00:00:00A.B.: I'm Amy Brainer, associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies and coordinator of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. And I'll let you introduce yourself.
00:00:09J.V.: I am Jaqueline or Jackie Vansant. I'm a professor emerita of German. I was, from September 1997 to April '98, the interim director of Women's Studies.
00:00:22A.B.: Yes. That was right before Lora Lempert, placing it in time.
00:00:29J.V.: I really saw myself as interim because although I had written my dissertation on women writers, and I was a feminist, my research had really taken me away from that. It was something that I was doing more because Pat [Smith] had done her - I didn't know how many years she did it, but I knew that she was retiring, and they needed somebody in that sort of juncture between Pat and Lora.
00:00:54A.B.: Do you remember how it came about? Did someone ask you to do it? Did you volunteer? Do you remember that?
00:01:02J.V.: I don't really remember. My guess is that somebody asked me, and it may have either been Pat or it may have been Lora, that they said - because Lora either was on sabbatical that year - because it was obvious that she wanted to wait until she had tenure. That was why we were waiting. It was actually the year before I was going to have my sabbatical.
00:01:23A.B.: Okay. Did you have tenure?
00:01:25J.V.: I did. It took me forever to get my - a permanent job. I graduated from Texas in '86 and got my first tenure-track job in '92. I had to wait six years until I could get my first sabbatical.
00:01:44A.B.: Tell me about yourself at that time. What did you specifically bring to the role of director? It could be academic background, personal background -
00:01:54J.V.: It wouldn't have been academic. That may have been the reason why they thought I might be a good fit, but I think it was more that I had tenure, that I fit in as far as ideology with the group and supported it. I knew that Lora was going be coming in the next year, so I felt it was a doable job. I was trying to think of stuff that I did that year, and I think - I remember I invited our faculty to give talks. The only one I remember is Bruce Pietrykowski. They were lunchtime talks, and I'm sure I did more than invite just him. [See the index for a lecture series Jackie hosted, including Bruce's talk and many more.] I was looking through my emails, wondering if my email would go back that far, but it doesn't.
00:02:38A.B.: Yeah, that makes sense. [Laughter]
00:02:42J.V.: So I remember the office. We had an office manager who worked with MALS, the Master's of Liberal Studies, and with Women’s and Gender Studies. We were in that office.
00:02:52A.B.: Oh, that's really useful to know.
00:02:55J.V.: I definitely did not have a good working relationship with the dean. But I don't think - I don't know if I tried to avoid confrontations with him that year or what, but I think I saw my main thing as just keeping the boat afloat and profiling our faculty.
00:03:18A.B.: So tell me more if you - what you remember about how Women’s and Gender Studies was seen by the college and by people outside the program.
00:03:27J.V.: I mean within the group, the small group, I think there was a lot of support. How it was viewed outside of the college, I really can't remember.
00:03:39A.B.: You didn't feel a lot of support from the dean, but was that more personal or programmatic?
00:03:44J.V.: I think part of it was personal. That I had had a run-in with him, and he was a big asshole and a bully, and I let myself be bullied. Which now, with wise years, I would have told him to go fuck himself. Then it was like, "Oh, I'm scared, I'm scared." I was also facing low enrollments in German, so there was a course release for [the directorship], but I had to teach a course as an independent study. I remember juggling that, and I remember Lora [Lempert] was saying, "Well, you shouldn't agree to do that." It's like, "I can't not agree to do that. My German program." So I was probably torn very much between German enrollments and what was going on in Women's and Gender Studies. I don't think scheduling classes was a difficulty. I think there were faculty there who really wanted to do the teaching.
00:04:38A.B.: You mentioned one reason you were a good fit, maybe, for director, is the ideology of the group. What would you say that ideology was at the time?
00:04:49J.V.: Uh oh. Oh, damn, Amy, I shouldn't have said that. [Laughter] What was the ideology? Well, I think it was part like becoming - it wouldn't be ideology, but it was the idea we gotta be out there, we gotta be visible -
00:05:04A.B.: Oh, we like ideology. [Laughter]
00:05:11J.V.: I may have misnamed it ideology but - because as far as the faculty, it's a really broad group. As far as the faculty, I remember Lora [Lempert]. Well, Pat [Smith] wasn't teaching. That was the thing, too. Both Pat and I had not been doing anything for a while, at least I hadn't, that would be Women’s and Gender Studies. Suzanne [Bergeron] was real active. Although she was also in sort of a tenuous position because she didn't have tenure yet. She was somebody who I could really depend on. Ideology. What was it?
00:05:49A.B.: Or values. Why don't we just call it values, yeah?
00:05:52J.V.: Values, yeah. It was Katie Anderson-Levitt who was very supportive of - and had been the chair, the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at some point. I don't know at what point did we change it to Women’s and Gender Studies, and what is it called now?
00:06:09A.B.: Women’s and Gender Studies.
00:06:10J.V.: Oh, it is. Okay.
00:06:12A.B.: Suzanne has some of that in her memory. We're starting to get that story of the name change from her.
00:06:22J.V.: My sense is that things really took off when Lora [Lempert] took over. As I said, I wanted to keep the ship afloat, to make us more maybe visible on campus, [to show] that people were doing things. But it was really, I think, my sense was with [Lora] and then with Suzanne, things blossomed.
00:06:42A.B.: What do you remember about your students at the time? The students who were sort of in the Women's Studies orbit. What were they like?
00:06:50J.V.: Well, see, I didn't teach any Women’s and Gender Studies classes.
00:06:54A.B.: Okay. So you mostly supported the faculty.
00:06:55J.V.: Because I was just - again, I was just teaching German. I think it’s going be sort of like a big void, the year '97 to '98. [See the index for Jackie's annual report on the 'big void' aka a ton of things that she accomplished in a single year.]
00:07:05A.B.: [Laughter] I don't think so. No. I mean supporting faculty is keeping the program afloat in such a critical way.
00:07:13J.V.: I'm trying to figure out - I know we must have had a budget, but it probably was not very big. That was probably one of the reasons that I thought I would draw on our faculty. I can't remember if I was able to give them an honorarium. If I were, it would have been minimal. Again, I don't know. I can't remember if I could. I may have actually invited one speaker, and I can't remember if this was because of Women’s and Gender Studies or because of my interest in film studies, but it was an African American professor [Patricia Turner] who Deborah Smith Pollard knew. She had done really interesting work on film, and she had done a study of the two movies, where the pancake - I can't remember the name of it. There are two where there's a remake of the one movie, and it has to do with pancakes and who gets credit for it. And one of the daughters who could - and passing. [Imitation of Life, 1934 and 1959; the Women's Studies winter lecture series flyer includes this talk.] That's possible that I organized that during that year. I can't really remember. That would have been the one outside speaker.
00:08:24A.B.: I mean, you did as much as I did while I was director. Please don't think you didn't do a lot. You did. To give you a little context, part of the reason for this project is because we seem to be constantly being asked to justify our existence and fighting for meager resources, and it kind of struck me that we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We've been around the block with this stuff. And also just wanting to know the story of all this work that people have done before me to do the same thing.
00:09:04J.V.: I don't know how one's - I mean it's so frustrating to have to keep on justifying your existence. I don't know when that stops or how it stops, and I imagine now in these times, it's even harder. I was looking at your research, Amy. Like how endangered is your research?
00:09:22A.B.: Yes. It definitely is a very precarious feeling that at any moment the rug will kind of be pulled.
00:09:31J.V.: I was talking to a friend of mine who's now the interim director of - not regional studies. I don't know what it's called in Ann Arbor. He was saying some of these things, they don't know what's happening with people who are working with their programs abroad. There's just such a big - like from day to day.
00:09:51A.B.: Yeah, absolutely. It makes this feel really precious in a way. I mean when I conceived of the project, I knew that it was important to me, but the timing of it has changed my sense of the urgency, right, of having this story.
00:10:10A.B.: Do you remember how you were supported when you were directing the program and by whom? You mentioned some of that instrumental stuff, like there was a course release, I think we probably had a budget. Did you have mentors? Were there friends that you kind of leaned on, or other things?
00:10:30J.V.: I would have definitely reached out to Pat [Smith], to Lora [Lempert], to Suzanne [Bergeron]. I'm trying to think of - Katie [Anderson-Levitt]. I don't know exactly - oh, no, Katie was definitely not dean at the time. It was John Pressley. And who else? In my department, there would have been people who maybe not were directly in Women’s and Gender Studies, but somebody like Kathy Wider, an older colleague. I don't know the dynamics of that. Maybe somebody like Jonathan Smith, some of the younger faculty.
00:11:06J.V.: There were a lot of splits at the time, and we were the Humanities department or the Inhumanities department, as we liked to call ourselves. [Laughter] The fire's going on in that department. Our chair at the time and John Pressley, I certainly did not get support from either of them. Somebody like Katie and Pat and Lora - they were very helpful to me, also giving me guidance. In some ways, I saw myself as just a figurehead and then getting help from these other people who really knew what was - who had a vision for Women’s and Gender Studies.
00:11:42A.B.: Did you learn anything about yourself through this experience? [Laughter]
00:11:47J.V.: Did I. Yeah. Well, I knew I didn't like conflict, and that became even clearer. And that probably I would never want to be chair. I mean, I was then later - I guess I did okay because then later I was director of MALS [Master's of Liberal Studies], and I think I did a reasonable job there. Carol Ligienza, who was the person who was the office manager was a lot of support, too. She was very helpful. I think she was also very diplomatic. I think she got along with John Pressley. She may have known that I - hell, I didn't, but she never got - she never played favorites. That, I thought, was really good. She was really -
00:12:32A.B.: She was a bridge.
00:12:36J.V.: But what did I learn about myself? I don't know. If I could remember back that far. [Laughter] I mean as I was looking at the dates, I thought, April? Why did I stop in April? It was because I had gotten - well, I had applied for a Fulbright to teach in Leipzig. I didn't get it, but I got some support from Ann Arbor. Their semester starts in April. I missed a week of our school, and I missed a week of Leipzig. Then I taught in Leipzig from April to the end of July. It must have been, at that point - I guess things were - I didn't either do anything, or somebody else took over in April. I was probably, in many ways, counting the days until my sabbatical.
00:13:26A.B.: Do you think you learned anything about the university as a result of either directing Women's Studies or just being involved with Women's Studies?
00:13:36J.V.: I don't know. If anything, it maybe increased my cynicism towards the larger university. And [I] saw Women's Studies as this place where one could do something and where the faculty could, even though I wasn't teaching within the program. The things that I would value would be things like Women’s and Gender Studies, but like be very skeptical of the university and its machinations.
00:14:06A.B.: When you say "do something," what's an example of something you could do?
00:14:11J.V.: Well, I think one of the things is this idea of the support that community gives. I think although I knew very little about the course content, I had the sense that the courses were very important. For some of the people in the class, really life changing. That's where I saw that things could happen. Then I think the later - the things that I remember about people in Women’s and Gender Studies were the classes that Suzanne taught that I think really were life changing for a lot of the students, or the women - the inside/outside, women in prison - that Lora did. I just think those are amazing. Whereas I had this skepticism, or I don't know what it is, about the university saying, "We're gonna do this," and they would have these programs, and it's like nothing would ever come of them. And you'd have to do all this work. I'd get so angry with the administration putting these things on faculty, with little consideration of where it's going to go or what is really - what's it taking away from faculty.
00:15:19A.B.: Absolutely. Do you remember some things that might have been going on socially, politically at that time? Again, you don't have to be so precise. It could be during the period of your directorship or just while you were involved in Women's Studies that the program kind of responded to.
00:15:38J.V.: Again, for some reason, I don't remember exactly what Bruce talked about, but I think the idea of women and economics and inequalities in the market. I remember that. I was trying to think of what was going on in '97 and '98.
00:15:56A.B.: Yeah. I mean, and like I said, it doesn't have to be the exact year because that's maybe too narrow.
00:16:03J.V.: I don't know. My sense was, at that point, a lot of my [German] students were much more conservative than I would say the Women’s and Gender [Studies] students. I remember working up to that election - working up to the election, that I think that a lot of UM-D students were going to vote for Bush.
00:16:25A.B.: So the campus had a conservative feel.
00:16:28J.V.: I didn't get that [conservative feel] so much before Obama was elected or - yeah, I was still teaching in 2016. After that election, I felt like there was this total malaise across the board and depression.
00:16:45A.B.: So there's been sort of a shift in the culture of the campus. That's interesting.
00:16:53A.B.: What memories of Women’s and Gender Studies or Women’s Studies do you cherish?
00:16:59J.V.: I guess, I mean I don't know if cherish - but what I think I find amazing is the strength that the group has had over the years and the support and the headway that it's made, a lot of times in spite of the hurdles. That's more from an outsider's view, but I think that's what I really think is quite an accomplishment.
00:17:26A.B.: What advice would you give to a director of Women’s and Gender Studies today?
00:17:33J.V.: That's a tough one. I don't know. I guess, to see where you have allies and work with those allies. I would say find allies and see where one can resist and try to be effective and see what things - where you could move, even if it's just an inch, some of this stuff that's going on. I would say, yeah, seek out your allies.
00:18:00A.B.: This is my last question. It's kind of a big-picture one.
00:18:04J.V.: Oh my god.
00:18:07A.B.: I know. [Laughter] How do you see the Women's Studies program fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
00:18:17J.V.: I mean [the directorship] was from September to April, so it was small. But as a graduate student, and my dissertation, that's when it was really important, and I had a great dissertation advisor at Texas. That's really when I worked on women’s and gender studies in my own work.
00:18:44A.B.: What was it like then to be doing that work? Your dissertation work and bringing in Women’s and Gender Studies.
00:18:51J.V.: I started at Texas in '82. My dissertation advisor was one of the first faculty at Texas doing anything with women writers. A couple years before that, I had gotten my master's at Wisconsin where Evelyn Beck, who was in the German department but also then went to Maryland and was in Women's Studies, was great. They were the first people who were doing anything with it. Then we were maybe - they all wrote dissertations on men, but their work then shifted to women. The other women that were in my cohort, we were the first women working on women writers, and it was exciting. We had to come up with a new reading list. My favorite substitution was taking Thomas Mann, one of his works off and putting on a book that's - in German is called Entmannung, which means castration.
00:19:52A.B.: [Laughter] I love it.
00:19:54J.V.: That was a lot of fun, that joke. Yeah, that was just, at the time, that women in German, which Suzanne knows one of the main founders of that, is now 50 years old. That was in its earlier years. They were becoming really visible at our major conferences. That was exciting.
00:20:16A.B.: Yeah, you were really creating something.
00:20:19J.V.: Again, I was able to participate. I wasn't one of these shakers and movers. But it was fun. At Texas, too, two other colleagues of mine worked on a reader, a German reader that focused on women writers. So that was fun. Things like that.
00:20:36A.B.: My questions are done, but is there anything else you wanted to add?
00:20:40J.V.: What I think is really exciting that I always liked was the research that women were doing. Or not only women. I remember Jim Gruber being really very supportive of Women’s and Gender Studies and one of the few men who I would really call a feminist. He was really very supportive.
00:20:58A.B.: Yeah, we’ve had some very feminist men involved in the program.
00:21:02J.V.: Well, Amy, I wish that my memory were -
00:21:05A.B.: No, your memory's phenomenal. Are you kidding? I'm telling you, I know it sounds like I'm just saying it, but my memory truly is worse than your memory. [Laughter] My spouse will vouch for that. Your memory is excellent. Thank you so much.
