San Diego State 1970: The Initial Year of the Nation's First Women's Studies Program

San Diego State 1970: The Initial Year of the Nation's First Women's Studies Program Roberta Salper In spring 1970 i had been hired for a one-year position as the Distin guished Visiting Professor and only full-time faculty member in the newly created Women's Studies Program at San Diego State College (sdsc),1 the first full-fledged women's studies program to be approved in the coun try. I took a year's leave of absence from another position to work with the women who had struggled and won the right to start the nation's first women's studies program in fall 1970. Their achievement was an extraordi nary feat. It came about because of what I came to recognize as a combina tion of extreme democracy and extreme authoritarianism. Possessed of a Harvard PhD and women's liberation movement admin istrative experience, I was a perfect "front" to work toward achieving permanent funding from the sdsc administration. For the first year, the program was on "soft money," temporary funds allocated by the largesse of the dean of the College of Arts and Letters. My tasks were multiple: start a new curriculum, teach, help secure funding, and ensure that partici patory democracy and progressive feminist politics were kept to the fore front. I was venturing onto new, exciting turf: what would be the param eters of governance for the first women's studies program? We knew we wanted to innovate nonhierarchical democratic forms for education, create new knowledge, and institute a permanent place in US higher education FeministStudies37, no. 3 (Fall 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 656 Roberta Salper 657 based on the female experience. However, we needed secure funding. One cannot make a revolution without money, and the provenance of fund ing became a critical issue at sdsc. It seemed an impossible task, but I was moved by idealism and conviction, and I was not alone: many of us in the women's liberation movement shared this vision of radical change. Some of us, particularly the socialist feminists, belonged to the New Univer sity Conference (nuc), a New Left organization for faculty and graduate students that existed between 1968 and 1973.2 All of us were thrilled to have an academic platform to advance feminism and New Left politics. This is how I described the political situation in which I was enmeshed about six months after I arrived in San Diego, in a 1971 Ramparts article: The implications of having an "academic arm" of a broader-based politi cal movement are important to consider because the issue involves the political development of the Women's Liberation Movement, the structure and control of American higher education, and the relationship between the two. And herein lies the political potential of Women's Studies: to the extent that the university-based programs can create links with other sectors of society, traditional divisions—student vs. worker, black vs. white, man vs. woman—... will be weakened. But this is no easy task, for on the one hand, the American system of higher education has a well-greased "escape valve" for such "radical emergencies" — the corporate foundation grant. On the other hand, a tendency in the Women's Movement to be excessively preoccupied with a politic of personal development prevents it from seeing beyond myopic white middleclass needs.3 Today, in 2011, I enjoy rereading this paragraph. The intense young woman who wrote those words remains a part of me, but her confidently strident, uncompromising utopianism has mellowed and been supple mented by maturity and irony. The willful optimism and militancy of that vision, however, still moves me. We in the nuc Women's Caucus thought of ourselves as socialist feminists but in 1969—1970, a time in which socialist feminism was not a term clearly defined in the women's movement, caucus members strug gled to agree on a nuanced definition of our vision. In order for nuc to play a significant role in the creation of socialism in the United States, 658 Roberta Salper we believed, "it must have a women's liberation caucus that is power ful within the organization and fighting for concrete power in...