Creating a Concentration of One's Own

This spring 12 freshmen declared a concentration that no other student before them had. The intrepid freshmen signed up to test drive the Women's Studies program four months after the concentration was voted into existence. The product of eight years of lobbying and planning, the concentration received only one dissent--from Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield--as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) approved its first new concentration in three years.

The only question mark that remained at the November meeting, however, was whether the concentration would succeed in attracting undergraduates. Now, six months later, administrators say they are pleased with the progress thus far.

The University has appointed a chairman, Oxford scholar Olwen Hufton--to whom they offered tenure last summer--and a head tutor, Soyna Michel. Five of the 12 students in the program are full concentrators and the other seven are joint majors. According to administrators, the concentration is negotiating for a new home.

"We are very pleased with the numbers, for someone who is a freshman to choose a new concentration takes a lot of courage," Michel says.

Even so problems remain. All of the concentrators are female, something administrators hope will soon change. One man was admitted to the honors-only concentration this year, but turned down the offer.

More critically, departments other than Women's Studies must offer courses in the field as Women's Studies is only a degree conferring committee and cannot appoint faculty members.

"Women's Studies depends for its life on the willing co-operation of the other departments," says Professor of Romance Langauges and Comparative Literatures Susan R. Suleiman, who chaired the Women's Studies committee for three years. "It is important that departments live up to their vote." She says that the concentration could not have passed eight years ago because there were not enough appropriate course offerings in other departments.

According to Barbara Solomon, a member of the committee since its inception, "it wasn't until female faculty members started assuming leadership positions on the committee two or three years ago, that talk of an undergraduate concentration began."

But recently the History Department denied Assistant Professor of History Catherine Clinton promotion to an associate professorship. "Any history department which doesn't have a Women's Studies professor, looks as ridiculous as one that doesn't teach the French Revolution," Suleiman says, adding that pressure to keep up with other universities would ensure that the Harvard history department would have a scholar on the history of women in America.

"I trust my historian colleagues," she adds.

More than any other interdisciplinary concentration, Women's Studies marks a significant change in academic attitudes at Harvard, which has been exceded only when the University adopted an Afro-American Studies Department, professors say.

According to Professor of Sociology Emeritus David Reissman, both concentrations have "importance both as a symbol and as an intellectual discipline."

But the absence of dissenters at the Faculty vote--which many attribute to the extreme opposing position Mansfield espoused during the Faculty debate--is in stark contrast to the heated debate on campus concerning an Afro-Am department. Only after student strikes and a takeover of University Hall did students sway the faculty on the creation of a new department.

Professors say changes in strategy, and tactics are responsible for faculty unanimity on the issue. "We allayed people's fears," Michel says. "It wasn't so foreign, not something put on from the outside, but something which came from within."

The proposal was especially palatable because it "very much fits the Harvard conception" of a concentration, carefully modeled on the Social Studies and History and Literature concentration, Michel adds.

But Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence says the Women's Studies proposal appealed to him because it was grounded in academics, not feminist ideology. He says there are two types of Women's Studies programs around the country: feminism studies, and an interdisciplinary offering on gender in society. "The reason Women's Studies was broadly supported is because subject has already been on the agenda" of many departments, Spence says.