It has been a busy, challenging and enlightening Spring semester for me as the Women's Studies director. As acting director for this year, the spring was a "journey of discovery" and also of "self"-discovery. On the one hand, it took both joy and sometimes pain to understand the full spectrum of the program and all the details that go into making it look "easy" and "seamless." The program comes out that well thanks to the behind-the-scenes on-going work of the staff. It is difficult to imagine that so much can be accomplished without the dedication and hard work of Linda Hillenbrand, Karen Lederer, and Nancy Patteson. I thank them for making my job possible and manageable. I also want to thank the faculty for their support of my work during the spring semester. At the same time, this semester was for me a journey of "self"-discovery. Despite my much touted cross-over between management and feminism, I often found myself promoting the managerial logic that, intellectually, I so much suspect. I found myself, in fact, "managing." I hope that eventually I will be able to find a viable balance between management and feminism that would serve as a positive contribution to Women's Studies.

All those reflections aside, altogether it was a very exciting semester. We were pleased to host challenging and engaging scholars such as Julie Graham, Ellen Kornegay, and Laurie Witt who through the lecture series "Truth and Consequences: The Ethics and Epistemology of Research" spoke on pressing issues of global importance. Also, the Spring lunchtime brownbag lecture series, ran jointly with the Graduate Certificate Research Seminar, and hosted feminist scholars from Finland, Croatia, Thailand, and Brazil.

From the above, you can gather that this past spring we have also started to strengthen and highlight the program's global expertise. The long range planning document, completed last December, outlines how the program's objectives will be focused over the next five years. This focus is moving now toward globalization processes and their impact on intersectionalities of gender, race and class worldwide. For this purpose a new scholarly niche on "Gender, Globalization and Multiculturalism" is being designed. You will be hearing more about this planning process in the months to come.

Also this past spring, Women's Studies got engaged in the campus debate on affirmative action. While this issue arose at UMass about admissions policies, we are part of a national conversation about affirmative action, the legal, ethical, and practical ways to address institutional racism and sexism. The Women's Studies Executive Committee called upon the Chancellor to set a national example by examining admissions standards as a whole, and not only focusing on affirmative action. Focusing on affirmative action alone assumes the current standards are "neutral" even though SAT scores and other indicators have been clearly shown to favor upper level economic groups and people from European backgrounds. We are pleased to be part of this national dialogue that will continue here and across this country this year. In fact, the 1999-2000 lecture series will have a strong focus on Affirmative Action in connection with the politics of gender, race and class. In addition several members of the Women's Studies program are coordinators and participants in various campus-wide upcoming events focusing on affirmative action. More information on these is provided in the following pages.

As always, we are proud of, and I am grateful as well to our productive faculty and their prestigious projects, but I am sorry to say a (temporary we hope) goodbye to Janice Raymond and Leila Ahmed. In the meantime, we have hired a trio of dynamic professors Sima Fahid, Lisa Robinson, and Kathleen Zane to teach in the program for this year and fill in the gaps.

For now, I am looking forward to a productive, stimulating year (and to Ann Ferguson's return as director in the Spring 2000!).