Anti-feminism in the Academy

Veve Clark, Shirley Nelson Garner, Margaret Higonnet, Ketu Katrak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317959069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contending that the anti-feminist backlash in the academy is part of the broader "politically correct" rhetoric, this collection of writers, academics and activists is a much-needed response to the assault on feminist thinkers and critics in the academy today.

I

Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment

1

Paying the Price of Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment

Annette Kolodny

Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but she had to do it backward in high heels.

—Ann Richards, Governor of Texas¹

Many of us have modulated our voices out of fear. I have. I am ashamed of it.

—Beth Kalikoff, Ph.D. in English²

I

On June 11, 1993, Jane Schaberg, a professor of religious studies at the University of Detroit-Mercy, was awakened after midnight by the sound of fire engines hurtling through the neighborhood. She hardly expected them to stop at her house. Seeing the flames through her bedroom window, however, she realized that her 1987 Toyota Tercel, parked out front, was on fire. A rag had been stuffed in the gas tank and then ignited. The police report listed the motive as “revenge.”³ But to Schaberg it was simply what the Chronicle of Higher Education characterized as “the latest salvo in a nasty battle raging over her scholarship” (Wilson, A7).

In 1987, the scholar and former nun published The Illegitimacy of Jesus, a historical and literary critique that examined internal evidence that the writers of the Gospels were handing on a tradition in which Jesus was not miraculously conceived but, rather, illegitimately conceived, perhaps as the result of the rape of Mary. By crediting divine love as intervening in the fate of Mary and her child, with God relieving Mary’s humiliation through His special relationship with her son, Schaberg offered a theology of God’s caring for the socially outcast—and thus endangered—mother and child. Understandably, Schaberg’s thesis was controversial, and not just in Catholic circles. Schaberg received hate mail and threatening phone calls, and she became a target of public attack by Detroit’s Archbishop. Most troubling to Schaberg in all this was her home institution’s lack of a forceful stand and its refusal to support unequivocally the value of serious scholarship, whatever its findings. In response to rumors of alumni threatening to cancel their contributions, the school’s administration began distancing itself from her and her work, both through public statements and internal silence, according to Schaberg.⁴ “I didn’t know the university was going to cave in like this,” she told the Chronicle of Higher Education. And although she still had a job at the Jesuit school, she acknowledged that her “will is a bit broken” (Wilson, A7). In fact, Schaberg has now stepped down as head of religious studies because of what she experienced as Detroit Mercy’s continuing lack of support.

While the torching of her automobile is surely an extreme response to a scholar’s findings, unfortunately it represents only one event in the escalating campaign of intimidation directed at feminist teachers and researchers in a variety of fields all across the country. Stories are legion about right-wing organizations moving onto campuses in order to finance publications whose sole purpose is to attack (and, they hope, shut down) a women’s studies program.⁵ In such an atmosphere, faculty look the other way when colleagues openly discourage students from taking courses in women’s studies on the grounds that these courses are inevitably anti-male. Many schools harbor senior faculty who refuse to sit on qualifying examinations or to serve on dissertation committees where the candidate employs feminist approaches. Deans and department chairs still quietly reassure recruitment committees that once they have hired one woman, they need seek no further, thus reducing affirmative action to the revolving door of tokenism. At some schools, faculty teaching gay or lesbian subject matter are forced to include a statement on all course descriptions and syllabi warning students about “sexually explicit material,” while equivalently explicit (or even violent) content in courses treating only heterosexual authors requires no similar warning.⁶ And in a typically incongruous situation, at Scripps College, “a women’s college dedicated to the education of women,” professor of English and well-published feminist critic, Gayle Greene, has seen her “course in feminist theory [repeatedly] … refused credit as ‘the senior seminar’,” while a supposedly “real theory” course “taught by a white male” was given senior seminar status.⁷

Should anyone suppose that the resistance to feminist scholars and their work is grounded in reasonable concerns for academic excellence, the public statements of those who oppose such work prove otherwise. The “self-proclaimed conservative watchdog,” Peter Shaw, for example, served on the National Council on the Humanities, the twenty-seven-member advisory board to the National Endowment for the Humanities, during Lynne Cheney’s tenure as chair of the endowment.⁸ Reflecting on his own predilections in the awarding of NEH grants, Shaw told the Chronicle of Higher Education that “what I truly believe is that second-rate traditionalist scholarship is ultimately more valuable to the country than first-rate feminist works” (Burd, A25).

Not surprisingly, this cumulative resistance has surfaced at the very moment that a graying professoriate of mostly white, Christian males looks toward retirement. Between 1995 and 2010, according to Department of Education projections, over 300,000 faculty are expected to retire, leaving vacancies in all fields and disciplines across higher education. At the same time, according to a recent Modern Language Association survey, women have been making “dramatic gains at the Ph.D. level,” almost doubling “their share of the doctorates granted in English and increas[ing] their representation among foreign language degree recipients by just over half.”⁹ As a result, especially in the humanities disciplines, the 1990s is certain to be the last decade in which tenured white males over fifty control what gets published and who gets tenured.

The transition, however, is proving extremely difficult because, as a rule, academics are not comfortable with rapid change. But these changes have taken hold within a single generation, and are massive in both their intellectual and their social implications. For, beyond challenging the orthodoxies of their chosen disciplines, the increasing numbers of women faculty also demanded that the academy scrutinize its daily behaviors and customary procedures. Once commonplace in hallway conversations and over faculty club luncheons, exchanges of sexual banter, sexist humor, ethnic jokes, and racial slurs were no longer without consequences. Sexual overtures to students or demands for sexual favors from untenured colleagues could now result in a sexual harassment charge. And whole departments splintered over outdated promotion and tenure procedures that gave them no way to evaluate the junior colleague who had designed a traveling museum exhibition or studied the works of a long-forgotten woman author.

If resistance to the magnitude of change was predictable, the fierceness and tenacity with which some groups and individuals have chosen to express that reflex was not. For almost a decade, Dr. Bernice Resnick Sandler, former Senior Associate at the Center for Women Policy Studies, has reported that, at some colleges, posters announcing any lecture or course with a feminist theme are routinely destroyed or vandalized.¹⁰ In one instance in the spring of 1988, the chair of the Women’s Law Association at Harvard put up a poster publicizing a weekly luncheon series in which the topic was “The ‘F’ Word: To Be or Not To Be a Feminist.” Within hours, according to Sandler, the words “a feminist” were crossed out, and the new title was “The ‘F’ Word: To Be or Not To Be Fucked” (Sandler, 7).

On other campuses, any negative reviews or published critical comments pertaining to the work of feminist faculty are duplicated and mailed out anonymously. At a small New England college recently, a feminist professor in the French department took great pleasure from the fact that her critical theory book had received laudatory reviews in the major professional journals. Thus, it was with some surprise that she and her students arrived on campus one day to discover a poster-sized blowup of the only negative review to have appeared, prominent in the department’s hallway display case, safely locked behind glass. The nastiest sentences in the review were highlighted in red. It was three weeks before the key to the display case could be located and the poster removed. In the meantime, she heard from students that some of her colleagues were reciting portions of the negative review to their classes or making fun of her work based on the distorted readings of this particular reviewer. When she shared her anger with feminist faculty in other departments, the French professor discovered that the feminist critics in the English Department (both male and female) had long been the subjects of obscene verses circulated almost monthly by unknown persons. And her colleagues in the School of Nursing told of needing to take extra security precautions for their labs whenever their grants supported research on women’s health issues.

Given this kind of anecdotal evidence, it is hardly surprising that national reports from every source regularly document “that the experiences of women on campus are substantially different from those of men” (Sandler, 1). Nor do we wonder that “a study of graduate students at the University of Michigan revealed that women are more likely to consider the university as alienating and less likely to describe it as accepting than are men.”¹¹ National studies notwithstanding, few administrators in higher education have measured the full scope of the problem or examined their own responses as a possible contributory factor. It is difficult to command a provost’s undivided attention or to invoke institutional responsibility, after all, in the face of seemingly unrelated and random events, however disturbing. Those who do not want the larger problem accurately named and understood, moreover, actively encourage this perception that each event is isolated, sui generis, and without aim or method connected to anything else. But the real problem may be just here, in the institutional habit of uncritically accepting “problems” as only discrete events, rather than probing for larger patterns.

The appeal from a feminist assistant professor denied promotion and tenure because her research area was unfamiliar to her department colleagues, for instance, rarely is viewed by the provost as having any connection to the vandalizing of posters announcing a women’s studies speakers’ series. At best, a dean or provost will acknowledge that there is a “climate problem” on campus. But this may only compound the situation by further masking the fact that women’s—and especially feminist—intellectual activities are being repeatedly attacked and hobbled. Accordingly, unaware that others on campus may be enduring different forms of the same malice, the targets of such harassment too often perceive themselves as alone and isolated. Without an adequate support network, they tend to internalize the harassment as a legitimate value judgment on their capabilities. At the best, these individuals reach out to family, friends, and sympathetic colleagues for help and guidance; and though their self-confidence remains deeply shaken, they develop coping mechanisms to see them through. At the worst, the vulnerable untenured assistant professor shies away from the activity that brings with it so much pain and struggle, even putting aside her most cherished research project.

For their part, faculty and students outraged at the attacks on feminist faculty and feminist activities are forced to respond on an ad hoc basis to each specific event. Some organize a letter campaign on behalf of the outstanding feminist scholar who has been denied tenure, while others file a complaint with the campus police to protest the repeated destruction of posters advertising the women’s studies speakers’ series. Unquestionably necessary and helpful, such ad hoc activities lead only to piecemeal solutions (if at all), and they never identify the larger problem of which these events are a part.

II

At the 1991 meeting of the Modern Language Association, that organization’s Commission on the Status of Women sponsored a forum and associated workshops on the topic, “Antifeminist Harassment in the Academy.” Within this complex topic, the commission encouraged participants to recognize “antifeminist intellectual harassment” as a specific and independent category. While the conveners of these sessions fully recognized that different modes of harassment often overlap and reinforce one another, their stress on the word “intellectual” was intended to distinguish certain kinds of events from more commonly understood forms of harassment, including sexual harassment, emotional battering, and physical threats.

As the speaker asked to address antifeminist intellectual harassment, I suggested that whatever form this kind of harassment takes—vandalizing posters or the threat of physical violence—its object is always to foreclose further feminist inquiry and, more generally, to shut down women’s access to unfettered intellectual activity in any field or discipline. Publicly humiliating a colleague by anonymously circulating scurrilous verses about her or torching a scholar’s parked car, in other words, are means—punishing means, to be sure—but means to the further end of intellectual silencing. And intellectual silencing, I insisted, was anathema to every definition of the academic freedom that our colleges and universities claim to protect.

Thus, at the heart of my remarks was an appeal for the preservation of the principle of academic freedom undiminished by bias, prejudice, or discomfort with difference. What makes this principle so difficult to grasp, however, is the fact that until its practice is historically situated, or until its practice takes meaning within a specific context, academic freedom remains only a vague, rather amorphous, abstraction. Retaining The Catcher in the Rye on a freshman English reading list, for example, enacts (and thereby defines) the concept of academic freedom only when a school or teacher enunciates the reasoning behind rejecting some local call to ban the novel. But while most teachers of literature nowadays would be quick to defend J.D. Salinger’s work under the flag of academic freedom, the same probably is not the case for Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, with its exuberant and unapologetic lesbian narrator. This is because the teaching, research, and scholarly practices that, to date, have been traditionally protected by the concept of academic freedom—that is, the practices that make the concept recognizable and constitute its meaning—have largely been practices forged without the participation of women (especially feminists), African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, (open) lesbians and gays, or the disabled. (Indeed, this is true of almost all the practices of the academy.) Having enjoyed no role in defining the concept of academic freedom, these groups are understood to be protected by it only insofar as their products and activities conform to the accepted products and activities of the past. As a result, when these groups interrogate inherited paradigms and try to introduce new creative or intellectual directions, the very unfamiliarity of their efforts renders those efforts vulnerable to charges of narrow partisanship or political contrivance. But, in truth, these new areas of interest—feminist inquiry, ethnic studies, queer studies, or the emerging field of disability studies—are no more nor less narrow, political, or partisan than earlier categories of research and analysis. And, to their credit, they have the potential to revitalize moribund corners of the more established (and ossified) disciplines. The challenge ahead, I suggested in 1991, was to reconstitute the meaning of academic freedom yet once more by enrolling our colleagues in scenarios that declared these new areas of research and scholarship to matter. For feminist scholars, the process could not begin soon enough.

If we are to preserve our few hard-won spaces for women’s research, scholarship, and innovative pedagogy—and create more adequate spaces for the future—I urged that it was essential to develop a workable definition of the term antifeminist intellectual harassment so that, as it is named, it also can be readily recognized and effectively c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• I Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment
• 1 Paying the Price of Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment
• 2 Feminism and Antifeminism: From Civil Rights to Culture Wars
• II Multiple Jeopardy on College Campuses
• 3 Talking about Race, Talking about Gender, Talking about How We Talk
• 4 The Meanings and Metaphors of Student Resistance
• 5 Anti-lesbian Intellectual Harassment in the Academy
• 6 Female Grotesques in Academia: Ageism, Antifeminism, and Feminists on the Faculty
• III Changing Systems of Knowledge: Feminist Resistance in the Academy
• 7 Antifeminism in Scholarship and Publishing
• 8 Transforming Antifeminist Culture in the Academy
• Contributors
• Index