Gendered Futures in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives for Change (review)

It is important to occasionally reexamine the status of key issues in higher education, and this volume attempts to bring together knowledge from the past, challenges and research about the present, and visions for the future of gender on campuses. In a word, I think it accomplishes the task of reminding us of some lessons from the past and is helpful in reviewing some current challenges. I was, however, concerned that there was little rationale for why these are the key issues we confront; and it is, perhaps, not sufficiently bold or comprehensive in its visions of the future. Although the volume has some weaknesses, the individual chapters offer keen insights—in particular the chapters by Jana Nidiffer, Laura Hensley, Lisa Wolf-Wendel and Kelly Ward, and Becky Ropers-Huilman and Denise Taliaferro.

The book is divided into four sections. Part 1, "Learning from the Past," has two chapters focusing on the history of women in higher education and on the contribution of women's colleges. Part 2, "Deconstructing the Present: Student Lives," contains a chapter on women's struggle with eating disorders and another on violence on campus. The third part, "Deconstructing the Present: Faculty Lives," reviews the trend in academe toward part-time employment, the difficulty for faculty trying to negotiate the demands of work and family, and the problem that feminist faculty have in "fitting in" with the predominantly male-defined culture of campuses. Part 4, "Reconceiving the Future," contains two chapters, one focused on the potential of advocacy education for helping to create new campus environments, and another on the importance of examining the intersection of race and gender in research in the field of higher education.

Although there is not space to review all the chapters, I want to note some key chapters that had particular insights. Nidiffer's chapter on the lessons from the past provides a comprehensive overview of the struggles for women students, faculty, and staff in terms of differential access to resources and opportunities. She reminds us that the culture of higher education has often been actively hostile to women while, at the same time, she demonstrates the progress that has been made in terms of enrollment and employment.

Hensley's chapter is a thoughtful examination of the role eating disorders play in college students' lives. The issue is placed in the sociocultural context of the "superwoman" concept and body image in the United States. The resiliency factors she identifies represent interesting themes that can also be used to develop campus programs. Wolf-Wendel and Ward present key information on the problems of the faculty trajectory—disrupting women faculty's ability to have children, creating concerns for balancing work and family, and challenging dual-career couples.

Becky Ropers-Huilman notes that the individual chapters represent different visions unique to the perspective of each author. But I felt that this characteristic became a weakness as the reader has little sense about how these various visions merge or might be connected. I hoped the editor would play a greater role in linking the ideas presented. Although I embrace a postmodern sensibility of ambiguity and fragmentation as a condition of our existence, I sensed little effort to link the ideas and make them more powerful than they are alone, especially since some of these ideas have been presented in other articles and chapters. What have we learned by bringing them together?

Another concern relates to visions of the future. The volume focuses primarily on gender in terms of woman's experience, although one chapter examines violence on campus and discusses the construction of male identity. Male constructions of gender continue to be privileged by being silenced. As William Pinar points out, men fall victim to many damaging social pressures, but we have not examined these issues as thoroughly as the issues impacting women. Our vision of the future looks grim if we do not begin to grapple with male experience...