Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA02906 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 8 Mar 2001 14:34:03 GMT Subject: Fwd: Harvard educator seeks renewal at NYU Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 09:30:03 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Message-ID: <20010308143005.AAA23968@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
We spoke, too briefly, here, about the law.
- Wade
************
Harvard educator seeks renewal at NYU
By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 3/8/2001
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/067/nation/Harvard_educator_seeks_renewal
_at_NYUP.shtml
In her cozy new Greenwich Village apartment, overlooking a tiny garden
covered with snow, Carol Gilligan has just written a book called ''The
Birth of Pleasure.'' It's about love, myths, and, more than anything
she's ever done, herself.
At 64, the renowned social psychologist has found a new life: a return to
''the edge'' of critical thinking about gender, two decades after her
landmark text, ''In A Different Voice,'' convinced many people that
societal norms were stifling many girls and young women from speaking
their minds.
This rebirth, as Gilligan's friends call it, has come with an
extraordinary change. She is leaving Harvard University after 34 years of
teaching for New York University and, in particular, its red-hot law
school.
It wasn't NYU's six-figure salary or the West Village apartment or $8,000
legal research budget or law school office that lured her (though they
helped). Rather, during a visiting professorship in 1998-99 and in her
ongoing part-time work at NYU, Gilligan found an experience that she says
Harvard hasn't matched: professors teaching together, weaving theater and
literature and law, and creating a fresh curriculum out of their books
and personal experiences.
''When you fall into questions on the edge of your own work, with people
in other disciplines - this is something I had not particularly expected,
and the joy was incredible,'' Gilligan said in an interview this week.
Harvard, in turn, has felt increasingly familiar and complacent to her,
Gilligan's friends say. Her research on gender and education has seemed
more and more narrow. And she thinks she is misunderstood by those in
Cambridge who say she should fully reveal and explain the data girding
her work.
''I think she feels bitter at Harvard, but it's being covered over,''
said David Richards, an NYU law professor who teaches ''Gender Issues in
Culture, Law, and Psychology'' jointly with Gilligan. ''Harvard helped
give her a stature and a standing, and she knows that.''
Gilligan's departure is a huge loss for the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, which fought hard to keep her, trying but failing to secure a
university professorship there for her.
The move, moreover, came at an extraordinary moment: NYU confirmed the
hire last Friday, the same day Harvard announced a $12.5 million gift
from actress Jane Fonda, who gave the money to create a center for gender
studies and education - in Gilligan's honor.
Gilligan's work to secure the gift from Fonda, and her awakening to an
excitement about New York, are closely entwined: Gilligan said she was
upfront with Fonda about her NYU plans, and saw the gift as a way to
ensure her legacy at Harvard and move to Manhattan - where she spent her
childhood - and to a law school in a city where her father was a
litigator.
''What's happening to Carol is happening to a lot of women today - we're
marrying our personal and professional lives,'' said Margot Stern Strom,
a close friend of Gilligan's who runs the Harvard Facing History Project
with her.
Gilligan's forthcoming book is her most personal, she said, mixing her
memories and dream analysis with observations about pleasure and love in
different cultures. At NYU, she said she wants to go beyond psychology
research and create a new curriculum that weaves literature, culture, and
civic life, as well as the gender work she has done before.
''She became increasingly convinced that psychology had come to a dead
end, had lost its momentum,'' said NYU's Richards. ''She felt the need to
move into other fields.''
In the NYU class she and Richards teach, some students write plays as
seminar papers. They also perform scenes written by Shakespeare,
Tennessee Williams, and the Greeks, to explore how people in varied
positions of power, or speaking with different emotions, can ''be in
dialogue with one another.''
''At this historic moment, the voices of so many people who were not part
of the conversation are now coming into it,'' Gilligan said. ''I saw my
colleagues at the law school picking up the inner world of voice and
narrative in society.''
Richards said one draw for Gilligan at NYU is working with young women
training to be lawyers.
''When we start class, students speak about how law school is crushing
them, how they're losing their voice, that it's a dreadful place and they
can't speak,'' said Richards. ''Carol sees these young women as having
strength for resistance that many men don't have, and wants to bring them
to a greater self-consciousness.''
Gilligan said she did not try to seek a similar post at Harvard Law
School. She said she could have tried to kindle similar connections at
Harvard, but that her moorings in the Education School and psychology
work would have made that difficult.
''I just walked into a very alive intellectual situation and
collegialship at NYU, and I was really very happy,'' she said.
Gilligan's work has been controversial with critics of feminism and
scholars of male childhood. Some professors at Harvard Law School said
NYU's nontraditional approaches to legal training are less in vogue in
Cambridge, and they doubt Harvard Law would have made as broad an opening
for Gilligan.
''There's nothing going on at Harvard Law School of the sort that's going
on at NYU Law,'' said one Harvard law professor.
Gilligan is only the latest high-profile loss for Harvard. NYU Law School
just hired away a top professor at Harvard Law, Joseph Weiler. And Boston
College has given a tenured post to a popular women's studies instructor
at Harvard, Juliet Schor. Her departure angered several students who said
Harvard hasn't done a good job recruiting and tenuring female faculty
members. Schor left in part because her husband works at BC.
Ironically, it was the Fonda gift as much as anything that opened the
door for Gilligan to NYU, which has been trying to recruit her for years.
''I was waiting to feel that I could move on without jeopardizing work
that I felt an enormous commitment to,'' she said.
Harvard responded to NYU's offer with what Gilligan said was a
''generous'' counteroffer, holding out much more money as well as more
sabbatical time.
Jerome Murphy, dean of the Graduate School of Education, also asked
Harvard president Neil Rudenstine about a university professorship for
Gilligan, which would have allowed her to teach in various schools, the
opportunity that most excites her about NYU. ''To the best of my
knowledge there were none available,'' Murphy said. (Harvard's governing
board now appoints about 20 faculty members to university professorships,
at the recommendation of the president.)
For Gilligan, NYU may provide a fellowship or position for her husband,
Jim, and the couple might teach together in the future. They have a home
in the Berkshires, as well as one in Brookline, and she will start at NYU
full-time in 2002, the same year her new book is expected to be published.
She will also play an advisory role for the Fonda-inspired Harvard Center
on Gender and Education. But she is clear that she has no doubts about
leaving - she likes where she's heading.
''I'm again moving to where the edge is for me,'' she said.
Patrick Healy's e-mail address is phealy@globe.com.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 3/8/2001. © Copyright
2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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