Required Reading

What Harvard people are saying, and what is being said about Harvard, in the press.

Once again from The Boston Globe, a gushy profile of a Harvard administrator. This time, Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson received a front-page Living/Arts profile complete with complementary color photo. Here's a sampler:

Wilson is, in fact, Radcliffe's first postfeminist president. A precise thinker, the scientist-administrator would certainly not be comfortable with such an ill-defined term--but neither is she with describing herself as a feminist.

As exemplified by Wilson, then, postfeminism is getting along with men without selling oneself short. It is taking responsibility instead of fixing blame. It is partnering and, yes, accomodating the male ego, while still trying to make progress toward equal rights. It is tact instead of confrontation. It is marriage instead of divorce.

Such a definition does in fact sound a bit like a job description for the president of Radcliffe in her necessary dealings with Harvard, where "it's almost always all men and me" in the high-prestige meetings and committees.

"Making things easy" for the men she's worked with, placing their comfort "ahead of my own," is what Wilson calls "good manners." It has also been an obviously successful tactic.

Her way of dealing with sex discrimination throughout her career has been to briefly "acknowledge" it, then to quickly move on to "more substantive matters" where she can prove herself. When integrating previously all-male professional meetings, where old-fashioned etiquette was a stumbling block, she would always arrive early and be seated so men would not have to rise at her arrival. If a man interrupted himself to apologize to her after using a swear word, she would deftly drop a "damn" or "hell" into her own presentation "in a very lady-like way," pause a half beat to smile and offer apologies all around, and then continue.