My father kept one of his old woolen men's bathing suits on his closet shelf. When his daughters laughed hysterically after discovering it while playing hide and seek one day, he said confidently, "If you live long enough, the old fashions will come back." His maxim seems true. Let's look at women's fashions and suits.

In the late seventies after women broke down some "do not enter" barricades and began to move into professional jobs dominated by men, the fashion world urged women to arm themselves by wearing suits. Men's suits. Pinstripes. Pants. Even ties--during one brief fashion season. The mantra of the incursion was if you were going to move into power, you should look as much as possible like the people already there.

The logic was faulty, of course. It sought to de-sex women, permitting leadership only if women were in drag. This strategy of chameleon leadership had other serious consequences. Since most of the people already in power were not only male but overwhelmingly white, it was virtually impossible for women of color to look like the people already there.

Today the fashion cycle my father had referred to has swung back. Glossy magazines are again awash with professional women in suits. There is a twist this time. Women are still clad in jackets and pants, but the ties are gone--and so are the shirts. The jackets are not to be buttoned but to remain seductively open, revealing just the hint of the curve of the breast. Women are now "freer" to enter the professional world but only as highly eroticized entities. Rather than erasing their feminine self as the earlier suiting up period seemed to suggest, today's fashions ask professional women to exaggerate and flaunt their sexual difference.

Fashioning Our Own Statement
This cultural analysis of fashion magazines reveals the unresolved issues in society about women in the work world, especially the work world connected to perceived arenas of power and money. Such ambivalence is troubling since 49% of law school students are now female, 50% of medical school students, 30% of graduate business school students, and 58% of doctoral students. So it seems time to suit ourselves, don't you think?

That is exactly what this issue of On Campus with Women explores in the higher education arena: How might women lead on our terms? What would our leadership look like if we were leading from our own most authentic selves and visions? And how might that leadership result in transformed institutions of learning?

Higher education might not be the fashion center that Fifth Avenue is but it nonetheless suffers a similar residue of not quite knowing what to do with the wide variety of women who have come into the academy in droves over the last four decades. To be transformational leaders in such a situation poses a number of dilemmas for women. By historic definition, a woman leader in the academy is already a potentially transforming element because the institution was never created with her in mind. She disrupts norms by simply being there. Hence the suits to disguise her unsettling presence. Hence the greater challenge for women of color whose presence poses even more questions about what is already in place.

Many women who have emerged as transformational leaders are caught in a tension between two dynamics. On the one hand, they frequently have to work doubly hard, be twice as good at their jobs, and five times as smart as men just to get a footing--and keep it--in the institutional arrangements already in place. At the same time, they need to use their power to re-calibrate or even re-envision the existing structures in order to make higher education a better place to learn, work, and live.

To do the latter, women are going to need to expand upon the current models for leadership, which is what writers like Mary Hartman, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, and Laura Rendón in this special issue on Transformational Leadership address. In Bolman and Deal's helpful book, Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership that Susan Gotsch refers to in her article, they describe four dimension of leadership: structural, political, symbolic, and human resource. I want to suggest four other dimensions that are necessary if women are going to fashion our own model of transformational leadership. The four dimensions are 1) intellectual, 2) cultural, 3) communal, and 4) spiritual.

Dimensions of Power
Intellectual (brain power): Transformational leadership needs to be informed by gathering rich, expansive knowledge from many kinds of sources. The diversified knowledge base now available in the academy because of scholarship by and about people formerly marginalized or erased makes this learning more accessible. Claiming our intellectual capacities, women also need to be able to analyze, critique, glean, assess, and then use new knowledge to lead in ways that meet the complex needs of today's world. Taking ourselves seriously as thinkers and being unabashed about owning up to our intelligence are both crucial elements of this dimension. Such action goes against the grain of a society that continues to illustrate powerful women primarily in seductive, sexual terms.

Cultural (culture power): American Commitments, AAC&U's major initiative on U.S. diversity, argued that to learn well students need a place in the curriculum to explore their own inherited and self-chosen cultural identities. Leading well requires no less. Transformational leaders need know and be able to draw upon the strengths of the multiple communities that have shaped and continued to shape them. Rusty Barceló's and Pat Lowrie's earlier OCWW article on the importance for women of color to be able to draw upon their cultural assets in the academy elaborates on the importance of this dimension. Very particular and specific to individuals, this culture power is necessary for women across all colors and classes if they are to be their best selves as transformational leaders. Claiming this culture power is likely to disrupt more limited expressions of culture currently deemed appropriate and in the process make the academy a more hospitable place for learning and working.

Communal (civic power): If drawing upon cultural power is specific and particular, drawing upon communal power is general and inclusive. Women have been socialized to worry not simply about ourselves but about the welfare of larger units--families, faith communities, schools, neighborhoods. Such socialization is a strength in a world defined locally and globally by an interdependency that is threaded throughout with inequalities. Transformational leaders need to carry this civic power into how they lead in the academy. Such leadership can help infuse civic responsibility as a necessary element of students' learning and a guiding principle for institutional policies. Who benefits? Who gets to decide? Who counts? Communal power disrupts the more typical leadership model that depends disproportionately on solo power.

Spiritual (transcendent power): A recent Higher Education Reserch Institute (UCLA) survey of spirituality in college students found that 73% said reigious and spiritual beliefs had developed their identity. If we surveyed academic leaders, they would likely report similarly. Higher education, and elsewhere, is currently hampered by a diminished model of leadership that typically excludes spirituality as a necessary dimension. Often defined as the guardians of the moral and religious values of a society, women are nonetheless normally asked to lead without drawing upon the very transcendent values that function as both compass (direction) and oasis (renewal) in their lives. By claiming transcendent power as a dimension of their leadership, women can help open up the learning and the quality of the communities on our campuses.

Perhaps my father was not entirely correct about fashions after all. It is true that fashions come in recurring cycles. But it is not true that we must necessarily wear what is on the rack. Instead, women can fashion something that suits us. Suiting ourselves we might be better able to transform academic institutions invested with the responsibility of educating future leaders, and in the process we can model what an equitable, humane work place might look like.