RE: Harvard educator seeks renewal at NYU

From: Vincent Campbell (v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 08 2001 - 16:01:30 GMT

  • Next message: Wade T.Smith: "Re: Are there any memes out there?"

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    From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk>
    To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
    Subject: RE: Harvard educator seeks renewal at NYU
    Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 16:01:30 -0000 
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    I'm sorry, I couldn't get any further after reading the bit about an
    academic getting a six figure salary. I just broke down and cried...

    Vincent

    > ----------
    > From: Wade T.Smith
    > Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    > Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2001 2:30 pm
    > To: memetics list
    > Subject: Fwd: Harvard educator seeks renewal at NYU
    >
    > 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_renewa
    > l
    > _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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