BY ANNE SISSON RUNYAN
Past Committee W chairs Alice Rossi and the author.
As Committee W (the AAUP’s Committee on the Women in the Academic Profession) marks its hundredth year since its founding, it is worth reflecting on its role in the age of intersectionality. The rise of feminist intersectional scholarship and activism discussed in my piece on “What is Intersectionality and Why Does It Matter?” in the November–December 2018 issue of Academe on “Gender on Campus” has implications for how inequities (based on gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation origin) need to be addressed in relation to each other in the AAUP and the academy today.
On the occasion of Committee W’s seventy-fifth anniversary, it was noted in a May–June 1989 Academe article on “The Status of Women” that after its first decade animated by the women’s suffrage movement of “first wave” feminism, Committee W was “quiescent” until 1970 when it inaugurated its current name. Its renaissance was reflective of the ferment produced by the civil rights and “second wave” feminist movements, prompting then chair of the reactivated Committee W Alice Rossi to report a “bitter sense of frustration and impatience” with the lack of progress on women’s issues in AAUP. She argued that the Committee had to become much more vociferous and cease doing “business as usual in old familiar ways” when it comes to the massive inequalities women face in academe. From then on, Committee W did promulgate a range of policy statements, starting with condemning anti-nepotism policies that precluded spousal hires, promoting maternity leave, and protecting part-time workers—problems identified in the first two reports of Committee W in the early twentieth century yet unacted upon for fifty years—and later tackling such issues as sexual harassment and assault while contributing to reports and legal actions on, for example, pay equity, pensions, and abuses of Title IX. Mary W. Gray provides an account of the Committee’s work in her May–June 2015 Academe article.
Understandably but problematically, “women” have constituted a homogenous category in much of such policy work, which until more recently focused on barriers to (white, middle class) women in the professoriate posed by their roles as heteronormative wives and mothers (although at least two founders of Committee W in 1918 were in a “Boston marriage” or surreptitious lesbian partnership). Racial, sexual-orientation, and non-normative-gender discrimination, accounting for the exclusion from and greater risk in academe for many who identify as women, were either not interwoven or made central concerns. However, AAUP Policy Documents and Reports, eleventh edition (the “ Redbook,” 353), credits Committee W, at its formation and in its post-1970 reincarnation, with the creation of the AAUP’s special Council Committee on Discrimination in 1971, leading to the Association Council’s adoption of a formal policy statement On Discrimination initially in 1976 and modified by 1995 to read:
The Association is committed to use its procedures and to take measures, including censure, against colleges and universities practicing illegal or unconstitutional discrimination, or discrimination on a basis not demonstrably related to the job function involved, including, but not limited to, age, sex, disability, race, religion, national origin, marital status, or sexual orientation.
Although this “laundry list” is reflective of an understanding of multiple vectors of discrimination (missing but potentially encompassing discrimination against trans people) in the wake of feminist and anti-racist politics and scholarship leading to the concept of “intersectionality” by the late 1980s, the challenge remains for the AAUP (and the other institutional sources of its information) to foreground the relations between those vectors in the Association’s mindset, organization, and data. With respect to the latter, intersectional analysis requires greater disaggregation of data on, for example, ranks, salaries, and contingent labor by, at minimum, gender in combination with race to identify differing types and levels of discrimination experienced by white women, women of color, and men of color. In the absence of such fine-grained distinctions (and preferably even finer based on the intersections of additional vectors of discrimination), it makes it difficult for connecting the work of various committees and to produce future policy statements that identify who is at most risk and where energies need to be most focused to raise the status of all. Indeed, as a 2018 Chronicle Review piece on “The Awakening: Women and Power in the Academy” intimates, women’s experiences in academe cannot be understood or adequately addressed without reference to their race, class, sexuality, age, national origin, and so on. Thus, in an age of intersectionality, it is worth echoing Rossi’s call that “the time is now past for doing business as usual in the old familiar ways.”
Note: I wish to thank Joerg Tiede, AAUP’s historian; Michael Ferguson, managing editor of Academe; and Tina Kelleher of Towson State University and member of Committee W, which I recently chaired, for providing me with historical materials for this reflection.
Guest blogger Anne Sisson Runyan, professor of political science and former head of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, has served as chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession and published widely in the field of feminist international relations. Her latest book is Global Gender Politics (2018).
