established to cut down on Jill’s power. The intent was to create a faculty-elected committee that would be in a stronger position with respect to executive decisionmaking. It was an attempt to cut back on her unilateral power. “ If Conway felt at all threatened by this perceived intent or by the Council’s mandate, she certainly didn’t reveal it in her confidential remarks to the board of trustees or in her more public reports. For example, in her May 1983 Report to the board of trustees she wrote: Members of the Board will recall a number of statements of opinion I have made since 1980 on the need to achieve a more effective system of informed faculty participation in the governance of the College. I am pleased to report that the Faculty has now adopted a sweeping revision of its governance structure. The revisions establish five major policy-recommending committees…and a new Faculty Council. The Faculty Council will consist of five tenured members of the faculty, one elected from each of the principal policy committees, thereby enabling the integration of concerns and recommendations from all areas of the College…. These proposals reduce the number of committees and the number of faculty involved by 50% and they provide for a committee structure along functional lines, which should enable much more informed faculty participation in the analysis and discussion of the issues facing the College.

Similarly, in the Report of the President, 1983–84 she discussed the establishment of the council in very positive terms. This council, which began its first year of work in 1983–84, has proved invaluable. I have long felt the need for some such executive body of the faculty, which now numbers approximately 282 voting members. While this is a manageable size for a legislative body, it is too large for useful consultation on complicated policy issues about which the president needs to discover the sense of the faculty from fully informed representatives.

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However, as I discuss in the closing chapter, the Faculty Council became the vehicle through which faculty expressed their deepest concerns about Conway to the trustees. ******* I opened this chapter by noting the limits of presidential authority with regard to academic matters and the affairs of the faculty. Conway tested these limits by implementing academic initiatives that had limited support within the faculty. When she was successful, it was because she identified resources to address a problem (e.g., the target-of-opportunity program). Other successful initiatives resulted when she had the support of the board of trustees (e.g., in lifting the tenure cap and in establishing institutional considerations for tenure) or when she involved faculty in identifying a problem (e.g., the climate for faculty). In other instances, she was persuasive because of the breadth of her knowledge (e.g., on tenure and promotion cases). Rarely, though, was she successful because she was able to generate widespread support for her ideas in the faculty. The tension that existed between Conway and the faculty was persistent and ultimately led to the faculty seeking ways to limit her authority. In the next chapter, I explore this tension as it evolved during discussions of two academic initiatives: the development of a research program on women’s lives and the establishment of a women’s studies program. In the first instance, Conway was in what became her typical stance of advocating for a program that a majority of the faculty opposed. In the second instance, she seemed to stand with the majority, but this time in opposition to a group of faculty who had been among her strongest supporters.

CHAPTER 4

Studying Women’s Lives

SUPPORTING SCHOLARSHIP ON WOMEN’S LIVES The 1970s was the decade in which research and teaching on women’s lives became a burgeoning enterprise in America’s colleges and universities. With the support of the Ford Foundation, research centers dedicated to this topic were established at a number of universities, including Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Arizona.1 By the 1980s, at least fifty centers were in operation across the country. Some were Washington-based policy centers, such as the Equity Policy Center, the International Center for Research in Women, the Program of Policy Research on Women and Families, and the Center for Women Policy Studies. Others, like the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers (founded in 1971) and the Wellesley Center, which began in 1974 with funding from the Carnegie Corporation, were campusbased centers that served as collaborative research space for faculty, homes for visiting scholars, and incubators for scholarly and curricular innovation.2 In 1982, the National Council for Research on Women was founded to help coordinate, record, and publicize the work of these centers. The rise of women’s studies programs paralleled the growth of the research centers and gave further evidence to the growing interest in research and teaching about women’s lives. Women’s studies was an emerging academic discipline, often multidisciplinary in nature, with a developing methodological framework that informed research in this area. As a program or a department in a college or university, women’s studies typically housed a group of faculty, sometimes from other, more established disciplines, offered courses, and with growing frequency, offered areas of concentration (i.e., majors and minors) in undergraduate and graduate programs. The research centers, in contrast, were typically designed to facilitate scholarship on women’s lives, often without a curricular component or departmental (or program) status. Although occasional courses 73

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were being offered in women’s history and related topics in the 1960s, the first systematic effort to develop and coordinate women’s studies programs began in 1970, with the first program starting that year at San Diego State.3 This was also the year that Sheila Tobias called for “Female Studies” at Cornell University and gathered syllabi from courses that included teaching on women’s issues and published them as Female Studies No. 1: A Collection of College Syllabi and Reading Lists.4 Thus began a sharing of information that led to a vigorous women’s studies movement. By 1972, the Feminist Press was established, and soon after came a number of journals, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies, and, in 1975, the most prominent feminist journal, Signs. In 1977, the National Women’s Studies Association was formed and began building on the work already being undertaken by discipline-based academic organizations, such as the Modern Language Association. By 1975, there were 150 women’s studies programs in colleges and universities across the country, most prominently in state universities. The number of programs more than doubled in the next five years, and there are now more than 600 programs nationwide.5 The growth of women’s studies programs and research centers on women’s lives belies the stiff challenges encountered by their “founding mothers,”6 particularly in the more controversial area of women’s studies. The efforts to establish a research program on women’s lives and a women’s studies program at Smith illustrate how difficult it could be to advance initiatives in these areas. Jill Conway played a central role in both of these efforts, as the strongest, if sometimes behind-the-scenes, supporter of the research program and the most visible opponent of women’s studies. She was ultimately successful in establishing a modest research program, while her opposition to women’s studies delayed the approval of a formal program. In maintaining her position on these issues, she further alienated important groups of faculty. Her support for the research project provided additional opportunities for more conservative (and often senior) members of the faculty to rise in opposition. Her disagreement with a group of more junior, feminist women faculty about how to incorporate the study of women’s lives into the curriculum fed a dispute that divided the feminist faculty and weakened the support she received from that group. THE PROJECT ON WOMEN AND SOCIAL CHANGE One of Jill Conway’s highest priorities as president was supporting scholarship on women’s lives. She spoke about this in interviews leading up to her arrival at Smith. She also outlined the concept in a document she produced on the mission of the college, in which she called for “a small research institute dedicated to the examination of questions which are of key importance in the lives of women.”7 In her inaugural address, she stated, “we must take our mission to educate women even further by trying to fos-


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ter research and the creation of new knowledge about matters of central importance in women’s lives.” Fran Volkmann said that Conway had “tremendous interest right from the beginning in women’s scholarship and teaching about women and having an institution that recognized the experience of women as a valid experience.” This certainly fit with Conway’s own scholarly interests, which included women reformers and the experience of American women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She described to me her interest in identifying support for her area of scholarship: When I came to Smith, one of the things that I was most concerned about as a scholar was that there’s very little cumulative study of women…. feminism is a cyclical phenomenon. When it’s in vogue there’s an active research program, and when it goes out of vogue it’s dropped and then accumulative knowledge is lost and it has to be recreated all over again. I was really interested in endowing a research program at Smith that would ensure that in fashion or out of fashion people would still be able to pursue such [scholarship].8 It was the biggest hope I brought there and it was totally frustrating for the longest time because naturally the faculty was very much opposed to it. They thought I was going to turn the place into a university and they had all fled the university research orientation and male faculty were particularly opposed to it….9

By the time Conway arrived at Smith, women’s research centers were being created with some frequency. Within the Seven Sisters, Wellesley’s Center began in 1974, and at Radcliffe the Bunting Fellowship Program had been in existence since 1960. The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study started in 1961, and the Henry A. Murray Research Center was established in 1976.10 Funding for scholarship on women’s lives was also increasing as a number of foundations and public agencies directed resources for this purpose. Among the foundations active in this area were the Carnegie Corporation and the Andrew W. Mellon, Ford, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage foundations.11The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education were also active in supporting such research. The environment was ripe for funding the type of center that Conway had envisioned opening at Smith. Her opportunity to attract this funding came soon after starting her presidency. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has a long history of supporting the humanities at liberal arts colleges and research universities. Its presidents, who have often been college or university presidents themselves, frequently approach new leaders at the institutions supported by the foundation to ask how they can target support in ways that meet the president’s objectives. John Sawyer, who led the Mellon Foundation after being president of Williams College, Smith’s neighbor to the west, approached Conway for just this purpose. She asked for funds to establish a research center on women’s lives. She recalled that conversation and the warnings Sawyer offered:

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change Jack Sawyer [asked] “So what do you need?” And when I told him what I wanted, he said, “Are you absolutely sure?” He even called me up the day his board was to vote it, “You haven’t had any second thoughts? Are you sure you want to do this? Because it will create big problems for you.” Which of course it did. But it was one of the best things I ever did…12

A TACTICAL MISCALCULATION Knowing that establishing the research center would be controversial, Conway chose not to inform the faculty that the funding for it had already been secured. Instead, she appointed an Ad Hoc Committee to Design a Research Program on Women, with members recommended by the faculty Committee on Committees.13 By April 1976 the committee was prepared to make its work public. In a memorandum to the faculty, the committee argued that “Smith is uniquely qualified to foster such research [on women’s lives], and the opportunity to do so in a substantial way could contribute both to the college and to the general benefit of women.”14 The committee ignited a minor controversy by suggesting that, as a women’s college, Smith had “special responsibilities” to contribute to the study and teaching of women. The outline of the proposed program was highlighted in the committee’s memorandum to the faculty: Having set as its major goal the preparation of women for the full realization of their potential, the college has a particular concern for fostering better understanding of how social, psychological, biological, cultural, educational, and other influences have shaped women’s lives and contributions to society in the past or may do so in the future. Although the scholarly interests of the college are not and should not be limited to subjects that fall within this range, such subjects are particularly germane to the purpose of a college for women.

In light of today’s social conventions and the mission of women’s colleges as we think of them now, it seems peculiar that a controversy would arise over the argument that the study of women in society would be especially appropriate at a women’s college. It seems odd as well that this controversy could be related to the classic curriculum of the nineteenth century. But at the time of its founding, Smith was deliberate in adopting that curriculum and the admissions requirement of Greek studies because those were the standards at the best men’s institutions. Even one hundred years later, many at the college saw Smith’s reputation as being tied to its strengths in the classic liberal arts. With the college’s aspirations aimed at men’s colleges, any move to redirect those aims had the potential to be seen as lowering standards. The Ad Hoc Committee proposed a program that would provide students and faculty with new research opportunities while providing a model for research at a liberal arts college that could be replicated elsewhere. Although the proposed program was similar in structure to existing centers,15


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it was likely to be seen as a fairly extensive and even bureaucratic structure for a college of Smith’s size. These factors may have played into the fears of those who were concerned that a university model of research, with centers designed to attract significant sponsored research funding, was being imposed on the college. The committee called for the appointment of a small staff, which would be overseen by an internal Committee on the Research Program on Women, and an Advisory Council for the Research Program on Women made up of outside experts. It had provisions for released time for faculty, a visiting scholars program, a visiting undergraduate student program, and conferences organized around research topics of participants. It recommended that the college seek grants, including endowed funds, to support the general program while applying for additional grants for specific projects. To strengthen the case, the Ad Hoc Committee argued that “foundation support for such an activity may now be found in the form of funds that would not be granted for other purposes…” The proposal met immediate and strong opposition from some segments of the faculty. Ten days after the proposal was made available, twentyeight faculty members endorsed a letter highly critical of the plan. First, the assumptions used…to justify this proposal strike us as debatable. The founder of the college . . . wished to provide women with education equal to that obtainable at the best colleges for men. The education offered by these colleges was intended to liberate and enlarge the mind, and nowhere in her will did Sophia Smith state that the educational excellence she had in mind would best be achieved by a curricular and scholarly emphasis on women…. Second, the Outline appears to suggest that at Smith College one special type of research is “particularly germane” – and so to be particularly fostered and promoted…. We believe that it would be a mistake to suggest to students or to faculty members that any one set of research topics or techniques has a special place in the “unique responsibility” of the college. We believe that no amount of ideological zeal can make research on women more significant than it already is as a legitimate field of scholarly interest. This kind of zeal, we find, can create a bias that tends to constrain the wide range of inquiry and freedom to dissent that we consider vital to an institution of higher learning. Third, we are troubled by what the proposed Research Program may mean in terms of [faculty] staffing…. Fourth, we are dismayed by the implications that….preferential treatment will be given to colleagues who are willing to bring their research into line with the aims of the Program, so that those who choose to pursue interests of their own unrelated to it will be discriminated against. The subtle pressures and injustices entailed might well be aggravated by the ideologi-

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change cal considerations from which, at this moment in history, women’s studies are not always free…. Because the Ad Hoc Committee’s proposal has such far-reaching implications for the curriculum, staffing, and indeed the future of Smith College, we presume funding for it will not be sought until it has been reviewed through normal channels by the [curriculum committee] and has obtained the approval of the faculty necessary for any major alteration of the College’s academic program.16

Two days later, at the faculty meeting, Jill Conway reported on the feedback received by the Ad Hoc Committee. She indicated that “responses have ranged from enthusiastic support through suggestions for improvement to concern about whether what is proposed is an appropriate activity for the College. On the basis of this response, she said, the Committee believes it needs much fuller instruction from the faculty before it feels it can bring forward a proposal.” She announced that the committee would hold a special meeting of the faculty in May of 1976 to discuss the proposal, with the intent of bringing before the faculty a revised proposal in the fall. “Normally, she said, no such procedure would be followed for a fund raising proposal but since concern has been voiced regarding the design and purpose of the proposal, such consideration by the faculty would be assured before any definitive action was taken.”17 Perhaps it is attributable to Conway’s being in the first year of her presidency, but on this issue she appeared to move with uncharacteristic caution. She concealed the fact that she had foundation support for the project, and going beyond any governance obligation, she brought the fundraising proposal to the full faculty for deliberation. The negative response to the proposal was stronger than anyone seemed to anticipate. Professor Larry Fink remembered that “faculty stood up and said, ‘I didn’t come to Smith to study women’s issues.’ There was a sense that there was something less high-plain about studying women’s issues.” For supporters of the research program, the opposition from their colleagues was a great disappointment. But some, like Martha Ackelsberg, suggested that the outcome might have been different had an alternative strategy been employed for developing and supporting the proposal. Jill, I guess, felt—probably appropriately—that you can’t just do this, you have to make it seem like it is coming from faculty in some way or another, and so she appointed a committee of people to think about this possibility. This was one of those areas where the particular strategy that she chose completely backfired. She appointed to this committee…almost everybody [who] was either neutral or opposed on the grounds that looking at this would somehow bring them along and then she would have the whole faculty behind her.


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…And then there was this open meeting of the faculty. It was clear that there was a lot of opposition and that…the committee report was not what she had presumably hoped it would be. Our little group had dinner sometime within the week before that faculty meeting, and people were saying, “What should we do? How should we handle this?” She said, “You guys stay in the background. Don’t put yourselves out there. The arguments against this are going to be so absurd that they’ll basically bury themselves.” I don’t remember exactly the language she used, but she did tell us for sure, more or less to shut up. And we did. Then people said the most outrageous things on the floor of the faculty—and it died! …On the one hand she was right. They were saying things that were just so unbelievable that you couldn’t imagine anyone would say them… A lot of people were looking around in horror. Some other people stood up and said, “This is a terrific idea,” or “I think these arguments are ridiculous,” or whatever. But because we also happened to be big mouths, we were among the people who would have spoken up and when we didn’t, the majority of voices were opposed to it. It somehow got out of hand, and I don’t think it was at all what she expected. After that meeting happened it just seemed clear that there wasn’t any way the program could be rescued.

Sue Freeman, who supported the research project, thought that the president “made the mistake of going to the faculty” to determine how to proceed with this research program. Her recollection was that “The argument against funding research on women was that it was a special interest—that it was money for certain people’s interest, and that was unacceptable. It was a real fight. There was a new president, the first woman to lead Smith, and there was a real backlash against her and these issues.” By inviting faculty discussion on a proposal that was so closely linked to her, her scholarly interests, and the direction she hoped to take Smith, Conway inadvertently gave those concerned about that direction an ideal opportunity to send her an unequivocal message. According to Fran Volkmann, the message was “This is not the kind of place Smith is.” It was a message about the quality and identity of the institution. I think there was a kind of fear that this shoddy scholarship that was lurking out there and challenging the canon was somehow going to be funded and brought in to infiltrate our community.18 It [came] at a time when scholarship on women was really just beginning to make a splash. And some of it was not very good…. I think it was particularly seen as a threat by people who probably had never in their lives gotten a grant for anything. It was seen as a kind of a university model, but even worse than that, it was all going to be about women, and therefore not very good.

One of the groups that worried about the college’s identity, and in particular, how feminism would define the institution, was the board of trustees. Jill Conway explained that she tried to overcome the trustees’ ob-

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jections by arguing that excellent scholarship, in any form, would benefit the college. The trustees were frightened that it would identify Smith as a feminist place, which is a ludicrous worry because it is identified as a feminist place…. People who are on a board of trustees, on the whole, are not intellectuals—they are activists, they are very pragmatic, they don’t understand the sociology of knowledge or how it develops. I think they couldn’t grasp at all that [Smith] might be perceived as a feminist hotbed. In fact, if there was distinguished research anywhere [it would be] to Smith’s credit. The faculty opposition was quite clear, but a lot of alumnae were very supportive, especially the ones who had any kind of professional life or scholarly life. [The trustees thought it was] just an obsession of mine— ”Oh, if she wants to do it, it’s okay.”19

The fear for some was that an emphasis on feminist scholarship at a women’s college would, as Martha Ackelsberg explained, “really attract the wrong kind of people.” She said that those who articulated this concern were worried that the “lavender menace” would come to Smith, a theme that Robert Haddad picked up on when explaining his own reservations: “I guess I found that [the Project on Women and Social Change] was too much a tail onto the kite of the feminist movement in the American states, the extreme left wing of which was really determined by a lesbian agenda.”20 Faculty also expressed concern that a research center would ultimately lead to a more feminist curriculum without going through the regular channels to make such a change. The strength of the opposition convinced members of the Ad Hoc Committee that no proposal that recommended an institutional commitment to a research program on women would receive the support of the faculty. In January 1977, the committee forwarded its final findings and its recommendations to Jill Conway. First, strong skepticism among many members of the faculty regarding the establishment of a generalized research program on women as originally proposed suggests that it would now be divisive and unwise to proceed with the proposal… Second, it remains a widely held view that members of the faculty who wish to undertake specific research projects relating to women should be encouraged to apply, individually or in groups, for foundation support for their several enterprises…. What we propose, therefore, is to set aside at this time the plan to request foundation funding for an established Research Program on Women…. We suggest that a small new working group might serve on an ad hoc basis to coordinate grant proposals related to the study of women and possibly to group them in one or more packages that might be attractive to foundations.21

The following month, Jill Conway responded that the committee’s recommendations seemed “admirably designed to meet the concerns of faculty, both those who are advocates of substantial research on the experiences of women and those who are opposed to a major institutional


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commitment to such a task at present.”22 At the faculty meeting that month, she reported on the committee’s deliberations. She said that the committee understood that “those opposed to the idea of such a program based their opposition on the fear that a research program focused on the study of women, even though it spanned the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, would give too narrow a definition to the research objectives of the College and that the research interests of faculty might consequently be redefined within such a focus.” She reported that “the Committee felt that the divisions within the College on this matter were too deep at present to warrant a recommendation to proceed with the original proposal.”23 AN INITIAL GRANT TO SUPPORT RESEARCH ON WOMEN After the first effort to approve a research center failed, Conway recommended that a group of faculty simply submit a proposal to the Mellon Foundation for a research project on women’s lives. Sue Freeman joined with Susan Bourque and five other members of the faculty to prepare a grant proposal. She recalled that “a call was made to the faculty for anyone with an interest to join in this proposal. The funding was for only three years, so it no longer appeared to be a big, institutionalized thing. We applied for $350,000 for the first three years, and it was pitched as just a group of faculty applying for a grant, so it couldn’t be turned down by the faculty.” Susan Bourque remembered a colleague arguing, “‘Because we are a women’s college we don’t need to have something like this. Maybe if we were Amherst we would need to do it, but not Smith.’ No recognition of the fact that we were way behind the field in terms of thinking about whether to do research in this area.” The grant application she submitted with her colleagues was successful “of course, because Jill really already had it promised. But we didn’t know that; we felt we were writing a grant and getting it.” Martha Ackelsberg regretted that the funding they were seeking was modest compared to what they had originally envisioned,24 but she recognized that the strategy they were using was exempt from the need for broader faculty approval. “What can you do if people get together and put together a research proposal and get it funded? No one’s going to say you have no right to do that,” she said. “We were just seven people putting together this grant…people could complain, which of course they did, but they couldn’t do anything about it.” The original grant proposal was entitled “Women and Social Change: A Multidisciplinary Research Project.” It proposed a program of multidisciplinary research centered on the experience of women and related activities. Activities included seminars, planning meetings, a summer research program involving students and both Smith and visiting faculty, and threeto five-day workshops organized around a relevant theme at the beginning

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and end of the summer program. The proposal described the researchers’ aims:25 We expect our multidisciplinary approach to have a substantially different and heightened impact on what we know of women’s experience and consequently to influence how these questions should be studied…. We begin from the premise that in order to understand women’s experience we must understand their economic roles, the influence of political institutions upon them, and the way in which social values and attitudes have influenced those economic and political interactions.

In January 1978 the college announced that the researchers had been awarded $350,000 over three years to carry out the work set forth in the proposal.26 In her January report to the faculty,27 Conway reported that the grant would “enable the research team to bring distinguished scholars in their fields to the campus in the summers and to pay an advisory board of eminent scholars to help in the design and implementation of the research.”28 In its first full year of activities, the researchers hosted “work-in-progress seminars” to discuss ongoing research; sponsored a “Conference on Catholics, Muslims and Protestants: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change;” participated in an interterm colloquium on “the history and current state of ideas on reproductive rights and freedoms;” sponsored a student prize for work on women’s experience; and organized a six-week summer workshop on how to study social changes. Jill Conway participated in this workshop by presenting a framework for studying and evaluating the history of women in the United States.29 As she stated in her 1980 report to the trustees, a key objective of the program was “to produce a set of explanatory models and concepts for the Social Sciences, derived from women’s experiences rather than taking that of males as normative for all persons.”30 THE FIRST STEPS TOWARD CURRICULUM CHANGE The second phase of work, which began with a new round of funding in 1980, highlighted tensions that had been simmering in the group of feminist faculty involved in the project. One source of these tensions was the debate over how to move the study of women’s lives into the curriculum, a question that was to be addressed through the ongoing work of the project. Susan Van Dyne helped lead the effort to translate the work of the project into the curriculum. She remembered that, as a humanist, she initially had an uneasy relationship with the social scientists who had led the first phase of the project. [Professor of French] Marilyn [Schuster] and I got involved with it in the second granting period as humanities people. It had always been social sciences before then. They didn’t know what to do with it. They really thought…who are these folks? And they gave us…the curriculum arm of


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it and the work that we started doing then became women’s studies. But it was largely because the project didn’t know how to cope with non-social science types.

The Curriculum Group, headed by Marilyn Schuster and Susan Van Dyne, attempted to find a way to integrate courses into the curriculum that focused on the experience of women without entering into faculty-wide discussions about the direction of the curriculum. The Curriculum Group reported on its work in 1981: In June 1981 planning started for a Curriculum Group that will seek to integrate the research and concerns of the Project more directly into the curriculum…. The first component involves the clustering or loose linking of several…courses in different departments that each have as a primary focus the experience and achievements of women…. In the first stage, the main instrument for linking the courses will be a common, obligatory lecture series… In more advanced stages the syllabi of cluster courses…might be more closely integrated. . . . [B]ecause clustering can be done without fanfare or a lengthy procedural itinerary, we can start immediately and retain a high degree of flexibility.31

At the end of the three-year grant, the researchers announced that the research generated from the project included a book, a number of articles that would be published in an anthology, and several papers.32 It also provided a home for feminist scholarship on campus. As the committee looking at issues affecting women faculty found, this provided many positive benefits, but for some faculty at least, the project had become highly politicized and divisive in ways that early critics had warned. However, now it wasn’t just the established, traditionally powerful groups who expressed such concerns; for some junior women faculty, the project seemed to represent another barrier to their full participation in the institution, particularly if they were not interested in feminist scholarship. By August of 1983, a group formed to review the state of women faculty at Smith saw significant disadvantages for women faculty in the project. Women doing research on gender-related issues seem to fare better than others in many of the areas outlined above. Many of these women have been able to find and/or create supportive communities in which to conduct research. The Women and Social Change Project has sponsored workshops, conferences and outside speakers which some women felt facilitated networking among researchers at Smith and with people doing state-of-the-art research on gender at other institutions. The existence of a critical mass of people working on gender issues and of the Project on Women and Social Change has not been a panacea, however. Some junior women found the interdisciplinary group to be very stimulating and helpful in generating publications only to face departments which were hostile to research on gender issues and dismissed their work as not serious scholarship. Others avoided or postponed involve-

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change ment with the group in order to forestall departmental scorn. Some felt that the Project on Women and Social Change had actually worsened conditions for women at Smith by polarizing the faculty along gender lines and/or by polarizing the female faculty along the lines of those who were or were not involved in the Project. Many not involved in the Project perceived it as a very powerful and exclusionary group.33

The group’s report went on to say that some faculty found the project “to be an active, intellectually stimulating, and supportive social as well as scholarly group. Others, however, have criticized [it] for being more a political than a scholarly enterprise, one which manifests little tolerance for those women whose personal and professional interests do not conform to [its] sense of its feminist mission.”34 It is perhaps inevitable that the project would be seen as divisive, given the strong opposition among some faculty to a research program on women’s lives. This may have been especially true because of the president’s close involvement with the project and the ideals it represented. THE CURRICULUM AS BATTLEGROUND Despite the controversy caused by the formation of the research program, the strategy to begin linking courses that had a curricular emphasis on women seemed sound, insofar as it appeared to generate little opposition within the faculty. Indeed, it seemed a modest step, yet only a short distance from the possible establishment of a women’s studies program.35 It was concerns about taking these next steps that brought together in opposition those who had been on differing sides of the debate over the Project on Women and Social Change. The most visible opponent of a women’s studies program was Conway herself. It was a view she made clear before arriving at Smith. In 1974, she laid out her argument against women’s studies programs: The major hazard of the special women’s studies program is that it trains women with low academic status and low employment potential, rather than women with impeccable professional credentials who can command acceptance within conventional disciplines. This is a danger which must be avoided if women are not to be relegated to areas of marginal scholarly importance within the university.36

She elaborated on these views during an interview: If you let that kind of research be ghettoized and if you let that kind of curricula area be ghettoized, you leave all those same old dead white males being taught in the same old curriculum elsewhere in the college, and across all the spectrum of disciplines—that was one major concern of mine. The second one is that I know from writing references for people at graduate schools and from being an advisor to graduate schools about admissions, they really still didn’t take seriously people who had majored in women’s studies. If you wanted to get into the Harvard history depart-


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ment or the Yale philosophy department you wouldn’t get there [with a degree in women’s studies]. It seemed to me that Smith was doing a disservice to its undergraduates if it let them think that this field was going to get them where they wanted to go. Now, in literary studies, I’d say that that has changed, but it certainly hadn’t changed in 1975–85. I know now, from serving on lots of foundations’ prize committees, it’s still a black mark against you, so …we differed on strategy but I don’t think they thought I differed with them about their scholarly objectives. I have to say also that although there was absolutely first-rate work done in women’s studies, there are some that are so picayune that it really is not of a very high standard. I was not about to endorse a field that I thought had a lot of questionable methodological and theoretical issues.37

These arguments situated Conway among the traditionalists with respect to concern for preserving the liberal arts, a position for which she seemed to receive little credit from her faculty colleagues with similar views. It was unusual for Conway to speak in concert with the so-called “dinosaurs” on women’s issues, but when it came to women’s studies, their views struck similar chords. Robert Haddad, for example, invoked some of the same arguments made by Conway in describing his opposition to women’s studies. I would much have preferred then and now to see these things pursued within traditional disciplines. Now, these traditional disciplines or those in favor of or in control of them can be faulted for not having thought of this before there was the Black up-surge, but still that would have been my preference and so with women’s studies. I can’t imagine what possible good a women’s studies major does for students who major in that area. What the hell do they do with it? This is not a vocational school…

Others argued that women’s studies lacked gravitas simply because the study of women provided few opportunities to examine society’s great achievements and those who led them. Susan Van Dyne described a discussion at a faculty meeting during which the establishment of a women’s studies program was being deliberated. She recalled a woman colleague standing and proclaiming, “‘We shouldn’t study women’s lives because that would be very demoralizing to our students. They didn’t achieve anything. Who our women should study in order to be successes is the successes, and that’s men.’” To Van Dyne, a proponent of women’s studies, these arguments revealed the difficulty she would face in persuading some faculty members of the value of integrating the study of women into the curriculum. If they believed that the study of women’s lives was “secondclass information,” why should it stand alongside the time-tested disciplines that formed Smith’s curriculum? These debates were not unique to Smith. In discussing the opposition to women’s studies nationally, Catharine Stimpson noted, “Both students and faculty, long accustomed to the cultural devaluation of women, considered

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women and gender unworthy of inquiry…. [O]thers called women’s studies too ideological or political, a subverter of academic standards, intellectual merit, and objectivity.”38 For Barbara Solomon, “The women’s movement…challenged the liberal arts curriculum. All institutions were forced to address the legacy of the sixties—an awakened feminist consciousness—and one result was an enlargement of the curriculum to include courses relating to women.”39 The legacy of the sixties included consciousness-raising about a number of issues other than gender that were beginning to have curricular implications for colleges and universities. These debates over women’s studies were taking place at the same time that many institutions, including Smith, were considering how or whether to open the curriculum to other emerging disciplines. Ethnic studies, Afro-American studies, East Asian studies, and a number of interdisciplinary fields threatened the traditional academic organization of knowledge and the discipline-based departments. Although these debates focused on the curriculum, they were not about the academy only. It is easy to see how the underlying arguments can come to represent differences in worldviews; emerging perspectives on social and cultural movements; the privileging of different sexes, races, and cultures; and the value placed on various areas of knowledge and inquiry. Ruth Solie, who later became a strong proponent of women’s studies and an active participant in Smith’s program, had early reservations about developing a separate program in the curriculum. She ultimately saw the issue as, “a kind of cultural situation in which things associated with women would never be as attractive…. I didn’t change my mind until I began to understand that we were talking about much bigger issues than just learning about some stuff that women had done, and it took a long time for structural issues and psychological issues to begin to look real.” Some faculty, including some of those who supported Conway generally, viewed her opposition to women’s studies as more than an academic issue. They saw her opposition as an unwillingness to acknowledge these “structural issues” that limited the roles and successes of women. Susan Van Dyne explained her concerns about that position, as well as her frustrations with what she understood as a tacit agreement among the feminist faculty to not question Conway on these issues. What’s problematic about Jill is that at the same time that she was very supportive of feminist research, she was very opposed to women’s studies at this point. It was up to us to understand but to be an allied feminist. We were always told, “Keep a lid on it, don’t ask.” Sort of very odd, that we felt, and some of us more strongly than others, that insofar as we had credibility with her there were certain questions that could not be asked, like, “Why not women’s studies?” She was very explicit and continues to be about why she opposes it, but it seemed very self-contradictory to us. Part of it was the ghettoization argument, that we should have it throughout the curriculum, but part of it was…that she said something [like] she


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didn’t know anyone’s life that has ever been improved by reading women’s poetry. And I thought, “Uh-oh.”… And part of it was her own sense of what women’s leadership was. One of the talks that she gave here was Joan of Arc, and Joan of Arc was a great model, so that she saw women’s success as public, sort of militaristic, strong.… So there was a limitation in how she imagined women’s success that kept her from endorsing the things that women’s studies was as a discipline.... I think she was being very individualistic. You can see that so much in her own writing, that the individual can overcome. [Her] individualism made her hostile to or impatient with structural explanations—that any individual worth her salt would overcome and triumph.

GROWING DIVISIONS AMONG FEMINIST ALLIES Van Dyne’s understanding that to be an “allied feminist” meant to quiet her criticism of Conway’s stance was undoubtedly complicated by the personal relationship she and others developed with Conway during their dinner sessions. The blurring of the lines between their professional and personal relationships made it harder for them to challenge the president publicly. But Jill Conway refuted the idea that she was immune to criticism from the feminist faculty, particularly when it came to their differences about women’s studies. These were differences, she said, of both strategy and intellectual orientation. I think there were a very loyal group, but there were also others who were extremely critical. It really depended on what issue was at stake. I think they never would have been critical of me in any battle about tenure or curriculum matters, but they might be deeply critical of decisions I made that affected their department. Certainly they would always be very strong supporters in that effort to create an institution that was receptive to and respectful of women faculty. I think a lot of the people who were strong maternalist feminists who wanted a special women’s studies program knew that I didn’t agree with them and wouldn’t support setting up a separate department just because I think that’s a self-defeating strategy, not because I didn’t believe in the field or what they were doing, but we disagreed about strategy.40

These disagreements gradually split the group of feminist faculty. Sue Freeman described it as “a struggle between feminist groups—a split between the research group and the curriculum group.” She observed that “Some people, like Susan Van Dyne, were much more interested in the curriculum; Susan Bourque wanted to hold the line on research.” But it is clear that these differences were not simply about research and curricular efforts. As Mary Dunn suggested, they were differences that exposed a division among the feminist faculty with regard to political orientation and tolerance for politicizing the process of identifying Smith with the study of women’s lives.

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change Susan Bourque was more interested than the women’s studies people in working with male authority figures. She seemed to want to de-politicize women’s research, whereas the women’s studies faculty were clearly more political. Susie took political issues seriously, but she wanted to engage colleagues in research. She was not in your face or as front and center as the women’s studies faculty.

Indeed, faculty and others regularly described the women’s studies supporters as being “in your face,” “radical,” or “political, “ particularly in relation to the “conservative” feminist ideals represented by Jill Conway and Susan Bourque, as Peter Rose explained. Jill and Susie Bourque wanted to bring the study of women to center stage—it wasn’t the study of feminism per se, but the study of women that they were advocating. To me, it seemed that their agenda for what became the program on women and social change was driven less by ideological considerations and a radical feminism than an interest in studying women’s lives, women’s place in society, and women in the modern world.

For Jean Higgins, it was “a great pity that women had to be divided that way because the Project on Women and Social Change was a very closeknit” group. She saw the split as resulting from “different philosophies….a degree of feminism, whether radical or not so radical, middle of the road.” The result, she said, was a “siphoning off of a central strength” that emboldened those who opposed feminism in any form. Within the women’s studies movement itself, there was fear that these “internecine quarrels” would put an end to women’s studies.41 Catharine Stimpson identified the source of these conflicts as arising from “women’s acceptance of cultural stereotypes of femininity and their consequent distrust of women in power, as well as ideological conflict” among different groups within the women’s studies community. Stimpson saw the greatest friction between the group she called “radicals,” who had come to women’s studies through other social or political movements, and “ideologues,” whose experience in the women’s movement brought them to women’s studies.42 For Jill Conway, the issue wasn’t about being radical or conservative, it was simply a “dispute between different schools of feminism.” I think the split [among the feminist faculty at Smith] was much more between those who were maternalist in their view of women…. The whole school of thinking that’s represented by something like Women’s Ways of Knowing, which was a very popular book among the people who wanted a special women’s studies department, or that woman psychologist [who writes] about reproduction of mothering—that’s the school of thought that thinks women are either genetically or in some essential way that’s culturally determined and affects women whether they give birth or not, more empathetic, less capable of abstract thinking, more loving as teachers…. I think the difference between the different groups who were in contention about the Project on Women and Social Change . . . was a dispute


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between different schools of feminism. . . . I raised money to set up the project to promote really rigorous research, and the maternalist school of thought was to me based on really quite questionable research at that point. Chodorow’s book is based on a very few cases, and so is Women’s Ways of Knowing. Carol Gilligan is another big name in that particular point of view.43

Differences in ideology and intellectual orientation may have precipitated the divide of the feminist faculty, but it was helped along by personality conflicts within the group. Fran Volkmann remembered that these differences were “between people who were committed to women’s experience in one way or another, but who also couldn’t get along with each other.” Martha Ackelsberg thought that strategic decisions became complicated by personal relationships that had fractured and questions about “who is going to be in charge.”44 She viewed the primary goals of the two groups as “transforming the entire institution,”45 but both groups remained locked in conflict, unwilling to cede their “unilateral position[s].” She explained that each group “went off in different directions and each group felt betrayed in some way by the other. It was very painful…very, very painful.” FORMALIZING THE STUDY OF WOMEN IN THE CURRICULUM The faculty interested in promoting women’s studies understood that they would be isolated from the president and the majority of the faculty in their efforts at curriculum reform. They employed a number of strategies to raise awareness of and build support for women’s studies and to develop a critical mass of related courses without the support of the larger faculty or the president. In a published volume, Susan Van Dyne and Marilyn Schuster, the early leaders of Smith’s women’s studies efforts, described their strategy as a “bottom-up model.” “At Smith as elsewhere,” they wrote, “incorporating a feminist perspective is a volatile political issue…” With “only tacit administrative support,” they saw their best option as broadening their base of support within the faculty.46 Florence Howe recognized early on that the most powerful members of the faculty and administration were unlikely advocates for this emerging field of study: “Women’s studies is a grass roots movement, mainly of young graduate students and undergraduates and young, nontenured faculty. It has developed without official administrative sanction, and occasionally despite departmental hostility.”47 The early efforts of Van Dyne and Schuster’s Curriculum Group, operating under the aegis of the Project on Women and Social Change, were an attempt to better coordinate and publicize courses that focused on women’s lives. In April 1979, Schuster wrote to the Committee on Educational Policy proposing “to coordinate the courses that already exist in the Bulletin concerned with Women’s Studies.” She argued, “Although it is

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technically possible for a student to put together an independent major, there is no formal, effective advising apparatus to aid in the selection and sequence of courses concerned with women’s studies. To create a coordinating mechanism would help to control the selection of courses and to avoid a random or hastily conceived program in this area.” She recommended that this be accomplished with the support of an advisory board of faculty, comprising faculty already teaching relevant courses, and that the advisory board construct a list of related courses and a description of a major. She offered a first draft of this description: This major aims to bring into a single focus courses which explore the contributions and problems of women in a variety of fields and disciplines. Courses may be grouped according to a number of different disciplinary concerns in response to the individual student’s preparation and interests. Each program will be formulated in consultation with at least two members of the women’s studies advisory board who will then monitor its implementation.48

Marilyn Schuster and Susan Van Dyne understood that the opposition to women’s studies was strong enough that simply proposing a major was unlikely to yield their desired results. So they took small steps that would allow the study of women to gradually be formalized in the curriculum. Van Dyne recalled how Schuster persuaded the dean of the faculty to include women’s studies in the college catalogue. Marilyn…went in to [Dean] Ken McCartney and she said, “I don’t know why women’s studies isn’t in the catalogue…. You know there are people who are here to help people design majors. We’ll call it the advisory committee on the study of women, and we’ll index it under women’s studies so students can find us.” And suddenly we had a page in the catalogue. Then we had a page in the catalogue that looks at the cluster courses…. I wouldn’t call it subversive, but it was to get what you could with the people at hand.

The cluster courses attracted a core group of faculty and a considerable number of students. The cluster courses were four courses that were loosely joined together by a common theme and a required lecture series, with each course sponsoring one invited lecture that students and faculty from all courses would attend. After each lecture, the students from different courses were mixed into discussion groups led by the faculty. With 200 students attending the lectures and a growing group of faculty participating in the cluster courses, an intellectual community focused on women’s issues began to gain a presence on campus. This early success was no doubt an important reason why women’s studies gained support. “What was wonderful about it [was that] we asked no one’s permission,” said Susan Van Dyne. “We created a huge programming presence and an intellectual community of faculty committed to it.”49


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Two other factors were central to establishing a women’s studies program. The first was that students became vocal supporters of women’s studies and they became organized in their effort to encourage the faculty and administration to adopt a formal program. The second was the establishment and effectiveness of the Advisory Committee on the Study of Women. The support from students came through enrollment in course offerings, such as the cluster courses. Students also started organizing to persuade the faculty and administration that there was great demand for women’s studies. In 1977, two students wrote an article, “The Case for Women’s Studies,”50 which argued, “The education we receive is based on male conceptions of what is legitimate for us to learn, rarely including women.” They described a “conflict between those who would like to see the study of women integrated into the existing structure of the disciplines and those who maintain that it is necessary to establish a separate, autonomous discipline called women’s studies.” They methodically made their way through the campus arguments, quoting Susan Bourque as saying that women’s studies “would have no long term impact on the curriculum…. I think that it’s far more important in terms of the curriculum of this college to end up having to deal with the issue of women in almost any course you take in the humanities and social sciences.” They also quoted Marilyn Schuster speaking to the opposition to women’s studies: “To introduce the notion that all scholarship reflects a structure of human values is very threatening to a lot of people who think they are doing objective, neutral, universal work. The unscholarly tag usually carries with it the accusation of being ideologically oriented—as if there were any endeavor that weren’t.” The students concluded by suggesting that “Studying ourselves as the subject is one more way to understand the potential we have and learn to use our lives in a powerful and meaningful way.” A few years later, the students moved beyond arguing publicly for women’s studies; they organized themselves into a “task force,” with the intent of preparing a formal proposal to the curriculum committee for the establishment of a women’s studies program. They created their own student-run January interterm project to follow up on an informal student planning group. A memorandum from one of the students leading this effort to those participating in it outlined the goals for the interterm project. Out of the planning group for this project has come a tentative proposal for a formal women’s studies program at Smith. It calls for: (1) More women-focused courses in the traditional departments. (2) Opportunity for students to design their own multidisciplinary majors in women’s studies. (3) Courses that are specifically ‘women’s studies,’ i.e. an advanced course in methodology and perhaps ‘feminist theory’ course at introductory and intermediate levels as well. Our goal is to present to the Committee on Educational policy…by May 1980 a document that will

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change present this proposal, justify it, and explain how we think such a program might be implemented.51

Despite the growing interest from students in women’s studies, there seemed to be little support in the faculty or from the president for a separate women’s studies program. In a letter to faculty colleagues, Marilyn Schuster described the curriculum committee’s deliberations on this topic. The [curriculum committee] and many faculty members felt…that the most effective and meaningful curricular expression of that commitment would be attention to courses in individual departments and not the establishment of a new, distinct department. This was due on the one hand to the conviction that the contributions and problems of women extended throughout the disciplines and should not be isolated; and, on the other hand, to the recognition that the creation of an entirely new, autonomous department would create an undue burden on an already strained budget.52

In this same letter, she proposed “the creation of an Advisory Committee on Women’s Studies” as an alternative mechanism for structuring women’s studies offerings. After developing a mandate for this committee (renamed the Advisory Committee on the Study of Women), the faculty formalized it with a vote in 1983. Ruth Solie, who chaired the committee, was surprised to see it win approval in the faculty. …the faculty voted to establish a committee with two mandates, one . . . that our activities . . . were supposed to be focused on the study of women [and two, that] we were to help departments and disciplines to understand how their work might be impacted….53 When I looked back on that in later years I thought, “How in the name of heaven did that ever get passed?” because the atmosphere in faculty meetings was not such that you’d expect that it would have been passed.

Certainly one of the reasons it passed was that the faculty involved in the early efforts demonstrated that there was demand for the courses, but more importantly, they showed that such courses could be established at the college without destroying Smith’s liberal arts tradition. In addition, by this time women’s studies was well along in its development nationally. It was becoming commonplace for colleges and universities to have women’s studies programs, so it could no longer be denigrated as a fad. Susan Van Dyne suggested that another reason that it passed and became an effective organizing tool for women’s studies was that Ruth Solie, who had been assistant to the president and an opponent of women’s studies, “had all the credentials. She was an insider to the power structure. She wasn’t perceived as radical or dangerous, the way Marilyn [Schuster] and I were. She had knowledge of things going on.”54 Ruth Solie quickly became the spokesperson for the committee, and by extension, the efforts to establish a women’s studies program. After the faculty voted to establish the committee, Solie was quoted in the student


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newspaper as saying, “The main focus of the committee is integrative. We want as much of the curriculum as possible to become aware of gender, race and class issues.” She went beyond that to say that the committee was looking at the possibility of establishing a minor in women’s studies.55 Later that year, the committee hosted an open house for students to discuss the possibility of choosing a minor in women’s studies. At that meeting, Solie said that the intent of the minor would be “to demonstrate the usefulness of gender as a category of analysis.” Susan Van Dyne announced to those attending the open house that “We stand firmly behind a women’s studies major.”56 The minor was established the following semester (spring 1985),57 but with the president still opposed to a major and to a formally recognized women’s studies program, it wasn’t clear when those goals would become a reality. Six months later, Mary Dunn succeeded Jill Conway as president of Smith. Susan Van Dyne thought the change of leadership opened the door needed for women’s studies to take the next step. I vividly, vividly remember my conversation with Mary. Kids are taking over the College Hall for divestment [from South African securities]. She was keeping the lights on, the food coming, the temperature up, but having all her work in her house…. Mary had all of her equipment in her living room, and I was sitting next to her on her couch. I said, “Mary, time for us to [have a women’s studies program]. I know that Jill didn’t want this to happen but we really feel that it’s necessary and here’s the reason why.” And she looked at me and she said, “You know, at Bryn Mawr I wouldn’t have said go ahead, but you’re much stronger here, you’re more diverse. Bryn Mawr it was only sociology, but I can see what you all have.” She said, “Go ahead.” What I said was, “Why didn’t I ask so much earlier?” But we were just trying not to ask. We talked ourselves into our own quietness.

THE LEGACIES OF FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING AT SMITH As Jill Conway was preparing to leave Smith, she wanted to ensure that the battles she and others fought and the gains they made to support scholarship on women would remain. The Mellon funds had run dry, and other efforts to secure funding had failed. She decided to take it upon herself to raise the money and to seek support from the trustees to endow a fund to study women’s lives. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission. I just raised the money. And once it was done, I just insisted that it get into the plan for the next campaign, which in fact, Mary did. But I raised the nest egg before I left. When I was leaving I told them I didn’t want a building named after me, didn’t want any kind of standard trustees’ gesture, but would they please just fund this project? They did. But really because they couldn’t get out of it.58

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A fundraising publication announced the Jill Ker Conway Fund for Research and Teaching on Women’s Experience: “The College plans to build an endowment of $2 million to ensure that at Smith research and teaching on women is carried on regardless of the changes that may occur in intellectual fashion.” By the end of the campaign, the fund stood at $1,003,843, with over half of the fund derived from designated gifts and $450,000 from a trustee transfer from unrestricted gifts. Gifts continued to be designated for the fund after the campaign ended; by 1994, the fundraising total for this initiative stood at nearly $1.7 million. The fund provides administrative and research support for the Project on Women and Social Change and helps support the women’s studies program. Conway said that the long-term contribution of the Project on Women and Social Change is that “it’s had a steering effect on how people work because you can get a summer salary, time off to develop material on the study of women for your courses. You can get very sustained and systematic research money.” However, as a center for research on women, the project now plays a modest role. In some respects, though, its original goal of encouraging scholarship on women’s lives has now been met. As Martha Ackelsberg said, “There’s…an extraordinary number of people on the campus who are doing research…one way or another [that] addresses questions of gender”—a situation very different from the 1970s. The rift that divided the feminist faculty had lasting consequences on how the study of women would be structured at Smith. Mary Dunn reflected on this issue: The women’s research project never became a big thing, mostly because the women who supported women’s studies quarreled with the women supporting the Project on Women and Social Change. Jill Conway herself thought that women’s studies shouldn’t be highly developed until the research was there to go with it. She was more interested in the research side of things, but, in the long run, women’s studies has been the more powerful program.

Sue Freeman agreed that women’s studies had become the more powerful program, but largely because of the importance of the curriculum at an undergraduate college: “Women’s studies became the stronger of the two efforts because, in a college, the curriculum is more important than a research agenda; and this particular issue provided the students with a new way of thinking about themselves and their lives at a time when that is important.”59 It is ironic that Smith’s most influential “feminist” program is women’s studies, an effort that grew under Conway but without her support. It is impossible to know, of course, what might have happened had Conway thrown the weight of her support behind women’s studies. Would it have allowed the feminist faculty to maintain their group coherence and their momentum, resulting ultimately in more ambitious changes? Or would it


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have further alienated Conway from the majority of faculty who opposed women’s studies, thereby limiting further the support she received from those faculty on other initiatives? I suspect that, because Conway had already distanced herself from the mainstream faculty by supporting the Project on Women and Social Change, it would have been more politically expedient for her to solidify her backing from the feminist faculty by pushing for women’s studies as well. Her support was so tenuous in the faculty that having the unequivocal backing from a group that was growing in number and power would have been useful to her. It is likely that she didn’t choose this route because it would have been in opposition to principles she had articulated clearly. She was a long-time public critic of separate women’s studies programs, and she never wavered from that position. The founding of the Project on Women and Social Change and women’s studies provides a glimpse into the limitations of the academic presidency. Jill Conway assumed the Smith presidency with the stated intention of starting a research program on women’s lives, and she quickly had access to funding for it. Yet even with a clear goal and the resources to support it, she struggled to establish the program; when it was finally in place, it was a modest effort. Perhaps it was a tactical error on her part not to be more direct by announcing that she had the funding for the program and then allowing an interested group of faculty to work out the implementation plan. She argues today that “There were histories full of institutes like this that had been founded and dumped once the sponsor left, and I wanted to make sure this got endowed and would be a formal part of the institution which would continue. And there really was no way to do that without getting it formally approved through all the institution’s academic processes and decision making.”60 Nevertheless, in opening the whole process to the faculty, she appeared to initiate a referendum on her larger vision for Smith and for women’s education. Indeed, it might have been a referendum on the direction higher education was taking in the latter part of the century. The women’s studies program on the other hand, ultimately succeeded despite Conway’s resistance. This was in part because the faculty leading the effort to establish the program were skilled at building “bottom-up” support for it. But it was also because women’s studies moved from being viewed as “warrior feminism unleashed”61 to one of several interdisciplinary programs that emerged during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The center of gravity had shifted in the liberal arts. When that happens, few mainstream institutions can hold back the changes. Sweeping changes are relatively rare in higher education, but when they come, as they did in the 1970s, neither a resistant president nor a resistant faculty stands much of a chance of holding back progress.

CHAPTER 5

The Substance and Style of Leadership

I began this investigation with the hope that it would offer new insight into the contradictory literature on presidential leadership in the academy. Cohen and March represent one school of thought prominent in this literature. The year Jill Conway was named president of Smith, they described their less than optimistic view on the potential for college presidents to make a difference in the institutions they lead. “Compared to the heroic expectations he and others might have,” they wrote, “the president has modest control over the events of campus life. The contributions he makes can easily be swamped by outside events or the diffuse qualities of university decision-making.”1 Others, like Birnbaum, also argue that the person sitting in the president’s office matters little;2 colleges and universities, for those who subscribe to this school of thought, essentially move along with the tides as rudderless ships. On the other hand, case studies of presidential leadership have typically found that presidents matter a great deal in setting a direction for the college, attracting resources, and bringing about significant changes.3 I conclude this study by thinking that none of these positions describes accurately the complex picture of academic leadership, but each has useful elements for understanding the presidency. In the case of Jill Conway’s presidency, I would argue that it mattered a great deal that she was occupying the primary office in Smith’s College Hall. At the same time, I would agree with those who note the importance of understanding changes at a college like Smith in the context of larger changes in higher education and in society. Colleges and universities do move with the tides, but not all at the same pace. Jill Conway sped the pace of change at Smith at a time when many at the college resisted the direction in which higher education was moving in the closing decades of the twentieth century. In this final chapter, I offer brief reflections on what Conway’s presidency might illuminate about the college presidency more generally, as well 97

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as some thoughts on the constraints, both external and internal to the college, that challenged Conway during her tenure at Smith. But constraints are not always in the environment. Leaders are also constrained by their own abilities and attributes. Conway was in many respects a leader of great capacity. She appeared to be limited by some of her personal attributes, however, as well as a leadership style that, in some respects, could be seen as ill suited to effecting change in a system of shared governance. OVERCOMING CONSTRAINTS The challenges facing Smith in 1975 would have been daunting to any seasoned academic leader, let alone a 39-year-old associate professor with good if limited administrative experience. Inflation appeared to be untethered and salaries, especially for faculty, were not keeping pace with inflation or other institutions. The energy crisis created budgetary fluctuations and demanded rethinking of and substantial investments in the campus heating and cooling infrastructure. Capital needs were great and in some cases immediate; budget deficits were a reality and predicted into the future; and a fundraising campaign had just concluded, suggesting that a renewed effort in this area would be some years off. If all this were not enough, the faculty was riven by discussions of coeducation, sex and race discrimination suits brought by faculty members who had been denied tenure, and growing evidence that Smith had become an inhospitable place for women faculty. With a highly tenured faculty, the increase and eventual elimination of a mandatory retirement age, a trustee-mandated tenure cap, and fiscal constraints that diminished the possibility of expanding the faculty substantially, the prospects for altering the composition of the faculty seemed dim. This at a time when to remain competitive and relevant, colleges and universities were adopting new academic fields that reshaped traditional liberal arts offerings. Adding another layer of uncertainty was the move toward coeducation across private higher education. By opening new choices for female high school graduates, this trend threatened the enrollments and relevance of women’s colleges. The possible enrollment shortfall was exacerbated by demographic projections that showed a decline in the number of traditional college-age young adults for the coming decades. Tackling such a broad array of serious institutional challenges demanded an enormous amount of Conway’s time and attention. This necessarily distracted her from other priorities she had set for herself, such as building new academic programs. She says today that she would preferred to spend her time developing an artificial intelligence program and strengthening Smith’s offerings in Asian studies and engineering. Nevertheless, she says, she was able to meet her central objective, which was making “sure [Smith] stayed a women’s college and that it was in a strong position to do so.”4


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Many of the challenges that Conway faced were not unique to Smith. The uncertain financial markets, energy crisis, an aging and highly tenured faculty, and the changes brought about by coeducation were issues confronted by all of Smith’s peer institutions. It is even reasonable to argue that Smith was better positioned to weather these stormy seas than many other colleges. With a national reputation for high quality, excellent students, a relatively healthy financial position, an affluent and dedicated alumnae body, and a strong faculty, Smith’s challenge was to maintain its position among an elite group of institutions. Colleges that were not positioned as well, particularly small and under-resourced women’s colleges, were fighting at this time for their survival. Identifying and implementing the means to overcome mundane challenges might not be the most glamorous and recognized activities of college presidents, but the long-term health of the institution often depends on how well this aspect of the job is managed. Allowing the quality of the faculty or the students to slip or managing resources inefficiently—especially the budget, the endowment, and key revenue streams, such as those derived from fundraising—can disable a college for decades into the future. Conway and her administration addressed such challenges with notable efficiency. When the energy crisis threatened to overwhelm the college’s budget, they invested in alternative energy sources. To address a decline in faculty salaries relative to inflation and peer institutions, Conway raised money for this purpose and overcame the objections of the college treasurer, who thought Conway was too generous to the faculty on this issue, to persuade trustees of the importance of directing resources to this area. She worked with the college Investment Committee to restructure the way the endowment was managed, resulting in competitive returns on the college’s endowment. With little prior experience as a fundraiser, she revamped and broadened Smith’s development efforts, leading a successful campaign and positioning Smith among the very top universities with respect to alumni giving. With regard to the faculty, she was able, with the help of the courts, to end the sex and race discrimination suits while insisting on codifying procedures for tenure and promotion. She persuaded the trustees to lift the tenure cap and add non-tenure-track faculty, and she instituted an early retirement program that opened space for junior faculty. Emboldened by the work of a committee that exposed the discouragement of women scholars at Smith, Conway began addressing faculty climate issues. She instituted a program to attract senior women scholars to Smith and became an activist chair of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion. Conway’s own visibility was likely one reason that Smith was successful in maintaining the size of its student applicant pool when evidence suggested that the college would face serious declines in this area. She took the lead in marketing the institution and the continued relevance of its mission by speaking and writing on the topic and shaping the college’s message to

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high school students. She also crafted the college’s response to alumnae and prospective parents who expressed concern with what they understood as an increased number of lesbian students on campus and a campus environment that encouraged sexual experimentation. When it came to areas in which Conway’s authority or expertise were decisive, she had considerable success. As for most presidents, there were times when Conway’s expertise was far more important than her formal authority. This was the case on the Committee on Tenure and Promotion, where her breadth of knowledge of disciplines gave her an advantage over faculty on the committee whose expertise tended to be narrow and deep instead of broad. It was also true in financial management, an area in which she became expert during her presidency, and in her ability to persuade trustees to trust her academic judgments. But it is also clear that she was able to bolster her authority through the careful control and management of groups and processes. Former trustee Nancy Lange’s description of Conway’s relationship to the board of trustees was similar to what I heard from others describing Conway’s work with committees. Board meetings were just beautifully run by Jill. And she had pretty much control of things all of the time. It was not a terribly free-ranging discussion, but of course there were subcommittees, and that was [where] a lot of these issues were discussed—much more in the committees, and then discussion by the board. She was pretty good, I think, about letting everyone have their say. But there was also a control there…you could feel it if you were getting into an inappropriate amount of detail or something that everybody else had come to agreement with. She was pretty controlling, but terribly able and competent and fair and ethical and all other things.

In general, however, at colleges like Smith, which are made up of communities of experts in which opinions flow freely and power is disbursed broadly, efforts by presidents to exert control typically meet with limited success. Rare is the occasion on which a president makes a unilateral decision. Rather, consultation is currency in a system of shared governance. It is a system that Conway saw as dependent on codified procedures and standards—the rules of the game had to be clear and agreed upon by all parties. So she expended great effort to put rules in place and to make standards known. But shared governance is also a system that is greased by personal relationships that help dissipate resistance and make persuasion possible. Conway’s greatest liability as a leader may have been that she failed to build and sustain these relationships, a fact made more apparent by her predecessor’s great strength in this area. To be fair, she had a monumental task in front of her if she was to develop relationships with many whose opposition to her and what she seemed to stand for was ensconced before she even arrived on campus. It is also apparent, however, that she had complicated relationships with most faculty, even with those who supported her initially.


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TROUBLED RELATIONSHIPS Conway came to Smith intent on disproving the notion that a president’s success is tied directly to the level of cooperation she/he receives from the faculty. She says that she believed she had no choice but to approach her presidency this way—that the resistance to her and her ideas from the senior faculty was unequivocal. She also said that it was possible to succeed in implementing changes without the support of the faculty as long as the alumnae and students were supportive of the changes. The centrality of faculty to decision making suggests that this is a questionable strategy. If it is indeed impossible to imagine persuading faculty to join in a program of change, then such a strategy becomes a rational if less satisfactory alternative. Conway did, in fact, seek the cooperation of some faculty. She developed relationships with a number of junior women faculty who shared her interest in feminist scholarship and in making Smith a more welcoming place for women scholars. These relationships provided support for the new president and seemed to sustain her through some trying episodes. But the nature of these relationships—partly personal, partly professional— created their own set of problems. They opened Conway to the criticism that she practiced favoritism and was undermining the governance system by establishing a “kitchen cabinet,” which were precisely the charges her predecessor faced. She described her own intention as creating a system of rewards that depended on clear standards and assessments based on those standards, but these close relationships with a small group of faculty weakened her position in developing a more egalitarian system. In effect, her moral authority was diminished on an issue of great importance to her. Presidents are under constant scrutiny by faculty, students and alumni to ensure that they live by the principles they espouse. This was an instance in which, for many faculty, Conway’s personal actions were in conflict with the values she articulated as being central to the mission of the college. These personal-professional relationships also led to difficulties when Conway disagreed with a number of her strongest supporters about how to integrate the study of women into the curriculum. By opposing the development of a formal women’s studies program, Conway was at odds with those who had backed her from her first days in Northampton. This conflict left some faculty feeling ambivalent about Conway. At one level, they felt obligated to her and thankful to her for creating a better environment for women, and, in some cases, for ensuring that they received a just hearing through the tenure and promotion process. But they also felt betrayed that they could not count on the president’s support on an issue that they saw as being very important for women. Conway’s relationship with faculty was also marred by allegations that she was untrustworthy. Her strongest critics say that she was not always truthful, and that their opposition to her and her initiatives was built on

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this distrust. Many others, such as trustee Nancy Lange, claimed that “she was completely trustworthy and honest” and that she always acted ethically. Those who viewed her this way typically indicated that those who said otherwise were playing sexual politics or were unable to understand that Conway, because of the cultural surround and circumstances of her upbringing, was private and reserved. It’s not clear where the truth or truths lie on this issue, but there is little doubt that for some it framed their understanding of Conway and her actions. One of the reasons it is difficult to discern the truth in these situations is that they were taking place in such a politicized context. As Conway neared the end of her presidency, academic politics clashed with beltway politics in two very public, controversial flaps. These highly charged incidents raised additional questions about the role of the president in shaping the identity of the college, the authority of the president in a system of shared governance, and for some, the forthrightness of the president. BELTWAY POLITICS IN NORTHAMPTON With a large and well-regarded government department and with alumnae who span the political continuum from Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan, Smith College is accustomed to lively political debate. But the debate reached a new pitch when it involved a commencement controversy featuring U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick and discussions about how to honor First Lady Nancy Reagan. Widely reported in the media, these campus debates ultimately distanced Jill Conway from some faculty, alumnae and trustees. In the fall of 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick accepted an invitation to receive an honorary degree and to speak at the Smith commencement. This followed an election held by the Class of ‘83 to choose a commencement speaker and a vote from the board of trustees to grant her an honorary degree.5 Kirkpatrick had been on the faculty at Georgetown University before accepting the United Nations Ambassadorship. In both positions, she was a controversial and outspoken figure. A favorite of the New Right—the conservative supporters of President Ronald Reagan—Kirkpatrick was a vocal opponent of communism and a proponent of Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives. She drew the ire of the left for her stance on the sale of infant formula to developing nations, her voting record at the United Nations, and her support for groups whose human rights records were questionable, especially in Latin America. This included her call for normalization of U.S. relationships with Chile under General Pinochet, who came to power by overthrowing a democratically elected government and whose forces allegedly tortured and killed thousands for their political views. She also took the unpopular position of favoring support for military forces in El Salvador. Members of these forces killed four Maryknoll nuns in El Salvador, setting off an international outcry. Kirkpatrick was not only criti-


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cized for promulgating a foreign policy that provided support to the troops who killed the nuns, but also for her public statements, in which she referred to the nuns as “political activists,” leading some to believe that she viewed the nuns as legitimate targets in a war zone. The murder of these nuns had special resonance at Smith because the founder of the Maryknoll order was Molly Rogers, who graduated from Smith in 1905. As it turned out, there was even a more recent connection of the Maryknoll sisters to Smith: A Smith student was a relative of one of the slain nuns. She was studying abroad when the announcement for commencement speaker was made. Upon her return, she and her family issued a personal appeal that Kirkpatrick retract her statements about the slain nuns. The student was joined by other students, who formed the Committee Responsible for Organizing Against Kirkpatrick (CROAK), which hosted symposia on Kirkpatrick’s work and organized a campaign against her coming to Smith. There was also growing unrest in the faculty about the college’s plans to honor Kirkpatrick. There were many faculty who, in the name of academic freedom and in support of free speech, argued that the college was obliged to allow Kirkpatrick to address the graduating class. However, a number of those who supported Kirkpatrick’s participation in commencement were strongly and vocally opposed to having their college award her its highest honor, an honorary degree. Thus, from various groups and for a diversity of reasons, Conway faced considerable pressure to rescind one or both invitations to Kirkpatrick. She described how this played out: I said to the then-president of the student government and president of the senior class, “Go back and check and check very carefully in the Catholic constituencies in the college and make sure that there aren’t people really, really opposed to this.” They went off and said they had checked very carefully and in fact nobody was opposed to it. As it turned out, in the senior class was a niece of one of the nuns. So when that turned up the family came to me and they brought the documentation that they said they had shown Jean Kirkpatrick. All they wanted was that she would retract her statement that dishonored their dead relative. So I called her up and told her that this student was in the class, and that the families felt passionately on the subject and I thought she might find her appearance as commencement speaker a pretty rowdy and contentious one. Having run the University of Toronto through all those troubles of the Vietnam War era, I know perfectly well that for an audience of 5,000 people you need 5,000 police if you’re going to make sure that it’s not going to be disruptive. I said, “I’ll do my best to see that you can be heard, but I can’t guarantee it because I’m not going to call the state police and just arrest everybody, because I think there’s real…difference of opinion. So if you want to come to speak at commencement, that’s great. What I can do to get your views heard on this campus is to have you come and speak before, during, or after commencement in a closed auditorium

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The Women’s Movement and the Politics of Change where we issue tickets and where we can alert people. And I’ll do that at any hour or time that you like.” And I also got the president of Georgetown, who is a friend of mine, where she taught, to call her up and say, “I know Jill Conway. She’s serious, she means it.” Well, Kirkpatrick, I think, got taken over by the Reagan press machine. After saying that she would consider that very seriously because she understood the problem, the situation got out of hand and Reagan’s press machine went into action, and so we had a very unpleasant controversy. The faculty was absolutely opposed. I’ve forgotten about the vote now, but it was a very tiny minority that supported the idea of awarding her an honorary degree. I just told the board of trustees that, in this instance, since it was a faculty responsibility as well as the trustees’, I wouldn’t be able to give her a diploma if she came. Of course she elected not to come, and some of the board went off and gave her a diploma.6

The college issued a statement in February 1983 that read, in part: “…given the possibility of demonstrators and the difficulty of controlling security at a ceremony as open to the public as Smith’s commencement, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick regretfully declined the invitation to be the speaker at commencement for the Class of 1983.” In the same month, the trustees voted to award an honorary degree to Kirkpatrick in absentia. The change in commencement plans did not put an end to the controversy. Those who supported Kirkpatrick’s political positions thought the college’s public statement about the affair was simply a cover for what they saw as an emerging trend toward political correctness at Smith. Others who thought the college revoked the invitation to give the commencement address because of a distaste for Kirkpatrick’s and the Reagan administration’s policies saw the action as an affront to free speech and to the academy’s most important principles, such as academic freedom. Some trustees were reportedly upset because they viewed Conway as having sided with the faculty on the honorary degree issue when such a decision was the province of the trustees. And then there were those who were happy to see Kirkpatrick’s trip to campus derailed but were disappointed that the college failed to take a public, principled stance on the issue by stating that Kirkpatrick’s achievements were not worthy of an honorary degree from Smith. The trustees took the unusual step of writing directly to Kirkpatrick to assure her that Smith did want her to visit the campus in the future and they did wish to award her an honorary degree. But in a letter to Conway dated June 23, 1983, Kirkpatrick made it clear that she would not be accepting any invitations from Smith. She also pointed her finger at Conway for what she saw as her role in the events that had unfolded over the previous months. Thank you for your letter of June 6, to which I have given some thought over the past ten days. Surely you understand that I am not without fora in which to speak. Surely you understand that I have no desire or inclina-


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tion to visit Smith in the foreseeable future. The Smith College community, yourself included, made certain decisions over the past several months that led me first to withdraw as commencement speaker and then to refuse an honorary doctorate of law offered to me by the board of trustees. My decisions were not taken lightly, but with regret….

The response to this incident from the public and alumnae was overwhelming. Conway’s secretary, Judi Marksbury, recalled “boxes and boxes of correspondence,” with “ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent …very, very, very negative. There were some ugly, ugly letters written to Jill…I mean they were just spiteful, awful comments…. So it was not a high point of Jill’s tenure, I can assure you. It was really terrible.” The way she handled this incident distanced her from some of her strongest supporters on the board, in part because they thought she hadn’t been entirely candid in her approach to Kirkpatrick. A member of the Smith community, who was close to this event, offered this perspective on how Conway managed it. I think she didn’t act decisively. We got into this situation where people said they were going to protest and they were going to walk out or they wouldn’t do this or they wouldn’t do that at commencement, and all of a sudden she said to herself, we would be better if she didn’t come, essentially. Then she told Jeane Kirkpatrick on the telephone that we couldn’t guarantee her safety. Jeane Kirkpatrick wasn’t going to take that lying down and it was just messy. I think it was handled badly. Maybe Jill should have stood up to people and probably should have had her here, and dealt with the consequences. I think most people felt that telling Jeane that we couldn’t guarantee her safety was not so much the truth as it was a way to wiggle out of having her here and trying to put…another face on it. [The chair of the board of trustees] used to be Jill’s biggest supporter— she was very upset about it.7

Two years later, when Mary Dunn succeeded Conway, the Kirkpatrick incident was still a regular topic of conversation. Dunn was told that it had damaged Conway’s relationship with the trustees because some questioned whether she had been entirely truthful with them about how she handled the controversy. Nancy Lange was on the board of trustees at that time. She recalled that conservative members of the board thought it “very inappropriate to not have someone conservative come to the college” so they were upset with Conway for rescinding the invitation.8 She also thought that the whole incident “represented [that] the honeymoon was well over with the faculty. You know, ten years is maybe a long time….it just was a focal point for everybody to have their frustrations about.” The fraying of the relationship of the president and the trustees was helped along by another incident with similar themes that played out at about the same time. This controversy was centered on a proposal to give an honorary degree to Nancy Reagan, who was First Lady at the time. On March 11, 1982, an alumna called the president’s office after dining with

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the Reagans. She reported that “Mrs. Reagan made quite a point about the fact that in all her years in public life, she has never heard anything from Smith College. [The alumna] said that Mrs. Reagan was exceedingly upset about this…”9 She went on to suggest that it would be appropriate for Smith to award her an honorary degree. A group of alumnae then arranged for Conway to visit Mrs. Reagan at the White House. Conway remembered that the visit was filled with surprises. We never got to visit at the White House because the whole place was in pandemonium. Someone up in the tower of the Lincoln Monument had a rifle turned on the White House, so I finished up being ushered through the kitchen by the sacks of potatoes and onions. She and I left by car out a sort of tradesman’s entrance of the White House. And the first thing she said to me, after we’d gotten through the usual perfunctory stuff—“I’ve never forgiven Smith for going coeducational!” So her level of knowledge about the place was not very high. She was quite startled to have me tell her that was not the case.10

Conway said that Mrs. Reagan “expected that she would be given an honorary degree simply for being Ronald Reagan’s wife and I just pointblank refused to do it. So that got a lot of alumnae riled up who were Reagan supporters.”11 Instead, she offered to establish a scholarship in her name and announce it at a dinner in New York for Mrs. Reagan. The correspondence between the White House staff and the Smith administration makes clear that Mrs. Reagan was insulted by this invitation and never accepted it. A version of this story was ultimately played out in Newsweek and in the local press, with the local paper reporting that “what Nancy Reagan did—marry a man who was to become President of the United States—was not enough for her alma mater to consider her worthy of an honorary degree.” The story led with the sarcastic headline, “First Lady to get tea, not degree.”12 This episode revealed that older alumnae tended to have a different perspective on Smith’s mission than younger alumnae and students. The older alumnae typically had traditional views of Smith and of women’s roles more generally. With few professional opportunities available to them, they were often life-long volunteers and active supporters of their husbands’ careers. In this way, they related to Mrs. Reagan’s accomplishments even if they disagreed with her on political issues. The younger alumnae and students, like Jill Conway, were more likely to focus on women’s achievements in the professional realm, apart from their husbands’ successes. These events also provided additional ammunition to Conway’s critics who thought that she was too political and too inclined to allow her own feminist bearings to reshape Smith’s identity. They also became a focal point for faculty and trustees to express their dissatisfaction with Conway over any number of issues. For some faculty, these dissatisfactions included


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the decision to establish institutional considerations as a part of the tenure process, where the lines had been drawn between administrative and faculty authority, and the decision that Smith would remain single sex. That the incidents happened near the end of Conway’s second five-year term allowed them to feed into the discussion about whether Conway should be reappointed for another term. Members of the Faculty Council heard from colleagues that they would oppose any action by the trustees to appoint Conway to another five-year term, a message that they communicated directly to the trustees. I was sent [by Faculty Council] to go and talk to the chair and vice chair of the Board about it… I didn’t know what they knew about her or about the faculty’s attitude—I would have no idea…. Nobody trusted anything she said and what was worse than that is nobody ever knew the actual truth status of what she said…. I mean there wasn’t even political alignment….We didn’t know whether the board had any idea of this.… I was very discreet and I was lucky, I was talking to two [trustees], whom I had come to know; we had lunch together down in what was then the Faculty Club. I got up and asked, “Can I communicate to you that Jill’s term is coming to an end and we don’t have any idea what you are planning to do, but Faculty Council hears from the faculty that it will be a terrible disaster if Jill was reappointed for another term.” They didn’t say anything to me—”Thanks for telling us.” That’s usually the end of it. I think it later became clear that . . . it seemed to everybody that ten years was probably the right amount of time anyway.13

Conway says that she had decided herself that it was time for a change and it was for that reason alone that she stepped down from the presidency. Had she decided otherwise, however, she clearly would have had to overcome a resistant faculty once again. KICKING AND SCREAMING INTO THE MODERN WORLD Conway’s presidency was political, controversial, and marred by imperfect relationships with her varied constituencies. Yet in many respects it was highly successful, and she was able to lead Smith through a major transformation during an exceptionally difficult time. Beyond needing to overcome a number of complex management challenges, Conway had the extraordinary task of remaking the image of a very visible and tradition-bound college. As one faculty member described it, “Jill left an imprint of feminism on Smith. She made it a feminist women’s college.” That identity continues to ring true today, two decades and three presidents after Conway’s departure. For many closest to the college, Jill Conway “dragged Smith kicking and screaming into the modern world,” in the words of Louis Cohn-Haft. For Martha Ackelsberg, this was certainly true, but she wondered if a way

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could have been found to open the discussion about this transformation that wouldn’t have left the divisions that still linger on campus. Jill did take this place from this kind of staid old school kind of place and did drag it kicking and screaming in some ways into the late nineteenth century. Maybe even into the twentieth century. Obviously I think that was a good thing. There are probably people here who still don’t. And I don’t really understand how one could not. That’s probably part of what [divides] the faculty…. We really don’t understand each other on some level and this stuff rarely comes out into the open—if at all. The closest it came, in some ways, was that conversation about that would-be research center when people were saying, “It will attract the wrong kind of people.” We were all sitting there thinking, “Hmmm, we must all be the wrong kind of people.” There are a substantial—it’s a minority probably—but a substantial group of people on the faculty who feel that there’s a lot of people here who are the wrong kind of people and who are, somehow or other, taking this place down a garden path that’s going in the totally wrong direction…

Conway had a clear direction for Smith in mind when she took office. Embattled from her earliest days as president, she chose a strategy that called for fighting back and pushing ahead to keep the college moving in this direction despite any opposition or hurdles she encountered. She kept her focus on implementing an ambitious agenda, even when that meant moving forward with only limited support from the faculty. The endgame for Conway was strengthening the college so that its survival as a women’s college was assured. This was more important to her than building relationships and sharing decision making with the faculty. By improving the college’s financial position, refining its mission, attending to enrollment issues, and making the college more attractive to a broader group of faculty, she was successful in positioning Smith to succeed as a women’s college in the years ahead. Changes of the magnitude of those that took place at Smith during Conway’s presidency do not happen in a vacuum. Colleges and universities are subject to external pressures and social changes. Conway was adept at navigating the winds of change that reshaped the landscape of higher education in the 1970s and 80s. She steered Smith toward a more progressive and women-centered orientation, propelled by the women’s movement and related social changes. There were certainly other directions she could have chosen. Indeed, it might have been considerably easier to have moved more slowly or to have stayed the traditional course that Smith had been on prior to Conway’s arrival. This certainly would have been to the liking of the dominant faculty group when Conway arrived. Had Conway chosen the cautious route, Smith would be very different today. It might be coeducational, for example. It might have a very different faculty and curriculum. It might not have the financial strength it currently enjoys. There are opportunity costs associated with choosing a particular direction for an in-


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stitution, particularly when that choice has such broad and lasting ramifications. But assessing those opportunity costs is often speculative work. For instance, what if Smith followed Vassar College’s route and became coeducational? Vassar struggled with this change for many years but has emerged with a new identity and considerable overall strength (whether or not it would be stronger today if it had remained a single sex college is an interesting but tough question to answer). Other women’s colleges have made that transition less smoothly, but with Smith’s considerable resources, it is fair to assume that Smith could have successfully charted a course toward coeducation. Instead, with Conway at the helm, Smith remained true to its founding mission as a college for women, but with a new feminist identity that continues to shape the curriculum, the students, and the faculty. While there is considerable debate about whether Conway chose the right direction for Smith, there is general agreement among Conway’s supporters and detractors that her leadership transformed the college. According to Conway, the trustees expected a transformation when they brought her to Smith. “They [the board of trustees] cast their votes when they hired me. They wanted it. They knew what they were getting and they were a little startled that I went about it in such a direct way, I guess. But they certainly wanted it. Or they would have chosen a very different kind of president.”14 That they chose a strong, determined, feminist president set the stage for a decade of conflict. But it was also a decade in which the college came out of a period of uncertainty and emerged with a clear identity and a solid foundation for future changes. THE END OF AN UPHILL BATTLE On 29 February 1984, Jill Conway announced to the Smith faculty that she would be concluding her time at Smith the following academic year. The minutes of the faculty meeting for that day read: “For both personal and institutional reasons, the President said, . . . she felt it most appropriate to conclude her term of office at Smith in 1985, when the faculty, the finances, and the physical plant of the College should be, as they are now, in excellent condition.” The minutes went on to describe the statements by faculty honoring Conway, including this, from the Faculty Council: “Mr. Rowe, representing the Faculty Council, said he heard the President’s announcement with regret but with understanding; he expressed admiration for her managerial skills and strategies, and for her energetic and indefatigable efforts on behalf of the institution.” The faculty gave her a standing ovation on that day, as they did during her last faculty meeting, on May 16, 1985. The Smith student newspaper ran a retrospective on Conway after she announced her intention to step down. It led with “Conway will leave to

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her successor a college in which many changes have taken place since her accession in 1975, in large part due to Conway’s own efforts on behalf of women’s education.”15 It seems a fitting summation that the major changes that took place at Smith during her years were understood to have been her doing. Jill Conway was a strong but sometime solitary leader. She didn’t coalesce people around her (with the exception of the junior women faculty who initially supported her). Rather, she articulated a vision, she appeared to keep her strategies largely to herself, and she proceeded to bring about change whether there was a price to be paid for it or not. It is certainly possible to see this as a courageous model of leadership, and it is not so different from what we think of as the archetypal male leadership style. In fact, Conway described the evolution of her leadership style as coming from her study of military history. I’ve had an interest all my life in military history, and have studied the careers of great generals and so on, so I had my own notion of what leaders do…. All great generals transform the definition of war, they don’t take it on the terms that are presented to them, and they figure out the things that other people see as disadvantages and turn them into advantages. Wellington at Waterloo—Napoleon was convinced that the configuration of the land was going to protect him, and Wellington figured out another way to attack, turning the fact that he had come from a high point into an advantage, and that changed the course of the Battle of Waterloo. So if you look at a complex situation and look at it the way your opponents see it and decide how to transform that definition of a problem, you’re threequarters of the way to solving it.16

This is a style with drawbacks, especially in a college where collegiality and shared governance is an expectation and when the support for the leader is tenuous from the beginning. Nevertheless, as Nancy Lange pointed out, Conway’s style was imbued early in her life, and it wasn’t likely that she was going to change when she arrived in Northampton: “You look at her whole life down The Road from Coorain and the University of Sydney and Toronto: she’s stood alone and taken on the uphill battle all along.” LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP Extrapolating general lessons about leadership or even the academic presidency from this very focused study might be considered a fool’s errand. But it is often in the particular that the more general is revealed. Below I suggest some lessons gleaned from Conway’s experiences. PRESIDENTS MATTER Despite evidence to the contrary, it matters a great deal who occupies the office of the president. Conway’s presidency would suggest that this is certainly the case when it comes to managing the regular, day-to-day chal-


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lenges of the institution, especially raising and allocating resources. At colleges like Smith, the president also plays a key role in determining who becomes the community’s permanent citizens—the faculty. Most importantly, the president matters a great deal in setting the direction of the college and in shaping its public identity. “THE TYRANNIES OF TIME AND PLACE” In 1976, Donald Hornig stepped down from the presidency of Brown University. His stormy six-year tenure was marked by student occupations of the central administration building, battles with the faculty about cutting academic programs, and difficult decisions to balance the budget during tough economic times. When he left office and was asked what he would have changed during his presidency, he is reported to have replied, “The times.”17 Presidents, unfortunately, have little control over the “times” or the context in which their work takes place. The context is defined in part by the particulars of the institution—its resources, traditions, and mission, for example. Indeed, the immediate needs of an institution can deflect a president’s attention from longer-term planning and from initiating fundamental changes of substantial long-term benefit. This situation can easily lead to the perspective that presidents would be fortunate to even inch an institution forward. A presidency is also defined by a larger external context that includes the competition from peer institutions; the economic climate that has a significant impact on the resources available for new and existing initiatives; the social and political tenor of the times that create new curricular and research opportunities, influence alumni engagement, and often serve as a catalyst for student movements. A challenging and tumultuous environment can overwhelm a president; or, as Conway demonstrated, it can provide the impetus for institutional changes that would otherwise be difficult to accomplish. It might not be possible to change the “times,” but it is possible to be attuned to them and to use them to push forward an ambitious agenda. PRESIDENCIES ARE SHAPED BY THE FACULTY Presidencies are often defined by the president’s relationship to the faculty. In a system of shared governance, and particularly at colleges where the faculty is afforded significant autonomy and authority, the faculty wields considerable influence. Conway made a bold if only partially successful attempt at minimizing the faculty’s opposition to her initiatives by seeking unequivocal support (and new resources) from trustees and alumnae. In most instances, however, she was forced to slow or scale back her own ambitious plans when she was unable to garner enough support for them in the faculty.

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PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITIONS AND THE SUBSTANCE AND STYLE OF LEADERSHIP A president’s leadership style is most apparent and possibly most determinative of future outcomes when the president first enters office. It is at this point when the new president is inevitably compared to her or his predecessor, and with little of substance on the table this early in a president’s tenure, comparisons tend to focus on stylistic issues. As was evident in Conway’s experience, perceptions of leadership style are often linked to expectations based on personal attributes such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, and religious and cultural traditions. These attributes become more important and are brought into sharper relief when the new president is the first to exhibit them. Given the concern many expressed about Conway’s personal attributes and leadership style, it’s likely not to have been a coincidence that the search committee that identified Conway’s successor, Mary Dunn, recommended a leader who, in temperament and affect, more closely resembled Tom Mendenhall than Jill Conway. Dunn recognized that she was fortunate to have had Conway take on some trying battles. She said that her “husband used to say that I had an easier time at Smith personally because Jill Conway had broken the old male presidential system. Being first, she acquired for herself the resentment of those who didn’t want to see change at all.” Style is important because it can either hinder or promote a president’s ability to make substantive change. In some respects, shared governance elevates the importance of style. The limits placed on presidential authority increase the premium on the power to persuade, and suggests the need for faculty to consent to a president’s authority over some issues. Conway was rarely granted that consent so she was constantly devising alternative strategies to exert her influence. There is no one leadership style that would be effective at all institutions. Institutional culture, traditions, governance structures, and the particular demands of time and place help determine what style would be most effective. Jill Conway led Smith in a manner that surprised and disappointed some and delighted others. Despite the differences in opinions about her style and whether it was right for Smith, there are few who would question her overall effectiveness as a leader and the enormous legacy of change for which she was responsible.

APPENDIX

List of Interview Subjects

Acklesberg, Martha. Professor of Government; joined the Smith faculty in 1972. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on May 23, 2001. Bell, M. Kathleen. Smith College Class of ‘44, Smith College Trustee from 1976–1982; Chair of the Board under Conway. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on May 28, 2001. Bracken, Ted. Director of Federal Relations at the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE). Interviewed by telephone on June 25, 2001. Bourque, Susan. Provost and Esther Booth Wiley Professor of Government at Smith College; joined the Smith faculty in 1970. Interviewed in my office at Smith College on March 1, 2001. Cohn-Haft, Louis. Professor Emeritus of History; was an active member of the Smith faculty from 1953–1987. Interviewed in my office at Smith College on May 16, 2001. Conway, Jill Ker. Smith College President from 1975–1985. Interviewed at her home in Conway, Massachusetts on March 25, 2000 and May 13, 2001; and at her home in Boston, Massachusetts on March 19, 2002. Dunn, Mary Maples. Smith College President from 1985–1995, and a dean and faculty member at Bryn Mawr during Conway’s term at Smith. Interviewed in her office at Radcliffe on November 1, 2000. Ellis, Robert. Treasurer of the College from 1965–1984. Interviewed in his home in Easthampton, Massachusetts on January 18, 2001. 113

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Appendix

Haddad, Robert. Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of History and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Biblical Literature; was an active member of the Smith faculty from 1961–1993. Interviewed in his office at Smith College on January 23, 2001. Hanson, Kay. Executive Director (and now former President) of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE). Interviewed by telephone on June 25, 2001. Higgins, Jean. Professor Emeritus of Religion and Biblical Literature, and assistant to the president under Conway from 1977–1979; was an active member of the Smith faculty from 1972–1991. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on June 19, 2001. Fink, Lawrence. Professor Emeritus of Education and Child Study and Director of Athletics at Smith under Conway; was an active member of the Smith faculty from 1963–1992. Interviewed in the Smith College Faculty Club on November 16, 2000. Freeman, Susan. Professor of Education and Child Study; joined the Smith faculty in 1974. Interviewed at the Green Street Café, Northampton, Massachusetts, on November 7, 2000. Kennan, Elizabeth T. President of Mt. Holyoke from 1978–1995. Interviewed by telephone on September 24, 2001. Lange, Nancy Ribble. Smith College Class of ‘47; President of the Alumnae Association from 1977–1980; Member of the Smith College Board of Trustees from 1977–1983; and Chair of the capital campaign undertaken during Conway’s term. Interviewed at her home in Little Compton, Rhode Island on June 14, 2001. Marksbury, Judi. Secretary to the President under Conway; joined Conway’s staff in 1980; currently Associate Director of College Relations at Smith College. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on June 19, 2001. McPherson, Mary Patterson. Smith College Class of ‘57; President of Bryn Mawr from 1978–1997; currently Vice President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Interviewed in her office at the Mellon Foundation on July 11, 2002. Nenner, Howard. Roe/Straut Professor in the Humanities; joined the Smith faculty in 1968. Interviewed at the Green Street Café, Northampton, Massachusetts, on November 8, 2000.

Appendix

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Rose, Peter. Sophia Smith Professor of Sociology and Anthropology; joined the Smith faculty in 1960. Interviewed at the Green Street Café, Northampton, Massachusetts, on October 12, 2000. Rothman, Eleanor. Founding director of the Ada Comstock Scholars Program (appointed in 1975); currently Director of Ada Comstock Campaign Program. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on January 17, 2001. Shanahan, Ann Edwards. Smith College Class of ‘59; Director of Public Relations under Conway; currently Chief Public Affairs Officer at Smith College. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on June 19, 2001. Solie, Ruth. Smith College Class of ‘64; Sophia Smith Professor of Music; Assistant to the President from 1979–1982; joined the Smith faculty in 1974. Interviewed in my office at Smith College on January 4, 2001. Van Dyne, Susan. Professor of Women’s Studies; joined the Smith faculty in 1973. Interviewed in her office at Smith College on January 9, 2001. Volkmann, Fran. Harold Edward and Elsa Siipola Israel Professor Emeritus of Psychology; Dean of the Faculty at Smith from 1983–1988; Acting President of Smith from January–September, 1991; was an active member of the Smith faculty from 1966 to 2000. Interviewed in her home in Northampton, Massachusetts on June 19, 2001. Zimbalist, Andrew. Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics; joined the Smith faculty in 1974. Interviewed at the Green Street Café, Northampton, Massachusetts, on October 11, 2000.

Notes

CHAPTER 1 NOTES 1

Time, January, 5 1976, vol. 107, no. 1, pp. 6–25. The inside profile of Conway was titled, “Jill Conway: From Outback to Ivy.”

2

Touchton, J., and Davis, L. (1991). Fact book on women in higher education. New York: American Council on Education and Macmillan Publishing Company.

3

Quesnell Q. (1999). The strange disappearance of Sophia Smith. Northampton, MA: Smith College, p 221.

4

See Horowitz, H. (1984). Alma mater: Design and experience in the women’s colleges from their Nineteenth-Century beginnings to the 1930s. New York: Knopf.

5

In 1972 the American Council on Education hosted the first association conference on women’s issues, followed in 1973 by the establishment of the Office of Women in Higher Education (Shavlik and Touchton, 1984).

6

For example, Princeton and Yale began admitting women in 1969; Williams in 1970; Amherst in 1974. Vassar agreed to admit men in 1970 (after a failed merger with Yale in 1967). The rise in coeducation decreased the number of women’s colleges from 300 in 1960 to 98 in 1988 (Diesenhouse, 1988).

7

Chinoy, E. (1969). Coeducation at Smith College. Unpublished report to the president and College Planning Committee.

8

Interview on 13 May 2001.

9

Conway’s first two memoirs, The Road from Coorain (1989) and True North (1994) brought these private aspects of Conway’s life into the public domain. Her third memoir, A Women’s Education (2001) focuses on her time at Smith.

10

Conway, J. (1994). True north: A memoir. New York: Vintage Books.

11

Conway, J. (1975). New responses for the second century. Smith College publication.

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Notes

12

COFHE is a consortium of thirty-one leading private liberal arts colleges and research universities. Originally established in 1974 to support research and lobbying on finance issues, its scope has broadened to include research on a number of issues, including student satisfaction, admission, financial aid, and staffing.

13

Jean Higgins said that Conway’s presence elicited just such a reaction from many women on campus: “It wasn’t just Jill coming to Northampton, it was a woman. It was a role model. You looked at that woman and the students looked at her and said, that could be me.”

14

Conway, J. (1975). Inaugural address, October 19, 1975. Unpublished speech.

15

Conway, J. (1975). New responses for the second century. Smith College publication, p. 7.

16

Interview on March 25, 2000.

17

Conway, Jill K. (2001). A Woman’s Education, Alfred A. Knopf, New York , p. 43.

18


19

Thomas C. Mendenhall came from Yale to the Smith presidency in 1959 and remained in office until 1975.

20

Kerr, C., and Gade, M. (1986). The many lives of academic presidents: Time, place & character. Washington, D.C.: Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, p. xiii.

21

Cohen, M., and March, J. (1974). Leadership and ambiguity: The American college president. Berkeley, CA: The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, p. 2.

22

Kerr, C. (1963). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 40–41.

23

Birnbaum, R. (1989). Presidential succession and institutional functioning in higher education. Journal of Higher Education, 60, 123–135, p. 124. See also, Birnbaum, R. (1988). Presidential searches and the discovery of organizational goals. Journal of Higher Education, 59, 489–509.

24

See, for example, Chaffee, E.E. (1984). Successful strategic management in small private colleges. Journal of Higher Education, 55, 212–241; McLaughlin, J., and Reisman, D. (1990). Choosing a college president: Opportunities and constraints. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Eckel, P., Hill, B., Green, M., and Mallon, B. (1999). Reports from the road: Insights on institutional change. Washington: American Council on Education; Eckel, P., Hill, B., and Green, M. (1998). En route to transformation. Washington: American Council on Education; Gilley, W., Fulmer, K., & Reithlingshoefer, S. (1986). Searching for academic excellence: Twenty colleges and universities on the move and their leaders. New York: American Council on Education and Macmillan Publishing Company; Peck, R.D. (1983). The entrepreneurial college presidency. Educational Record, 64, 18–25; Benezet, L., Katz, J. & Magnusson, F. (1981). Style and sub-

Notes

119

stance: Leadership and the college presidency. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education. 25

McLaughlin, J., and Riesman, D. (1990). Choosing a college president: Opportunities and constraints. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, pp. 13–14.

26

Eckel, P., Hill, B., Green, M., and Mallon, B. (1999). Reports from the road: Insights on institutional change. Washington: American Council on Education.

27

For example, see Walton, K.D. (Ed.). (1996). Against the tide: Career paths of women leaders in American and British higher education. Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.

28

For example, see Finch, E. (1947). Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr. New York: Harper; and Thorp, M.F. (1956). Neilson of Smith. New York: Oxford University Press.

29

These would include McLaughlin, J. (Ed.) (1996). The new college president: Leadership transitions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Bensimon, E.M. (1990). Viewing the presidency: Perceptual congruence between presidents and leaders on their campuses. The Leadership Quarterly, 1, 71–90; and Gilmore, T.N. (1988). Making a leadership change: How organizations and leaders can handle leadership transitions successfully. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

30

Sturnick, J., Milley, J., and Tisinger, C. (1991). Women at the helm. Washington, D.C.: American Association of State Colleges and Universities is one exception.

31

American Council on Education (2002). The American college president: 2002 edition. Washington: American Council on Education.

32

For a meta-analysis, see Eagly, A.H., and Johnson, B.T. (1990). Gender and leadership style: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 108, 233–256.

33

For example, see Helgesen, S. (1995). The female Advantage: Women’s ways of leadership. New York: Doubleday.

34

Examples include Lipman-Blumen, J. (1992). Connective leadership: Female leadership styles in the 21st-Century workplace. Sociological perspectives, 35, 183–203; and Jablonski, M. (1996). The leadership challenge for women college presidents. Initiatives (57), 1–10.

35

Howe, F. (1975). Women and the power to change. In F. Howe (Ed.), Women and the power to change. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 140.

36

Examples include Kanter, R.B. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. New York: Basic Books; and Birnbaum, R. (1992). How academic leadership works. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

37

Chliwniak, L. (1997). Higher education leadership: Analyzing the gender gap. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, Volume 25, Washington: ASHE.

38

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. and Davis, J.H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; and Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (1983). The good high school: Portraits of character and culture. New York: Basic Books.

39

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. and Davis, J.H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 3.

120

Notes

40

I am indebted to Erika Taecker, Smith College Class of 2001, for her assistance in unearthing documents in the Smith College archives.

41

Access is restricted to the Minutes from the Meetings of the board of trustees, so they were not available to review for this study.

42

I did not include students in these interviews, largely because the focus is so clearly on Conway’s relationship with faculty. A full biographical account would need to include the important perspective students would provide.

43


44

Miles, M. B., and Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

45

Bogdan, R., and Biklen, S.K. (1992). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theory and methods (2nd ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

46


47

Fraenkel, J.R., and Wallen, N.E. (1993). How to design and evaluate research in education. New York: McGraw-Hill.

48

For example, see Seidman, I.E. (1991). Interviewing as qualitative research. New York: Teachers College Press; Miles, M. B., and Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; and Eisner, E.W. (1985). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs (2nd ed.). New York: Macmillan.

49

Maxwell, J.A. (1996). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, p. 90.

50


51

Ibid, p. 255.

52

Ibid, p. 246.

53

Maxwell, J.A. (1996). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

54

Miles, M. B., and Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cited in LawrenceLightfoot, S. & Davis, J.H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 245.

55


56

Kidder, T. (1982). Face validity from multiple perspectives. In D. Brinberg and L. Kidder (Eds.), Forms of validity in research. New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Sciences, no. 12, pp.41–57. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

57

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. and Davis, J.H. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 246–247.

Notes

121

58

Schutz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world (G. Walsh & F. Lenhert, Trans.). Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

59

Lincoln, Y.S., and Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, p. 107.

60


61

I had moved to a position at Brown University during the final stages of data collection for this study.

62

Miles, M. B., and Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, p. 263.

CHAPTER 2 NOTES 1

Conway, Jill K. (2001) A Woman’s Education, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (p. 18–19).

2

Larry Fink indicated that Mendenhall’s concern for people was evident in his dealings with students, who took precedence over anyone else, including waiting trustees: “I went up to drop something off with the president’s secretary, Florence McDonald. Sitting on the sofa opposite the secretary’s desk were [members of the board of trustees]. Tom Mendenhall’s door is closed. While I’m waiting for Florence to get off the phone, a student comes up the stairs and says to Florence McDonald, ‘I have to see Mr. Mendenhall.’ Florence buzzes the buzzer, he pops out and takes the student into his office. I asked Tom Mendenhall about that, and he said, ‘If a student comes to my office it takes courage. It’s clearly the most important thing in her life at that moment. Everything else can wait.’”

3

Judi Marksbury recalled that Conway’s privacy extended to her acts of generosity: “People thought she was cold because, the thing is she’s very reserved and that has to do with her, you know she’s Australian—I think it has to do with her makeup as an Australian. But, she really wasn’t and people thought—she is shy, I think, quite shy, but she does have this fabulous sense of humor that will come out. And she…would do things very quietly that no one [would] ever…know it was her that was doing it. Let’s say if someone was very sick for a long period of time, I remember something about how she made sure that newspapers were delivered to that person… little things like that and never took credit, you know, never wanted it known, it wasn’t necessary to her.”

4

Given Conway’s personality and talents, it is understandable that she would assume a presidency at a time when a premium was placed on management skills. Yet in fitting the emerging role of college president, Conway drew even starker lines between her and Tom Mendenhall, as Peter Rose pointed out: “Jill came at a time when institutions were beginning to transition from the president as intellectual leader to CEO, PR agent, and fundraiser. In addition to having a very different personality and sense of mission, her personal style was also a sharp contrast to Tom Mendenhall. She was shy and socially awk-

122

Notes ward. It wasn’t easy for her to be with people. She didn’t wander the campus or go to the faculty club just to mingle with the faculty, to get to know what they were doing as he had done.”

5

Report of the President, 1969, p. 14.

6

There were three surveys conducted to assess support for coeducation. George Mair summarized the results in a Memorandum to Peter Rose, January 11, 1977: “Between 1967 and 1969 the weight of opinion continued to move more in favor of coeducation so that the spring 1969 questionnaire showed stronger pro-coeducation sentiment than that of 1967. Opinion then moved the other way, resulting in an anti-coeducation majority in 1970.”

7

Chinoy, Ely (1969) Coeducation at Smith College: A Report to the President and the College Planning Committee, p. 1.

8

Ibid, p. 45–46.

9

Peterson, Iver (1974). The New York Times, November 19, p. 45.

10

The percentage of full-time women faculty at Vassar fell from 43 percent in 1967–68 to 38 percent in 1973–74. (From Duffy, E. and Goldberg, I (1998). Crafting a Class: College Admissions and Financial Aid, 1955–1994. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.)

11

Augmented College Planning Committee (1971) “Smith College and the Question of Coeducation: A Report with Recommendations Submitted to the Faculty and the Board of Trustees,” p. 13.

12

“Trustees vote to maintain Smith as women’s college,” The Smith College Sophian, February 24, 1972.

13


14

Louis Cohn-Haft described the faculty discussions and his own perspective on this issue: “Every time it came up…there’d be great debate in the faculty and those who were saying we’ve got to become a coed college or else we’re going to die.…when the women’s colleges began to go coed and the men’s colleges began to accept women, there’s no question that we lost a lot of good students. I mean we’d have to. Obviously there’s no way of counting them, but it was clear, we were bound to lose them. And…the argument for going coed was that: to protect ourselves by admitting men so that the best women wouldn’t go elsewhere…. And you know aside from sentiment, as near as I can recall, the major argument for staying a women’s college was that Smith had a great tradition as a fine college with excellent students who were serious and that admitting men would simply turn them, in effect, frivolous and female. Or feminine, or however you want to say that. I shared that view. That is, it was my experience that some superbly brilliant student I would meet on campus on a Saturday and there she was clinging to some pimply-faced boy and looking up at him as if he were God.”

15

For example, Peter Rose suggested to Dean George Mair that it was “time for another assessment” of the coeducation issue in a memorandum dated January 5, 1977. Mair responded on January 11, 1977: “As to the thought that perhaps it is time for another assessment of the question of coeducation, it seems to me that this would be premature. The last assessment took several years, at least from 1967 to 1972, and resulted in agreement, not unanimous

Notes

123

of course, among all the college constituencies that Smith had a role to play as a college for women. Events since then have not so far negated the expectation that as a college for women we would be able to continue attracting students and faculty of high quality. In the light of this, the moment at which we are about to enter a major development campaign premised on our decision to continue as a college primarily for women does not seem a logical one at which to begin a reassessment of the college’s purpose.” 16

Pat McPherson said that the coeducation issue was framed differently at Bryn Mawr and never created the lasting divisions that it had at Smith. In the late 1950s, the Bryn Mawr faculty studied the possibility of coeducation and in the 1970s they turned their attention to building a stronger relationship with Haverford College. The Bryn Mawr and Haverford relationship was strained that same decade when Haverford, over the objections of Bryn Mawr, became coeducational in an effort to strengthen its admission outlook. However, the two colleges continued to collaborate and the students moved freely back and forth between campuses, eliminating to some degree the calls for coeducation at Bryn Mawr.

17

The Census Bureau reported 4,258,000 births in 1960, dropping to 3,144,000 in 1975. The number of births climbed throughout the 1980s, reaching the 4 million mark again in 1989.

18

In 1979–80, more than 3 million students graduated from U.S. high schools. That number dropped to under 2.5 million by 1990 and did not begin climbing toward 3 million again until the close of the century (From Fact Book on Higher Education, 1998, by American Council on Education and The Oryx Press, Phoenix, Arizona.).

19

Examples of Conway’s writing and speaking on this topic include “Women’s place,” Change Magazine, March, 1978, Vol. 10, No. 3; and “A feminist agenda for the 90s: Some questions about strategy,” speech by Jill Conway to the Women’s National Democratic Club, May 9, 1985.

20

Director of Admission’s Report to the Faculty, September 1979.

21

Letter from Jill Conway to the Smith College board of trustees, August 14, 1981.

22

Director of Admission’s Report to the Faculty, September 1979.

23

Wick, Emily (1982). Demography, admissions and the size of the college, April11, Mount Holyoke College Archives, p. 6. Quoted in Duffy, E. and Goldberg, I (1998). Crafting a class: College admissions and financial aid, 1955–1994. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, p. 16.

24


25

Conway, Jill (1976), “Statement on lesbianism,” Smith College Memorandum, July 30.

26

Nancy Lange said that Jill Conway set a tone of civility on campus, “whether it was race issues or whether it was lesbian issues or ethnicity or anything else.” She described the “Statement on Lesbianism” as “a wonderful crutch for trustees to fall back on when discussing the issue with the alumnae.”

124

Notes A second document, dated April 1983, on Smith College Office of Public Relations letterhead, stated, “We are aware that alumnae and others are concerned about whether the lesbian minority at Smith is larger than it is on other campuses or in the society as a whole…. While we see little change in the lesbian population at the College, the situation at Smith is complicated by the fact that the City of Northampton has become an attractive residential and professional setting for many young professionals, including some lesbians…. The contact between the Northampton-area lesbian community and Smith, however, seems to be very limited.”

27

Lubenow, Gerald (1982) “Gays and lesbians on campus,” Newsweek, April 5, pp. 75–77.

28

Financial Report to the Trustees of Smith College for the year ended June 30, 1974.

29

Financial Report to the Trustees of Smith College for the year ended June 30 1975, p. 3.

30

For example, the inflation rate was 11.1% in 1973–74 and 10.9% in 1978–79.

31

Financial Report to the Trustees of Smith College for the year ended June 30, 1979.

32

Smith, like other institutions, struggled to maintain increases in faculty salaries that would be equal to or beyond inflation, as I discuss in the next chapter.

33

These figures are taken from the Smith College Financial Reports of 1975–76 and 1984–85. Controlling for inflation, the comprehensive fee rose from $4,980 to $6,597, a real increase of nearly 33 percent. Again, holding inflation constant, the budget for undergraduate scholarships rose from $1,653,244 to $3,035,177, a real increase of 84 percent.

34

For example, the 1978–79 Financial Report indicated that “…President Conway opened the Campaign in up-State New York, New Jersey, Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania last year.”

35

Interview on May 13, 2001.

36


37

Table 2 shows fundraising figures and endowment market values held constant in 1975 dollars.

38

This was reported in the Minutes of the Faculty Meeting, September 10. 1980: “Our alumnae support has put us ahead of all 528 private colleges surveyed by the Council on Financial Aid to Higher Education, as well as ahead as such universities as Brown, Chicago, Duke, Notre Dame and Pennsylvania. The only private universities attracting more alumnae support are Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Case Western, and MIT. Large grants which came in over the summer include $250,000 from IBM to support the sciences, $68,000 from the Funds for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education to support the start-up costs of the Smith Management

Notes

125

Program, and $325,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a renewal grant supporting the Project on Women and Social Change.” 39

President’s Report to the Board of Trustees, October 2, 1979.

40


41

In her second Report of the President, Conway made clear that fundraising was going to be a top priority for her. “Historically Smith women have supported the College at a level equaled only by the alumni of some of the country’s major private universities….Even so, as we look to the future, it is clear that we must develop an even more sophisticated fund-raising organization than we have had to date. Perhaps because our alumnae and friends have been such generous supporters in the past, we have not been so effective in soliciting corporate and foundation support until very recently. We must make the case for support of Smith more effectively to corporate donors and to foundations.” From the Report of the President, 1976–77, p. 10.

42


43

In contrast, universities with active research programs had been aggressive in seeking private and governmental support for sponsored research as research programs expanded in the 1950s and 1960s.

44

The memorandum was marked with the initials RTA, possibly identifying the author as Robert T. Averitt, Professor of Economics.

45

By 1985, the investment committee had set an “asset allocation policy stating that the portion of the endowment dedicated to equities will not generally exceed 80% nor fall below 35%.” This quote is from page 5 of the 1984–85 Financial Report.

46


CHAPTER 3 NOTES 1

Rosovsky, H. (1990). The university: An owner’s manual. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, p. 250.

2

Harper, W. R. (n.d.). “The college president,” cited in Storr, R. (1966) Harper’s University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 103.

3

“Stepping down” in this case meant moving to the newly-created position of Chancellor.

4

Yemma, J. (1996) “Silber sets last days as BU’s boss; but he’ll keep advisory role,” The Boston Globe, March 30, p. 1.

5

Brown, W.R. (1982) Academic politics. University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press.

6

For example, in 1996, the elected Faculty Council released a report detailing twenty instances over a twelve-year period in which Silber and the BU administration allegedly threatened academic freedom by interfering in faculty appointments, tenure and research. See Dembner, A. (1996) “Silber dismisses faculty criticisms; academic freedom alive at BU, he says,” The Boston Globe, March 13, p. 23.

126

Notes

7

Between 1944 and 1956, the GI Bill helped 2,232,000 veterans attend college. From Cardozier, V. R. (1993) Colleges and Universities4 Between 1944 and 1956, the GI Bill helped 2,232,000 veterans attend college. From Cardozier, V. R. (1993) Colleges and Universities in World War II. Westport, CT: Praeger, p. 224. in World War II. Westport, CT: Praeger, p. 224.

8


9


10


11

See, for example, Tidball, M. E. (1974). “The search for talent,” Change (May), pp. 51–52, 64. Also, Tidball, M. E. & Kisiakowsky, K. (1976). “Baccalaureate origins of American scientists and scholars,” Science, vol 193, pp. 646–652. Many others were writing on the role of women’s colleges in fostering achievement. For example, Oates, M. J. and Williamson, S. (1978). “Women’s colleges and women.

12

In an interview on March 19, 2002, Conway told me that she developed this style of speaking from notes while delivering lectures to large classes.

13

This quote is from a transcribed interview. The interview subject has had the opportunity to review the transcript, but I have not identified the subject because of the sensitive nature of the quote.

14

The Report of the President, 1966, p. 7.

15

Letter from Myra Sampson to Thomas Mendenhall, dated September 25, 1970.

16

In a memorandum to the president, dated September 28, 1970, Dean George Mair offered the following advice to President Mendenhall on the Sampson report: “At budget meetings with chairmen, the President could—and probably already does on occasion—mention the fact that the decline in the proportion of women on the faculty is not particularly cheering and that if it could be stopped or reversed without damage to the quality of the faculty, that would be all to the good.”

17

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, October 22, 1975.

18

At a faculty meeting on September 13, 1972, “Mr. Mendenhall announced that the ad hoc committee to study the present policy of appointment, tenure and promotion is in the process of appointment and election.” However, the new policy was not adopted by the faculty until 1974.

19

For example, the Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty for September 12, 1979 suggested a lengthy discussion on when a doctoral dissertation needed to be completed for an instructor to be promoted to assistant professor; the following meeting, on October 24, 1979, was again devoted to discussions of proposed amendments to the policy, with ongoing discussions about whether to substitute “should” for “shall,” etc.

20

The conflicts that were taking place in the English and History Departments at Smith can be viewed as battles that were part of the culture wars that swept through higher education and transformed a number of disciplines, especially in the humanities, during the last decades of the twentieth century.

Notes

127

21

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, April 27, 1977, from “Procedures for Dealing with Charges of Illegal Discrimination” A Report to the Faculty from the Committee on Committees.

22

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, September 14, 1977.

23

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, December 3, 1975.

24


25


26

Jill Conway read the following from the Court’s decision at the Faculty Meeting on September 14, 1977: “That the findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Order of [MCAD] is set aside and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination is directed to dismiss with prejudice the complaints of Ms. Maurianne Adams and Ms. Mary Carruthers.”

27

The Report of the President, 1976–77, p. 11.

28

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, November 30, 1977.

29

The Report of the President, 1979–80, p. 20–22.

30


31


32


33

Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College, August 1983, p. 26–27.

34

Memorandum to Members of the Faculty, from Jill Conway, dated November 3, 1982.

35

Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College, p. 1.

36

The Report showed that the proportion of women appointed to the faculty actually decreased during Conway’s first years in office in comparison to the final years of Mendenhall’s term: “Prior to 1977, the period 1971–72 through 1976–77, 53% of the hires were women and 47% were men (76 women and 68 men). Since 1977, the period 1977–78 through 1982–83, those statistics have been reversed and 53% of the hires were men and 47% were women (64 men and 58 women)” p. 10.

37

The gender ratio of senior faculty in 1983–84 was 67.5% men, 32.5% women; the gender ratio of junior faculty that same year was 57.7% men, 42.3% women.

38

Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College, p. 15–16.

39

Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College, p. 20–21.

40

Ibid, p. 21.

41

Ibid, p. 16–17.

42

Ibid, p. 16–17.

43

Ibid, p. 32–33.

128

Notes

44

Solomon, B. (1985). In the Company of Educated Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 210.

45


46

It was also clear that the faculty made their opinion known to the trustees on this issue. The Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty on May 11, 1977 reflected the following discussion: “The Advisory Committee on Faculty Appointments expressed its opinion that the proposed 50–50 quota, to be achieved by 1992, and the requirement…for a department by department plan showing how this proportion could be achieved would necessarily involve more or less arbitrary decisions which would inevitably conflict with the maintenance of academic quality. The Advisory Committee communicated its belief to the Trustees that a combination of approaches which stress careful planning, careful decision, and careful monitoring would be more flexible and more likely to maintain academic standards.”

47


48

In her Report to the Board of Trustees, dated October 2, 1979, Conway wrote, “Now that the Department of Labor regulations implementing the legislation concerning the mandatory retirement age are available a major faculty concern will be some revision of the Early Retirement Option in line with the new situation….I hope this matter can be an early concern for the Finance Committee because a satisfactory plan is crucial for the maintenance of junior faculty morale.”

49


50

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, February 25, 1981.

51

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, May 12, 1982.

52

In her Report to the Board of Trustees, May 1983, Conway posited the following: “In 1983–84 69% of the faculty will be tenured (up from 65% in 1981–82). Of these, 67% are men and 33% are women. However, at present, of the 70 faculty in the tenure track 41 are males and only 29 are women. Thus our strategy of recruiting senior women is clearly our surest path toward improving the gender balance.”

53


54

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, October 27, 1982.

55

Memorandum from Jill Conway to Faculty Council, November 29, 1983.

56

Report of the President, 1982–84, p. 3.

57


58


59

Ibid.

60

Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation, p. 48. Stimpson cites Lynn v. University of California, U.S. Court of Appeal, Ninth Circuit (San Francisco) No. 79–3384, September 21, 1981, which ruled it discriminatory to downgrade women’s studies in the tenure process.

61


Notes

129

62

In the President’s Report to the Board of Trustees, October 1980, Conway wrote that “…the 1979–80 Committee on Tenure and Promotion overturned the tenure recommendations of departments in three instances in 1979–80….many faculty were highly critical of the action of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion.” Her Report to the Board of Trustees in May 1983 had a similar theme: “This year the negative decisions of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion were the subject of much criticism on the ground that the Committee had over-ruled majority or unanimous departmental recommendations and raised the level of scholarly achievement which warranted the granting of tenure…. Negative decisions are always the subject of strong feeling in a community as small and as close as Smith….The Committee tried to take tough decisions and to do so with the best interests of the College in mind.”

63

Report of the President, 1982–84, p. 4.

64

On January 7, 1985, the board of trustees voted to reinstate institutional considerations in appointment, reappointment and tenure decisions.

65


66

Memorandum to All Members of the Faculty, from Faculty Representatives on the Committee on Committees, January 19, 1983.

67

Memorandum to All Members of the Faculty, from Faculty Representatives on the Committee on Committees, February 10, 1983.

CHAPTER 4 NOTES 1

Berresford, S., in Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation, p. vi.

2

See Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation, for a discussion of the development and contributions of such centers.

3

There were other significant events in the decades prior to the formal establishment of women’s studies programs, including the 1953 establishment of the Commission on Educational Opportunities for Women at the American Council on Education.

4

Tobias, S. (1970). Female Studies No. 1: A Collection of College Syllabi and Reading Lists. Pittsburgh: Know, Inc.

5

This brief history of the women’s studies movement is culled from a number of sources, including Boxer, M. (1982). “For and about Women: The theory and practice of Women’s Studies in the United States. Signs, vol. 7, no.3, Spring.” This article is reprinted in Minnich, E., O’Barr, J. and Rosenfeld, R. (Eds.) (1988). Reconstructing the Academy: Women’s Education and Women’s Studies. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Other sources used include Mari Jo Buhle’s introduction to Howe, F. (Ed.) (2000). The Politics of Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press; Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford

130

Notes Foundation; and Howe, F. (1975). Women and the power to change. In F. Howe (Ed.), Women and the power to change. New York: McGraw-Hill.

6

This phrase comes from the subtitle of Florence Howe’s volume, Politics of Women’s Studies (2000), which is Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers.

7

Conway, J. (1975). New responses for the second century. Smith College publication, p. 7.

8

Jean Higgins described Conway’s motivations in similar terms: “As a feminist historian, she had spent a lot of time studying the history of woman’s movement. And the one thing that depressed her very much about that was the fact that they came and went like the tides of the seas, they rose and they fell. And they fell in part because the economic situation changed or the political situation changed, so that outside sources had an influence of whether they existed or not.”

9


10

Along with the Radcliffe Seminars, founded in 1950, and the Women’s Archives that became the Schlesinger Library in 1965, these resources at Radcliffe represented the range of efforts to study, teach and collect materials related to women’s lives. Dates cited are from the Summer 1999 issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly.

11

The Ford Foundation funded post-doctoral and dissertation fellowships supporting scholarship on women. From the mid 1960s to the end of the 1970s, Ford allocated $30 million overall to support women’s studies and scholarship on women’s lives. From Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation.

12


13

The Committee was chaired by George Mair and included Helen Chinoy, George deVillafranca, Jean Higgins, Frances Volkmann and Allen Weinstein.

14

Memorandum to Members of the Faculty, From the Ad Hoc Committee to Design a Research Program on Women, dated April 16, 1976.

15

In an interview on March 19, 2002, I asked Conway if the evolution of the centers at Wellesley and Radcliffe had informed her own thinking about how the Smith program should be designed: “No, it probably should have, but it didn’t,” she said. “I just wanted to make absolutely certain that the program we founded would be very scholarly and it wouldn’t be a parking place for everybody who didn’t make it anywhere else.”

16

Letter To the Ad Hoc Committee to Design a Research Program on Women, Dated April 26, 1976, with 28 faculty listed as signatories.

17

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, April 28, 1976.

18

Susan Van Dyne remembered that one of the objections they would have to overcome was that the support for feminist research would insidiously influence the curriculum: “…it was a feeling that certain people’s research fit better under the project rubric than others and it was a lot of money and people were very jealous of the money. [Jill tried] to bring feminist women together to support it. We had dinners and meetings where she tried to garner support for it…I remember those conversations were very heated about did we want

Notes

131

something that was so specifically, did they even think of it as feminist? They must have thought of it as feminist, but the reaction against it was that a research institute would influence the curriculum without it going through curricular channels.” 19

Interview on March 25, 2000. While it is true today that Smith is identified as a “feminist place,” in the mid-70s that identity was yet to be secured.

20

As described in the preceding chapter, the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty at Smith College, in its 1983 report, indicated that the college had “become polarized on the subject of lesbianism and, by extension, on the subject of feminism…”

21

Memorandum to President Conway, from The Ad Hoc Committee to Design a Research Program on Women, dated January 21, 1977.

22

Letter to George Mair from Jill Conway, February 18, 1977.

23

Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, February 1977.

24

In contrast to this fairly modest grant that was to go to seven faculty, the Wellesley Center was generating more than $1.6 million in income by 1980–81 and had a staff of forty-four by 1982. These figures were cited in Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation, p. 26.

25

The original research team consisted of Mark Aldrich, Susan Bourque, Donna Divine, Sue Freeman, Mary Lynn McDougall, Kathryn Pyne Parsons, and J. Diedrick Snoek.

26

Smith College press release dated January 26, 1978.

27

The Minutes of the Meeting of the Faculty, 25 January 1978.

28

In the Report of the President, 1977–78, Jill Conway wrote: “The project [on Women and Social Change] has been designed to enable the research team to investigate the factors of a developmental and societal nature leading to changed in women’s roles and women’s consciousness. It is the hope of the researchers that they may be able to restate some key assumptions of social theory as they relate to the formation and modification of the females personality” (p. 19).

29

Report of the Project on Women and Social Change, 1979–1980.

30

President’s Report to the Board of Trustees, October 1980.

31

Smith College: Project on Women and Social Change, Curriculum Group, 1981.

32

Smith College Sophian, Vol 29, No. 3, 1980. In a Press Release dated August 18, 1980, the publications resulting from work at the center were chronicled this way: “During the initial three-year period of the project, its members and associates have produced a number of articles which are being collected into an anthology, An Endless Waterfall: Studies in Women and Social Change; a book, Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns, which won the Hamilton Prize in 1979 and will be published by the University of Michigan Press; and papers presented at a variety of professional meetings and institutions.”

132

Notes

33

Report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on the Recruitment and Retention of Women Faculty At Smith College, August 1983, p. 16.

34

Ibid, p. 32. Smith Professor Donna Robinson Divine, in a letter to the Committee chair dated 20 December 1983, criticized the Committee’s findings: “That the Committee chose…to summarize all views [on the Project on Women and Social Change], however subjectively based, notwithstanding the many caveats and qualifications, gives a distorted picture not only of the Project, but more importantly, of its place in the intellectual life of the College…. It is indeed gratifying to learn that the intellectual creativity of the Project has mitigated the social isolation experienced by some members of the faculty, but the sole purpose of the Project is to support and encourage gender-based research. As important as social activities may be, we have no mission but that of promoting scholarship.”

35

As President Mendenhall described in the Report of the President, 1972–73, discussions about how to integrate the study of women into the curriculum were not new. “Although by its very existence Smith College has served to give young women a greater sense of purpose, it has never formally maintained a course of study that specifically focused on their lives or work. From the start Smith students have been offered such liberal studies as mathematics and as wide a range of sciences as might be available to young men. In the last three years psychology and biology have doubled their majors, and the former has now the largest number of majors of any department, ahead of such old favorites as English, art and government. Although in the early years many colleges, including Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, had courses in cooking, sewing, and housekeeping, Smith has resolutely refused to offer such aids for the homemaker…. Although homemaking courses have always seemed either too feminine or too utilitarian to be included in the liberal arts curriculum at Smith, today’s growing interest in women’s studies already has a visible effect. Such courses seek to study the role or the concerns of women as illuminated by a particular discipline or combination of disciplines, for they are often inter-disciplinary…. So far, such courses have developed at Smith usually by women faculty and under departmental auspices but without a formal program or major in women’s studies. Even the emergence of extra-mural athletics with Smith teams competing in eight different sports this year against outside rivals, reflects the growing concerns of Smith students for the same opportunities as young men for self-expression and selfrealization through competitive sports…” p. 7–8.

36

Conway, Jill (1974) “Coeducation and women’s studies: Two approaches to the question of woman’s place in the contemporary university,” Daedalus, (Fall) p. 239 – 249, p. 245.

37


38

Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation, p. 48.

39

Solomon, B. (1985). In the Company of Educated Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 204.

40


Notes

133

41

Boxer, M. (1988) For and about women: The theory and practice of women’s studies in the United States, in Reconstructing the Academy, in E. Minnich, J. O’Barr and R. Rosenfeld, eds Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 77.

42

Stimpson, C. (1973). “What matter mind: A critical theory about the practice of women’s studies.” Women’s Studies 1, no. 3: 293–314. Cited in Boxer (1988).

43


44

This concept of transforming the entire institution to better serve women and society is explored by Adrienne Rich in her essay “Toward a woman-centered university,” in Howe, F. (Ed.) (1975). Women and the power to change. New York: McGraw-Hill.

45

Schuster, M. and Van Dyne, S. (1985). Beyond departmental boundaries, in Schuster, M. and Van Dyne, S. (1985). Women’s Place in the Academy. Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Allanheld, pp. 98–115. These quotes are from p. 102.

46

Howe, F. (1975). Women and the power to change. In Howe, F. (1975) (Ed.), Women and the power to change. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 8–9.

47

Howe, F. (1975). Women and the power to change. In Howe, F. (1975) (Ed.), Women and the power to change. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 8–9.

48

Memorandum from Marilyn Schuster to the Committee on Educational Policy, 17 April 1979.

49

In 1984, Susan Van Dyne described the intent of the cluster courses in the student newspaper: “This combination of the course and the lecture series is our way of designing a program of study which involves a common educational experience including approximately 30 faculty members who are lecturing, leading discussion groups, basically sharing their knowledge and experience with the 200 students who are taking at least one of the cluster courses.” “Women’s studies add cluster series,” Smith College Sophian, February 2, 1984.

50

Lehmann, K. and Rowlands, J. (1977) “The case for women’s studies,” New Current (April), pp. 3, 13.

51

Memorandum to Students registered for Interterm project on women’s studies, from Faith Reidenbach, December 14, 1979.

52

Letter from Marilyn Schuster, March 7, 1980.

53

Back in 1974, the faculty had followed the lead of the curriculum committee, which recommended that no separate department be established for women’s studies, but rather that efforts be undertaken within departments to include the study of women in relevant courses. Establishing the Advisory Committee on the Study of Women was not a radical departure from this position, but it did provide further encouragement to centralize the study of women.

54

Susan Bourque said that the political environment of the time affected how she and others approached efforts for curricular reform: “We were somewhat shy of being accused of being highly politicized and things of that sort…And I think some of our first efforts were of that ilk, sort of running with this

134

Notes awareness of that and I think Marilyn and Susan were much braver in their sense of saying, no this is what we really need to do, Smith really needs to get out there in the forefront and really be a leader in terms of pedagogical change, and I think they were very effective at it.”

55

“Courses integrate women’s studies,” Smith College Sophian, September 13, 1983.

56

“Panel views women’s studies minor,” Smith College Sophian, April 19, 1984.

57

“New minor established; women’s studies added,” Smith College Sophian, December 3, 1984.

58


59

In the 1999–2001 Smith College Catalogue, the “goals for the women’s studies major” begin with the following: “The women’s studies major fosters a feminist, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and critical understanding of human experience, cultural production, and the construction of knowledge,” p. 357.

60


61

Stimpson, C. (1986). “Women’s studies in the United States,” New York: A Report to the Ford Foundation, p. 13.

CHAPTER 5 NOTES 1

Cohen, M., and March, J. (1974). Leadership and ambiguity: The American college president. Berkeley, CA: The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, p. 2.

2

See, for example, Birnbaum, R. (1989). Presidential succession and institutional functioning in higher education. Journal of Higher Education, 60, 123–135.

3

Examples include Eckel, P., Hill, B., Green, M., and Mallon, B. (1999). Reports from the road: Insights on institutional change. Washington: American Council on Education; Eckel, P., Hill, B., and Green, M. (1998). En route to transformation. Washington: American Council on Education; Gilley, W., Fulmer, K., and Reithlingshoefer, S. (1986). Searching for academic excellence: Twenty colleges and universities on the move and their leaders. New York: American Council on Education and Macmillan Publishing Company.

4


5

Jeane Kirkpatrick finished second on the students’ ballot for commencement Speaker to Sandra Day O’Connor. When Justice O’Connor was unavailable, Kirkpatrick was issued an invitation.

6


7

This quote is from a transcribed interview. The interview subject has had the opportunity to review the transcript, but I have not identified the subject because of the sensitive nature of the quote. For her part, Jill Conway said, “I certainly wouldn’t have done that any differently. Oh well, I might have put a

Notes

135

little light on my own judgment and vetoed Jean Kirkpatrick anyway as a commencement speaker, but she’s a distinguished woman scholar and I could understand the students wanting to hear from her.” From an interview on May 13, 2001. 8

Robert Haddad offered a similar explanation: “The faculty didn’t want Kirkpatrick and I think the president backed off at the very last minute…under faculty pressure, which did not entrance the trustees, as I gather, since the trustees’ political proclivities were not exactly the same as the faculty.”

9

Memorandum from Judith Marksbury to Jill Conway, dated March 12, 1982.

10


11

Ibid.

12

Larmon, Marcy (1984). “First Lady to get tea, not degree.” Daily Hampshire Gazette, June 4.

13

This quote is from a transcribed interview. The interview subject has had the opportunity to review the transcript, but I have not identified the subject because of the sensitive nature of the quote.

14


15

“The Conway era in retrospect: achievements discussed,” Smith College Sophian, March 12, 1984.

16


17

Mitchell, M. (1993). Encyclopedia Brunoniana, Providence: Brown University Library, p. 295.

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Index

Brown University 73, 111, 121, 124 Bush, Barbara 102

A Ackelsberg, Martha 18, 38, 39,47, 54, 64, 67, 78, 80, 81, 89, 94, 107 Ada Comstock Scholars Program 7 Adams, Maurianne 46, 51, 52, 127 Affirmative Action 2, 60, 63–64, 67 Alumnae Relations 1, 2, 5, 10, 11, 14, 25, 27–31, 80, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 111, 123–124 American Council on Education (ACE) 117, 129 Amherst College 2, 37, 38–39, 52–53, 81, 117 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 75, 81, 93, 125 Arizona, University of 73 Athletics at Smith 7–8, 132

C Career Development/Career Services 3, 7, 8, 39 Carnegie Corporation 73, 75 Carruthers, Mary 46, 51–52, 127 Carter, Gwendolyn 45 Case Western 30, 124 Center for American Women 73 Center for Women Policy Studies 73 Chase, Mary Ellen 45 Chicago, University of 35, 124 Coeducation 2, 4, 6, 16, 22, 23–28, 36, 38–39, 98, 99, 106, 108–109, 117, 122, 123 Cohn-Haft, Louis 19, 44, 47, 49, 50, 51, 65, 107, 122 College Planning Committee 2, 23–24 Connecticut College 23 Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) 26, 118 Cornell University 30, 74, 124

B Banerjee, Ron 46–47, 51–52 Barnard College 1, 26 Bell, Kathleen 15 Bennington College 23 Berkeley, University of California at 73 Bourque, Susan 17, 21, 38, 40, 46, 50, 53, 69, 81, 87–88, 91, 131, 133 Bracken, Ted 11, 20

D Drew, Elizabeth 45 Duckett, Eleanor 45 Duke University 73, 124

143

144 Dunn, Mary Maples 11, 16, 24, 45, 67, 87, 93, 94, 105, 112 E Ellis, Robert 19, 32, 53 Endowment Management 4, 5, 16, 22, 28–33, 99, 125 Energy crisis 6, 29, 98, 99 Enrollment Challenges/Admissions 6, 16, 23, 24, 26–28, 34, 98, 108, 123 Equity Policy Center 73 F Faculty Campus Climate for 4, 6, 36, 50, 54, 56–64, 72, 99 “Dinosaurs” 4, 26, 37, 40, 85 Gender Composition 3, 4, 6, 36, 43–52, 60, 98, 127, 128 Junior Women 4, 37, 38, 47, 47–50, 53–58, 63, 69, 74, 83, 101, 110 Recruitment of Women/Target of Opportunity Program 6, 36, 55, 56–60, 62–64, 72, 128 Feminist Scholarship Curriculum Change 6, 28, 53, 73, 74, 76–80, 82–95, 109, 130, 133 Project on Women and Social Change 4, 74–84, 88, 89, 94–95, 125, 131, 132 Feminist Studies (Journal) 74 Ford Foundation 73, 75, 130 Freeman, Sue 41, 54, 71, 79, 81, 87, 94, 131 Friedan, Betty 1, 102 Fund for Improvement of PostSecondary Education 75 Fundraising 5, 14, 21, 29–33, 70, 78, 94, 98, 99, 121, 125

Index G Goucher College 4 Governance 4, 10, 14, 18, 19, 35, 43, 55–56, 67, 70–72, 98, 100–102, 110, 111, 112 H Haddad, Robert 26, 27, 40, 41, 48, 67, 80, 85, 135 Hanson, Kay 3, 11, 21, 22, 31, 52 Harper, William Rainey 35 Harvard University 3, 30, 35, 37, 38, 39, 84, 124 Higgins, Jean 2, 16, 37, 43, 53, 88, 130, 118 Hornig, Donald 111 Howe, Florence 10, 89, 130 I Inflation 6, 24, 29, 32, 61, 98, 99, 124 International Center for Research in Women 73 K Kirkpatrick, Jeane 7, 102–105, 134–135 Kitchen Cabinet 21, 37, 52–56, 101 L Lange, Nancy 17, 28, 68, 100, 102, 105, 110, 123 Leadership Presidential 8–9, 97, 108–111 Feminist/Gender and Leadership 1, 4, 8, 9–10, 11, 21, 25, 36, 40, 41, 54, 55, 59, 69, 86, 87, 88, 106, 107, 109, 112 Lesbians/Lesbianism and Campus Debate 25, 27–28, 59, 80, 100, 123–124, 131 M Marksbury, Judi 42, 105, 121 Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) 2, 46–52, 124

Index Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 30, 124 McCartney, Ken 41, 90 McPherson, Mary Patterson 4, 17, 123 Mendenhall, Thomas C. 5, 16–23, 32, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 55, 65, 112, 118, 121, 126, 127, 132 Modern Language Association 74 Morgan Guaranty 32 Mount Holyoke College 1, 2, 4, 17, 20, 25, 26, 46, 47, 132 N National Council for Research on Women 73 National Endowment for the Humanities 75 National Women’s Studies Association 74 Nenner, Howard 39, 45 New Right 7, 31, 102 Notre Dame, University of 124 P Pennsylvania, University of 124 Phillips Andover Academy 32 Portraiture (Research Methodology) 10–14 Presidential Transitions 6, 8, 9, 14, 22, 37, 112, 121 Program of Policy Research on Women and Families 73 R Radcliffe College Bunting Fellowship Program 75 Henry A. Murray Research Center 75 Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study 75 Reagan, Nancy 7, 102, 105–106 Reagan, Ronald 7, 102, 104, 106 Rogers, Molly (and Maryknoll Sisters) 102–103

145 Rose, Peter 4, 19, 25, 47, 55, 64, 65, 88, 121, 122 Rosovsky, Henry 35 Russell Sage Foundations 75 S Sampson, Myra 44,126 San Diego State University 74 Sawyer, John 75–76 SAT scores 26 Seven Sisters 1, 18, 23, 75 Sex Equity 2, 36, 60 Sexual politics 10, 17, 39–40, 102 Shanahan, Ann 16, 45 Signs (Journal) 74 Silber, John 35–36, 125 Solie, Ruth 19, 23, 38, 48, 86, 92–93 Solomon, Barbara 60, 86 Stanford University 30, 73, 124 Steinem, Gloria 1, 102 Stimpson, Catharine 67, 85–86, 88 T Tenure Tenure Process and Committee on Tenure and Promotion 4, 6, 36, 44, 46–52, 57, 58, 64–69, 98–101, 126, 129 Tenure Cap and Ratio 37, 60–63, 68–70, 72, 98–99, 107, 128 Tidball, M. Elizabeth 39 Title IX 2, 49 Toronto, University of 3, 25, 31, 37, 65, 103, 110 Trinity College 23 Trustees of Smith College 2, 7, 11, 14, 15, 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 37, 38, 43, 44, 49, 51, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 79–80, 93, 99, 100, 102, 121, 123, 128, 129, 135

146 V Van Dyne, Susan 21, 54, 66–67, 82–83, 85–87, 89–90, 92–93, 130, 133 Vassar College 1, 4, 23–24, 39, 109, 117, 122 Volkmann, Fran 20–21, 41, 48, 54, 66, 68, 75, 79, 89, 130 W Wellesley College 1, 3, 26, 27, 73, 75, 130, 131, 132 Wesleyan University 23 Williams College 23, 39, 75, 117 Women’s Studies (Journal) 74 Women’s Studies 5, 7, 59, 67, 72–74, 78, 83, 84–95, 101, 130, 132, 133, 134 Women’s Studies Quarterly (Journal) 74 Y Yale University 24, 30, 32, 37, 38–39, 68, 85, 117, 118, 124 Z Zimbalist, Andrew 16, 41, 64, 67

Index

The Women's Movement and the Politics of Change at a Women's College: Jill Ker Conway at Smith, 1975-1985 (Routledgefalmer Studies in Higher Education)

gynecology and womens health

The Emerging Markets and Higher Education: Development and Sustainability (Routledgefalmer Studies in Higher Education)

Literary history womens writing britain

The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Science Education (Routledgefalmer Readers in Education)

Educational Structures in Context: At the Interfaces of Higher Education

Scientific american presents womens health

Botanical Medicine for Womens Health

Acting Otherwise: The Institutionalization of Women's Gender Studies in Taiwan's Universities (RoutledgeFalmer Studies in Higher Education)

The Kids' College Almanac: A First Look At College (Kids' College Almanac: First Look at College)

The Routledgefalmer Reader in Gender and Education (Readers in Education)

The Mens Guide To The Womens Bathroom Malestrom

Politics at the Airport

The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Sociology of Education (Readers in Education)

The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Psychology of Education (Readers in Education)

Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk

Merit Aid and the Politics of Education (Studies in Higher Education)

The Transformation of the Student Career: University Study in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden (Routledgefalmer Studies in Higher Education)

CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMENS WRITING (Postcolonial Literature)

Congress and the nuclear freeze: an inside look at the politics of a mass movement

A Public Health Perspective of Womens Mental Health

Women in Higher Education: Empowering Change

The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Inclusive Education (Readers in Education)

Tvei at the Change of Life

Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil

Smith, Wilbur - Shout At The Devil

Smith, Wilbur - Shout At The Devil

The Law of Higher Education

Womens Experiences in Leadership in K-16 Science Education Communities, Becoming and Being

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