Ann Ferguson Retires

After serving for two consecutive terms as Director, Ann Ferguson retired in 2007. Faculty wondered how the program would survive without Ann's prodigious energy and tireless work on many projects including founding the Graduate Certificate Program, organizing a number of important conferences, and connecting to activism around the many issues on campus and in the state. Her work with the Graduate Certificate Program went far beyond its initiation. She served as GPD for many until her retirement and during her tenure she was the reader on virtually all the students' research papers. She was aided in this work by members of the committee most of whom were in other departments and some, like Joyce Berkman and Marta Calas, have been serving on this committee since the beginning of the graduate program. In May of the year before her retirement, women's studies and the philosophy department hosted a two day conference in her honor: "Feminist Philosophy Conference in Celebration of the Career and Legacy of Ann Ferguson." Feminist philosophers from across the country attended, some of them also founding mothers of the field. Also on the occasion of her retirement Ann founded the Ann Ferguson Scholarship Fund, for low income graduate students returning to school, in honor of her mother Elizabeth Ferguson and made the initial donation of $10,000. Most importantly for the future of the program she was able to convince the Dean to allow the program to search for a tenure track position in gender and sexuality since she had brought half of her faculty line into Women's Studies when she became director.