With a deep weariness in her voice, a long-time faculty member sighed, "I just don't want to have to go back to tackling this sort of thing anymore." Then she described a recent incident.

1972 Redux
A cluster of faculty members teaching a first-year honors program gathered in the auditorium for the inaugural open forum for all the sections. As faculty and students filed into the room, female faculty sat mingled with their classes; male faculty, by contrast, lined up together at the front of the room. The male facilitator then introduced each of the men as "Dr." but introduced all the women by their first names, devoid of any professional prefix. During the next hour of discussion, when female faculty members commented, their male colleagues challenged their remarks. Comments by male colleagues were never questioned.

Thus the 2003 fall semester began, and the clear delineation of who held real authority was mapped out unmistakably to the students.

For those of us who began teaching before Title IX was passed in 1972, this kind of treatment was the norm. Many of us spent decades challenging such pernicious norms. One expression of our success was the passage and implementation of Title IX, making sex discrimination illegal in educational institutions. To honor both the real and symbolic importance of Title IX on its thirtieth anniversary, On Campus with Women dedicated this year's issues to exploring what difference Title IX has made in institutional life and in the lives of women and men.

	New OCWW Editor
	The Association of American Colleges and Universities is pleased to announce it has hired Karen Rowan as the new editor of On Campus with Women and as program assistant within our women's office. read more >>

Pernicious Norms
With this double issue of On Campus with Women, we complete our year's review of Title IX and the slow march to full equality in education for girls and women. As the experience of the weary faculty member above reveals, sometimes the march feels as if it has gone in a complete circle, ending not far from where it all began: in pernicious norms dependent upon the reassertion of male authority. We learn, for example, in OCWW's Data Connection that women who have babies early in their careers pay a professional penalty not exacted of men. Or in that same data page that preferential access to more powerful and well-paid positions continues to be disproportionately allocated to men across the spectrum of academic institutional life.

Likewise, the University of Arizona's Millennium Report uncovers a challenging and hostile climate for women faculty and staff and faculty and staff of color, and the newly released study of the status of women at Duke University indicates that, since 1991, the percentage of female assistant professors has flattened like a monitor recording the death of a patient. In a chilling example of 1972 Redux, Duke women students also report, "Being 'cute' trumps being smart for women in the social environment."

Leveraging Lessons from the Past
Countering the drift back to the old hierarchies of exclusion is the visible, measurable progress toward equality achieved over the past three decades. This issue of OCWW helps elucidate some of those high water marks. In the story of those accomplishments are some lessons about how to preserve the victories and prevent backsliding. The lessons come in six linked pairs:

1. Historical consciousness and intellectual foundations


2. Organizing and ally-building


3. Structures and policies


4. Political will and leadership


5. Monitoring and reporting


6. Vision and vigilance

Historical consciousness and intellectual foundations: When the women's movement emerged at the end of the 1960s, it emerged largely without any links to earlier efforts by women to organize on their own behalf. Insofar as it ignored its own history, the second wave women's movement began its march forward with a limp rather than with a leap. Understanding the legacies of the past, both those that analyzed the sources of discrimination and those that documented women's agency, ultimately became a means of empowerment for women and enlightenment for men. Hence, one of the distinguishing marks of the women's movement of the past decades has been its success in recovering the history about women and gender in all its complexities and embedding those narratives in the curriculum and in scholarship for all to examine.

This issue of OCWW featuring the evolution of one women's studies program at the University of Maryland offers testimony to the importance of making gender a focus of intellectual inquiry within the academy. Similarly, Cathy Middlecamp's article describes the University of Wisconsin's system's Curriculum Reform Institute that reformulates the content of science courses by asking, "What does chemistry have to do with the lives of our students, especially women and people of color?"

Organizing and ally-building: As OCWW's Fall 2002 issue documented, Title IX would never have been passed if women had not organized to make it happen. To do that, women sought to make allies with men who were in a position to redefine norms and laws. This issue of OCWW similarly documents strategies at the Ohio State University, for example, to organize a women's commission, muster broad institutional support, and ultimately create more equitable opportunities for women. The National Initiative for Women in Higher Education challenges readers in this issue to do the same in order to tackle the persistent problem of differential progress for women of color as faculty and administrators.

Structures and policies: What gives academic institutions their shape and determines much about the quality of life of people who work and study within them are the structures and policies that govern everyday occurences. Achieving gender equity is less about changing individual attitudes than it is about changing the ecological systems of which individuals are a part. Thus it matters that the University of Arizona has created a Millennium Project Oversight Committee to implement priorities and monitor progress; that Duke University has instituted a paid child care leave; and that a new website to coordinate resources for women across Ohio State University's campus has been put in place. It mattered as well that the University of Maryland secured tenure lines within women's studies as they were building their program. The women's studies department has successfully tenured ten women and increased the tenured women of color in the process.

Political will and leadership: Structures and policies lay inert without the political will and leadership to give them muscle and movement. No better example of both can be found than in Jim Lewis' description of the determination of the department of mathematics at the University of Nebraska to improve the climate for women. They did so by articulating clearly defined recruitment plans to increase the number of women faculty and the number of women in the graduate program. They first set 30 percent as their goal for women graduate students but exceeded that and range from 42-48 percent. At the University of Maryland, the impetus for allocating tenure lines to women's studies was the result of a university-wide review of the climate for women initiated by its president a number of years ago. Leadership and political courage need to surface at all levels to inaugurate and sustain progress.

Monitoring and reporting: If we have learned anything from Title IX and the Supreme Court decision in the Michigan cases, we have learned how data can drive change. It has been critical that we were able to amass reliable data over time disaggregated by gender and race. Without such documentation, evidence of discrimination can be erased and progress obscured. Disaggregated data also permits us to know if generalizations hold across categories. Such accumulated data have punctuated myths and illuminated where inequities persisted in the University of Arizona Millennium Project, the Duke University Women's Initiative, and the monitoring of women's status at the University of Washington. But monitoring alone is insufficient without recommended actions and accompanying resources to implement changes. That is the promise inherent in the Arizona and Duke studies.

Vision and vigilance: The Old Testament says, "Without vision, the people will perish." Where do we need to go in higher education and why? For what ultimate purpose? The lessons of Title IX and of the recent Supreme Court decisions in the Michigan cases make it clear that actions linked to powerful, comprehensive visions of an inclusive, equitable communities can make a profound difference. Devoid of vision, even the most well-meaning actions can jangle in disconnected disarray. If one is guided by a vision of empowering women students to claim their full intellectual capabilities and men students to perceive women as intellectual equals, then the attempt by those male professors in the opening paragraphs to reestablish a 1972 hierarchy of male authority subverts both a democratic and an educational covenant.

But such subversions are often so subtle. So apparently civil. So seemingly small in scale. And the collusion can be so complete. Resisting the gravitational pull back to 1972 norms can be exhausting--and demoralizing. But as Ida B. Wells warned, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Even if we might be weary, we all, men as well as women, need to take a deep breath and drive 1972 behavior back into history where it rightfully belongs. This is a new world we are building, and such pernicious norms have no place in it.