Sustaining and Disbanding the Women's Studies Committee at Greenfield Community College (2002)

Women's studies is an institutional change movement that continues both to flourish and flounder in the academy with varying degrees of success for institutions, faculty, and program directors as well as students (Luebke and Reilly; Mahar and Tetreault; McTighe-Musil, Courage to Question). At Greenfield Community College (GCC), a small rural community college of 2,200 students located in western Massachusetts, our journey into women's studies has certainly been both joyous and perilous. GCC is the only higher educational institution in the poorest county in Massachusetts. Yet nearby to the south is the Five-College Consortium of Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. These institutions have women's studies programs and/or minors as well as the Five-College Women's Research Center. Such an atmosphere has provided ongoing professional development opportunities and resources for the women's studies faculty and staff at GCC. In our college, women's studies courses began with the efforts of six committed women faculty.1 For nearly twenty years, this small group has sustained the interdisciplinary curricular offerings, strengthening them for women students by collaborating with other programs and services within the college and in the community. It also has secured outside funding to support its work. Despite these strengths and successes, the Women's Studies Steering Committee recently disbanded itself after nearly two decades of work. Over the years, the committee worked diligently to balance its own vision for itself with the larger administrative and institutional demands. Our committee believed its primary function was to develop and promote the curriculum, teach women's studies courses, advise students, and foster women's studies and more inclusive content in the larger college curriculum. Administrators, however, often considered the committee's primary role to be coordinating the annual speaker series, arranging and hosting events to celebrate Women's History Month in March, and serving as a liaison and resource on women's issues for the surrounding community. Given the limited financial and human resources and different expectations, tensions ensued. This past fall our efforts to reach yet one more compromise on the coordinator's job functions failed. The Women's Studies Steering Committee found itself at a crossroads and the members of the committee made the heart-wrenching decision to disband. Nevertheless, over the nearly twenty years of its existence, the Women's Studies Steering Committee did manage to sustain the balance of coordinating the curriculum and coordinating the public role with regularly scheduled events. We accomplished this through the development of alliances with other campus groups and a simultaneous willingness of the members of our small committee to labor under a constant work overload. The collaborations promoted and strengthened the women's studies curriculum and our connections with the community. However, the constant overload and tension between our own view of our roles and the administrative view of the public events role continually stretched our personal resources. In building and maintaining a women's studies program, each institution must consider its role in its own institutional culture and environment. Our committee found it most helpful to remain connected to various other marginalized groups, both in the college and the community, and to form alliances with them. Over the years, these have included committees or groups involved with diversity and multicultural issues; international studies and global issues; affirmative action; sexual harassment; health awareness and violence prevention; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students; and disability groups. As difficult and time consuming as these cross-institutional alliances are, they are important for institutional change and as models of change for students. …