Jane Roland Martin. Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women’s Hopes and Reforming the Academy, Routledge. 2000.

Deborah Tannen. The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War on Words. Ballantine Books, 1999.

In 1938, Virginia Woolf asked “Shall we join the procession of educated men? Where is it leading us?” In her book Three Guineas, Woolf discussed whether or not women should enter the professions, and be educated for those professions in a university. She concluded that if women were to enter the academy and remain “civilized beings; human beings, that is, that wish to prevent war,” the academy would have to change profoundly.

Sixty years later some feminist literary critics and philosophers claim that feminism is now a part of the academy. Has the academy undergone that profound change? Or did feminists sell out to get in?

Much has changed since Woolf’s time. In the U.S., women are now 36 percent of overall faculty. Princeton University now has a female president. Presidents of several major universities have met and pledged to investigate and change the adverse circumstances of female professors as MIT has done (see Spring 2001 Newsletter).

However, some things stay the same. Faculty women tend to accumulate at lower ranks and at less prestigious institutions. Averaged over all fields, 58 percent of all instructors are female and 21 percent of full professors are female.[1] A recent report says, “Less than ten percent of full professors in the sciences today are women, despite the fact that women have been earning more than one-quarter of the Ph.D.s in science for 30 years.”[2] And, we don’t have a lot of confidence that universities will act on their pledges of improvement. Even MIT—although it has improved circumstances for women in some areas—has no female full professor in its math department. Moreover, a chilly climate for women appears to have contributed to the recent suicide of an MIT undergraduate.[3]

Women are filtered out at every level of academe. The educational environment (including classroom, curriculum, and campus culture) that is part of the filter is one of the themes of Martin’s book. A second theme is estrangement from their own experiences, from occupations traditionally considered “women’s occupations,” and from other women. One example that might be of particular interest to WAGE members is the separation of feminist scholars and scholarship from their activist roots.

Martin describes how feminist scholars have criticized feminist activists and early consciousness-raising groups as essentialist, that is, assuming that women have an “immutable, eternal essence or nature.” Feminist scholars are also separated from women outside their specialties, in particular from feminist activists outside the academy, by esoteric language and the separation of theory from practice. In Martin’s view, these are part of the price that women pay to enter the academy.

Another part of the price of admission to the academy is enduring the chilly climate for women, both for students and faculty. Martin’s discussion of chilly climate mentions some examples of unconscious bias, but it might also have mentioned the considerable literature on unconscious bias summarized by Virginia Valian in Why So Slow? (One example of unconscious bias was exposed by Susan Ervin-Tripp’s analysis of letters written to solicit tenure recommendations for Jenny Harrison.) Instances of unconscious bias may be one of the more easily remedied phenomena of the sort discussed in the final section on transformation. Moreover, unconscious bias from well-meaning parties may help to make possible biased actions from those actively opposed to the presence of women. For example, those who don’t find it surprising for women to fail to continue as students or faculty, will not think to ask if there is an individual or an institutional cause—as WAGE members have seen.

I think that the most important and interesting contribution that Martin’s book makes is her identification of an entity she calls “the education–gender system.” We can view male-oriented curricula, male-dominated faculty, the filtering of women, antipathy toward feminist scholarship, academic estrangement from women and their occupations and experiences, harassment of female scholars, chilly classroom climate, and the rest as separate phenomena—or we can think of them as parts of one interconnected system, the education–gender system. Considering them in this way suggests that they are not independent of each other. For example, Martin points out that the chilly climate for women inhibits asking the “wrong” questions, which affects the way teaching as well as research is done.

Martin takes an “immigrant interpretation” of women’s situation in the academy, thinking of women as strangers in a promised land—a land with customs predicated on estrangement from women. In the final section of the book she discusses how these customs could be transformed. This is a very difficult task, and her suggestions for how it may be done concern individual and collective action rather than institutional remedies. She doesn’t give a reason for doing so, but one reason may be that colleges and universities have done studies, documented cases of inequity, bias, or harassment, and sometimes even suggested remedies. Sometimes these result in movement toward equity, but often it seems they rest on the shelf or in the file cabinet. Reports of serious faculty offences like harassment or plagiarism can remain for years in an administrator’s office collecting dust.[4] Sometimes the dust is disturbed and the file is read—if those aware of previous offenses are also aware of later ones. It’s frightening to hear of individual cases like UCLA professor Malcolm Nicol’s harassment of his graduate student Diane Reifschneider. It’s nightmarish to hear that the same person has harassed before and nothing was done to prevent it from happening again.

One of Martin’s suggestions that might help prevent such reccurrences is the creation of feminist fikas on campus. Fika is a Swedish word for an activity involving “coffee, cake, and conversation,” which sounds something like morning and afternoon tea for students, faculty, and staff. At this spring’s WAGE meeting Susan Ervin-Tripp said that there used to be more communication between women in the faculty and on the staff. Such communication seems essential for both parties. Moreover, students and post-docs can profit from the memories of faculty and staff. Newcomers can be warned about those harassers and plagiarizers whose files are collecting dust. All can compare notes on how they are treated—which is how some legal actions against UC concerning gender or racial bias have started.

Martin describes a feminist fika as creating an atmosphere that is safe for discussions of chilly climate incidents, great and small—not as “wallowing in victimhood,” but as a possible source of collective knowledge and action. Certainly it seems as if individual reports are often discounted or disbelieved, so one wonders what would happen if the report of an individual was followed by a collective action such as a meeting of her supporters with the appropriate administrator. (As we know, meeting with an administrator doesn’t always result in changes. The Women’s Association at Lawrence Livermore National Lab pursued this strategy for years. However its work did not go to waste—the salary data collected by the Women’s Association is now fueling Singleton, et al. v. UC Regents.)

Deborah Tannen’s book The Argument Culture complements Martin’s book in certain ways. Among other things, it provides an account of the litigation system that may be the next step for women after the chilly climate of academe described by Martin. The main theme of Tannen’s book is the argument culture that “urges us to approach the world . . . in an adversarial frame of mind.” According to the argument culture, “the best way to settle disputes is litigation” and the best kind of litigation is adversarial rather than truth-seeking. In class and in academic research one builds a reputation by attacking previous work rather than understanding and refining it. News stories should present two polarized viewpoints—whether or not there is in fact substantial agreement or if one view has a small group of supporters.

Those who have had cases against UC are all too familiar with the “scorched-earth” tactics of UC lawyers, who use every opportunity to harass the opposing side (think of the Ryans’ case—which included a nine-hour deposition so harrowing that it was followed by attempted suicide). Tannen sees such tactics as an outcome of the increased emphasis, due to the argument culture, on “‘zeal in advocacy’ as ‘the fundamental principle of the law of lawyering.’” These phrases occur in a 1983 code of professional conduct. Similar phrases occur as early as 1908, but now it seems that lawyers are interpreting zeal as meaning they should be loyal to their clients and win at all costs, including moral costs. Tannen does point out that the District of Columbia Bar and the New York State Court of Appeals have become aware that these tactics are undesirable and have developed codes to curb them. My brief Web search suggested that lawyers are now talking about professional conduct and that some frown upon scorched-earth tactics.

The U.S. system of litigation compounds the problem by a structure focused on winning rather than seeking a version of events that is as accurate as possible. Other systems of justice, for example, those in France, may afford more accurate interpretations of events.

Unfortunately Tannen’s book doesn’t suggest remedies for these particular problems. Concern in the legal profession is certainly a welcome sign, but many of us probably wish it would occur to UC lawyers—or at least their bar associations—today, if not years ago.