Marjean D. Purinton
Department of English
Box 43901
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
806.798.7090
marjean.purinton@ttu.edu
What a Decade of Women’s Studies Exit Interviews Reveals about Female
Faculty Retention and the Emergence of Corporatization at Texas Tech University
This study has been a difficult one for me. Anyone who cares about students,
about faculty, about Texas Tech University has to be devastated by the incredible loss of
talent, experience, expertise, and human resources that we have sustained during the last
decade. What is particularly sad is the high number of women who have left the
academy altogether, who have taken their training to other professions. An associate
professor that left in 2001 shares what happens when women do not listen carefully to
other women, for as she asserts, men faculty “cannot hear a woman’s voice.” It is,
therefore, imperative for us to listen to these women, to hear what they reveal about their
experiences and their motivations for leaving the university so that we can do a better job
at retaining the excellent faculty that we recruit. It is also important to listen to what the
subtexts of their stories tell us about the effects on women faculty of the corporatization
of the academy evolving during the last decade. Corporatization threatens to undermine
systemic and institutional efforts to foster gender equity at the university, and it is, in fact,
generating a different but powerfully oppressive “chilly climate” for academic women at
all levels. Advancing gender equity at Texas Tech University, as it is at many institutions
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of higher education, is contingent upon recruiting, retaining, and promoting women
faculty. Exactly where to target our future efforts can be effectively determined by
listening carefully to what women faculty reveal in their exit interviews. Their responses
point to subtle discriminations, uncomfortable feelings, systemic undervaluing, and
workload expectations that contribute to decisions to leave the university in greater
proportion to men across all ranks, frequently making lateral moves, taking positions at
universities or colleges comparable to Texas Tech or leaving the academy altogether, and
this analysis considers what a decades of those exit interviews tell us. 1
Representatives of the Women’s Studies Council at Texas Tech University
conduct campus-wide, exit interviews, on a voluntary basis, with women faculty who
have terminated their employment with the university. The interview consists of a series
of standardized questions, including those that ask respondents to indicate why they are
leaving the university and what difficulties they experienced during their employment at
Texas Tech, including instances of discrimination and harassment.2 I read more than
sixty exit interviews over a period of about ten (1994-2005) years to see whether I could
identify any patterns of responses, indications of what we were doing well and what we
might do better to retain women faculty. At a university where women compose
approximately 25% of the faculty, it is obviously important for us to retain those women
who come to Texas Tech. Obviously, the “revolving door” syndrome that women faculty
experience with greater frequency at Texas Tech than do men faculty has an adverse
effect on recruiting women faculty to the university. During the ten years that I have
been in the English Department, for example, we have lost twelve women faculty and
five men faculty, for various reasons, and while it is not good for us to be losing any of
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the splendid teacher-scholars that we hired, it is clear that women leave in greater
proportion to men.
To be fair, the university has instituted, during the last decade, several corrective
responses to the faculty flight from Texas Tech. Dean Jane Winer of the College of Arts
and Sciences, for example, has instituted a women faculty mentoring program so that
women at all professional levels and across departments might enact and garner advice
and direction in non-threatening workshops. Under the able direction of Associate Deans
Susan Hendrick and Mary Jane Hurst, this program has been extremely helpful in making
the procedures and politics of tenure and promotion more transparent for those who
participate in the program. Five years ago, with the encouragement of the Madonne
Miner, then chair of the English Department, I began a voluntary mentoring program for
all untenured faculty in which first-, second-, and third-year faculty meet about three
times a semester to discuss matters relevant to departmental requirements and procedures
for tenure and promotion. We also try to foster collegial and supportive climate for new
faculty. Other departments at Texas Tech University have instituted similar programs.
The Teaching Academy here has also offered mentoring services so that
experienced and tenured faculty team up with a first-year faculty member to offer
pedagogical and collegial support. In 1994, the Sexual Harassment Committee began
conducting mandatory training for all faculty and staff. The annual All University
Conference for the Advancement of Women in Higher Education promotes networking
and cross-disciplinary sharing for all women on campus. In the summer of 2001, the
Provost’s Office assembled a committee of faculty, students, and staff, the Gender Equity
Task Force, chaired by Charlotte Dunham, to investigate and to report gender issues as
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well as the gender climate on campus. A summary of this essay was included in our
findings, and a permanent Women’s and Gender Equity Committee was elected in spring
2005 and will exist under the auspices of the Faculty Senate. The university’s strategic
plan has identified diversity has a key goal that it seeks to accomplish. The numbers of
women who are being tenured and promoted at Texas Tech University are slowly rising,
and the representations and salaries of male and female faculty in some departments are
reaching parity. We have seen efforts to secure spousal appointments, and there are, as
we have seen, sincere efforts to provide newly hired faculty with mentoring
opportunities.
Despite institutionalized efforts to create academic settings where women are
comfortable and productive, valued and valuable, we are still struggling to retain many
women faculty at all levels, not just untenured women faculty. The exit interviews reveal
patterns of reasons why women leave, with low salaries, high teaching loads, and
inadequate research or travel resources constituting the dominant reasons. I want to point
out that while some of the women interviewed, particularly in the last three years,
conveyed that they were accepting positions with better salaries and resources as well as
lower teaching loads, many indicated that they were making lateral moves, that is they
were not taking another position at a better research institution, but they were, instead
moving to university or college comparable to Texas Tech. Even then, most claimed that
they were being paid more, asked to teach less, and in some instances, both, in addition to
being given more travel or research resources. During the last decade, Texas Tech
University has been seeking to position itself as a Research I institution, and so it has
demanded Research I productivity from its faculty without providing the salaries and
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resources that make such scholarship possible. This transition has been occurring at the
very same time that corporate values and contexts mark ideological shifts in the
university. Both movements have put exceptional stress upon underrepresented women
faculty.
The next reason female faculty cited for leaving involved heavy service and
administrative responsibilities, frequently the coordinating of teaching assistantships.
Women faculty given administrative and service responsibilities early in their careers felt
that their own research, and therefore their chances for tenure and promotion, was in
jeopardy. They believed that the only way that they could get out of these responsibilities
and duties was to leave. Thirdly, I discovered that women cited ambiguous and changing
tenure and promotion expectations, ineffective mentoring, failure to find spousal
accommodations, and ambivalent maternity leave practices as reasons for leaving. These
reasons are directly connected to the shift in university ideology to corporate rule.
Margaret Schramm points out that the influx of women in the academy during the last
decade has not translated into an abundance of capable women mentors (61).
Furthermore, the campus climate, institutional ecology, and individual receptivity
contribute complexly to the success or failure of networking for women (66). Several
women here felt betrayed by the university that hired them with one expectation of
scholarship for tenure and then changed the requirements mid-way through their
probationary period, and this was a problem that mentoring could not redress. Issues
about what counted toward tenure were frequently expressed: grants, previous
publications, feminist scholarship, community activities? Issues about quantity vs.
quality in scholarship were expressed. Dissatisfaction with teaching effectiveness being
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assessed solely by student evaluations came up repeatedly. These problems with
workload and tenure expectations were compounded with the challenges of living in
Lubbock. For married women, limited employment opportunities for husbands. For
women with children, inadequate childcare and poor public schools. For single women,
little social and cultural opportunities, aside from church. For lesbian and bisexual
women, fear of censure from prevalent homophobia. For all women, the conservative
community in which professional women are held in derision.
Finally, a particularly disturbing pattern emerging during the last three or four
years had to do with the tensions of a growing and changing institution, the ways in
which newly hired faculty are valued and rewarded in contrast to long-term faculty,
pronounced discrepancies in the ways some programs are promoted and funded,
particularly the professional and vocational programs and those in qualitative fields,
“education” in the conventional sense of acquiring understandings of the human
condition, global cultures, and oneself, the acquisition of informed reading, critical
thinking, and analytical writing skills in general.3 The emerging corporatization is
altering the paradigm for academic accountability, a change that undermines women’s
professional autonomy and success in fostering a female-friendly university.
Respondents pointed to ageism and body-size discrimination. Respondents cited health
issues as a price exacted for success in the corporate regime.4 The business model (a
decidedly masculinist model) which the university is adopting dictates that the rewards
go to those who generate external funding, leaving the humanities, liberal and fine arts,
even the social sciences devalued and under funded. While the university gives lip
service to interdisciplinary studies, programs that might generate diversity in faculty (as
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well as students) are not supported. Repeatedly, the interviews underscored how difficult
it was to function professionally in an environment that demands your over-extension and
exhaustion while at the same time demonstrating through multiple indicators how little
value you were to the university. Jennie Hornosty underscores these gendered
consequences of corporatization for women will result in decreased space for feminist
scholarship and programs like Women’s Studies (53), and this trend alarmed women
here.
The market-driven university, furthermore, has fostered a “chilly climate of
capitalism” in which overt expressions of racial or gender discrimination and sexual
harassment are re-surfacing. An assistant professor who had been here for four years and
left for another position in 2001 remarks: “If I was Black or Hispanic…I wouldn’t want
to be in Lubbock. If I were gay I’d get the heck out of Lubbock. I have a friend who’s
Jewish and I went to his wedding, and I didn’t realize there was only one synagogue in
Lubbock and they don’t even have a rabbi. I don’t know if I’d want to be single in
Lubbock because everything’s geared to married people.” Another assistant professor,
here for four and one half years, who left in 2000, comments about the demographics in
Lubbock: “There were some prejudices here that I really didn’t know existed anymore.”
When she pointed out to her female mentor that she was Jewish, her mentor quipped: “I
think you’d be happier in Austin because they allow Jews in the country club there.”
Consequently, this faculty member felt forced to keep private, and even ashamed of her
religion.
An assistant professor taking another position in 2001 after two years at Texas
Tech tells the story of having a graduate student confront her and tell her that she was a
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“monster,” an abomination to the world because she is mixed race. An associate
professor here for eight years, left for another position in 2001, delineates the community
climate: “Here I feel different on so many levels. I’m not heterosexual. I’m not
religious. I’m not conservative. I recycle. There are all sorts of things that make me feel
different in so many ways. …We want to live some place where diversity is more
appreciated, where there’s a great range of values and beliefs…. It does fell like a battle
at times and it doesn’t feel nurturing.” She reported having experienced discrimination
based on sexual orientation in the community and on campus. An assistant professor
interviewed on Mary 12, 2005, reports that in her seven years at Texas Tech University,
she received student papers expressing warnings about negotiating internationally
because businesses do not want to “get jewed down”--an expression that, she claims,
seems to have been acceptable in the campus culture but that this Jewish woman found
offensive. Another assistant professor, interviewed April 29, 2004, confirms that she
frequently heard “rather disparaging racial remarks…and gender comments” from
students, but a colleague of hers in another department, an assistant professor here for
four years, reports in an interview of the same day, that her “Chair often makes very
inappropriate sexual remarks.”
Susan Estrich identifies the lack of retention and promotion of women as a
problem that limits an institution’s talent pool, and the absence of significant numbers of
women in positions of power as an obstacle that perpetuates this problem (145).
Estrich’s observation characterizes the brain drain of tenured women at Texas Tech
University during the last decade. A tenured associate professor leaving after twelve
years at Texas Tech University explains in her May 20, 2005 interview, “…there’s a lot
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of space fore being uncomfortable and feeling that it’s not a very welcoming place for
women.” She illustrates the hostile environment with incidents in which her department
chair entertained job candidates in a space where explicitly and sexually provocative
nude male bodies were featured in pictures on the wall. She points to the discomfort
experienced by everyone, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and the
tensions generated by such a professional meeting, even as a social event. Her chair also
dismissed salary discrepancies between male and female members of the department with
the statement: “Well, the reason for this is probably because men have been more
productive than women.” At the 2004 All University Conference on the Advancement of
Women in Higher Education, a panel of administrators from Texas Tech University held
an open discussion about gender equity. Much to our dismay, the provost of the
university maintained that one of the reasons women are paid less than men is because
women are not good negotiators.5 Institutional inequity is here glibly explained away
without any critical assessment of the assumptions that perpetuate salary disparities. In
the corporate paradigm, male productivity is valued differently from that of female
productivity, and all the while, women are asked to produce in an environment that is, in
fact, hostile to their work.6
The most infamous recent case of sex discrimination and instance of sexual
harassment under the emerging corporate university occurred at Texas Tech during 20022004, when a female professor of fourteen years was denied a promotion to upper
administration, simply because she was a woman and the then president of the university
did not believe that women should hold the administrative position for which she had
applied. The resulting lawsuits and threatened lawsuits with their concomitant
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investigations revealed that an alleged sexist and misogynist epitaph about her gender had
been directed at the female professor by the university president, a man who confessed
that he had never heard of the “glass ceiling.” Additionally, the female professor
believed that she had been denied an opportunity to compete for the position under the
open search rules and processes. A student group concerned about diversity organized a
march in support of the woman professor, and other female faculty in the department felt
at risk due to the hostile environment created by this situation. The interview of May 3,
2004 reveals that the only woman administrator, the vice provost, who could have made a
difference with intervention instead supported the status quo at the very time when the
respondent most “needed a voice above” her. The harassed professor saw this betrayal in
female leadership as a continuing problem for women at Texas Tech University. Women
are grossly underrepresented in upper administration at Texas Tech University, and the
token women at those levels exercise relatively little power and privilege. The parties
involved in this case eventually settled out of court, and although this woman left the
university for an administrative position at another institution, she emphasizes in her
interview, “People leaving doesn’t cure the problem.”7 And yet leave, women do. In
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, Phyllis Chessler asserts that as long as patriarchy and
capitalism set the rules, “only a minimal number of women can be allowed to succeed”
and generally those who do succeed at upper levels of administration must “cater to the
men at the top” (337). Chessler’s and Estrich’s assessments aptly describe the upperadministration “glass ceiling” for women at Texas Tech University.
Women who have succeeded or who are attempting to succeed in meeting the
demands of the new corporatized academy are, in fact, encountering various “glass
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ceilings” that erode their productivity. A newly hired assistant professor was told by her
department chair that her year-long Fulbright would be “an enormous inconvenience.” A
hearing impaired assistant professor was terminated when it was determined that hiring
an interpreter or acquiring a computer-assisted real-time translation would cost too much
for her to remain in her position. Her replacement was a man who could hear without
accommodations. Another assistant professor that left in 2003, following her third-year
review, pointed to the problem of being able to make connections that facilitates research
and scholarship. She explains: “It’s been very difficult for me to connect with people,”
and “there is no time for collaboration.” For her research, she felt isolated and invisible,
and consequently, her number of publications were lacking. Because her teaching
evaluations were phenomenal and she had earned teaching recognition, she asked the vice
provost if her 50/50 research/teaching expectations could be recalculated, but because we
have no contracts at Texas Tech University, the provost’s office was unwilling to
negotiate the change. Ironic, since women are accused by the provost of being unable to
negotiate.
After four years another assistant professor decided to move to a smaller college
because her department, one she described as exhibiting “paternal treatment” towards
her, had been critical of the time she spent mentoring students. She explains: “I
mentored whole students not just academic students. I think that might be a feminist
issue…. Because if my students come to my office and say, ‘I think my roommate’s a
drug addict. What do I do?’ I don’t say, ‘I don’t know. Go talk to somebody else.’ I sit
and deal with that student.” A non-tenure track instructor who left in 2003 similarly cites
her inability to deal with students and controversial subjects “head on” in the classroom
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or in her office: “Anything that comes up that might be controversial in any shay, shape,
or form is shrugged off by the teacher or is directed to another place. …Here, I think we
hand-feed our kids and in lots of ways they make their decisions based on what we
believe. And I just don’t think that in a university setting that that strengthens your
academic programs.”
The consumer-based university system is something that several women point to
as troubling for them. An assistant professor leaving in 2003, after three years, cites as
an example of how market-driven funding hurts women the case of a parallel male
faculty member in a program that gets specialized treatment received a $5000 raise in the
year when she received nothing. According to another assistant professor who left in
2000 after two years, the university promotes “more of a consumer mentality—it’s not
like learning. It’s like buying a product.” In a “throw-away” economy, age is, especially
for women, a handicap. An associate professor leaving in 2002 after thirteen years
reports that senior faculty are often relieved of any decision-making responsibility within
her department and treated “very shabbily for how much they’ve done and what they’ve
done for this department.” The result is a factionalized department, with some of it, she
speculates, having been actually engineered. Male senior faculty who feel threatened by
senior female faculty often gain gullible and eager recruits from newly hired faculty to
buttress their power base. As the interview reflects: “So I don’t think that this strategy of
pitting program against program, and junior faculty against senior faculty, and tenured
faculty against untenured faculty—it may be a leadership style where if you’ve got
everybody sort of being uncomfortable and suspicious and defensive against each other,
nobody bothers you—but I think for health and well-being of this department, it’s going
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to be an extraordinarily expensive strategy over time.” A tenured associate professor at
Texas Tech University for twelve years claims in her May 20, 2005 interview that the
corporate university, a variation of the “old boy network” does not support, utilize, or
recognize female leadership at the same time that there “is an increasing emphasis on
turning out product,” with the student’s diploma as “a kind of product.” She is leaving
because, as she concludes, “I just did not see that there was going to be any change in the
way things are here.”8
As women entered the academy at both the faculty and the student ranks in record
numbers in the 1990s, they found themselves, as we have seen, in an institution
undergoing the transitions of a paradigm shift from the paternal liberal university to the
corporate, consumer-based university. Just as women were beginning to shed the
shackles of service under the paternal regime, they found themselves newly employed in
“services” for the customers of the new university/corporation. Service, in other words,
continues to be a double-edged sword that manifestly appears to integrate female
strengths into academic practices while simultaneously providing justification for the lack
of productivity among female faculty. The kinds of service that women, often untenured,
frequently perform at Texas Tech University include supervising teaching assistants,
coordinating departmental programs, advising students, mentoring colleagues, and
sponsoring student organizations. These service responsibilities are added to committee
and teaching assignments, all of which are time-consuming and enervating. Pointing to
the service load that often becomes the bane of female faculty, an interviewee who had
been here for over six years complained that she had taken over most of the service load
of her department, and that graduate student support was being assigned to new faculty
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members, even when they did not have service or administrative responsibilities: “My
load became just huge, my service load here.” The story related by a woman interviewed
on May 11, 1998 emphasizes how her service affected her scholarship, how her service
became “invisible” in the systems of accountability in the department and the college,
and she concludes, “over time, that just started to wear a bit.”
Women at Texas Tech University are often asked to do more teaching than men
and are ironically held by students and colleagues to a higher standard of pedagogical
performance then their male counterparts. A woman interviewed on June 22, 1995 notes
that although women do prodigious amounts of teaching, “Here, teaching is sometimes
not seen as valid scholarship. Depending on her departmental affiliation, a woman’s
research may not have been counted if it involves feminist or gender scholarship,
collaborative research, anecdotal rather than statistical research, interdisciplinary
scholarship, or scholarship not supported by outside funding. Standards of scholarship
are derived, of course, from masculinist notions grounded in historically male-dominated
institutions. These women would have been helped by expanded notions of what
constitutes “research” and “scholarship.” As one exit interview claims, “some of what
gets called service is really research and scholarship.” Since 1995, the categories of
“research” and “teaching” and “service” have become even more contingent upon their
“market” value and therefore not divested of their masculinist criteria, so that, as
Elizabeth Burlé argues, “Feminist, anti-racist and crucial pedagogies, which foster the
decentering of knowledge and validate student experiences, subjectivity and personal
agency, are severely constrained and potentially negated within the narrow confines of
quantifiable and measurable ‘services rendered’” (258).
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Furthermore, if female faculty are found “wanting” in teaching styles and
practices by the student customers they serve, their careers are in jeopardy. An assistant
professor of two years, interviewed on May 5, 2005, was asked to leave Texas Tech
University when student evaluations were not high enough. She was criticized for a toorigid grading system and high expectations of her students. She explained that she was
trying to offer an alternative to what she calls the “fast food kind of instruction” generally
practiced here, despite having heavy teaching loads. She desperately needed a female
mentor she could trust in helping her with these teaching matters, especially since her
department was more interested in having her leave than in supporting her pedagogical
policies and practices. Another assistant professor here for seven years, claims in her
May 12, 2005 interview that her high marks on student teaching evaluations simply
resulted in her being required to teach an extra class, which senior members of her
department said “won’t be a big deal for you.” For her, the additional teaching created an
environment in which she would have great difficulty succeeding, especially in terms of
her research. She concludes: “You know you can have intrinsic motivation about your
job and you really love it even though your office really sucks and you don’t like your
co-workers, but you love what you do so it doesn’t matter.” This attitude is exactly what
the academic masters (whether paternal or capitalistic) count on from women who are
allowed to enter university life. To be sure, power, control, and privilege remain malespecific, reified and strengthened by corporate values.
For many academic women, the acquisition of a professional identity requires
collusion with this academic system defining their worth in male-derived terms, and our
acquired “academic” identities may subtly contribute to the chilly climate for women in
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the corporate university.9 In one exit interview, conducted on January 28, 1998, an
assistant professor who at been at Texas Tech University for three and a half years points
to the absence of female support. For this faculty member, women ostracized her from
their powerful “clique”: “…I started out in the clique and because of some things in my
personal life and some personal decisions, I got removed from the clique, and when that
happened, other things started to not go so well. That’s one of the reasons I started
looking for positions elsewhere. The surprising thing is that it came from women in my
department and not the men.” The interview expresses surprise at how the women of the
department took “things from my personal life” and brought “them into my professional
world” so to use them against her. She cites the overall unsupportive and unhealthy
environment as her primary reason for leaving the university. In other words, it was the
discriminatory behavior of her female colleagues, not any institutionalized forms of
discrimination, which contributed to her dissatisfaction and unproductivity. Jennifer
Gore acknowledges that the academic identity absorbed by most women is another
unhealthy dimension of their professional lives (21), and Phillis Chessler adds that
because female-female competition is subtle, deep, tension-producing, and wracking, it
compels expectations of sex-role conformity that most women simply do not find at the
academy (338-346).
Another exit interview, conducted November 18, 1997, reveals a similar response
from a woman who, after two and a half years at the university, sought another position.
She remarks: “Really and truly, I have more trouble with the women in my department
than I do with the men. There’s only two other women and they’re very, very
competitive and don’t collaborate well. …There’s not a lot of collegiality in the
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department.” In adopting the competitive model of professional behavior at the expense
of a newly hired colleague, the women of this department colluded in discriminatory
practices against women, discriminations that are not necessarily eliminated by
institutional program or policies against discrimination and that are perpetuated by
women who continue to operate uncritically in masculinist academic modes of interaction
and structures of success. Gail Griffin asserts that as “academic mothers,” we can situate
ourselves in explicit contradistinction to the paternal tradition that has shaped the
academy as we know it and that continues to influence our behaviors towards other
women (193-204). Unfortunately, the corporate model upon which the academy of the
twenty-first century is remaking itself is structured by the very competitive, masculinist
tenets that make what Griffin challenges us to achieve as difficult as it was for women in
the academic paternal order. According to Susan Kress, the academic story for women
over the last three decades has been that of confrontation, power, struggle—conflict. She
concludes: “No wonder we are all worn out.” (45).
Can we ever experience an academic story without this painful conflict? While
some women of the academy uncritically collude with masculinist systems, paternal and
corporate, that are detrimental to women, others alienate their “sisters” by enforcing a
“feminist” subculture that is so narrowly constructed as to exclude many women. This
mode of discrimination is particularly insidious, for women who are involved with
institutionalized efforts to eliminate systemic discriminations can contribute to the very
problems that they purport to remedy. All too often, academic women advocate feminist
theory, feminist pedagogy, and feminist approaches to leadership, but when it comes to
practicing them, they fall short, especially when it comes to recognizing and valuing
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genuine “differences.” In our corporate academic culture, it is easy for women to forge
emotional and professional distances among women, disguising that climate as
“feminism,” and it is easy for narrowly defined feminism to have the same discriminatory
effects as antifeminism. In To Be Two, Luce Irigaray emphasizes the theoretical
necessity of seeing our culture (the academic environment to which we contribute) as one
capable of alienating our thinking of subjectivity as intersubjectivity, a process that could
offer alternatives to oppositional binaries and hierarchies in our daily interactions (90).
In other words, we need to recognize and to know our conditioned behaviors in the
corporate/academic culture before we attempt to change it.
For Robyn Wiegman, feminism’s academic enterprise in the future must resist
“institutionalization’s disciplinary effects” (33) in order to help women rewrite their
experiential stories in terms other than conflict. A colleague who had been at the
university for only a year pointed to the practice of antifeminist feminist in her interview
of June 30, 1998. About her inclusion in the women’s community on campus, she says:
“I did join the Women’s Studies Council…but it doesn’t seem like women faculty get
together too often so that we can talk across disciplines.” Feeling as though it was
particularly difficult for a single woman to feel included even among women, she
observes:
…The thing is that an attitude shift has to happen that says, “We are more
open to the idea of new ideas and people and what’s happening out in the
world.” It’s good that we newcomers know what’s going on here, but to feel
as though there is no opening for our ideas and that we’re just supposed to be
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absorbed, that’s really what the crux was for me. I felt like a malcontent. …And
that doesn’t really suit my personality. I finally said to myself, “You either have
to shut up and go with this or you have to leave.” So there was no middle ground
it seemed to me. …So I just said, “Ok, I surrender.”
Because the women’s community did not accommodate diversity—not just in the
obvious forms of race, age, gender, or sexual orientation, but also in conceptual modes—
this woman felt unwanted. She was entrapped by a dilemma that demanded she conform
or leave, a situation in which there was no middle ground for change or growth because
the on-campus environment rejected difference. Women-centered divisions and
“cliques” result, and women who are not party members feel alienated, isolated, and
lonely. Our feminist subculture can work to deflect gender disparities of the corporate
academy only if it is inclusive and diverse, only if it does not mutate into antifeminsm.
The experiences expressed in the exit interviews point to the assumptions we
make about gender, rendering it difficult for women who do not conform to stereotypical
behaviors and attitudes of what it is to be “woman” or “feminist.” In subtle but harmful
ways, we can target women who “do theory” or women who “participate in activism” or
women who do not work from essentialized “feminine” methods of learning and being.
The academy cannot be a happy and healthy site for women who are riddled by other
women colluding with the masculinist status quo or by women who make feminist
alternatives exclusive and crippling. Women who feel insular, particularly women
isolated in their own departments, have difficulty developing social and professional
networks that can provide mediation for harsh criticism or perceived lack of production.
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In her exit interview of June 19, 1998, an assistant professor of four years describes an
environment that makes her feel inadequate, unvalued, dehumanized, and at risk, a
climate with no feminist support in the face of male-dominated assessment:
There was a lot of pressure. It was a pressure cooker. At my third-year
review, I broke down and cried. And there was no need for me to do that
because they told me I had been super productive. I had a whole slew of
manuscripts in the pipeline, but not as many in press. And, of course, with
that pressure, pressure, pressure, all I could hear was them saying, “well, you’re
still behind.” It invalidated everything that I’d done. The bottom line was the
number of publications. …That’s when I broke down. I said, “You can’t push
me any harder than you’re pushing me. I’m at my limit.” …I think women’s
health is a big issue, and women approach stress differently than men.
In this case, women’s silence and absence, their abandonment of a colleague at her most
vulnerable professional moment, resulted in her leaving the university—a pattern we saw
repeated in the sex-discrimination case of 2002-2004.
As an inclusive community, we can promote collaborative networks that take the
sting out of an inherently combative system and substitute instead spaces where
competitive work is productive, rewarding, and rewarded. Leaving the university after
eight years, an associate professor comments in her April 25, 1994 interview that the
negatively competitive environment here left her feeling alone and unprotected, even
mentally and emotionally assaulted:
21
I just don’t think people have a clue about how really unpleasant it is to
be a woman faculty member on this campus. I mean, you feel so isolated.
Your work is devalued. You’re personally attacked. It’s so demoralizing.
…You feel so isolated because there are so few other women to talk to and
even some of those women are not open to talking about this. It’s what a
friend of min calls the “foxhole” mentality. You’re too busy dodging
artillery rounds coming your way to help someone else.
Fortunately, during the last decade, courageous but often invisible women have worked
in individual and systemic ways to alleviate the isolating environment and “foxhole”
mentality from our campus. Their efforts have made significant differences in the
professional lives of all women at Texas Tech University because they were willing to
listen to these women’s stories and then willing to try to change the conditions that these
stories identify. We talk about “a good match” in faculty hiring and retention, but in our
efforts to find faculty who will be happy and successful in a particular position, we also
want to avoid simply preserving an academic environment with limited space for
difference. I want to emphasize that individuals must take responsibility for being aware
of the institutional history and mission as well as the community’s culture when they join
a faculty, but it is in this area that mentors can be especially helpful to new hires in
negotiating the environments in which they live and work.
As we have seen from the exit interviews, women on our campus work in a region
where women generally are not extended the same respect and legitimacy as men. One
22
interview, for example, notes the community response to gender: “When you say you’re
a faculty member at Tech, they kind of give an odd look like, ‘But you’re a woman!’”
This community attitude extends to campus where, as another interview demonstrates,
“Male students consistently referred to me as ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs.’ Every male faculty
member of the department is always ‘Doctor.’ Never ‘Mister.’” One interview
conducted on April 29, 2004 explained how her chair assumed that she did not need a
summer salary for research because she had a husband who could support her during the
summer. Several interviews explained these disparities as products of the prevailing
religious ideology in West Texas. The dominant denominations do not allow women to
hold position of leadership, to exercise any power, authority, or voice within the church
structure. This belief informs behaviors outside of church and even at the university,
where women have historically been quiet and submissive. Outspoken and assertive
women are consequently at risk. But it is a double bind for academic women, for, as one
interview states, in a culture that has very low value for women, if you assume a
leadership role, you are a deviant, but if you stay in a subservient and supportive role,
you are not going to get tenure and promotion. “West Texas is,” one interview exclaims,
“a hard place for independent women.” In this region, especially, it is important for the
women’s academic subculture to be inclusive and to resist cultural assumptions about
gender, for there are few, if any, alternatives in the larger community. Here for only
three semesters and interviewed April 29, 2004, one woman recognized the need for
more connections between community and campus, pointing out that the community’s
view of “women at Texas Tech is Marsha Sharp and that’s all.” Interviewed on
23
September 1, 2005, a woman here for seven years, recalls being invited to the faculty
wife and staff luncheon hosted by her Dean’s wife.
Because Lubbock (the city in which Texas Tech University is located) is a
homogeneous and conservative community, many expectations shaped by essentialized
notions of identity prevail. Women of color and lesbian women are working in an
environment where resistance to “difference” is thoroughly woven into the social fabric
of the region. Even on campus, these community values inform assumptions about
identity formation. For both campus and the community, for example, heterosexual
marriages and “traditional” nuclear families are the norms for which political decisions,
cultural and recreational activities, and marketing choices are made. More importantly,
these norms also shape people’s interactions, so that if you are not in an identifiable
heterosexual relationship or if you do not have children, your interests, needs, and
presence are often not acknowledged. Repeatedly, exit interviews exposed the hardships
experienced by single women (whether straight, gay, bisexual) who felt they had “no
community.” For married women and/or women with children, the domestic demands of
spouse and/or family ironically became impediments to their academic responsibilities, to
which they could not devote 100% of their time as did many of their “successful” male
colleagues, many with spouses and/or families. Women of color are joining the
university at a time when “diversity” (here diversity is defined only in terms of race)
pressures to recruit and to retain minority faculty and students enlists them to perform
miraculous transformations in the university’s demographics. We have seen an interview
that pointed to the difficulties of lesbians in West Texas, and it is important to note that
sexual orientation is conspicuously absent from the official Equality statement for Texas
24
Tech University despite efforts during the last decade by various groups on campus to
have it added.
The corporate ideology of campus compounds what levels of discomfort or
alienation that women here feel from the larger community, a pattern we need to inspect
closely. Women are more readily and easily dismissed as no longer useful at mid-career
than men. Susan Gubar highlights the ageism and body-size discrimination experienced
by tenured women in the academy. She identifies the brand of new faculty emerging in
the 1990s as “The Young People” who position women of the middling to older
generation in overextended and under appreciated roles (91-100). A tenured full
professor who had been at Texas Tech University for thirteen years and who was
interviewed August 12, 2003 expressed her dissatisfaction at an environment where the
way she could “get along” was to be “disengaged.” The ageism she experienced deeply
concerned her, and she has seen too many women moved out of decision-making
positions treated disdainfully after they given selflessly to their departments. The exit
interviews reveal that one of the university’s sincere efforts at female-faculty recruitment
and retention is, in fact, not working as long as the university continues to embrace the
market economy mindset of education. The strategy has been to give newly hired female
faculty lower teaching loads and/or service loads, graduate courses to teach, higher
salaries, and more resources so to jump start their careers. One the surface, this response
looks to be a perfect solution to many of the issues raised by the decade’s exit interviews.
This move, however, comes with a catch; for the department or academic unit, especially
those with large numbers of new hires at the assistant professor level, is still required to
teach the same number of classes and to generate the service necessary to keep the
25
business of the department, college, and university running. The extra burden for
teaching and service has fallen ironically on the shoulders of female associate and full
professors, women who survived the heavy teaching and service responsibilities of their
tenure-track probationary periods. Without more faculty to help take up the slack, these
women are feeling doubly oppressed. Not a fair tradeoff so that their younger colleagues
can have a break. As Gubar points out, generational friction among feminists in the
Humanities abounds—another version of conflict in which women continue to feel
marginalized and depressed, even as tenured faculty, not fully integrated into the
university system.
Furthermore, these tenured women see the newly hired faculty astutely take
advantage of the teaching/service reductions and material resources only to move to a
better institution in three to six years, where they will continue to enjoy a career with
teaching assignments and financial remunerations that exceed their own. As a result of
this disparity, several of our tenured women faculty are leaving and going to institutions
where ageism does not seem to prevail and where their experience is utilized and
appreciated in leadership capacities. This strategy therefore may succeed in recruiting
talented and qualified women to Texas Tech University, but it really does not retain them,
and, in fact, as we have seen, it works against the retention of tenured and experienced
women faculty. One assistant professor, here for four years, explains in her April 12,
2004 interview that the university was not benefiting from its recruitment strategy based
on the “potential superstar status,” a strategy that was undermining faculty continuity.
She emphasizes how the university should “recruit and retain people who are productive
for Texas Tech University… I’ve seen way too much turnover and there’s no reason for
26
it.” The “revolving door” puts additional mid-career stress on tenured women who are
asked every fall to take under wing a new crop of protégés (one of my colleagues calls
them “little princesses”) at the same time that they attempt to maintain their own hyperproductivity.10
In addition to the disparity created between “old-timers” and newly hired faculty,
the “corporate” academy has forged a wider margin between the salaries and resources
for “haves” and “haves-not” faculty, that is those faculty in business, engineering, law,
sciences who have “greater market value” than faculty in the humanities, fine arts,
education, and social sciences. What happens in this configuration is that it sets up
women across disciplines as competitors, women who might otherwise find common
ground. Newly minted Ph.D.s are already corporate savvy, but they lack collective
memory of feminist struggles for equity in the academy, and so the potential for
“sisterhood” is obviated by generational differences, (mis)understandings about how the
academy can function for women. This disparity says to the colleges and departments of
the university in which women have made more progress that the academy does not
“value” them, that their “market value” is far less than others engaged in the same
mission of scholarship and teaching at the university. The business model dictates that
rewards are bestowed on those who can generate external funding, and disciplines that
seem to offer little use value in the corporate paradigm are ironically those very
disciplines in which women make up a larger proportion of the faculty. As these
interviews reveal, teaching load distributions and service expectations remain
disproportionately higher for women than men, even among the senior ranks and often at
the same time they are shouldering administrative responsibilities with little or no
27
compensation. 11 Consequently, corporatized academic policies, processes, and practices
defuse the power of critical feminist work and have the potential of further marginalizing
or eliminating feminist work, for its perceived lack of “value” as knowledge and its
“unmarketable” skills.
Some of these issues are being addressed at Texas Tech University, as they are at
institutions of higher education across the country. Some of these issues can only change
with time, as our geographical and cultural location creates certain destinies. But we can
try to overcome those disadvantages by making the campus community more inviting and
supportive of difference. As I read the exit interviews, I assumed that conditions driving
women away from the university would improve and that those improvements would be
reflected by the most recent interviews. Sadly, that was not the case. What was
particularly distressing, the exit interviews revealed patterns of female collusion with
systems that foster hostility towards women. The exit interviews also demonstrated the
ways in which these systems create an exclusive and delimiting community. The stories
of the exit interviews suggest that, in this academic environment at least, pervasive
gender assumptions constitute the foundation upon which subtle discriminatory actions
and words are built, and that women perpetuate these assumptions rather than work
collectively to correct them. I know that as a senior female faculty member, I have been
disheartened about the potential of making a difference at the program level, and I am
now discouraged about pursuing a path in administration, something that I had looked to
earlier in my career as a way to help younger women in the academy, as a place where I
might deploy my feminist strategies for conducting the “business” of education. I am
sadly aware that academic consumerism is eating up the lives of tenured women who
28
repeatedly voice concerns about the ways in which this work intensification causes them
to be over-extended and overworked, coping with health, mental, and burnout problems
not necessarily experienced by their male counterparts. Women are still more likely to
bear the burdens associated with family, including elder parent care, childcare, and
household maintenance. The corporate health system offers only shallow clichés (“just
make time” or “balancing acts”) in response to unhappy and unhealthy senior female
faculty. Why perhaps so many tenured women are leaving the academy altogether.
The feminist community is being fragmented anew by a corporate ideology that
weakens bonds and solidarity among women faculty/feminist scholars, that silences
activism on and off campus, the erodes feminist scholarship and pedagogy, that renders
women vulnerable to oppression and discrimination by their isolation within its
structures. As a second-wave feminist, I find it difficult to know how to advise my
female graduate students about to embark on careers within the academy now wearing
corporate regalia that mask its sexist foundations. The “motherwork” and feminist
agenda to which I have been committed fails me, and so I am at a loss about what to tell
them. It is not that I have naïve nostalgia for the old systems of patriarchy, now
seemingly easily identifiable, in my endeavors to achieve gender equity at the university,
but I do fear that the corporatization of the university, as these exit interviews attest, will
not help women and will probably hurt women. It pains and enervates me to see the
strides of the last decade put in arrest or, worst, remission, by the corporatization of the
university. In her recently published study about the myth of empowerment, Dana
Becker argues that women’s self actualization have been shaped by discourses, primarily
scientific and psychological, discourses in which “empowerment is the panacea for
29
women’s problems. As Becker cogently demonstrates, however, “empowerment” is
merely another myth constructed by male-dominated structures to keep women
subservient to those structures. We delude ourselves if we think that we have achieved
“empowerment” or even that empowerment for women is possible in the corporate
university. In Amanda Cross’s [Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s] last mystery novel Honest
Doubt, the plight of actual academic women (like Heilbrun) are rendered in a fictional
account that reflects reality all too poignantly. Professor Antonia Lansbury explains to
private investigator Estelle “Woody” Woodhaven how the sexual politics at fictitious
Clifton College operate: “…subtle discrimination is the hardest kind to describe or grasp
if you haven’t experienced it, and academic discrimination is the hardest to make
explicable. The acts of discrimination are subtle and impossible to demonstrate” (70).
We need to be better at reading the signs and listening to the stories that women share so
that what Professor Lansbury describes does not continue to represent the sexual
dynamics of the academy and so that we can retain and promote women.
Notes
1. Magda Lewis points out how difficult it is to document systemic discrimination
precisely because the system absorbs the conceptual frameworks by which its
own oppressive privilege might be uncovered (64).
2. Mary Jane Hurst details networking strategies and the process of the exit
interviews at Texas Tech University (45-53).
3. Accoring to Marilee Reimer, the university is undergoing a restructuring
according to the logic of the market, with increasing emphasis on education as
30
consumable product and students as its consumers: “This shift takes curriculum
development and teaching practices away from the humanist liberal ideal of
fostering active learning or citizenship to one focused on delivering quantifiable
services and satisfying consumers in measurable terms” (23).
4. Cody Wells, a tenured professor of psychology at a southern liberal arts college,
identifies her declining health due to stress as the reason she resigned from her
position in 2003. The message the corporate regime sent her was that she could
never do enough. When she inquired about her ranking for college and
community service, for example, she reports what an administrator told her: I
could get the highest rating only if I worked so hard that I totally collapsed at the
end of the year. Anything less than that was not considered excellent service”
(C3). Professor Wells’ story reminds me of a conversation I had with a senior
colleague in my department at Texas Tech University in 1998, shortly after I had
received tenure and promotion to associate professor and a time when I was
struggling with migraine headaches and pancreatitis for the first time in my life.
He chuckled that an indicator of whether I had earned tenure was how sick I had
become during the probationary period and tenure review process.
5. We may not be so surprised at these male administrators’ denigration of women’s
abilities in light of remarks made by Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers at
the 2005 NBER Conference on Diversifying Science and Engineering in which he
suggested the possibility of a difference (i.e., unequal) in the standard deviation
and variability in attributes and aptitude between men and women as an
31
explanation for the dearth of women in the high-paying academic fields of science
and engineering.
6. Summers’ address also asserts that most women are unable or unwilling to
“work” the 80 hours per week demanded by the corporate university, that
generally only women “totally committed to their work” (unmarried and/or
childless women) achieve high-ranking positions.
7. While Shirley Nelson Garner emphasizes the need for individual women to stand
up and to speak out against sexual harassment, sexism, and sex discrimination
(202-206), we might look to the realities chronicled in the fall 2004 report issued
by the American Association of University Women, Tenure Denied: Cases of Sex
Discrimination in Academia. According to Robin Wilson, sex discrimination
cases take an enormous toll on women’s lives and careers. In most cases that
reach trial, universities win, and female faculty who sue spend from $20,000 to
$200,000 on the “nightmarish” process (“Report Shows Difficulty of SexDiscrimination Lawsuits” A10). In “Are Faculty Members Overworked,” Wilson
reports that at Harvard University in 2003, women received only four of thirtytwo tenured job offers in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (A14).
8. Catherine Evans, a pseudonym for an assistant professor in the arts at a major
research university, explains that she left the academy because the “Ivory Tower
and I simply have irreconcilable differences” (C4).
9. Annette Kolodny points to the ways in which senior women now in power in the
academy are those who survived or thrived under the liberal-education university
32
model. For those senior women, adjusting to the corporate model is fraught with
tensions, anxieties, and alienation (84).
10. Susan Gubar details the precarious position senior female faculty occupy in
today’s corporate university where they are expected always to deliver, especially
for others: “Because, in order for us to survive and fashion a niche distinct from
that framed by the Old Boys,” who rarely claimed us as their own, we will need to
discard some of the conflicting demands made on our time” (92).
11. According to Susan Gubar, senior women faculty continue to bear the brunt of
work at the corporate university: “Tenured female professors today are expected
to be able to interrupt research for teaching, and teaching for service activities,
and all those for various domestic exertions--…(the most tiring of them all)
bolstering—presumably with no cost to our health or welfare” (93).
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