My Life on the Road (13 page)

H
ow do I love campuses? Let me count the ways. I love the coffee shops and reading rooms where one can sit and talk or browse forever. I love the buildings with no addresses that only the initiated can find, and the idiosyncratic clothes that would never make it in the outside world. I love the flash parties that start in some odd spot and can’t be moved, and the flash seminars that any discussion can turn into. I love the bulletin boards that are an education in themselves, the friendships between people who would never otherwise have met, and the time for inventiveness that produces, say, an exercise bike that powers a computer. Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.

I’m often asked how many campuses I’ve visited. The truth is I have no idea. I’ve gone to several each month of my lifetime on the road, and I’ve gone back to many more than once. All I know for sure is that university and college campuses, with some high schools and prep schools added, have been the single largest slice of my traveling pie—and they still are.

When I started traveling to campuses, protest against the draft and the war in Vietnam was empowering students as a political force—and there were many more movements to come. They have brought about change, from what gets taught to who gets tenure; from how the university invests its money to where athletic uniforms are made; from students taking a role in campus decision-making to Take Back the Night marches against sexualized violence on campus; from marginalizing some by class, race, sexuality, and physical ability to including diverse people and new courses of study.

In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just “given” the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then, academic courses on Europe far outnumbered those on Africa, even though it is the birthplace of us all and is bigger than Europe, China, India, and the United States combined. When I’m on campus now and look at course listings, the relative importance reflected in them is much better but still way off.

There has always been this question of what is being taught. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in general and African American women’s history in particular, summed it up, “We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds.”
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No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. I say this as a reminder that campuses not only help create social justice movements, they need them.

Now, campuses look more like the country in terms of race and ethnicity—though we’re not there yet, and bias can survive college degrees. I see women outnumbering their male counterparts on some campuses, but degrees are often a way out of the pink-collar ghetto and into a white-collar one. Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt.

I see campuses representing more age diversity. More than a third of college students are over twenty-five, and this age group is growing faster than students of conventional age, a change that was pioneered by veterans and the GI Bill of Rights, then by older women returning to campus. I remember watching a thirty-year-old pregnant woman arguing about the health care system with an eighteen-year-old male student, and thinking:
This has to be good for education.

In campus terms, you might say I’ve gone from mimeographing to tweeting; from curfews to hooking up; from no-credit women’s studies courses in summer school to the National Women’s Studies Association; from African American history as demanded by black students to such history as the expectation of all students; from gay and lesbian groups forbidden to meet on campus to transgender and transsexual students who challenge all gender binaries; from blue book exams to handwriting as a disappearing art; and from limited seminars to limitless Web hangouts.

For instance, during early visits to campuses, I saw students painting a big red X on sidewalks wherever a woman had been sexually assaulted—and ending up getting arrested for vandalism instead of being praised. Now I see their daughters and granddaughters using Title IX—the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education, including sports—to threaten campuses with the loss of federal funding if sexual assault creates an environment hostile to women’s education. For decades, places of higher education obscured the rates of sexual assault, in order to protect a campus reputation and encourage parents to send their daughters. Now I see a few campuses that are honest about and have policies to deal with sexual assault—which happens to an average of one in five women on campus, and a few men, too.
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It shows this is beginning to be taken seriously, which is a reason for parents to trust those campuses.

As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism. Scholarly language may be so theoretical that it obscures the source of feminism in women’s lived experience. One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is “I don’t know enough to be a feminist.” Or even “I’m not smart enough to be a feminist.” It breaks my heart.

But despite all these differences, with the passage of time, I’ve found there is a pattern to campus visits. It goes like this:

I arrive at the airport—or train station or bus station—where I’m met by one or more of the hardy band of activists who invited me. In the car on the way to the campus—or hotel or classroom or press conference—I learn they are worried. In the South or Midwest, they may warn that this is the most “conservative” place I’ve ever been. If we are on the East or West Coast, they’re more likely to say it’s the most “apathetic.” Or perhaps it’s “activist,” but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production. They have reserved a hall for tonight and have publicized the event, but they’re worried that hardly anyone will come. After all, they’ve been told that feminism is too radical or not radical enough, antimale or male-imitative, impossible because men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or unnecessary because we’re now in a postfeminist, postracist age. The nature and specifics of the negative depend on the part of the country and the year, but the common thread is: self-doubt.

I tell them they’ve done their best—now it’s up to the universe. Then I ask about current events or controversies on campus so I will know what to use as examples in my speech. After all, my job is to make their work easier after I leave than it was before I came. It’s already easy for me. I don’t have to worry about getting good grades, negotiating faculty politics, achieving tenure, publishing in scholarly journals, becoming department chair, or crossing other hurdles that those in academia have to cross. I can bring up problems and possibilities that students want brought up. I can also carry ideas from one campus to the next, in the bee-and-flower model of organizing. I’m here to make them look reasonable. After all, I’m leaving in the morning.

At first, my student hosts may cite faraway subjects—say, global warming or foreign policy—as if only the big, distant, and well publicized could be serious. But since revolutions, like houses, are built from the bottom up, I ask what changes they want to see on campus and in their daily lives.

In this way, I find out that, say, the business school is getting a new building while the college of education is still in Quonset huts; or that the state legislature has raised tuition and cut scholarships but is now paying $50,000 a year per prisoner to Wackenhut, which operates prisons for profit; or that military recruiters are offering impoverished female and male students big signing bonuses but giving little forewarning of combat or sexual assault statistics; or that faculty of color somehow never become department chairs; or that the mostly female nonprofessional staff is being paid bubkes and forbidden to unionize; or that fraternities are defending brothers against sexual assault charges by threatening to bring libel suits against the women who report them; or that a newly “out” lesbian basketball coach has to take a monitoring faculty member along on team travels; or that a law school professor is famous for asking only female students about cases with a sexual component; or that a male medical school professor hires prostituted women on whom to demonstrate gynecological exams; or that the football team spends a lot on Astroturf but not on preventing brain injury—and many other indicators of a need for change.

In short, serious politics are happening right here on campus.

After visiting a class or two, maybe having dinner with student leaders and faculty—where I find out still more about what’s happening on campus—we go to the lecture hall. There we discover that it’s already full, and people are waiting outside: Perhaps someone is hooking up a public address system for the overflow, or people are being put into rooms with closed-circuit television, and paper is being handed out so they can send in their comments for the postlecture discussion. In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also underestimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.

Now the organizers are apologetic for thinking too small. Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women’s movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step. At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women’s libbers, “bra burners,”
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and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase-carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters responsible for a gender gap that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a “postfeminist” age, so we would relax, stop, quit. Indeed, the common purpose in all these disparate and contradictory descriptions is to slow and stop a challenge to the current hierarchy.

But controversy is a teacher. The accusation that feminism is bad for the family leads to understanding that it’s bad for the patriarchal variety, but good for democratic families that are the basis of democracy. The idea that women are “our own worst enemies” forces us to admit that we don’t have the power to be, even if we wanted to. When occasionally a lecture hall has to be emptied and searched after an anti-abortion group has sent in a bomb threat, I’ve noticed that when we return, the audience has grown bigger out of support.

So far, I’ve also noticed that, if an audience is half women and half men, women worry about the reaction of the men around them. But in one that is two-thirds women and one-third men, women respond as they would on their own, and men hear women speaking honestly. When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

Sometimes, hostility shows up, and that is educational in itself. Without campuses in the Bible Belt, I wouldn’t know that the belief that women’s subordinate role is ordained by God is still with us, or that it can take courage for a student from a strict Christian family—or a Jewish or Muslim equivalent—to go to any college that doesn’t teach the New Testament, the Old Testament, or the Koran as the literal truth. A student from Bob Jones University who sought counseling there after being sexually assaulted was asked to “repent,” as if she had attracted the assault. In Texas, I saw people outside an auditorium where I was about to speak. Because their signs called me a humanist, I assumed they were welcoming—until a former fundamentalist explained to me that because humanism is bad and secular, Christians were demonstrating against my speech.

In some audiences, feminism is blamed for, say, divorce or plummeting birthrates or lower salaries—instead of blaming unequal marriage or lack of child care or employers who profiteer—but this is an education, too. People who arrive assuming that no one could possibly disagree with equal pay may learn otherwise from someone who rises to say that the free market takes care of that; unequal pay just means that women aren’t worth as much as employees. Anyone who believes we’re living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history. On the other hand, hearing men say they want to humanize the “masculine” role that is literally killing them, and that they want to raise their own children, keeps all those present from measuring progress by what was, and raises a new standard: what could be.

Altogether I’ve seen enough change to have faith that more will come.