I want to welcome you and thank you for coming and I also want to thank the sponsors and the arrangers of the event. It is a good occasion and I am now going to spoil it, as the old boys would complain. But I feel bound to honor Carol’s memory by reminding you why she did not want to set foot on the Columbia campus once she had left in disgust in 1992.
As many of you know, my first contact with Carol was 30 years before that, when I started teaching at General Studies and my office was a drawer in Carol’s desk. She was friendly and supportive from the beginning, and in those early years, I think I can say she was happy to be at Columbia, happy to be teaching adults, the GS students and the graduate students. We didn’t miss teaching adolescent boys in the College – which we weren’t allowed to do then – and we didn’t really notice that our being prevented from teaching Lit Hum meant we didn’t get that time off after three years which the men at the College got, an important advantage when you were preparing for the tenure process. It took a while for her/us to become aware of the problems. I think the beginning of her disillusionment was the complaints of her students about the department’s hiring of junior faculty. It was done primarily by the DR’s for GS and the college in those days, and one notorious pair shared a room at MLA several years running and used the casting couch method.
When the women’s movement began, a mole in the comptrollers office leaked the department salaries – a closely guarded secret even now – to us and three of us saw that our male “cohorts” in the same field and roughly same age made much more than we did, though two of the three had produced much less. (The third, whose vita was strong, was Robert Hanning who also gave us his salary to use openly – something the men never forgave him for.) The then provost, Michael Sovern, looked at the pairs of vitas for 10 minutes and told us he would take care of it. That’s how blatant it was.
The federal program of affirmative action, with the need to justify the hiring of white males, created a backlash in our department. One year when we had seven positions open, there were white males at the top of every short list. Carol and I went to the administration and threatened to go to the government unless we hired two women. Our chairman called us after the meeting and said, “You don’t really want to get women by blackmail.” “Whatever it takes,” we said, but we only got one. Incidentally, twenty years after affirmative action began, we had a net gain of two tenured women in the department – it went from four to six, a little better now but not striking: ten tenured women in the department, of whom one is now in fulltime administration, one about to retire; of the new senior appointments from the outside, six are men, three women.
In 1987, with much pressure from Carol, the Institute was created though with a small endowment. Carol was its first director and had to raise money to do what she wanted with it, but it brought women to the university is other departments and created an intellectual community. However, when she managed to get a line in feminist theory for our department, to answer the needs of our students, we couldn’t fill it. We tried senior senior women – nationally and internationally recognized women – then junior senior women. Nothing was good enough. Finally I said (I was chairing then, which may have been an unfortunate coincidence) “until we fill this line, we don’t fill any line.” The reaction was to try to force me out of the chair, but that didn’t work, and we finally hired Gayatri [Spivak].
But most stories don’t end that well. Over the years, hard as Carol worked to hire and tenure young women in the department, she had little success. The final straw was the loss of a junior woman she (and others in the department) thought highly of, while a man who seemed far less impressive but was cast in the same old-fashioned intellectual and arrogant mold of his senior colleagues was maneuvered through. Carol left but she did not go quietly, so the old boys accused her of being uncollegial and “out of control” on women’s issues.
They had only grudgingly if at all acknowledged her prestige as a writer, as president of MLA, as recipient of honorary degrees. Of course, outside the department it was different. At Columbia, The Institute was a haven, the Law Scnool offered her an exciting new venue for her talents. But Columbia did nothing to honor her “retirement.” It was CUNY that took that on, in a splendid conference that many of you participated in. Now that she is dead, Columbia has finally decided to do something. And I do think what it is doing is appropriate and that she would have appreciated it and would have approved the people involved in it. Perhaps she would even have liked being the inspiration of this kind of event. And she doesn’t have to set foot on campus to be at the center of it.
