Spring semester 1994. Actually it is January and the middle of one of the worst winters in recent memory. I prepare to go to the first class of Women's Studies 187, "Introduction to Women's Studies." I lift the box containing the more than 300 copies of the eight page syllabus for the course, and the 5 teaching assistants and I walk to the large auditorium where many of the seats are already filled with students who have come early on this first day of the class because they want to be sure to keep their place. Many more students sign up for this course than we can admit. Three hundred is the limit of the room and the edge of my tolerance. Sometimes, in the middle of a lecture on genocide and white supremacy as the foundations of U.S. culture or the prevalence of rape on college campuses that number is over the edge I wonder what in the world I think I am doing.

It didn't begin this way. Twenty years ago the curriculum of the two year pilot program in Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst was based on the idea that classes in Women's Studies were places where feminist faculty and feminist students would meet in small groups to share our lives as women. Courses would explore what had been until then banished-- women's lives, our lives; women's experiences, our experiences and we would together find ways to change the world. Developed by a committee of faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students working collaboratively, the proposal for this experiment proclaimed Women's Studies to be an academic program based on the scholarship on women, most of it new but some of it newly discovered in the late 60's and early 70's by this second wave of feminists, all of it ground breaking. That was the face we showed to the Faculty Senate, which approved the proposal in the Spring of 1974, but the dream that many of us had for this new program was that it would create a new academy, one built on feminist principles.

It is almost time for the class to begin. I look out at the women and men streaming into the room, and I think about those beginnings as I always do when I teach this class. I raise the microphone to my lips and speak into it, signaling that I will always begin promptly at 10:10 whether students are in their seats on not. I welcome them to the class, stating both the number and the name to be sure that everyone is where they think they are and ask those in the last row if they can hear. One or two heads nod, others are still talking or already have the glazed look of students in large classes.

Now that I have formally begun the class some students take out their notebooks and the Teaching Assistants begin distributing the syllabus, a document developed over the more than 10 years I have been teaching this course. That, at least, has been a collective effort. My colleague Sandi Morgen and I developed it together years ago and now it is reviewed and revised at the end of every year with the Teaching Assistants. The first two pages are not about the personal being political, or about how this course is going to change the world. They are filled with rules, rules that I the undisputed authority have set down for students. They are to come on time; they are not to leave early or start to pack up their things 5 minutes before the end of class; they are not to read the paper or talk to their neighbor during class; they are not to cheat and if they do, we will fail them; they are not to get airline tickets before final exam schedule is printed because having tickets is not an acceptable excuse for missing the final; attendance will be taken in the 30 person sections they are required to attend and if they do not come they will lose points in their grades.

I don't feel like an ogre, nor do I think I have been coopted. The students who enroll in this class are from all parts of the University: students from the schools of business, and health sciences as well as social and behavioral sciences and humanities and fine arts; students who are majoring in wood technology and engineering as well as english and history; some students are in the greek system, others are athletes; twenty percent are men. They are not necessarily in this class because they are interested in women's issues, though that is true for some. Most students are here because this course fulfills two University requirements: an "I" and a "D" and there are just not many of those in the catalogue. The "I" stands for interdisciplinary and may be used as a wild card, even to fulfill the second science requirement. The "D" is for diversity, and that there is a dearth of courses fulfilling this requirement is evidence of how much of a WASP bastion the academy continues to be despite all the talk about multiculturalism taking over the curriculum. They may have taken the course merely to fulfill a requirement, but I will have them in this class for fourteen weeks and I will work very hard to get them to question their assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality.

The University administration, desperate for this course, will fund as many Teaching Assistants as I am willing to take. I have stopped at 5; they each lead 2 sections of thirty; 10 sections. Six hundred students a year will be able to fulfill the "D" requirement by taking WOST 187. The Teaching Assistants are graduate students in other departments since Women's Studies has unable to implement the graduate certificate program approved by the University years ago. We do not have enough faculty in the department and there has been no money to hire more. The Teaching Assistants are mostly advanced graduate students who they have exceeded the funding limit most departments have had to impose because of cutbacks. They have not been able to finish their degrees because they have too little time for their our research and writing. Most work two jobs to support themselves, and sometimes children. All of their dissertations are focussed on women's issues. The success of this course depends heavily on these women who lead the weekly discussion sections and deal with the fallout from my lectures: the anger, the resistance, the hostility, and eventually the learning and the growth.

There is still a low rumble in the room and I prepare to assert my authority. I tell the students to find seats and be quiet. Then I read the rules from the syllabus because I know that no matter how many times during the semester I tell them to read the syllabus, some of them will not. I want to be clear. They are quiet now. Some look resentful as they hear the authority in my voice and look at the hefty syllabus having perhaps expected a "gut" in WOST 187. Others look expectant, waiting for me to get to the "woman" part. I ask who they think about when I say "woman or women?" A few courageous students tentatively raise their hands. After the first few speakers more hands go up and students call the names of the significant women in their lives: their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, teachers, neighbors. I listen attentively and repeat what they have said for the students who can not hear what was said. When I see no more hands, I look at the mostly European American students and ask if the woman they named or thought about look like themselves? Are they the same color? Class? Sexuality? Slowly, most of the students who spoke nod their heads in assent. I begin the enormously difficult task that I will be engaged in all semester to both validate their experience and broaden their vision; to provide an analysis which looks at both the similarities and the differences in women's lives; to establish that women's lives are worthy of study, that gender is an important category of analysis, that women's lives are shaped by patriarchal institutions even while some women are in power over other women and even some men and that some women gain privilege through the oppression of other women. Without adequate texts I contextualize gender not privilege it so that women's lives are understood through an analysis which integrates gender with race, class and sexuality. And I must do this in 50 minute lectures to 300 students, 90 to 95% of whom tell us that they are not feminists in the survey we administer at the beginning and end of each semester.

I point out that their conceptualization of women has both drawn only on their own experiences and been individualized. I tell them that both are important, expressing the ideas in the personal is political but not yet using the words which will be part of the lecture on the history of the women's movement. But I go on to say that we have to be aware of our assumptions and their effects. Most students are now taking notes as I construct and deconstruct gender. As 11:00 o'clock approaches, I end the lecture with a sentence or two about the next class which will focus on the Columbus' invasion of the ancient land that came to be called the "New World." I put down the microphone and the room fills with the sounds of 300 people collecting their things and getting up out of their seats. The Teaching Assistants and I are surrounded by students, most of whom are trying to get into the class. They know it is closed, but they try to insert humanity into the now computerized registration system. We can not accommodate them. I can not overburden the Teaching Assistants with more than 30 students in their sections, we have ordered only 300 books and copied only 300 readers. We are bound by the numbers.

Women's Studies 187 is not what we had seen in our future twenty years ago, but perhaps our vision was limited by the margins we were on in the 1970's. Perhaps we did not have the courage to take on the teaching of students who were part of that mainstream. Some of these students will have been so touched by this course they will become Women's Studies majors and sit in a circle in small classes where hopefully they will continue to learn about gender as it intersects with race, class and sexuality. But for most of these students WOST 187 will be their only Women's Studies course. For some of them this course will have been just another one of those requirements they had to fulfill, others will have had their vision broadened, and for others the course will have changed their lives.

Teaching WOST 187 is an opportunity to reach beyond the small circle of feminists of those early classes to a wide variety of students. While they might come to fulfill a requirement I can provoke them to begin to think critically about their world. And as we witness the frightening rise of the radical right, the capitulation of the center and the disarray of the left, WOST 187 becomes more and more important. At its best, the course provides an important critique of the sexism, racism, classism and hetersexism that shapes our world and exposes students to the political movements that have changed the world. And as the electronic and print media are increasingly controlled by the right and give us less and less information WOST 187, at the very least, imparts some facts about women's lives. Presented with the discrepancies between what they get in the media and the realities of women's lives, students might understand that what they read in the paper or hear on television is most probably a partial and distorted account and that getting information to understanding what is happening is hard work. Maybe WOST 187 will expand their consciousness enough so they will ask critical questions about gender, race, class and sexuality in other courses. Maybe they will take other courses in Women's Studies or other departments or interdisciplinary programs that have a critical perspective on our world. Maybe they will get involved in progressive activitism outside the classroom. Maybe some of what we do in WOST 187 will be the seed that will grow into a rage at injustice and a sense that they can do something to change the world. These are my goals for the 300 students I face in this auditorium. As I say to my friends, teaching "Introduction to WOST" gives me fourteen weeks to subvert young minds.