newsletter spring 2002

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Elizabeth Davenport on Sylvia Manning's "Women in Higher Education" address.

Take an elegant dining room at the Davidson Conference Center. And Chancellor Sylvia Manning of the University of Illinois, Chicago. And ninety-nine women and seven men! You have this year’s Women in Higher Education luncheon, held on March 6, organized by a small collective from the Center for Feminist Research, Gender Studies, the Center for Women and Men, Women’s Student Assembly, and the School of Education graduate student organization, and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate.

Manning’s long tenure at USC (in the English Department, and subsequently as vice provost), prior to her move to Chicago, assured a large turnout of her former colleagues and friends. Her topic – women in educational administration – meant, perhaps predictably, a large turnout of women.

After a delicious lunch of asparagus soup, followed by portobello mushroom Caesar salad (yes, one of the guys present was heard to ask jokingly, “Where’s the beef?!”), professor of English and gender studies, Dr. Hilary Schor, introduced Sylvia Manning. “Sylvia is someone who, in higher education, has long stood higher and taller than the rest of us,” she said, detailing Manning’s life and career in terms that prompted Manning to beg her, “Please be sure to come to my funeral!”

“I left USC because I’d been here too long,” Manning began, in her familiar wry style. “I didn’t want to become the old woman of the tribe, the one who remembered how things were done in ancient times.” Nonetheless, she took a few moments to remind her audience of how it had been in the old days: the beginnings of feminist organizing at USC; the women who wrote their salaries on large pieces of card and pinned them to their chests in protest both at the secrecy surrounding pay scales and at the widely perceived lack of pay equity; the former administration’s discomfort with ’80s demands for a women’s center (“We’ve got women on everything already…”); and the emergence of the Feminist Council, led by respected faculty.

It was quite a different setting that Manning found at the University of Illinois when she moved there in 1994. The stately, mature, self-confident campus at Urbana/Champaign… and the fiery, upstart, brash Chicago cousin of which she was to become the chancellor. Of 22 senior administrators, she discovered, 12 were women (herself included). Good, she said. But then she looked at where the women were: deans of social work, education, pharmacy, nursing, the library, applied health, student affairs, public health, and so forth. Where were the men? You guessed it: business, engineering, the graduate school, urban planning, dentistry, heading the college of letters, arts, and sciences….
We women are excellent at higher education administration, she continued. But there are some things we just have to learn, and better sooner than later.

Like: “Pay now or pay later.” In other words, don’t think you can get away with acting without consulting first. Yes, consulting sometimes seems disingenuous, or a waste of time, but if people don’t like your process (however agreeable the outcome!), you’ll spend more time repairing the mess you’ve made than you would have done consulting them in the first place. Oh, and given the speed with which you sometimes must make decisions, talking to people first may save you some embarrassing mistakes.

And: “Accept male mentors – you can learn from anybody.” Yes, you may experience some mediocre mentoring sometimes, but better that than nothing!
And: “Transcend the trivial.” Fight the issues that matter. (If you got all As in school, this is hard to learn!)

And: “It’s OK to change as you learn.” Despite old stereotypes of women as flighty, inconsistent, and not forceful enough, it really is OK for you to change your mind.

Manning peppered her talk with stories and reminiscences of moments when she learned lessons that had shaped her understanding of higher education. Recalling a conversation with former USC dean of students Bob Mannes, for example, she quoted him as having told her: “If you have to make a decision, and you make the choice that is worse for the university, the university will probably emerge unscathed. But if you have to make a decision, and you make the choice that is worse for the student, a life may be harmed.”

Reflecting on the need to be able to see the world as others see it, she remembered once speaking up in defense of an administrator who had said something that appeared tinged with racial overtones. He doesn’t mean it like that, she had said, in the presence of an African American colleague. Her colleague quietly countered: “But how’s a Black man to know that?” That question made her realize, she said, the need to cultivate empathy by practicing sitting in the seats of others.

During the discussion time at the end of the luncheon, members of the audience wondered, “Do men sit and talk like this?” And, directly to Manning, “Would you have talked like this to a group of men?” “Yes,” she answered without hesitation. And vice provost Neal Sullivan proffered that, from his perspective, the advice Manning had been giving was good for women and men alike. But Jeannie Weiss, administrator in the gender studies department, expressed regret that more men were not present. “It’s even more important for men to hear a talk like this,” she opined.

Response to the event from those present (faculty, administration, and students, from both the university park and health sciences campuses) was uniformly warm and enthusiastic. Rabbi Susan Laemmle, dean of religious life, noted the sense of solidarity and commonality that often occurs when a group of women get together. “Not that this can’t happen in a mixed audience,” she added, “but there’s a particular sense of group feeling.” Jennifer Vega, doctoral student in education and one of the organizing collective for the event, commented how glad she was that, after four years, the luncheon had taken root. “I’m so proud that this event still exists,” she said, “and that it will continue after its founding mothers graduate.”

In previous years, former Berkeley provost, Carol Christ, and noted MIT professor, Nancy Hopkins have addressed the event. With major research universities around the country now following MIT’s example in paying renewed, and sometimes overdue, attention to gender equity issues, the annual Women in Higher Education luncheon continues to be a significant event on the USC calendar.

And, as Sylvia Manning said in closing her talk, quoting from a favorite cartoon: “The reason you can’t fool all of the people all of the time is because half of the people are women.”