University of Venus

Reflecting on choices, hardships and successes.

The last few weeks at my university have seen the usual busyness that comes with the end of the semester amplified by a lot of change.

It was that time of the year again, one of my favorites: spring when I get to. I love raking, organizing, and generally cleaning up our relatively large lot, and this year was extra-special because we had a lot of large, dead branches littering the yard. Or, as my kids like to call them, Angry Bird launchers.

On 29 March - coincidentally my birthday and the day General George Patton took Frankfurt - Susan Patton published a Letter to the Editor in The Daily Princetonian titled “Advice for the Young Women of Princeton: the Daughters I Never Had” that made a stir at my doctoral alma mater. Like me, Patton has two sons. Like me, Patton has adopted highly accomplished female undergraduates at her alma mater as surrogate daughters. Like me, Patton finds endless banter about “leaning in” to careers vapid unless it engages women’s private as well as public personas. Unlike me, she advises Princeton women to graduate with a diploma and a marriage license. Ms. Patton’s prescription depends upon three flawed premises, all rooted in assumptions.

An academic career is challenging for anyone, yet the gender gap suggests that the current system continues to favour men. There are a number of particular factors that women face and, late last year, I realised that these challenges fall into two main categories.

There was a time when university presses, defined not as enterprises but as simple printing facilities, had as primary function the publication/diffusion of research texts produced at the university with which they were affiliated. One of the primary text forms to be published was the doctoral or magisterial dissertation.

Several incidents recently drew me into the core of my University’s business: students. One was a failed suicide attempt. Last semester, we had one who was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Less tragic were two students known to me who have similarly dropped out of school: one who was a recipient of a food subsidy program I had been supporting and another a Political Science junior whose health could no longer cope with the travel from her remote mountain village to our campus in Miagao. Being chair of a Division that runs two undergraduate programs with 420 odd students, having 4 students fall into the cracks as it were may be statistically insignificant. But being a teacher, any addition to the score of (near) dropouts is heartbreaking.

In early March 2013, I attended the 1st Biennial Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference at John Jay College in New York. I presented a selection from Chapter 2 of my dissertation (you can see an early draft of that here) and was very excited to share my work with other Latina/Latino studies scholars.