“Don’t Lead With Your Tits, Witz:” A feminist analysis of my 32 years at UNH? Or – the academy and difference? Or…passing the torch?- Or – being a feminist pioneer??

I began this memoir as I was about to enter my thirty-third year of teaching at the University of New Hampshire, my last semester in fact, my swan song. Instead of taking the lucrative-for-everyone-but-me buyout offered by my university (another story), I spent the two previous years transitioning to retirement, during which time I organized my half-time commitment by working full-time for two book-end semesters and taking an entire year off. During that year, I was amazed at how little I wanted to accomplish each day: how I could spend the morning reading newspapers on line, answering emails, making a few phone-calls; and then it would be time for my run, a tour of my gardens, some lunch, a shower; and then, poof, it was three in the afternoon. I have come to the conclusion that my un-goal-oriented lifestyle was the result of having spent the past thirty some odd years trying to do too much, of trying to have it all. Essentially, I am in recovery now, and certainly hope that I recover quickly enough to be able to do some more good work, albeit outside the confines of the academy.

The title of this essay is a verbatim quote, from a man whom I had believed to be my mentor, uttered while we were arguing about the tenure case of a male colleague who acted abusively to female students and intimidated female colleagues. The impact of both these male colleagues on my career at UNH forms a central part of this narrative, but not the only one.

I feel a burning need to tell my story, as a member of a pioneering generation of women academics. Surely we were not the first women in academia, and when we entered the academy in the latter years of the seventies and early years of the eighties we had had several generations of foremothers. We were preceded by our immediate colleagues who were even scarcer than we were, often the token women in entirely male territories, and by those rare female stalwarts who had found their way to academia during the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, we witnessed a sea-change in the gender constitution of the academy, which in the late 1970s was still a mostly masculine purview. I write because I want both to connect with my sisters in struggle, i.e those women of my cohort who were There, and also with the next generation of women scholars, because alas the struggle hasn’t ended even though it might look different at this point. I also want to write to solve the riddle of my own life, how my career began with so much idealism and enthusiasm, yet ended on a somewhat minor note.

My Beginnings in the Academy

I went back to get my Ph.D. after I had been non-reappointed from my first teaching job, ostensibly because I lacked a doctorate although, I believe, it was really because I was a hippie art teacher who smoked dope with students and “lived in sin” with her lover on Main Street. There actually is a prequel here; to wit, I was not this school’s first choice. In fact, I had one of my first feminist “aha” moments when I received a rejection letter from them after my on-campus interview, stating that they had offered the position to someone else, because although they “were impressed upon meeting me personally, [they] were concerned about what [I] would do if [my] husband accepted a position somewhere else.” When I showed this letter to a lawyer for the AAUP, he told me that I wouldn’t have a case, since the person to whom they offered the job had a doctorate, and I didn’t. Nonetheless, its naïvely sexist wording is a good benchmark of the overt and unsubtle discrimination that was still rampant in the early Seventies. In the end, however, I got the position, because the school’s first choice (and ultimately their second, as well) stood them up and they called me a month before the semester began and asked if I were still interested in the job. Though at that time I was a decidedly indecisive person, I answered “yes” with alacrity and without hesitation. That’s how I began my 38 year academic career, with a phone call from fate.

To my surprise, during those early two years, I discovered that I really loved to teach and after having been non-reappointed, I decided that rather than expending energy explaining why I didn’t have a Ph.D., I would simply go and get one. I was amazed that, once I had begun my studies, I also really enjoyed that process, the intensive reading, the class debates, and the archival work on illuminated manuscripts. Teaching was my avocation, however, so I went on the job market after I had completed my research but a year before I received my doctorate.

By the time I applied for jobs, I had cleaned up my act and had shed much of my hippie persona. I had become “serious” about my career. I really loved and believed in my research and my particular angle on it; I still loved being in the classroom, and I already had had the equivalent of three full years of teaching experience. I seemed to interview well, had an enviable number of interviews at the College Art Association’s annual meeting, and had obtained five or six on-campus interviews. I chose to come to UNH, and I arrived with an extremely positive attitude. What happened?

One worm in the apple: The art department itself was a very contentious place, and perhaps I should have been warned off during my initial interview when my aforementioned ex-mentor took me aside and in a hushed voice, one of many such covert disclosures, told me about a rift in the department, centered around him and another senior male faculty member. Although the rift intensified, in the end, those two became politically aligned once more. The rest of us, children in a dysfunctional family, remained doomed to replicating the pattern ad infinitum.

And another problem, contained within that early interaction. That sly, conspiratorial, communication was typical of this person, my putative mentor, the departmental chair at the time. And although our relationship never crossed the line, for a long time it was charged with an implicit flirtation. I thought he was my mentor, the person who was teaching me the ropes and helping me to navigate the university. I thought that I had his ear. But he never really had my best interests at heart – he never saw me as a future equal to whom he would pass the baton. And I mistakenly believed his interest was in my career at the university, rather than in the diversion I provided.

Teacher as Mother

I became pregnant two months after I came to UNH. That was no accident. “Planned parenthood!” joked the mentor when I told him I was pregnant and due on July 1st. It certainly was. One aspect of my life had been resolved, at least on the surface, so it was time to get the other ball up into the air. I had just turned thirty. It’s probably significant that I began to have my cognitive shift about being a mother as my career path developed. In my late adolescence and early twenties, before I really knew what I wanted to do with my life, I was very afraid of getting caught in that old female bind of being derailed by pregnancy, and I professed that I was opposed to having children. During the time of my first teaching job, however, when I was twenty-four, I began to look at families with children from a different perspective, and I began to hear the first faint tickings of my biological clock.

Although at thirty I was considered an “elderly primapara,” pregnancy did not in any way interfere with my ability to do my job and during that first year I established the pattern of multi-tasking that characterized my career. Yes, it was true that for the first three months I felt a bit queasy, but I dismissed it as mere unpleasantness and soldiered on until those months passed and the three “cheery” months began. I didn’t let anyone know I was pregnant until the beginning of the second semester (coincidentally the beginning of my second trimester), at which point, since it was my first pregnancy and I didn’t “show,” it came as a big surprise to all.

In addition to making my way on campus, my other task was to finish writing my dissertation – my promotion to assistant professor and continuance at the university was contingent on so doing. No problem there either. I spent the winter break in London revisiting the manuscript I had researched and revising some chapters, and then submitting and revising them again during the second semester, making at least two trips to Ithaca, for my defense and to submit the final copy. My second semester at UNH ended with the very pregnant me preparing the final, to-be-bound copy of my dissertation (in those bad old days before computers each revision needed to be re-typed—no small task), rushing to submit final grades, and also writing the annual report which I had just discovered was required of faculty members (although it wasn’t until later that I learned it was an important document in the preparation of one’s tenure case). I received my Ph.D. when I was 8 months pregnant, and then made my way back to New Hampshire to spend the month of June recovering, eating ice cream, and waiting for the next chapter to begin.

Although the baby was planned for early July which would have given me two full months to recover before classes began, my first lesson of parenting was its lack of control. My first son, Ben, was born on July 18, and instead of more than eight weeks “maternity leave” I now had only six. I had almost forgotten this – but the very first accommodation to motherhood that I made was that a week-long summer class that I had been conned into accepting had to be handed off to another faculty member. The assistant dean who had convinced me to agree to teach this course beginning the third week of July had been very persuasive, she was a mother herself, and had actually passed along some baby clothes to me. But her point was, oh, no problem going to teach a class two hours a day with a three week old baby. Sure. So perhaps it was fortunate that when the class was to start the baby was only a few days old, and it was painfully obvious that indeed, there would be a problem.

And “problem” was the name of the game. There was absolutely no support within the university for a female faculty member who wanted to be a parent at the same time she was a professor. Faculty wives got pregnant. There might have been a few pregnant students. But during the time I was pregnant there was only one other highly visible pregnant woman on campus, a member of the professional staff. And there certainly was no one else who then had the task that I had: to try to mesh the demands of a tenure track job with the reptilian demands of a human infant.

Of course there was no available childcare, although I subsequently discovered that the struggle for university-supported daycare had already been in the process of being waged for close to five years. My spouse and I had decided that we would divide the responsibilities between ourselves: I would care for the baby on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays while he went to work, and he would take him on Tuesdays and Thursdays while I taught my classes (two during that first semester). We had absolutely no geographically proximate extended family members to cover for us, and at that point, very few local personal friends.

Yet another problem: I was not prepared to return to work in early September, even though my baby was six weeks old. Becoming a parent, particularly for the first time, was just much more world-rocking than I had expected. Physically, I was exhausted – a difficult childbirth, the adjustments to working out a breast-feeding regimen, the continuous lack of a full night’s sleep, all contributed to my feeling drained and constantly tired. But also, I had not anticipated the emotional pull of early motherhood. I didn’t want to leave my son, and the first time that I spent away from him ever, at a morning of meetings in August before the semester began, I felt the back of my neck tingle with anxiety. That feeling continued throughout the semester – mother and newborn are still a dyad, and it was often very psychologically difficult and painful for me to extricate myself from that cozy enmeshedness and to shift gears into my public, professional persona.

How did I manage meetings and pulling slides for my lectures? I must have brought Ben to school with me on occasion, on those days when meetings were scheduled when I was responsible for his care, but I don’t have any mental images of doing so. Perhaps that’s because the year was so draining that I’ve blocked them. However, his absence from the University environment is consistent with the feelings I do recall: that he needed to be kept out of sight and out of mind. The incongruity of teacher as mother and the need to keep children hidden from the workplace is one way in which attitudes changed between 1978 when Ben was born and 1983 and 1985 when each of his brothers were born. In their cases, I distinctly remember bringing them around campus with me as I went about my non-teaching responsibilities, although at that point I was still one of the few women who dared to do so. I have clear mental images of Jacob (#2) sleeping in his infant seat in the slide library while I pulled slides for my lecture the next day, or walking to a committee meeting with Ethan (#3) in a stroller, in which he obligingly slept through the entire meeting. But in 1978 the culture dictated that if I wanted to be a mother I had to do it on my own time, and that it in no way should appear to impinge upon my role as a professor. And with each child I had the task of negotiating maternity leave on my own. Although University policy stipulated six weeks of leave post-partum, obviously such a timetable was in conflict with the structure of the fifteen week long academic semester. Not once did I take the full six weeks of released time, and the accommodations made by the University ended up being ad hoc, at best.

But the biggest problem was the lack of childcare. Had it been available that first semester perhaps I would have been able to schedule some hours for the non-teaching aspects of my position. The second semester I switched to a three course, Monday Wednesday and Friday schedule and we decided to continue each caring for Ben two days a week and hiring someone to take care of him on Friday mornings, no easy task, as we discovered. At that time, there were no daycare options for such a young child. We encountered a few people who could have cared for him in their homes along with several other children, and even fewer who would come to our home for three hours of childcare per week. We chose a mother of teenagers who was trying to reenter the work force, but this did not work out. Worst situation: she decided that it wasn’t for her one Friday morning, and phoned me about half an hour before my class was to start. OF COURSE it never occurred to me that I could just cancel my class. I swooped Ben into my arms, ran across the street to the house of a stay-at-home mom whom I barely knew, and asked her to keep an eye on him for the next two hours while I taught my class. Thank goodness I’d already prepared my lecture and slides.

Quest for Affordable and Quality Day Care: Some time during the spring semester of Ben’s first year I read an announcement in the Campus Journal that a group of mothers, mostly students and student wives, were starting a day care program for children 6 weeks through two and a half years the following fall, to be housed in student housing, and that they were accepting applications. When a representative of the Durham Infant Center called during the summer that Ben turned one and said that there was a slot for him we still hadn’t quite worked out an alternate plan, so I felt very lucky indeed. They had received a small start-up grant from the NH Charitable trust, and a concession from the University that enabled them to rent an apartment in the graduate student housing complex. They hired two co-directors at close to minimum wage and soon enlisted me to serve on the board of directors, which I did for several years – my first stint beginning immediately (and shortly after I became Chair); the second occurring when my younger children attended. A friend and businessman claimed that they could never survive solely on parent fees. In fact, over the years this group has joined forces with the other day-care facilities in Durham. Growing Places is a comprehensive multi-sited program that serves children from 6 weeks to 10 years (the latter through after school programs) with a caring and child-centered curriculum, currently stronger than ever, although no longer solely dependent on the fees paid by parents, and not a part of the University.

Although the Durham Infant Center ultimately moved to the town grange on Main Street, as head of the board of directors I spent a goodly amount of effort trying to convince the University to support day-care, even if only by allowing us to continue renting space on campus. It was not until later that I learned that the battle had begun as early as 1976 and that our work was part of a larger endeavor. This goal was finally achieved in 1988, just as my youngest son was graduating from the Infant Center, when the Child Study and Development Center, under the auspices of the Department of Family Studies, opened a new facility that offered day-care for children from infants to five, in addition to the lab-school nursery school program that had been used for instructional purposes. The CSDC was a fabulous facility with very child-centered and enriched classrooms and an international theme (I was astounded when after only a few months of attendance, my three year old identified some of the flags hanging in our local supermarket). But, as it turned out, this facility also soon became over-stressed – and today, there is no way to insure that one will be able to find a slot here.

The juggling act: Although I would not have been able to have had three children while becoming a tenured professor without quality, affordable day-care, its availability or lack there-of was only one factor in trying to mesh the personae of professor and mother. First, I always tried to get away with as little day-care as necessary, partially because day-care was expensive, but especially because I wanted to be able to have some unstructured time with my children. Then, there was always some health crisis or another that could keep a child out of day-care: conjunctivitis, chicken pox, colds and flu. The dreaded call from the day-care center: Jacob is running a fever, come and pick him up NOW. What do you do? Miss your meeting, perhaps, but not cancel your class. Miss your meeting but not actually say that it was because of a sick child – certainly not in the late seventies through the mid-eighties. Stay home with the sick children during the morning, and then drive the kids times two with chicken pox in the car to meet their father as he’s coming out of his class, so you can get out and go teach your class and he can drive them home and watch them for the rest of the afternoon. How would I have managed if I did not have a partner, or if at that point in time, my partner did not have a similarly flexible schedule. I was fortunate in that none of my children experienced any extenuating health crises. And as difficult as it is to walk away from your child under the best of circumstances, it is even more painful to have to leave a child about whose health one is concerned.

Also, professional life as it was constructed in the academy and the life within the family are at constant odds with each other, although many of the skills one employs as a mother are the same as those that one draws upon as a teacher. I remember sitting in a lecture listening to a discussion of biblical exegesis and images in manuscripts, and then driving home and picking half-digested noodles that one of the kids threw up out of the green shag carpet in their room. Or, the opposite image: quickly quartering a chicken, dowsing it with garlic powder and soy sauce and throwing it in the oven, serving it all around, gulping down a piece and running off to stand up in front of a class, all dressed in tweed, and talk about Justinian’s relationship with God, smell of garlic in my hair. As an old friend said, while a house guest one Saturday, “Well, you certainly didn’t get to do much art history today.” That was putting it mildly.

The university, the world of scholarship pulled in one direction; the call of the nest, the family, in exactly the opposite. And although it might have been more “doable” to combine being a professor with being a mother, than say, combining motherhood with being a lawyer, the lack of boundaries inherent to both jobs that made the combination possible also kept me in a state in which I was never, ever off-duty. So I might not have had any classes or even meetings one or two days a week, but on the other hand I would also find myself awake at two a.m. grading papers for an hour or so, then feeding a baby who’d awakened meanwhile, and then finally snatching a couple of hours of sleep before it all began again. I was always exhausted, flat-out. Every once and awhile I’d go for dinner with some women friends. But usually I never had any unstructured time when I could loll about the house reading or dreaming. Or thinking, unless it was about the children or about some pressing aspect of my job. While this state of total immersion in both worlds was particularly intense during the years when the children were younger, for all intents and purposes, it persisted to some extent until my youngest child moved out of the house when he turned eighteen.

There are some positive images here and it would be misleading not to acknowledge them. Two year olds actually DO interact – it’s definitely NOT only parallel play. At a second birthday party for a daycare compatriot of my middle son – after tuna sandwiches and juice for the kids and the same with wine for the parents, we all headed across a snowy field, the kids running off together happily chattering in groups, the parents conversing, marveling at the independence of their progeny. When my youngest kids were in school, they’d take the school bus to campus – the stop for the kids who lived with their parents at student housing – and they’d make the short walk from there to my building. My class was just getting out and they’d wait for me to open the door, hit me up for change to buy snacks from the art supply store across the hall, and then run around the building for an hour while I met with students or pulled slides. For the few months when I was desperately trying to finish my first book to deliver the manuscript to the publisher, I felt particularly rushed to get the kids into bed each night so I could get in a solid block of work time before collapsing. When finally that period had passed, and I was feeling somewhat less pressured, my middle son said – “Mommy, I miss when you were working on your book because I loved it when I woke up in the middle of the night and saw the glow from your computer.”

Tenure track life without mentoring

When I started my position at UNH I was very enthusiastic and had a reasonable amount of teaching experience; nonetheless, I really was pretty clueless about how to survive and make it in the academy. In my first job which I had begun when I was twenty-four, I identified with the students and was oblivious to institutional politics and the need for playing the game. But since that experience had ended disastrously with my “non-reappointment,” I had no desire to repeat it so I embarked upon my position at UNH with a different attitude. Besides, the process of going back for my Ph.D., along with my increasing age, had changed both my focus and my commitment. At just about thirty, I no longer saw myself as one of the students. I was very aware that this was my career and I didn’t want to mess it up.

But how was I to express this? Aside from no longer fraternizing with students, one insight I had was to begin to look like an adult, to dress for success; and over the years I acquired quite the collection of suits and pantsuits. My change in appearance came from the desire and necessity to maintain authority. My failed position, in which I dressed the role of the hippie art teacher, showed the dire consequences of not maintaining proper boundaries. Tweed and tailored suits provided one means of making me appear professorial, someone who was definitely not a student, particularly in New Hampshire, where LL Bean is the standard of dress for students and even some male members of the art department. As a woman professor I felt it was especially critical that I look the role and, except for the last few months of my pregnancies, it wasn’t until after I received tenure that I began to revert to the hippie-esque clothes that I had worn in my former life. Of course the sad thing was that no matter how many suits I had in my closest I could never really look the part, at least as it was formulated back in the late seventies. The suit was an external marker, and the pregnancies exacerbated the many basic ways in which I was not a professor sent from central casting. And of course, pregnancies or not, I differed in a very basic way through my being a woman.

Although I was able to figure out the clothes on my own, it took me a long time before I came to understand how to play the game successfully, on both the local (the university) and the global (the professional) levels. Without a mentor I was lost and adrift and left to decode the vagaries of academe on my own.

I may have been respected by my advisers in graduate school, but none of them filled the role of mentor. A memorable experience with my graduate school adviser who at one point even described me as his “blue-eyed girl”: being allowed 10 minutes to explain my recent thoughts about the direction of my dissertation, while accompanying him from the library to the tennis court where he was meeting his wife. Since he would barely talk to me about my work, he certainly was not about to explain to me the subtleties of how one needed to act once one landed a tenure track position: that one was supposed to proceed to push one’s work and one’s name, or how one was supposed to do this. My ignorance proved to have a negative impact on the course of my future scholarly career, since by the time I had figured it out for myself, I had missed several important potential opportunities. I was always a couple of beats off. I thought that landing a tenure-track position was an end unto itself; clearly, it is just the beginning of a process, one that involves ritualized professional behavior such as submitting proposals regularly, maintaining a scholarly agenda, keeping active several research projects in various stages of completion. At no point did anyone ever articulate this to me with detailed clarity – not my adviser in graduate school, nor my alleged mentor at UNH.

I also came to my current position without an understanding of what life in a university was all about. My grad school adviser certainly never talked turkey to me, although during a conversation at the end of my second year at UNH, when I gave a paper on a panel he had organized (perhaps the one time when he had acted like a mentor is “supposed” to act towards a favored graduate student), he did share that all had not been peachy keen in my department of origin. But I had no idea – of how the bits and pieces related to each other, of how one needed to serve on committees to meet people, and then keep up those acquaintances, of how if the dean invited you to a party, you needed to invite him and his wife for dinner soon after. I had a grad student and hippie view of socializing and friendships – in fact I was both suspicious and shy of sources of power.

At first I thought that the person who had hired me when he was department chair was my mentor. He included me in a group of people from the art department and other places in the university who lunched together with regularity. He told me how he chatted up the dean on my behalf at a hockey game when I had applied for a summer fellowship. He put up my name for membership on several committees, although not the major university ones for which he recommended my male colleagues. He shared a number of tidbits about the vagaries of departmental politics, often in hushed tones and with the request to “close the door.” I felt I had his ear and, through that, I would be able to effect change. In fact, at one point I did convince him to go back to the candidate pool and look for more potential women candidates when the one woman candidate brought to campus for a painting position turned out to be an obvious dud. And he leaked positive reports from the promotion and tenure committee when I was up for tenure.

My view now, however, is that it was just a combination of a moderate flirtation based on a perceived empathy as two ethnic city-types, lost in the WASP wasteland of New Hampshire, and his own egocentric need to feel he was dispensing largesse to retainers within the department. When I compare the so-called goodies the alleged mentor threw to me to those that came the way of a male professor hired as an art historian just the year before, somehow I always came up short; unlike my male colleague (let’s call him George) who received the really significant prizes I did not look the part of up and coming professor.

And, the proof was, that when I tried to challenge my ex-mentor in a meaningful way it was with disastrous results. Our big falling out came about the year that a male colleague in my field who had been appointed several years after I had, came up for tenure (let’s call him Professor Jones). I was on sabbatical that year, and had not been elected to the departmental committee of which the alleged mentor was chair. At first I naively thought that all I had to do was to demonstrate to my ex-mentor the many ways in which my colleague’s actions had pushed the boundaries of appropriate professional comportment. How wrong I was.

The invalidation of my character

There are really two parts to this process. First – the events around my conversations regarding the tenuring of Professor Jones. Then – the subsequent events around my desire to be department chair, the final straw.

Although the story of Professor Jones and his continued hostile and destructive presence in the department forms a later piece of this narrative, in order to consider the point where my cozy relationship with the supposed mentor began to unravel, we have to detail some of the unpleasant characteristics and antics of Professor Jones.

In fact, Professor Jones owes his presence at UNH to the controlling aspects of the alleged mentor’s personality. That is, the year that we were interviewing for another art historian, alleged mentor was taking his sabbatical during the spring semester. Rather than interviewing candidates at the national convention, held in February, alleged mentor steam-rolled the three remaining art historians (all junior faculty) to hold the search during the fall semester, hence insuring a much smaller pool of candidates. Professor Jones (whose father had been George’s dissertation advisor) was our second choice out of a pool of two possible candidates. Unfortunately the first choice turned us down, and that was it.

Basically Professor Jones is a bully, a narcissist, a sexist pig, and a sociopath – in no particular order – and those aspects of his character were visible from day one. In the few years leading to his tenure decision he already had used his position to rail against types of art he didn’t like; he politicized the meager department library budget, insisting on the lion’s share because his field was “more important;” he routinely used the department’s slide library as his personal podium from which he continually baited the slide librarian (female) and railed against colleagues who were not present (mostly a woman colleague, let’s call her Victoria); and he was particularly intimidating and threatening, while also flirtatious, towards young women students. I knew of at least two students (female) who had been mercilessly maligned and subjected to a barrage of insults and recriminations when each had told him that she was changing her major. In one case one young woman was so afraid of submitting a paper to him that he told her to give it to me to read (of course typically he had not consulted with me first). During one the most embarrassing experiences in my professional life and perhaps the biggest travesty of the hiring process I have ever encountered, an event witnessed by alleged mentor, then still department chair, Professor Jones put the candidate (female) on the defensive by his quarrelsome and bombastic questioning. He employed the same tactics against this candidate such as needling, insults, escalation of the timbre of his voice, and excessive language, that he routinely used to intimidate his colleagues and students. Upon his departure, alleged mentor and I spent the remainder of the interview apologizing to the candidate for Professor Jones’s rudeness, and consequently we were unable to make a fair and reasoned assessment of this woman’s suitability for the position.

When Professor Jones came up for tenure, only a year after I did because he was given credit for previous academic experience, I attempted to communicate my serious concerns about his character and its potentially deleterious impact on the art history program with the ex-mentor. Since ex-mentor had shared the embarrassing hiring experience, and been present during some of Professor Jones’s slide library harangues, and also, I thought, respected me as a colleague and had sought my input on numerous big and little decisions, this seemed to be a reasonable path to take. That was not his point of view. We went to lunch at a location off campus, and when I had finished expressing my concerns about Professor Jones, the ex-mentor looked me in the eye and said, with a laugh, “Stop leading with your tits, Witz.” And then he expressed his belief that I “had it in” for Professor Jones because of my adherence to dogmatic feminist rhetoric. If not for that, I would see that Professor Jones was just a “character” “like Victoria is, in fact” – that he “didn’t really mean any of it” but “just got carried away.” I tried to argue my case with further examples, but it became clear that the mentor would have none of it: according to him, I was just being a strident, unfunny, “party-line” feminist. That was really the beginning of the end of our friendship, and also of our seemingly productive professional relationship, as well.

Fast forward about five or six years. The mentor was no longer the chair of the department; in fact there had been several other department chairs. He and the person whom he warned me about when I was hired had become very close, indeed. Of course Professor Jones had been tenured, and of course he did not in any way stop the offensive behaviors. On the personal front, I had already had my third and last child. I had already begun to devote most of my energies as a scholar towards working on women artists. For reasons that elude me at this point, I thought that I might like to have a go at being department chair. Partially this came about because of the work that I had done with the group of art historians of the six New England land-grant institutions, organizing two conferences. I had also organized a series of events celebrating the alumni of the art department. I had served on the College Policies and Executive committees. And I had begun a lengthy period of coordinating the art history area, being the point person for student inquiries, interviewing and hiring part time instructors, as well as making the course schedules and supervising the slide librarian. Whereas those administrative functions were viewed within both the university and the department as odious, in many ways I really liked them. I liked the interface with people, and I liked the process of setting goals and making them happen. I didn’t actually think about the personalities in the art department and how difficult, cantankerous, and basically ungovernable they were.

However, I was not to have a chance at finding that out through experience. For many reasons, yes, but the primary one amongst them: I started hearing a whisper that ultimately grew to a roar. My ex-mentor was engaging in back-stabbing character assassination, going around to all and sundry, working them up into a frenzy about what an incompetent I was, and a rabid feminist to boot, a person who had “publically repudiated her scholarship” and “couldn’t even control her own family, so how did she expect to control the department?” The week before the nominations meeting, he and his former enemy, now ally, beseeched a male colleague who had been hired the year before I had, to run for department chair, to save the department from that rabid, dogmatic feminist, me. Of course almost everybody except Victoria, my one true colleague who actually thought it would be a bad idea for me to try to lead in such a poisonous and toxic environment, rushed to defend the department from my evil influence, one woman (whose hiring I had also supported), saying to my face – “How can you possibly be serious if you have three children?” At an opening in the art gallery, several weeks after the election, the ex-mentor came up to me and started to play kissy-face as if nothing had happened. I took his arm off from around my shoulders and said – how can you act as if you haven’t been going around bad-mouthing me all over campus? He walked away.

That was twenty years ago, perhaps. The experience got buried beneath so much, it really did stop being foremost in my consciousness, and by this point the ex-mentor and I have reverted to distant geniality. You could almost say that I forgot all about it. I’ve only thought of it now as I am charting the path that led me from my hopeful, open, receptive, positive arrival at UNH, and my, shall we say more realistic or perhaps more cynical, state of mind upon departure. Admittedly, I can see very clearly that it would really not have been a very good thing for me to have been chair of that department, that nest of vipers. And really, I believe that my talents were better spent in the administrative position that I ultimately took, as head of the Women’s Studies Program. But, this story does illustrate how and why I ultimately began to feel that the art department was not a very safe space, that in fact it was dangerous to my mental health. Those feelings were exacerbated in spades by Professor Jones.

Professor Jones, the colleague from hell – or yes, one person can destroy an entire academic program. Or, how the university allowed an entire program to be destroyed while protecting the rights of a single individual.

Despite my previous reservations, when Professor Jones arrived on campus, I attempted to reach out to him and build collegial bridges. I invited him and his wife for dinner and in turn, my son was invited to the 3rd birthday party of his younger daughter. Contrary to the department myth that I always “hated” him irrationally, at the beginning I wanted at least to establish a functional working relationship with him. But it wasn’t long before destructive patterns in his behavior began to emerge. I’ve already described how he hogged and politicized the department library budget, goaded the slide librarian, used the slide library as his personal podium, and alternatively flattered and badgered female students. Additionally, he either missed department meetings entirely, often while he was holed up in his office down the hall allegedly because he “forgot,” or once there, he engaged in vehement, temperamental explosions. At every turn we had to find a way of conducting department business that circumvented his outbursts. We could never just simply focus on the task at hand.

By the time of Professor Jones’s mid-career review (half-way to his mandatory tenure decision), a paper trail had begun, documenting his pattern of abusive, violent, hostile, and explosive behavior and its negative effect on his participation in department business, as well as on his teaching, and even his scholarship. The incidents grew during the next two years so that when Professor Jones was up for tenure, in our letters Victoria and I outlined even further deleterious examples of the impact of his pattern of rage, and expressed our very grave concerns about the advisability of granting a permanent position to such a disruptive colleague, especially in a very small academic area. But, just as I was ignored when I tried to informally articulate my concerns to my ex-mentor, the department Promotion and Tenure committee, which consisted of Victoria, George, and three members of the studio faculty, insisted on seeing it as a “personality conflict” – the two feminists against the harmlessly “eccentric” male professor.

A significant event in this sequence occurred towards the end of the semester in which Professor Jones was granted tenure. Late one Friday afternoon, after everyone else had left and Victoria was preparing to go home herself, Professor Jones stood looming in her office door, blocking her egress, and began to harangue her about the case. He said he knew how she had voted, that obviously a “mediocrity such as herself” would have opposed his case, and that he’d “get her to pay”. No small or timid woman, she was scared. In those days before the advent of cell phones there was no easy way to call for help. Afterwards, she wrote a letter to the president of the University outlining the details in full and requesting a meeting with him. She received no response.

I included that event, as well as numerous others in which Professor Jones severely violated the contract of decent social intercourse, in letters I wrote for his three bids for promotion to full professor. By the time of Professor Jones’s first promotion attempt, George had also begun to document the negative behaviors, identifying them as “sociopathic.” Although George was a man of stature, he too, had been the recipient of Professor Jones’s outbursts, and was afraid of him. More than once, in the course of disagreements, Professor Jones subjected all of us — George, Victoria and me, his art history colleagues — to loud vituperative bullying that impugned our scholarly integrity, screaming that we were mediocrities, for example, often in public spaces, witnessed by both students and faculty members alike. At the first meeting of the Promotion and Tenure committee at the time of his second promotion attempt I was subjected to twenty minutes of a hostile verbal barrage, which ended only when I got up and left the room to get a tape recorder. At that point Victoria and I complained to the Dean, with no long-lasting results. The case ended up being denied, with the committee outlining a succession of Professor Jones’s most egregious outbursts, and also demonstrating that his explosive temper had a negative impact on his teaching, as well as the art history area as a whole. The final recommendation of our case was that the administration attempt to rein him in. This also never appeared to occur. Additionally, a year or so later, after complaining to the University’s affirmative action officer, at her suggestion I wrote a letter of complaint to the Academic Provost, outlining a succession of hostile behaviors exhibited by Professor Jones precipitated by an emotional outburst at a meeting in which the art historians had gathered to approve a new course. This too, seemed to have no consequences.

When Professor Jones came up for promotion to Full Professor again for a third time, I decided that it was in my best interest to resign from the committee. Nonetheless I submitted a summary of the entire dossier, ending it by writing, “By promoting Professor Jones, the University is making the statement that it endorses the well-documented and longstanding pattern of anti-social behaviors described in the enclosed documents. Go ahead and do it if you must. But don’t say that you haven’t been informed–or warned.” At this point he finally received his promotion.

Although Professor Jones did not discriminate in his bullying and over the years has worn down and humiliated male colleagues as well as female ones, he had a particularly insidious impact on female students, whom he both insulted and flattered. When his promotions were being considered I pointed out that on the student evaluations a number of students accused him of sexism, one of whom said the course “would be more accurately named if it were titled ‘sexuality and its images in art’ given how much time was devoted to the phallicism and eroticism of particular works . . . .” I conveyed two disturbing incidents that a student had recounted as having occurred in Professor Jones’s class one semester, after he had received tenure but before he was promoted. In one lecture he bemoaned the tendency of “girls” to wear slacks instead of skirts to class and exhorted his students to dress in skirts the following day. The student reported with dismay that many of her classmates complied with their instructor’s request. Additionally, when the same class was shown an image depicting the rape of the Sabine women, the student reported that Professor Jones commented on women’s enjoyment of rape in general and on the obvious pleasure of the women in the painting, specifically. These were not isolated incidents, but part of a recurring pattern. To wit, only a few years ago, a colleague’s son who was taking art history with Professor Jones recounted the very same occurrences. Although Professor Jones would have us believe that they are humorous, they are not.

How I ended up staying after all

Basically, I was able to remain at the University because I left the orbit of a punishing and dysfunctional department and used my talents where they were needed and appreciated. During the year that Professor Jones’s final promotion bid was pending, at the instigation of the (then) new dean, the structure of Women’s Studies appointments and leadership changed, and instead of there being a dedicated line for the coordinator, program leadership was sought from within the Core Faculty. I had been associated with the program for many years. Although its inception coincided with my arrival on campus, it wasn’t until several years later, after I had become interested in the writings of women artists, that I subsequently developed a course on women artists of the 19th and 20th centuries which was cross listed with the Women’s Studies Program. Several years after that I was appointed to the “Core Faculty,” faculty members with official appointments in other academic units who took part in the governing of the program and regularly offered courses that could be counted for credit to the Women’s Studies minor, at first, and then after it was developed, to the major as well. Several trusted colleagues (including Victoria) suggested that if I wanted to leave UNH it might be to my advantage to gain some experience as Women’s Studies Coordinator. Although I accepted the position in order to leave, in fact, it was what enabled me to stay.

Actually, I had been participating in the women’s community at UNH even before I joined the Women’s Studies core faculty, which had proven to be an antidote to the toxic environment of the art department and to the misogynistic face of the university. In the very earliest of my days at UNH women faculty were scarce. There were only three female full professors—until one retired and then there were only two! It was news when a woman received tenure and, at that time, there were few enough women on campus so that all the women faculty members throughout the University were invited to the annual tenuring of women party held at the end of the academic year. There was also a series of interdisciplinary discussion groups, where faculty members shared their writings, or perhaps brought in guest speakers, combined with a pot-luck dinner.

My first big committee assignment at UNH was to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women – “the Women’s Commission”—which had been established in order to redress the asymmetrical relationship of women within the university, by providing a direct link to its president. Recruited by a senior colleague in the English department, whom I’d met at an intra-departmental discussion group related to our academic fields, I found the work, although extremely time-consuming, relevant and interesting, a satisfying activist path. One important project in which we were involved was trying to create greater physical safety, by pushing for lighted walkways and prominently displayed call-boxes. In my work for that body I discovered the long history of the attempt to establish quality and affordable on-campus childcare and how the work that I had done as head of the board of directors for the Durham Infant Center dove-tailed with a larger effort. My work on the Women’s Commission also made a very significant contribution to my education about how the university functioned. Most important, from a personal perspective, was the crash-course I received concerning the process of gaining tenure: we organized yearly seminars in which tenured women shared their wisdom and experience with junior colleagues. It could be said that work with the Women’s Commission and with other women faculty members throughout the university helped to provide me with the mentorship that I had found lacking from male colleagues.

After I started my position as coordinator of Women’s Studies, I knew I was somewhere else almost immediately when the Administrative Assistant would sing out in her dulcet tones upon my arrival – “He-ere’s Mara!” As with my membership on the Women’s Commission, I liked the feeling of activism, of actually accomplishing meaningful and necessary work for social good. I felt that it was my role to mediate between the Women’s Studies and University ways of doing things. On the one hand, I was very committed to demonstrating that we were a legitimate, academic program, with an innovative curriculum, excellent faculty, and extremely motivated students, not simply a “women’s center,” and I felt it was important to participate in University business alongside the other academic departments. On the other hand, there was a unique “Women’s Studies” way of doing things: more collaborative, more direct, more engaged, and less hierarchically restricted that I also valued. Our students were passionately involved in the material and many felt that they had been adrift until they finally encountered a meaningful subject; it fell upon me to help them navigate through the bureaucracy of the institution. We developed an especially effective internship program, and I was very pleased when it became a model of service learning for other departments. Whereas in most academic departments the non-tenure track faculty were peripheral, in Women’s Studies their talent, energy, and vision were central to our mission, and it was important to demonstrate their value to us, in contrast to the prevailing point of view. I was particularly pleased with being able to help implement a Queer Studies Minor and the hiring of faculty members who belonged to underrepresented minorities. In short, I was able to draw upon and put to good use those administrative skills that I had found I possessed and enjoyed, in service to a program that needed and appreciated them.

Nonetheless, the time came when I needed to leave. It is not healthy for a person to remain in the same administrative position for too long a time, either for the institution or for the individual. There was a new challenge that came my way – to spend a year as Resident Director of the University’s study abroad program in London. After that, I spent an interim year coordinating Women’s Studies again, took a year-long sabbatical, spent another semester as a resident director of the study abroad program in Italy. And although at that point, perhaps I might have sought out other administrative challenges within the University, instead I decided that I had reached the point where I wanted to sever ties with UNH, effectively ending my academic career.

My Last Semester at UNH

Initially I thought that my last semester at the University was going to be a walk in the park, or at least a walk down memory lane. I returned after a happy year of preretirement to teach only one course of my choice, Women Artists of the 19th and 20th Centuries, and to serve on two promotion and tenure committees. My hope was that I would successfully complete the transition to a new phase of life by contemplatively re-experiencing the old, familiar rhythms. Which, in fact, one could say I did, but not with any sentimental fondness, and I was roundly disabused of any misty, soft-focus, nostalgia-laden fantasies I might have harbored.

First, I was really surprised by how different the students in my class felt, even after only a year’s absence from teaching. I believe that there has been a vast cultural change, certainly brewing since before my leave, but one that is very tangible now. In my art history class, images and ideas that had evoked a certain set of responses in previous years were no longer relevant to the current crop of students. Perhaps, had I planned to continue my career I might have felt motivated to deconstruct the change and to implement new teaching strategies. But I didn’t, and purely from the point of view of classroom interaction, my last course was a very tepid experience, not one of those memorable, poignant classes that makes one feel that it’s worth it, after all.

Then, in terms of expenditure of time and emotional energy, teaching an additional class would have been a much better deal than serving on those two committees. My experiences on both of them crystallized the most problematic aspects of the university and life within it, the very struggles that I wanted to put behind me by leaving. I was, as it were, plunged into the belly of the beast.

One committee brought to the fore thirty years of contentiousness within the art history area. In that case, the person who had replaced Victoria years ago was up for a promotion to Full Professor. George had already retired, partially because he had been beaten down by the hostile atmosphere in the department, and the committee consisted of me, Professor Jones, the other tenured art historian who was a woman, and a member of the studio faculty who played a completely passive role in the process. Although Professor Jones had been friendly to the candidate when she first arrived at the University, when he realized he couldn’t manipulate her he began to treat her with the scorn and hostility with which he treated her predecessor, as well as George and me. During the process of considering her case his contempt and hatefulness was given free rein. The other art historian on the committee was a woman who was the one tenure track art historian not subject to the animosity of Professor Jones. Her interactions with the department and university were characterized by an aloof elitism; for example, she would arrive at a faculty meeting, hold her keys in her hand for the duration, sit impatiently saying nothing, and then leave abruptly after a half hour without a word of explanation. In some circumstances she could be a functional colleague, but she had a particular grudge against the candidate, although she ended up being voted as the committee chair. Meetings were a reenactment of the punishing scenarios of the past; the letters written about the candidate by my two art history colleagues were over the top, way outside of any appropriate modes of critiquing a colleague. It became clear that they wanted her to go away; that in their opinion there was nothing she could do that was right; that they were bound and determined to dismiss the overwhelmingly positive feedback that we received from the other sources. In order for the candidate to get a fair hearing I had to single-handedly write an alternative Promotion and Tenure document.

The other case was in the Women’s Studies Program and although it proceeded without contention and initially seemed to be less burdensome, there were some notable surprises along the way. The first came when I became the chair of the WS Promotion and Tenure Committee, towards the end of my alleged year off, when it turned out that the other senior Women’s Studies core faculty member was going to be on leave from the summer until the beginning of the next spring semester, the following January. The case was a promotion to associate professor with tenure, and the candidate was a member of a targeted minority, whose hiring I had played a large role in implementing. The challenge: although she was a brilliant teacher with the most consistently excellent teaching evaluations I have ever seen and an extremely good citizen who received several university awards for her service, it had taken her awhile to establish an appropriate record of publication. Nonetheless she had hit her stride by the last year before the decision, and all the nine outside evaluators we had polled said so in their letters. The next surprise: in November, I realized that I had to write yet another Promotion and Tenure document when I read the rough drafts of my colleagues on the committee, just as I had sent off my tome for the other case. Although they were unanimously supportive, and they had a bounty of good raw material, in their drafts they had not put together an effectively written case.

But the real shocker was that after it had been submitted, the case got a very bad review from the College Promotion and Tenure committee, thanks to the work of a member of that body who was skillful at higher order discrimination. If his point was to invalidate both the candidate and the Women’s Studies Program, he chose what for awhile seemed to be a very effective strategy. That is, rather than simply attack the candidate outright because she was a woman and a minority member, or to attack the validity of Women’s Studies as a discipline, he subjected her case to undue scrutiny, in the course of which he found some inconsistencies in her scholarship. He brought these to the College Dean, as evidence of misappropriate scholarly conduct and the dean, in turn, convened a special committee to investigate. Although the so-called Inquiry panel ultimately exonerated my colleague of any scholarly improprieties, it was only after six very harrowing weeks and a whopping legal bill. It was only after that process was complete that the case could begin to move again through the usual channels.

Good news! The art department case was approved at every subsequent extra-departmental level and likewise, all levels except for the College Committee were supportive of my Women’s Studies colleague. Despite the frustration and hard work, I can say that my presence on those two committees had a direct impact on the successful outcomes of the promotion and tenure cases of two deserving women colleagues. That certainly is very satisfying, and I suppose one could say that I had a very good last hurrah.

Passing the torch?

Nonetheless, it all leaves me feeling somewhat unsettled. That is, although there is little doubt that – or – to all appearances it seems that – the University is not the male-dominated, sexist bastion that it was thirty years ago, things are just not as rosy as they may appear. Sure there are many more women faculty members now, even some in the hard sciences, the last hold-out to crack. These days it would be impossible to gather and celebrate all the women across campus who have received tenure in a given year. There is now an accepted way for women faculty to negotiate time around the birth of their children without having to make ad hoc, unsatisfactory and unfair individual arrangements (or plan for their children to be born during the summer months), and suffice it to say it is not at all unusual to see a pregnant professor on campus. Improvements to the atmosphere in the workplace that we fought for have been implemented: lighted walkways, a sexual harassment and rape crisis center, even a lactation room where nursing mothers can go to feed their infants.

I am concerned, however, that in the future the battles will go unfought, and perhaps even unrecognized, as my generation of feminist pioneers retires from the academy. Because of the intensification of academic pressure, the proliferation of women faculty members, the many shifts in the political landscape, it would be politically naïve to assume the old “natural” alliances. Although I always have defined myself as “for” women, this becomes a less meaningful political principle as more women enter the faculty. It is almost a truism that women faculty members do not all have the same needs, desires, issues solely based on gender, and it would be inaccurate to presume that the sisterhood that provided me with such support still functions in quite the same unexamined way. In fact, I know of several instances where women faculty members have been extremely vicious to their female colleagues, and in the two promotion cases discussed above, there were definitely instances where “sisterhood” did not come to the aid of the candidates (although there also were some where it did).

New faculty hires are under even more pressure than they were thirty years ago. The bar has been raised to such an extent that in order to receive a tenure track job current candidates need to have accomplished what we were expected to produce in order to receive tenure,. Many women faculty members of later generations than mine do not wish to align themselves with other women, believing instead that ours is a post-feminist age and seeing greater advantage to their careers in avoiding gender politics entirely. To an extent, that they can do so is a tribute to the success of some of the “advances” that women in my generation fought for. Along with day-care and lactation rooms, for example, the preferential voting mechanism for the college promotion and tenure committee ensures that the panels will be balanced in terms of gender, academic rank, and departmental affiliation. My institutional memory is long enough to recall that a handful of senior male professors decried this system when it was instituted, declaring it an erosion and “feminization” of academic values. Likewise, not only is there no longer the burning need that many of us felt twenty-five to thirty-five years ago to apply the lens of gender to our areas of expertise, but scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies has had sufficient impact on numerous academic fields, so that studying women no longer implies that one is working in the field of Women’s Studies.

Along with the increased complexity of the circumstances, it sometimes feels as if the forces against which we were able to fight with a concerted effort thirty years ago have gone underground. If there is discrimination now, it is a higher order discrimination, what happens when overt bigotry gets displaced by more subtle and pernicious habits of thought that still allow certain populations to discredit others. And culturally, the increasingly pervasive objectification of women in the name of both fashion and sexual freedom, has made it difficult to name that process for what it is. Today many women aver that being on sexual display is empowering as opposed to demeaning.

I don’t want to sound nostalgic for the allegedly good old days. They weren’t that good and they involved real political struggle at real personal expense. The women of my generation are ready to pass the baton – but who is there to receive it? Sending this cry out to the universe is one way in which I’m trying to make sure that the agenda we began stays on a forward moving trajectory.

Mara Witzling

August 2009-May 2010