Women, Work and the Academy: Strategies for Responding to 'Post-Civil Rights Era' Gender Discrimination

Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Sandra Morgen

Unfinished Business: Understanding and Promoting Gender and Race Equity in Higher Education

Sandra Morgen, University of Oregon

Gender and race equity are complex, related goals that remain "unfinished business" in higher education. Progress toward these goals has been uneven and nonlinear, and even the goal evokes contestation from some quarters in what has been called the "post-civil rights" era. Affirmative action as policy has endured relentless political and legal assault, and the culture, procedures and effects of affirmative action and diversity offices on campuses differ substantially. Indeed, it is common to hear colleagues on campuses across the country refer to their affirmative action offices as more about protecting the university than as engines for promoting substantive diversity and institutional transformation.

As a researcher whose expertise includes the study of organizations, and as someone who has been involved in a wide variety of efforts to promote gender and racial equality within and outside higher education, it is clear to me that much remains to be done if colleges and universities are to equally value men and women; people from different racial, ethnic and class backgrounds; and ways of knowing and producing knowledge that honor and emerge from the broader social locations that "diversity" is meant to encompass institutionally. Moreover, as the director of a women's research center at the University of Oregon for the past fourteen years, I have had the privilege of working with many faculty, staff and students who share the vision of higher education as a site that has the potential to realize the dream of diversity, despite the many dilemmas of difference that create challenges along the way.

In this presentation I want to share some of those challenges, and a few things I have learned along the way about what it takes (or will take) to move forward toward greater equity during a period of increasingly scarce resources (especially at public institutions), political backlash, and cohort/generation change (many of those who pioneered these changes and for whom institutional transformation was a political, as well as an individual concern have already or are now retiring). Specifically I will discuss the following:

What is the role of units such as women's (or feminist!) research centers and institutes as part of an institutional strategy to promote greater gender (and racial) equity at a research university?
What is the value of creating interdisciplinary and collaborative research opportunities and communities as part of a larger strategy to foster greater equity? To what extent has this helped to expand and change definitions of excellence in research? to support scholars whose research and/or teaching focuses on gender? to incubate innovative research/teaching/policy/public education connections?
What are some of the effects of an institutional (and state) fiscal crisis on equity goals, and how can units such as a women's research center, or a women's and gender or ethnic program weather these challenges?

In an institution such as the University of Oregon, declining state revenues have led the administration to make up for lost revenues from private donors and from faculty research activity, especially research that brings in federal and other grants and contracts with indirect costs. "Fiscal realities" have a very mixed effect on institutional equity goals. In this kind of climate there is a strong incentive to channel institutional resources to departments and faculty which have the greatest likelihood of generating "big money" from private donors, business partnerships and federal grants and contracts. Overall, at least at the University of Oregon, this has meant a reinforcement of some dimensions long recognized as aspects of a "chilly climate," especially for faculty who are not seen as potential money makers. There are a series of subtle and not so subtle effects this has on everything from the definition of positions for searches to hiring and retention.

It is important to analyze how neoliberal values increasingly saturate colleges and universities and to explore the effects of these institutional changes on the goal of gender and racial equity. Understanding these consequences and then working to make them visible in ways that can be tied to core aspects of the institution's mission is crucial in this period which is more than "post civil rights." It is also a period that, in some ways, is "post activist state," (at least when it comes to equality and social justice. I will conclude by talking about a few strategies we are pursuing at the Center for the Study of Women in Society to support and generate research, research opportunities, and intellectual communities that can sustain individuals and units whose work embodies and upholds core liberal (in the sense of liberal arts) values and transformative potential.