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UC Davis English Department Sued Again
Margit Stange, formerly Assistant Professor of English at UC
Davis, has filed a federal lawsuit claiming that gender bias, ageism,
anti-feminist backlash, and retaliation for her advocacy of gender equity,
motivated eight professors to block her 1996 tenure bid in the troubled
department. Although Stange had the support of half the department's
voting members (including, she asserts, all the tenured women and the
active experts in her specialty fields), and also had rulings in her favor
from the Ad Hoc Committee and the Committee on Academic Personnel, the
Davis administration adamantly backed Stange's adversaries.
External evaluators also endorsed Stange's qualifications,
praising her interdisciplinary feminist approach to American women's
literature and citing the importance of her book (Personal Property:
Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women, Johns Hopkins University
Press). But a group of departmental critics has repeatedly demanded that
Stange switch to traditional scholarship, stop focusing on gender, and
include male authors in her research. These and other complaintsÑincluding
unfounded allegations of uncollegiality and inaccessibilityÑare reflected
in the department chair's very negative tenure review letter. This is a
document deemed unrepresentative, unsubstantiated, irrelevant and
inadmissible by the Committee on Academic Personnel, the Committee on
Privilege and Tenure, and by the Ad Hoc Committee, yet Vice Provost Carol
Tomlinson-Keasey cited the departmental sentiment it reflects as very
significant in denying Stange tenure.
Stange was hired in 1989 to fill a newly-created post in
inter-disciplinary approaches to women's literature. During the 1980's a
series of program reviews, student petitions and Affirmative Action
reports revealed the English Department to be intellectually intolerant,
hostile to women, and gravely lacking in women and minority members. A
1987 EEOC complaint of gender and age bias filed by Assistant English
Professor Carolyn Burke was settled by the University. Subsequent reform
efforts brought in women and feminists, but in their letters supporting
Stange, English Department faculty describe continuing bias in matters
ranging from course loads and personnel evaluations to hallway behavior.
In 1996 six women graduate students left the program, two of them filing
a formal protest against departmental sexism. In an unsuccessful 1997
petition to UC President Atkinson, thirty-seven Davis campus faculty urged
an external review of Stange's tenure case.
The University has hired a team headed by San Francisco attorney
Michael Lucey to augment in-house counsel; Stange is represented by Dan
Siegel. Both sides are preparing for depositions with trial scheduled for
March, 1999. Go to
www.stange-support.org for
information and links to media coverage, or phone the
Margit Stange Support Committee at 510-527-4332.
-wage@wage.org-