- Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education
Judith Glazer-Raymo’s Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education comes nearly a decade after her thought-provoking Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe (1999). In this follow-up volume, Glazer-Raymo takes on the daunting task of incorporating, in a thorough and in-depth way, the continuing gender challenges faced by women in higher education. As editor, she has brought together an intergenerational cast of noteworthy scholars, all women, who examine past, current, and future challenges to women in higher education. They employ varied lenses: their roles as leaders, faculty members, researchers, mentors, graduate students, community members, mothers, and colleagues.
Glazer-Raymo sets the stage in the first chapter by providing an overview of events that she reads as a shift away from supporting and advancing women in higher education. While she notes that the passage of Title IX and affirmative action policies once helped women begin to bridge the gap between them and their male counterparts, now many in academe and the public are reporting (unfairly and inaccurately, in Glazer-Raymo’s eyes) that a new “gender gap” exists. This gap relates to the ways in which women have purportedly reached parity with their male counterparts in higher education, a claim typically butressed by data showing that women now comprise the majority of undergraduate enrollments. This new shift, Glazer-Raymo argues, which includes doing away with affirmative action and other institutional policies that work toward promoting women, has created the “unfinished agendas” that the contributors address in the succeeding 10 chapters.
Key themes of the volume include: the multiple, intersecting, and often conflicting identities of women; the lack of women in senior and administrative positions; the double struggles of women who are also members of groups underrepresented by race, ethnicity, or other identity; and the changes in higher education toward academic capitalism. The book is strongest in its feminist analysis of critical questions related to faculty roles, responsibilities, and rewards, including promotion and tenure.
Three chapters (by Becky Ropers-Huilman; Aimee Lapointe Terosky, Tamsyn Phifer, Anna Neumann; and Ana M. Martínez Alemán) are especially effective at making visible the arguments and evidence that counter the myth of gender neutrality for female faculty. An excellent chapter on female faculty in community colleges (by Kathleen M. Shaw, M. Kate Callahan, and Kimberly LeChassuer) is a valuable addition to the literature, and Glazer-Raymo’s chapter about women on governing boards makes it clear why—and how—gender matters.
Another strength of the book is its use of research and data throughout. We question, however, Amy Scott Metcalfe and Shelia Slaughter’s decision to use data on faculty salaries that can, in a few cases, be linked to individual faculty members by department, rank, and gender (pp. 88–89), despite the objections of pre-publication reviewers of the manuscript. The authors’ explanation, and Raymo-Glazer’s decision as editor to support them, is not, in our estimation, satisfactory. [End Page 551]
We also found unsatisfactory their reason (space limitations) for using this individually identifiable data from just one institution, when the data were obtained “with the [institution’s] understanding that it was a multi-institutional analysis rather than a single case study” (p. 105). The authors point out that salaries are public data at this university, so they are not in fact revealing confidential information. In addition, they make a complex case for their claim that academic capitalism has a more profound impact on faculty salaries than can be understood through simple comparisons of salary differences within and across departments, and such a case needs detailed data to support it. We believe, however, that the case could have been made compellingly without raising the ethical questions involved in the conditions under which data were provided and the level of detail with which they were presented.
Throughout the book, authors draw attention to an important development in higher...