More on Klein

The Crimson received a copy of the following letter to Government Department Chairman John D. Montgomery.

Dear Professor Montgomery:

I understand that Ethel Klein is currently being considered for promotion to Associate Professor. I am writing to say that in my years as a Harvard undergraduate and as a law student (at Berkeley). I have never met anyone more committed to teaching than Professor Klein.

As an undergraduate I was lucky to be in a small department with a reputation for good teaching (History of Science), and many of my classes were small seminars and individual tutorials. But without a doubt the best-taught class I ever took at Harvard was Government 133. "The Politics of Women's Liberation," which I took in the fall of 1979 (Professor Klein's first year at Harvard).

As I recall, the class had about 80 students (I was one of about a dozen men). Some of the students in the course had a deep personal commitment to the feminist movement, and were active in feminist politics on and off campus. They were interested in exploring feminist questions. My initial interest in the course was more academic: I wanted to learn more about a social movement which, like the civil rights movement, had had great success in mobilizing political activity in many different sectors of the political landscape.

Professor Klein's great accomplishment was in making us understand that in order to explain how the feminist movement developed, you must integrate the "academic" issues with the "personal" issues. She devoted much of the course to developing a general theoretical model of social movements. This is what I had expected to learn from the course, and she taught it well. What I had not expected, but what ultimately turned out to be the most rewarding educational experience I have ever had, was Professor Klein's exploration of the personal experiences which drove women (and men) from all parts of the political spectrum to take positions ranging from militant feminism to the "pro-family" reaction of the new right. On a superficial level it is easy to make the point that in the mid-1960s there were millions of women employed outside the home in a society which bombarded them with the message that they were passive creatures whose only job was to be at home. But it requires great teaching skills and extraordinary sensitivity to make a class of 80 students really understand the personal transformation that many women went through when they stopped accepting the traditional view of their role in the family. Not surprisingly, many of the students had very strong feelings about the topics being discussed, and discussion sections sometimes focused on the experiences of individual students. Professor Klein succeeded in using those discussions to bring the subject to life by tying them into the theoretical model we were learning.

For one of my papers in the course I analyzed the way that my mother's entry into the work-force (and rapid rise from P.T.A. housewife to very successful businesswoman) affected her relationship with my father. It was the most personal of topics, yet it was also a case study of the development of the basic building block of the feminist movement: the woman who can no longer accept her traditional role in her family. Writing that paper forced me to critically apply the theoretical model we had learned. More than any other piece of academic work I have done, that paper changed the way I look at the world.

Professor Klein is such a good teacher partly because of her great commitment to her students. Within a month of the start of the semester she knew the names of almost every student in the class. The most fruitful discussions I had with her about my final paper were after the course was over. I have never seen anyone more willing to spend time with students.

I think Professor Klein is the kind of teacher that helps make Harvard a very special place to be an undergraduate. I hope you take that into account in considering whether to promote her to Associate Professor. Eduardo Muslar