"Vision 2000" is a call to our Presidents and Chancellors to ensure full and equitable participation by women in the New England Land Grant Universities. Through nine broad recommendations, the document sets forth a vision of where women at our six institutions can and should be at the beginning of the next century. "Vision 2000" is the combined effort of the faculty, staff, and students who make up the New England Council of Land-Grant University Women. The nine recommendations are:
To guarantee continuing excellence in public higher education, the leaders of our institutions, and specifically our Presidents and Chancellors, must understand the issues raised by "Vision 2000" and provide clear and visible leadership to bring the ninerecommendations to fruition.
Institutional demographics are changing as more women enter higher education at all levels, however, the structures to encourage, support, and retain women have not kept pace. Women continue to be underrepresented in the curriculum, ignored or disparaged in the classroom, underrepresented in leadership roles and overrepresented in entry-level and support positions. Women face sexual violence and sexual harassment in the classroom and in the workplace, and are too often silenced by a system that protects the perpetrators of these crimes. Women of color, lesbians, and women with disabilities are further marginalized. At the same time, since men are overrepresented in the curriculum and in leadership roles, a system of privilege and gender inequity is perpetuated. We cannot commit ourselves and our institutions to principles of social justice, multiculturalism, and pluralism without a clear plan for achieving gender equity.
Despite some 30 years of gradual legislative change, fulfillment of the goal of gender equity has been slow, partial, and painful. The legal and ethical mandate is clear; institutions of higher education can no longer ignore the harmful effects of the inequitable allocation of resources. Our claim is not to additional resources, but to our fair share of resources.
We ask our Presidents and Chancellors to lead us to "Vision 2000." Hold department heads accountable for improvement in achieving gender equity. Reward those departments that can demonstrate measurable progress. Collect and analyze data on the status of women. Publish an annual report that measures progress on each of the nine recommendations outlined in "Vision 2000." Report our successes to the public via an annual press conference. Our campuses are involved in various strategic planning and re-engineering processes, which provide a unique opportunity for leaders to be creative, innovative, thoughtful, and specific in reallocating moneys to those groups who have historically been marginalized and underrepresented.
Discussion of the problem: Accountability for gender equity is not always integral to regular administrative structures at our universities. We have relied in large part on volunteer groups, task forces, offices of human resources, and equal opportunity/ affirmative action officers to advocate for the cause of women and to monitor policies and programs affecting women on their respective campuses. As particularly significant issues have surfaced, we have responded by creating new positions, programs, or committees. Women's Studies programs, women's health programs, rape crisis programs, women's centers, and commissions and councils on women, all came into being to solve problems of gender inequity.
These offices and programs have played, and will continue to play, important roles in making our institutions more nearly equitable places for women to be educated and employed. They are also generally understaffed and underfunded in relation to their mandates, and located on the periphery of the organizational structure of authority. They are therefore able to provide encouragement, information, and technical assistance to others, but are not positioned to exercise sole responsibility for institutional change.
It is time to realign responsibility and authority for gender equity so it is more than an add-on. Members of the faculty, department chairs, and deans need to be accountable for equity in curriculum, pedagogy, and academic advising. Supervisors need to be accountable for equity in hiring, workplace behavior, and career development opportunities. Student aid offices need to be accountable for equity in student need assessment, aid packages, and work-study assignments. In short, the institutional procedures already in place for establishing expectations, creating and implementing work plans, and reporting on results must be invoked to achieve the goals for gender equity.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: Research, one leg of the tripartite missions of our universities, is integral to our academic values, yet it is too rarely brought to bear on processes of change in our own institutions. We call here upon our leadership to (1) apply the considerable body of research on gender in higher education to institutional practices; (2) utilize institutional research capacity to produce the data necessary to raise consciousness, instigate action, and monitor progress on our campuses; and (3) examine the degree to which the research programs and priorities of our institutions equitably benefit women.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: Environments receptive to difference are environments receptive to women, and vice versa. The more diverse an institution, the more open to a variety of cultural values and practices, the more likely it is to be a place in whose work women can participate fully. Our universities are in various ways attempting to become more diverse and more sustainably pluralistic communities, although with mixed success to date. New England Land Grant University Women welcome and support these endeavors, which promote equity for women of color, for women with disabilities, for women of all sexual/affectional preferences, indeed for all women.
The full benefit of diversity depends upon our universities' taking the broadest possible view of it. Initiatives should therefore include not only efforts on behalf of the current Affirmative Action populations, but also of other groups for whom Equal Opportunity at our universities has yet to become a reality, such as working class people, recent immigrant groups, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered persons, and underrepresented ethnic populations historically significant in our own states, such as Franco-Americans and Portuguese-Americans.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: Employers who fail to acknowledge the economic importance and social burden of work for family and community discriminate against women. Single or married women whose family members require care often experience demands and stresses which are typically much greater than those experienced by their male peers. Far fewer women than men can choose to have children without interrupting or retarding their career development by several years. Women are also often called on to provide care for elderly parents. Because of such differentials, opportunities for advancement which require full-time devotion to the job are open to most otherwise qualified men, but to few otherwise qualified women.
Society has chosen to reward those who postpone or interrupt a career to serve in the armed forces by making it easier for them to resume a career after their period of service. Veteran's education benefits and preferential hiring are a form of compensation for contributions to society. Work for family and community deserves similar consideration.
Our universities can choose to value as job-related assets the experience gained by working women with families. We can promote opportunities for women to participate and to advance in the workforce by enhancing childcare services, liberalizing family leave provisions, facilitating flexible work arrangements, and instituting provisions for slowing or temporarily stopping the tenure process. Such investments make our universities fit workplaces for people with families.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: After more than twenty years of affirmative actions, women are still found in disproportionate numbers in low-paid and low-status jobs and specialties. There are still major penalties for being female: many programs and colleges in our institutions that have a high proportion of female students and faculty also have lower pay and less institutional clout.
To achieve equal pay, prestige, job satisfaction, and autonomy, women students and employees need access to education, credentials, mentors, and evaluative procedures that are truly gender-neutral. Strategies for change must be based on a comprehensive understanding of the factors that hinder women's personal and professional development within our male-dominated disciplines and places of work.
Our universities must change in many ways to provide each and every woman true equality of opportunity. Supervisors must embrace the notion that the university's mission and their own department's productivity are enhanced by encouraging the personal and professional development of all employees. Departments and disciplines must change curricula, pedagogies, and workplace practices so that women students and faculty can translate entry-level access and ability into satisfying careers. Teacher preparation programs must collaborate with schools to liberate the aspirations of young women and men and of current and future teachers. And our Cooperative Extension programs must carry these models of gender equity into every community in our states.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: An effective Women's Center is an invaluable resource to any university committed to the pursuit of gender equity. It provides a safe space for women in a frequently hostile or indifferent environment. It develops and promotes women's leadership. It models for the larger university the values and practices essential to any institution that intends fully to meet the educational needs of women. It is the nucleus of networks organized for mutual support and for community action essential both to individual well-being and to progressive social change. It is the single best source of information, education, and advocacy in matters of concern to women. Unfortunately, however, it rarely receives public recognition of these functions or resources commensurate with their importance.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: Women's status within American higher education reflects an intellectual bias that is deeply rooted in the disciplinary methods and social assumptions of university communities. Such bias weakens and limits university research efforts. It deters women students from many fields that could benefit from their equal presence with men as students, researchers, and professional leaders. Until such bias is acknowledged and addressed through faculty development and support for curricular change, women and men will continue to be denied the full benefits of higher education. Women's Studies and women's presence in the institution cannot be ghettoized. Critical and innovative work on the curriculum must be seen as an intellectual imperative to transform the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Two approaches to organizing women-friendly and culturally diverse curricula are best seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. Our universities need both a strong separate academic program in Women's Studies and an institutional commitment affirmed at every level to transforming the curriculum with perspectives from scholarship on women and other historically oppressed groups. The process of transformation is best conducted with guidance from an autonomous Women's Studies site and active Women's Studies scholars working cooperatively with others.
Colleges and universities that have moved assertively to offer more diverse experiences have benefited from higher rates of student satisfaction and recruitment, while also better preparing their students for the future. Leadership at the highest levels is needed to spur and maintain curricular and pedagogical transformation in all academic programs.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: As long as women remain at unequal risk for violence and intimidation at their places of study and work, our campuses discriminate against women. While some progress has been achieved in providing support services to survivors of rape, sexual harassment, and dating and domestic assault, much more is required to demonstrate that our universities are fully committed to change the fundamental social and physical conditions that sustain violence against women. Many women express dissatisfaction with existing methods of prevention and redress. On some campuses, even basic services for survivors (such as an easily accessible, effective, and visibly confidential advocate) are lacking; whereas on other campuses, several offices need better coordination to insure continued progress.
In too many cases, women remain silenced about violent or intimidating behavior by superiors, peers, and partners. Some women are driven out of the university by a spuriously even-handed approach, which rarely results in real sanctions for the perpetrators or real justice for the survivors. When accountability for women's safety is marginalized in Equal Opportunity or other offices outside the regular reporting structures, the result is often to forestall legal remedies that women off campus can pursue if they are attacked in their homes, workplaces, or in public spaces.
Vision for the Year 2000:
Discussion of the problem: A survey of the distribution of women employees at our institutions indicates that they are conspicuously underrepresented in many of the organizational units. Women's opportunities for career advancement are inequitably restricted, as evidenced by their disproportionate under-representation in positions of administrative and supervisory responsibility, and by their disproportionate overrepresentation in positions of lower rank or status, less compensation, and less job security. Faculty and other professional women are less well paid than their male counterparts, and faculty women are less likely to achieve tenure or, having achieved tenure, to be promoted to full professor. Non-exempt staff positions tend to be highly sex- segregated. In the segments of the workforce in which women predominate, such as clerical and office workers, opportunities for career advancement are severely limited. Far too many women report being intimidated or silenced, when they have spoken out against these facts of university life; they also report profound distrust or dissatisfaction with available grievance and other conflict resolution mechanisms.
Vision for the Year 2000:
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