New ideas promise progress

Unlike many Ivy League colleges Harvard has no women's studies department or concentration. The only paths available to undergraduates who wish to focus on women's scholarship is to pursue it within their established concentration or to apply for a special concentration, an option successful for one undergraduate, although attempted by many others.

This year the Faculty's Women's Studies Committee made several distinct efforts to promote a more comprehensive program for women's studies, including Harvard's offer of a tenure to a scholar who would be associated with an established department but specialize in women's scholarship.

After both the Anthropology and English departments nominated candidates for the position, the committee on Women's studies made an offer to Elaine Showalter of Rutgers University, a specialist on women's and late 19th centruy English literature. Showalter turned down the position, accepting instead a position at Princeton.

This rejection marked a definite setback for the subject at Harvard, because, according to committee coordinator Judith A. Kates, the tenure process must begin all over with the initial process of individual department nomination of candidates.

Kates says the committee wants to select another candidate this fall, but that the position could not be filled until the fall of 1985.

Professor of Romance Languages Susan R. Suleiman will succeed Kates as chairman of the committee next year. She agrees with Kates that women's studies has "taken a big step from what things were like four to five years ago."

"Harvard has a strong sense of pre-eminence," says Suleiman. "People need to get used to new ideas slowly."

Kates says that while Harvard has no women's studies concentration or professor, there are several tenured men and women who work in the field. Kates adds that the committee has considered several ideas to improve the status of women's studies, including a faculty development seminar to incorporate new viewpoints into courses, and raising funds for student research in women's studies.

She points to the nine to ten women's related courses this year and the 11 offered next year as evidence of a "momentum that has been building up."

While faculty committee members seem content with the pace of change, students who only spend four years at Harvard are somewhat more impatient. Toba E. Spitzer '85, a student member of the Faculty Committee on Women's Studies, this year said it was not "an activist body" and that the Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) started a student committee of women's studies this year in response.

Among the student committee's accomplishments were a feminist thought group and an initiation of women's studies committee within individual departments. According to Spitzer, the department committee discussed issues with tutors and department heads. In the English department it compiled a list of tutors interested in feminist criticism, and in the History department the committee worked with Professor Catherine Clinton to create a junior tutorial that focused exclusively on women's studies.

"The committee were also envisioned as support groups within the departments to help students share ideas and resources," says Spitzer.