Greetings from the Director of the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies, SUNY Cortland
We welcome you to this momentous occasion to reflect upon and celebrate women's achievements in higher education. So, too, we welcome to our campus Dr. Nancy L. Zimpher, the first woman chancellor of the SUNY system, the largest university system of the United States. It is the ideal time to explore the challenges and successes of women in higher education.
This conference is devoted to the assumption that women should be taking on greater leadership roles in the academy. Faculty, professional staff, administrators, and students will address what Bernice Sandler has called "the chilly climate" for women, and offer diverse perspectives from their scholarship and from personal experiences. Discussions during plenary sessions as well as workshops and paper presentations will help to construct an agenda for substantive change in the academy nationwide. Following this three-day intensive conference, we plan regional meetings and an email forum to discuss implementation of the recommendations, working with faculty, staff, administrators, United University Professions (our union), the Chancellor's Office, and the SUNY Office for Diversity and Educational Equity as well as legislative bodies in Albany. We also plan to publish a number of the most innovative papers in the online, academic journal Wagadu: A Transnational Journal of Women's and Gender Studies (wagadu.org), which is supported by SUNY Cortland.
Special thanks go to the Cortland faculty, staff, and student volunteers without whom this conference would not have been possible. We look forward to thought-provoking discussions that will effect meaningful change.
Mechthild Nagel
Director, CGIS; Professor of Philosophy; and Conference Chair
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Greetings from Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher - the first woman to get a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware; SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of History and Secondary Social Studies Education, (retired) at Buffalo State College; President, United University Professions, 1981-1987
I am delighted to pen greetings to this truly significant conference devoted to the celebration of the success of women in the Academy and an examination of the problems still facing us. I congratulate Dr. Mechthild Nagel and her colleagues at Cortland and the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies for conceiving and carrying out the program. I am truly sorry that I cannot be with you, but retirement is a time for investing energies in ways that was not possible before, and so I am off to help organize the Faculty at Temple University for the American Federation of Teachers and then to long planned family sojourn in Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Nagel asked me to share with you some of the history of the Drescher Diversity Fellowships, with particular emphasis on the creation of these pre-tenure awards, and I do so with great pleasure because I consider the program to be one of my most significant contributions to collective bargaining in higher education and the State University of New York in particular.
The contract between United University Professions and the State of New York was completed in 1987. It included significant sums of money allocated for what was called "Labor-Management Cooperation." This meant these funds could not be invested in the needs of the members of the bargaining unit without mutual agreement. Either side could veto the ideas of the other. After the long and tense time before settlement, this could have proved problematic. There was, however, one area where all parties, UUP, SUNY and the State of New York had no difficulty in agreeing. The University needed greater diversity in faculty and staff. Recruitment and retention of women, people of color, and other members of the federally protected classes were woefully inadequate.
The plan to invest the monies in "buying time" for persons in the protected classes, before their tenure decision, was proposed by UUP because in my travels around the University I had met several women of color who had a common problem. They were sent out to recruit students, drafted for committee service, or work on governance, they fitted into two categories and helped make things look a little less bleak. They felt that they could not refuse to serve in these ways because it was important work, worth doing, but it was not letting them get their research and writing done. To a person they reported that if they had had a fellowship or grant from a funding agency to which they owed allegiance, they could, in good conscience, say "no." As it stood, there was no way they could retreat and get the work done with the result that many failed to get tenure or, later, promotion to Professor.
So, when the first Joint Labor Management Committee met to determine how to invest these funds, UUP proposed that these diversity fellowships be established. The concept was accepted by all parties, and the ground rules worked out. We are now in the twenty-first year of its operation, and it has proved to be marvelously successful. (Let me lobby here for the suggestion that the program be expanded to address the problem of promotion for persons in the protected classes. Diversity at all ranks is as necessary in today's university as it was in 1987!) A study of the products of the fellows makes me very proud, particularly when I realize that many of them were produced by single mothers with huge graduate school debts to pay off. Their work would not have been completed, and they would not be with us, inspiring new generations of students to devote their lives to the life of the mind, if this opportunity to retreat from the campus and devote time, without guilt, to research and writing had not been afforded to them.
On a lighter side, let me report one of the experiences I have had when meeting some of the Drescher Fellows. The first time I was invited to a reception for fellows on one campus, a recipient came up to me as I walked into the room and exclaimed: "But you are alive!" " Yes, and still making mischief," I replied.
The impression that many had of the program was that it had been established by a rich old eccentric who left her estate to the program. This bothers me because the fellowships are very much a product of collective bargaining - a point I will happily make in my work at Temple next week. The diversity fellowships use money that could have been invested in other ways to the benefit of the faculty and staff of SUNY. Instead, colleagues agreed that it was vital to a first class, modern university to have a diverse faculty and staff, and so they agreed to use their negotiated money in this way. In all of the years of its operation, I believe that there has been only one complaint that he had been cheated by someone who was ineligible to apply.
In closing, let me wish you great success in your deliberations on the matter of Women in Higher Education. We must be ever vigilant to the dangers of amnesia and apathy. We must be ever cognizant of those who have gone before us, and solicitous and nurturing of those who come behind.
Respectfully,
Nuala McGann Drescher
