Doing Diversity in Higher Education: Faculty Leaders Share Challenges and Strategies

Chapter 7: Feminist Interventions: Creating New Institutional Spaces for Women at Rutgers

137 Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, has a national reputation as a leader in diversity. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Rutgers ranked among the top ten public Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions in percentages of women faculty and faculty of color. Rutgers-Newark is routinely ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the most diverse campuses in North America in terms of student composition. Moreover, as the home of Douglass College, the only women’s college in the United States located within a major public research university, one of the top women’s and gender studies departments in the world, and five major research centers and institutes on women, Rutgers University enjoys a reputation for gender diversity that is unparalleled. This chapter explores the invisible labor of faculty and administrators— predominantly women—who worked over the course of the twentieth century to transform an all-male institution into a coeducational institution, featuring unique intellectual spaces for women and innovative academic programs, research centers, and institutes. Tracing a series of feminist interventions into the standard operating practices of the university, the chapter documents how entrepreneurial faculty and administrators have used their ingenuity to create and sustain spaces that undermine race and gender hierarchies within and outside the university. Through the creation of new academic spaces, interdisciplinary networks of scholars have developed the expertise to address pressing problems concerning inequities grounded in race, gender, and sexuality, generating innovative research and transformative policy proposals. Linking their scholarly investigations to teaching, advocacy work, and public programming, faculty have devised new curriculum 7 Feminist Interventions Creating New Institutional Spaces for Women at Rutgers MARY HAWKESWORTH, LISA HETFIELD, BARBARA BALLIET, AND JENNIFER MORGAN and cocurricular opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and new community, state, national, and transnational social justice initiatives. In and through these various initiatives, they have forged a diverse and inclusive community within the larger university. Beyond illuminating the arduous invisible labor of faculty to sustain these initiatives, the chapter identifies a recurrent pattern of incomplete institutionalization . Despite decades of successful grant writing and fund-raising, each of these units experiences a paradoxical combination of strength, derived from national and international renown, and fragility, stemming from insufficient university resources and recognition. While the “self-help” tactics of entrepreneurial faculty and administrators have made the creation of new institutional spaces for women possible, more complete institutionalization requires enhanced support from the university. Institutional Context Rutgers has a unique history as a colonial college, a land-grant institution, and a state university. Chartered in  as Queen’s College, the eighth institution of higher learning to be founded in the colonies, the school opened its doors in New Brunswick to male students in . In , the name of the college was changed to honor a former trustee and Revolutionary War veteran, Colonel Henry Rutgers. Rutgers College became the land-grant college of New Jersey in , resulting in the creation of the Rutgers Scientific School, with departments of agriculture, engineering, and chemistry. Further expansion in the sciences came with the founding of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station in , the College of Pharmacy (now the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy) in , the College of Engineering (now the School of Engineering) in , and the College of Agriculture (now the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences) in . Despite the impressive growth over the course of the nineteenth century, Rutgers remained an all-male institution. Women in the state of New Jersey had no access to higher education, public or private, until the early decades of the twentieth century. During a period of intensive suffrage and women’s rights activism, a number of influential women mobilized to demand access to educational opportunities and to create women’s colleges. The New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs launched a campaign to create a liberal arts college for women that would be nondenominational and affordable. Under the leadership of Mabel Smith Douglass, a committee of the Federation of Women’s Clubs mobilized school superintendents and principals to support higher education for women. Lobbying wives of members of the Rutgers Board of Trustees, Douglass persuaded the president and the board to allocate land and a building for the new college. Tapping the political and economic resources of women across HAWKESWORTH, HETFIELD, BALLIET, AND MORGAN 138 the state, Douglass initiated a “one-dollar women’s subscription” to raise $, to support the college...