25 Years of Struggle and Achievement Remembered

From Center to Department, 1992-May 1997

section written by Sally Kitch
Charged with directing the next phase of development, Dr. Sally Kitch was hired in the fall of 1992 as the new Director of the Center for Women's Studies. She became Chair of the new Department in 1995.

Sally L. Kitch, Director and Department Chair, 1992-2000

Women's Studies Gets a Home

When I arrived on campus to begin my first four-year term as Director of the Center for Women's Studies in September 1992, the carpenters and painters had long ago vacated the scene. No sounds of sawing or drilling could be heard in the Center's new, spacious, light filled offices in University Hall.

Our location directly above the office of the Dean of the College of Humanities spoke volumes about the stature that my predecessors had achieved for Women's Studies in the university community. But the quiet was deceptive. In very important ways, the Center for Women's Studies was still under construction.

Institutional Transformations

Over the five years since my arrival, the faculty and I have worked to transform both the form and meaning of Women's Studies at OSU in numerous ways. And in this construction process, wonder of wonders, the allies have not been only women. Indeed, a legion of men — faculty and administrators — has formed behind us in our forward march. Their motives include a mixture of honest support for a field that has truly earned their respect and admiration for the obvious success of Women's Studies classes and degrees at OSU.

The largest transformative act started almost as soon as I figured out where to park, how to operate the Humanities Information Network, and how to cope with budget reports in which negative numbers somehow represent assets. In my first quarter, the faculty and I started working on the process of transforming the Center for Women's Studies into the Department of Women's Studies.

It seemed an easy enough goal at first. The Women's Studies faculty, the Dean of the College of Humanities, and even the University President were all in favor of the change. In their view, Women's Studies had grown up and earned the right to hire and tenure faculty, a right that would allow us to develop the interdisciplinary core of our field (what some of us called an 'interdiscipline').

But institutional change is never as easy as it looks. In the end, it took three years of document writing, approval seeking, and (yes) political maneuvering to accomplish the feat.

Timing was a key issue. On the one hand, we were anxious to pre-empt the restructuring process that was sweeping the university as a result of massive budget cuts mandated by the state ($80 million over five years). In a climate of shrinkage, a request that appeared to expand a unit might look a little greedy; therefore, we wanted to be ahead of the coming curve of institutional change.

On the other hand, certain realities made delay inevitable. The supportive Dean of the College of Humanities was not reappointed. The Acting Dean was not in a position to spearhead the change, although he was quite willing to conduct discussions in the College Executive Committee. A new Dean had to be searched for, hired, and brought on board. There was an Acting Provost who had her mind on other matters.

Despite our hopes, our request for departmentalization became intertwined with restructuring, so that we ultimately had to justify growth to committees charged primarily with the task of downsizing.

Such institutional complications also resulted in our departmental status proposal's receiving two separate College level reviews, one conducted via the College Executive Committee, in Spring 1994, and one conducted in Autumn 1994 after the arrival of the new Dean, Kermit Hall. Fortunately, Dean Hall was at least as supportive of departmental status for Women's Studies as his predecessor had been, and he made the second College approval process as unimpeachable as he could.

Hall constituted a wonderful review committee, whose members included Paulette Pierce of Black Studies, Arnold Zwicky of Linguistics, Xiaomei Chen of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Studies, Jane Snyder of Classics, and Ken Andrien of History. Andrea Lunsford of English served as its chair. The committee conducted a thorough review and wrote a magnificent report (in my totally objective view) recommending to the College faculty that a Department of Women's Studies be established. The vote of the College faculty in December 1994 was unanimous in favor of our organizational change.

In Winter 1995, we moved on to approval at the Provost's level, which meant a hearing before the Council of Academic Affairs (CAA), a standing faculty committee appointed by the Provost. Our way to the Council was paved both by Vice Provost Alayne Parsons, who was supportive of our proposal, and by Dean Hall, who proved to be very persuasive with the new Provost, Richard Sisson, who had preceded him in office by one year.

That didn't mean we encountered no opposition, however. The subcommittee assigned to make a recommendation to the full Council consisted primarily of people who had barely heard of Women's Studies and needed to be convinced of the legitimacy of our claim for departmentalization. But eventually our most vocal and wary interlocutor on the subcommittee, Chair John Wilkins of Physics, became our most ardent supporter. He took his job very seriously, so seriously, in fact, that he acquired our faculty's publications from the library and read them. I was convinced of his dedication when he asked me during our discussions something rather specific about one of my own books!

It turned out, however, that John's biggest worry was whether we would get the institutional support we needed in order to succeed as a department. Thus, it was at his insistence that we crafted what has turned out to be a very useful Memorandum of Understanding between Women's Studies and the College of Humanities. It was in that document that the College committed four new FTE (full-time permanent faculty positions) to Women's Studies. Ultimately, the CAA approved the subcommittee's recommendation in favor of departmental status for Women's Studies.

Next was a visit with the Committee on Restructuring, chaired by Susan Huntington. That committee was surprisingly amenable to our request for growth, primarily because of Dean Hall's steadfast commitment to Women's Studies' leadership in his vision of the College's future. He convinced the committee that enhancing the status of Women's Studies was a linchpin of Humanities' restructuring.

The final step was approval by the University Senate. Naturally, the chairmanship of the CAA changed between the Council's approval of our departmentalization at their final Spring meeting in 1995 and the first Senate meeting in Autumn 1995. Fortunately, the new CAA chair represented the earlier body's position well as he reported to the Senate.

Dean Hall and I fielded a few thoughtful questions about the legitimacy and track record of Women's Studies, as well as a few hostile questions by a couple of male students who wondered whether Women's Studies was just a special interest group. President Gee, who chaired the Senate meetings, rebuked one of the student interlocutors for his narrow viewpoint, thereby displaying his solid commitment to Women's Studies at OSU. The final vote in the Senate was approximately 80-3 in favor of departmentalization.

The taste of success after three years of effort was very sweet indeed. Women's Studies faculty who attended the meeting — Susan Hartmann, Leigh Gilmore, Linda Bernhard, Mary Margaret Fonow, assorted interested observers, and Humanities Associate Deans Chris Zacher and Martha Garland — celebrated our victory by swigging nonalcoholic champagne, provided by Susan, in the parking lot of Kottman Hall.

Not long afterwards we hosted a large party in our office space and conference room to celebrate our departmental status, and we were delighted to have as guests the Provost, the President, and the Dean of Humanities, among approximately 200 others.

Plans for New Projects

Buoyed by that success, someone (nobody remembers exactly who) decided it was time to celebrate the fact that Women's Studies has been a part of OSU for 25 years. We selected 1997 as the proper year for the celebration, and Claire Robertson composed the winning slogan for the event — Women's Studies: A Presence With a Future.

Becoming a department changed very little about daily life in Women's Studies. We retained the same staff (although the entire staff has turned over since then), the same operating budget, the same offices, degrees, and courses.

But the one major change that did occur makes all the difference. In 1995, we had no full-time faculty in Women's Studies. By Autumn of 1997, we will have five full-time faculty, including myself, and we will be in the midst of a search for one more. The ability to determine our own job descriptions and to hire faculty with interdisciplinary teaching and research capabilities will transform the shape of the Women's Studies curriculum for the future. It is the key to further developing our graduate offerings, including the possibility of a Ph.D. program.

Women's Studies' transformation during the last five years has not been limited to achieving departmental status, however. While composing our departmental proposal, the faculty also reconstructed the M.A. requirements, creating an interdisciplinary required "core" of theory courses, including perhaps the first Introduction to Graduate Studies in Women's Studies in the nation. In addition, the faculty collectively designed courses in "Theorizing Difference," "Theorizing Gender Representation," and "Theorizing Gender, Power, and Social Change."

The graduate core has been in effect now for three years, and by all accounts it is working well for our students. It has also impressed our peers as we have presented the graduate curriculum at national and international conferences.

We are currently tackling the revision of the undergraduate major. At our faculty retreat in 1996, we agreed on a general outline. The Undergraduate Studies Committee is working on details. The changes we have in mind will require the usual approval processes at the university, so there's no telling when the revision might be in effect. But we're hoping to see the changes before our 50th anniversary!

The metaphorical hammers and drills reconstructing Women's Studies at OSU in the last five years have also included the establishment of two student organizations: the Women's Studies Undergraduate Forum, and the Women's Studies Graduate Association. The Forum was founded in 1996 by Dana Greenblatt, Marcie Omo, Lika Souris, Tracy Zitzelberger, Carly Skotis, Angela Banks, and Julie Griswold. Nancy Campbell serves as its faculty advisor. The WSGA was founded by first-year graduate students in 1995. The original leaders included Síle Singleton, Susie Park, and Sharon Ross, although all the students were very active in the initial organizing. Judith Mayne serves as its faculty advisor. Like the faculty, the WSGA has a retreat every year to set an agenda and discuss issues.

Some of our building has been going on in cyberspace. Not only have we reconstructed ourselves on the World Wide Web, but we are engaged in a project to publish a series of anthologies, entitled Reading Women's Lives, that will be marketed via CD-ROM. The idea is a sophisticated variation of a professor-published textbook, but it will consist of a large menu of articles, book chapters, and other readings that OSU faculty have chosen, from which individual instructors of introductory Women's Studies courses across the country can make their own selections.

The credit for our involvement with this project, formerly known as the Electronic Bookshelf, goes to Mary Margaret Fonow. In 1995, she responded to a request by Simon and Schuster, who had determined from their market research that ours was the best Women's Studies program in the nation to direct this project. She negotiated the offer with the publishers and took a leadership role in getting other faculty involved. Leigh Gilmore, Nancy Campbell, Susan Hartmann, and Cathy Rakowski have also made major contributions.

They, along with other Women's Studies faculty and TAs, have identified a dozen or so thematic rubrics — including family and intimate relationships, science and technology, education, religion, women's movements, motherhood and reproduction, work and economic policy, law, and film and mass media — that provide the conceptual framework for the collection. Both core and associated faculty members are currently writing introductions to these themes that will be usable for any selection of articles from the "bookshelf." The database should be available for ordering in early 1998.

Despite all of this construction and reconstruction, the building boom in Women's Studies is far from complete. We will continue to forge linkages with other departments and centers in the College and University. At the moment, we anticipate possible joint appointments to expand the curriculum in the areas of religion and science. The women and religion position may be a distinguished professorship. We are also working on the design of a possible Ph.D. program. Under the leadership of Martha Wharton and Valerie Lee, the Graduate Studies Committee is working to market our master's program more effectively to African American students.

We're also hoping to build upon the relationships with the Columbus community we have formed in the course of planning the current celebration of 25 years of Women's Studies at OSU. Certainly, Rhonda Benedict, the new Program manager and unofficial Queen of the 25th, will be an invaluable asset in that process. Other new staff members include Ada Draughon, Crystal Golden, and Brenda Raver. They have all demonstrated both their commitment to and their competence in working toward our collective goals.

As the history of Women's Studies attests, we are certainly here to stay. The Department of Women's Studies, as well as having a remarkable past, has an exciting future at The Ohio State University. Stay tuned!

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