The Intellectual Architects of Inclusive Institutions

American University in Cairo. Photo by Ahmad El-Nemr.

In the early 1960s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology bolstered its efforts to welcome women into science and technology with the construction of Stanley A. McCormick Hall, its first dormitory for women. The building’s name both shields and points toward the identity of its benefactor and intellectual architect: Katharine Dexter McCormick, a 1904 MIT graduate who donated the building in honor of her late husband because she saw the creation of permanent housing for women as essential to securing their place at MIT. Katharine McCormick believed what MIT more recently reaffirmed in the 1999 report of its Committee on Women Faculty—that an institution’s physical structures (such as available laboratory space) can suggest subtle and overt biases that perpetuate inequity and imperil inclusivity.

Of course, the task of building inclusive institutions involves more than constructing new dorms and creating new labs. It means revisiting a range of norms, structural and cultural, visible and invisible, that constitute the building blocks of higher education. These norms inflect the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators alike. Like the physical environments of many campuses, they often lie on foundations set long ago, and sometimes fail to accommodate or build on the diverse identities, experiences, and knowledges women and men bring to the learning enterprise. As AAC&U’s recent report A Measure of Equity: Women’s Progress in Higher Education suggests, the time has come to rethink these structures and rebuild our institutions according to a blueprint of inclusive excellence. Women, who are moving into leadership roles in greater numbers than ever before, are positioned to be lead architects in this project.

This issue’s authors share their drafts for a new and sustainable design for twenty-first-century higher education. Denise Bauer explores how the current generation of women leaders is exercising feminist leadership, while colleagues at Purdue University examine Purdue’s work to make its campus inclusive of women of all identities. Reinforcing the idea that women’s leadership is key to cultural transformation, Donna Lisker describes Duke University’s initiative to build leadership capacities among women students, and Ding-Jo Currie shares an innovative leadership training program for women administrators of color. Finally, Lupe Gallegos-Diaz asserts that institutional leadership is essential to creating meaningful change. In aggregate, these authors indicate how leadership by women can become leadership for all women and men.

Indeed, women’s leadership will be essential if institutions of higher education are to redesign themselves as the inclusive and collaborative educational environments our nation’s changing demographics and complex modern challenges require. Audre Lorde famously said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and her observation rings true in at least one sense. In order to rebuild higher education to best serve our diverse nation, we will require an architectural team whose ideas and experiences reflect our nation’s great diversity. Much like Katharine Dexter McCormick, higher education’s new leaders, both women and men, have an opportunity to lay the cornerstone to this new sustainable foundation.