Faculty apathy for the new women's studies program
Though the proposal for the new women's studies program passed through the faculty council without much opposition, Lane also did not remember there being a great feeling of commitment on the part of either the faculty or the students. She hypothesizes that the reason there was so little opposition was that those battles for equality had already been fought by African Americans. The new program had similar rationale and purpose to the already-approved African American programming.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Mary Turner Lane, September 9 and 16, 1986; May 21, 1987; October 1 and 28, 1987. Interview L-0039. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
May is when we finished the report. September is when it went to the
Faculty Council.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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And it was accepted. The recommendation was accepted.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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Yes.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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A committee was established to search for a director?
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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Yes, but the recommendation that the Faculty Council accepted was the set
of recommendations that came out of the report, essentially, which as
you go back and look at it, it very loose and not very….
- PAMELA DEAN:
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To develop a program [laughter] .
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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To develop a program. There are no strong guidelines in there except that
there be three core courses on the model of the existing American
Studies Program which would be interdisciplinary in nature. So, yes, the
report was adopted. As I recall, Dean Gaskin, who was dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences, was then asked to appoint a search
committee for the director. The understanding that came from both Dean
Gaskin and Chancellor Taylor was that the director should come from
existing faculty. Well, existing faculty of women, at that time, would
be a very small faculty of women. Ninety percent of whom would be junior
faculty.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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Let me back up just a little bit. Why, what was the rationale for
selecting within existing faculty, do you think?
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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I don't know. Maybe it had to do with money, I'm
not sure.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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Might it represent a tentativeness of commitment?
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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I think it could. I still think that the men who were making the
administrative decisions on this knew so little about this and found it
to be such a new idea, on this two hundred year old, men's
campus, that, yes, they were tentative about it. I'm sure
that the idea was that we'll start small. There's
no great pressure, and there really wasn't any great
pressure. We didn't have students marching on this. Faculty
women were at such junior ranks that they could not assert themselves
too strongly on this. So, yes, I think there was a notion that
we'll start small and if they can pull it off, fine, and if
they can't, we haven't invested too heavily in
it.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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On the reverse of that, I think there's a question. There was
no great pressure for this? Why did it go through? I don't
recall in the records of the meetings that I found in the archives, or
in the Daily Tarheel, any really overt opposition to
this.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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I think that the great battles had been won for blacks on this campus.
The great battles in civil rights had been for blacks. And now here were
women who were asking, really, for what blacks had already asked for and
gotten. And that was what we were calling at that time, compensatory
education. That was the term that we used in my building, the School of
Education. That was the great area of research and writing and program
development, focused primarily on children. Children who went through
their whole public school life without ever learning anything about
their black heritage, their black history, and whatever. We presented,
part of our presentation of a Women's Studies Program was as
compensatory education. I used that term because it was part of what I
was accustomed to.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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And that is a concept that you find in those reports, the recommendation
keeps coming up. There was so little known in this area.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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There was no way for men to deny the fact that women graduated from
college without knowing anything more about women's place in
western civilization or society in general than they'd come
into college with. The literature had been proving greatly that they
weren't learning this in high school. So here we had college
graduates who would go out knowing nothing either
about the contribution of women or the development of self or the
socialization of gender. We were also beginning to talk about role
models. We began to talk about this with the blacks. We said black
children have no role models that would enhance their being and
becoming. So we could say exactly the same thing about women. So I think
that part of the liberal heritage of this University was awakened when
women began to say….
- PAMELA DEAN:
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Me too.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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Me too. That's exactly what we were saying. That it would be
less than appropriate for this great University to limit the offerings
or to deny the fullest education possible to the student body that was
now in place. We still were not having increasing numbers of women but
that was an appropriate time. I'm looking for the one aspect
of the rationale that we finally adopted because I think that emphasizes
that point very clearly there.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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I think that comes through, particularly in that section that Joan Scott
wrote.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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Yes, that was the appendix. This was the rationale for our
recommendation, rationale for recommending a Women's Studies
Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. And the first statement was, "There
has been neglect, bias, and omission in the fields of study and
traditional disciplines which should include the study of
women." And we certainly were able to support that, and there
was no question about that. The second strong statement that we made
was, "A goal basic to any liberal arts curriculum should be the
development of the full capacity of the individual student."
And it was easy to say that the traditional
liberal arts program is incomplete. And we elaborated on that. We also
made the point that because the systematic, scholarly study of women had
not been fostered, then there really was no accurate presentation of
women. And what there was, was often filled with inaccuracies and gross
exaggerations. And then we were able to turn to what was going on in
society. There was a general concern about the need for social change in
society where women should and would be playing new and more significant
roles. So I think that this appeal, really, to fairness had something to
do with it. In our getting the foot in the door.
- PAMELA DEAN:
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Right, that explains why you were able to get it passed at all.
- MARY TURNER LANE:
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To get the foot in the door. Now that's being fair. Now what
happens to you after you get the foot in the door is something else.
[laughter] Everything's
equal, or so the assumption was on the part of the administration.