The ALANA Letter Precipitates Curricular Changes

While the program had made strides in its inclusion of race into the curriculum, it had neither successfully displaced gender from the center of its analyses, nor had it addressed racism among its faculty, students, and staff. In the summer of that year, a group of ALANA (African, Latina, Asian, and Native American) faculty, staff, and students delivered a letter to the Women’s Studies program that outlined the ways that they felt the program fell short for people of color on campus. The authors of the letter acknowledged that individuals and groups within the program had been working to address issues of race and racism, but nonetheless felt that Women’s Studies was not a “comfortable and encouraging environment” for ALANA students and faculty. Most ALANA students, they wrote, had experienced both subtle and overt racism from European American faculty and students in the department. Overall, they felt that the curriculum remained primarily focused on middle class white women’s experiences and did not facilitate ALANA students’ desire to learn about women of color and non-Eurocentric theories.

While Women’s Studies had made progress by hiring more faculty of color in recent years, and had required students to participate in workshops on racism, the authors of this letter said, there was still a great deal of work to be done for the program to live up to the ideal of inclusiveness implied by its name. They offered two concrete solutions at the end of their letter. The first was that Women’s Studies should continue its efforts to hire people of color for all types of positions and that students of color should be involved in every step of the hiring process. Their second recommendation was that Women’s Studies should support student-led colloquia so that students, particularly women of color, could have opportunities to learn from one another and take active roles in their education. The authors also requested that their letter be published in the Women’s Studies newsletter, which it was, in the fall of 1992.⁴³

This letter served as one of the main catalysts for the curriculum re-evaluation and structural changes Women’s Studies undertook that fall. A Curriculum Committee, consisting of core and associated faculty, developed a draft of a new curriculum, to replace the one that had been in use since the program’s founding. They presented it to students for comment and it was subsequently approved by the Executive Committee in the spring of 1993. At the heart of the new curriculum was Women’s Studies faculty, staff, and students’ desire to address “issues of racism and multiculturalism.” As Leila Ahmed, Women’s Studies Director at the time, wrote,

The America in which contemporary feminism arose in the sixties and the Women’s Studies Programs it gave rise to in the seventies, has changed. Feminism too has changed. It has become more sophisticated and, above all, critically aware of the interlocking relation between racism, classism, and sexism, and of assumptions about the cultural primacy of the American and specifically the Euro-American cultural vision.

Among the major revisions the committee made were the replacement of the Foundations of Feminism course with a Critical Perspectives on Feminism course; the development of a Theorizing Women’s Issues course to replace the older theory course; and the replacement of the Cross-Cultural course with two required courses on Women of Color.⁴⁴ 

⁴³ WOST Newsletter, Fall 1992, p 2-3.

⁴⁴ WOST newsletter, Fall 1993, p. 1.