AC_1965_Web

176 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K T R E I C H L E R was very Antiochian: “theoretical perspectives and practical skills.” I was associate director of the pro- gram; the director was Paul Hoover, also an Antiochian. I invited Antioch alumni Michael Fajans (painter) and the Otrabanda Theatre Company to participate in our artist in resi- dence program. Unit One was an excellent place to learn the ways of a large research university. And be- cause annual budget crises regularly provoked efforts to shut down our little program, it served as a train- ing ground for struggles against the powers that be. Unit One survives to this day. I have to skip ahead quickly now. Five years at Unit One, then, at the urging of friends, I applied for the position of dean of students (or in med school lingo “assistant dean for student affairs”) at the Urbana- Champaign campus branch of the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. Very unex- pectedly (because when I dropped off my CV, no one was in the office except a massive Saint Bernard), I made the short list and spent two days in interviews with deans, de- partment heads and clinical fac- ulty—all men. Example: Melody, the dean’s secretary, escorts me to the lab of a physiology professor where a small research assistant is drilling into the brain of a large orange cat. Sparks are flying and Melody turns white.The professor emerges. Melody: Is that cat in pain? Prof: It’s anesthetized. Melody: What about when it wakes up? Prof: It won’t wake up. The interview is cold as the grave until I mention Robin Lakoff, a linguist recently on campus, who studies jokes. He lights up: “Jokes? Can she tell me why I start telling dirty jokes once I’ve had a few? My wife hates it.” He is burbling with cheer as he returns me to the dean’s office. (Many women entering tra- ditional masculine fields will recog- nize these primitive hazing tactics.) The interview with the med school search committee was better, offer- ing a sighting of two women! And a student! Long story short, I got the job even though I’d spent two inter- view days in a rage (evidently they thought I had“poise”) and spent the next five years in the alternate uni- verse of medical education, medical politics and clueless medical sexism. In that eventful period we expanded from a one-year school of basic med- ical sciences to a four-year clinical program that granted the M.D. de- gree at Urbana-Champaign; we also founded the medical scholars pro- gram (though I wasn’t yet part of the “we”), an extraordinary M.D.-Ph.D. program in which exceptional stu- dents can pursue medicine as well as a Ph.D. in virtually any field of study on the vast Urbana-Champaign research campus: in the humanities, the social sciences, media and com- munications, social work, law, com- puter sciences,fine arts, engineering, agriculture, and the life and physical sciences. Once again, however, budget cutbacks (real or trumped up) pro- posed to give our innovative pro- gram the axe. This time it was the College of Medicine in Chicago, our mother ship, that was the villain; they had fought against our expan- sion into a four-year M.D. program and attacked the medical schol- ars program as well, and it did ap- pear that politics and malice were elements in the closure plan.What followed was an intense 18-month struggle with the Chicago campus and the central administration; by the end we had the support of lead- ers of the Urbana-Champaign med- ical community, the med school faculty and student body,basic scien- tists with med scholars in their labs, the UIUC faculty senate, the media, and the Illinois legislature.The medi- cal program and the M.D.-Ph.D. pro- gram survive to this day. To the extent I could work re- search into the complicated and la- bor-intensive demands of being a dean of students, feminist scholar- ship was still my primary research field. Throughout the 1970s—a heady, unrepeatable experience— women everywhere were chang- ing. At the University of Illinois, women faculty, staff and students were seeking to establish a wom- en’s studies program. As at other campuses, there was administra- tive resistance but also resistance from feminist activists who be- lieved that a formal alignment with academia would be disastrous for the broader women’s movement. Meanwhile courses and research proliferated, and in 1978 we orga- nized an ambitious five-day confer- ence on feminist theory—to our knowledge, the first of its kind. Along with established figures like Mary Daly, Sheila Tobias, Gayatri Spivak, Marsha Houston Stanback and Pauline Bart were junior schol- ars who are now stars in their areas of research. In addition to co-edit- ing the papers from this confer- ence ( For Alma Mater: Theory and Practice in Feminist Scholarship ), I had another ambitious collaborative feminist project on the table— A Feminist Dictionary (Cheris Kramarae As dean of students, University of Illinois College of Medicine, ca.1980. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z