00:00:00A.B.: I’m Amy Brainer, I'm an associate professor of Women's and Gender Studies and director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
00:00:09S.B.: And I'm Suzanne Bergeron. I'm a retired professor of Women's Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and I was the first person with a joint appointment in Women's and Gender Studies.
00:00:23A.B.: I have you serving as the assistant director of Women's Studies from 2000 to 2003, director of WILL [Women in Learning and Leadership] from 2003 to 2006, and then director of Women's and Gender Studies from 2006 to 2016. Does that sound right?
00:00:42S.B.: Yes, that's right. I want to tell you a little bit more about that trajectory. But before I start, I just want to thank you so much, Amy, for doing these interviews. I really feel like the rich and storied history of our program should never be forgotten, especially now with heightened anti-gender, anti-gay, and anti-trans legislation. Then I'm just so personally gratified that you think this history is important enough to invest in.
00:01:12A.B.: Oh my gosh, thank YOU so much for doing this. You know, I've shared with you in personal conversations, this has been really encouraging for me to do right now, at a period of time when it feels like programs like ours are being chipped away, if not directly assaulted. Hearing about how people navigated different climates, and also hearing from people who built the programs to begin with, has been really encouraging to me, so thank you.
00:01:43S.B.: Oh, well, I'm really glad. And because I'm talking about so many years, and a lot of the other directors were not, my answers are probably going to focus more on shifts in the program and the changes I saw during my time. But feel free to ask any follow ups about details. I want to answer your question about the years that I served with a brief outline. I started as assistant director, and I began by working with Poonam Arora. Her focus was really on the devaluation of women of color in the academy and arts-based feminism. Then I started working with Rashmi Luthra, who took over after. And all of these people will be interviewed, so I just want to say - I worked with Rashmi, and we launched WILL [Women in Learning and Leadership] together, and she restarted the advisory board, wrote the first draft of the Women's and Gender Studies major proposal, led the college on diversifying the curriculum, and then she worked to decolonize the Women's Studies curriculum during her years.
00:02:44S.B.: Then Maureen Linker came in, and she finalized the Women's and Gender Studies major and got it approved and provided a lot of support to keep WILL going. Then also organized this campus-wide conference on diversity in higher ed, following, adding on with her own flavor, the work that Rashmi had been doing before that. Also collaborated really closely with Arab American Studies on more Arab American feminist programs. Then I became the director. At the very moment I became the director, the major was launched and the program's name changed from Women's Studies to Women's and Gender Studies to make space for LGBTQ, masculinities, and gender studies in the curriculum alongside the focus on women. There's actually a paper that a grad student wrote on name changes in women's studies around the country, and I was interviewed for it, and I'll link that paper for the archive. [See the index for this paper by Sydney Lemire.]
00:03:40A.B.: Oh, perfect. So tell me what you remember about how you became the assistant director and then director of WGST and WILL. For example, were these positions you volunteered for or were asked to do?
00:03:54S.B.: Sure. Well, I became the assistant director at the request of then-dean Paul Wong, who really supported Women's Studies and wanted to expand what we were already doing. I was hired by Lora Lempert. She was like the Energizer Bunny of Women’s and Gender Studies [laughter]. She started the [Women’s Studies] certificate program. There was a lot of energy, and it was a really exciting time. Then I was hired and so there were more hands on deck, so to speak. The dean really wanted to grow what was already a pretty exciting, expanding program, and especially to expand student engagement. That was something that I had been doing right from the very beginning, where Marilee Parsons (now Benore) and I launched the Women's Studies Student Alliance. And he wanted us to strengthen ties with what we now call the SOAR program [Support, Opportunities, Advocacy, and Resources for adult learners] for non-traditional returning students. He also wanted to grow feminist scholarship, so he wanted to put me in charge of a mini-grant program, a three-year mini-grant program for Women's Studies. So that was kind of great.
00:05:08S.B.: My WILL directorship then grew out of the work I did on the student engagement piece, which grew into this idea of the Women in Learning and Leadership program. [See the index for documents related to the founding of WILL.] Since I was the chair of that committee, I was a natural first director. Then my Women's and Gender Studies directorship grew out of this idea that because I had the [faculty] line that I would someday become director. But they wanted me to wait til I got tenure. And really no one else wanted to do the job. [Laughter]
00:05:38A.B.: I was struck in interviewing others, the support of protecting junior faculty seemed important. Not having you direct before tenure.
00:05:50S.B.: It was really wonderful to have that because you're kind of putting yourself out there [as a director], and it's not a good idea when you don't have tenure.
00:06:03A.B.: Just as a side question, you were director of WILL, kind of sandwiched in between assistant director of Women’s Studies and director of Women’s and Gender Studies. Did these roles feel similar or was there something about WILL that was different?
00:06:17S.B.: Oh, WILL was so different! The assistant director thing was more like the day-to-day Women's Studies business. But then when I took over WILL, that was just really focused on the students, getting that off the ground, the students working with the advisory board to think of programming, advising students, recruiting students, plugging them into the projects they wanted to do. It just became very concentrated on that, and not the day-to-day of the program.
00:06:47A.B.: For those who are listening and can't see, Suzanne's eyes lit up when she described that about WILL. And I will say as someone who has directed Women’s and Gender Studies but not WILL, interviewing people who have directed WILL, I have gained a new appreciation for how special that program is. So I look forward to keep talking about it with you. Tell me about yourself at that time. What did you specifically bring to each role? This could be your academic background, your personal background, both, or something else.
00:07:19S.B.: I think some unique things that I brought to the job was first, my own personal experience with a transformative interdisciplinary undergraduate program that really changed my life. And that was my undergraduate major in social thought and political economy at the University of Massachusetts. It was a program that was started specifically to give students a critical social science and political economy background integrating women's studies, Africana studies, politics, economics, anthropology, et cetera, coupled with amazing advising by the directors and plugging us into these co-curricular activities. I had this sense of what was possible because I saw it, and I saw what a difference it made. And I also hoped for an opportunity to give back what I had received when I became a professor someday. And so here was this great opportunity to do that. There weren't women's studies PhD programs back then. I'm not going to say that I brought in all of the characteristics of someone who would've had that degree, but I was a truly transdisciplinary scholar, in part because of that undergraduate experience, in part because of my graduate school training in economics, which is a fairly narrow discipline except not where I went to study it.
00:08:45S.B.: I was studying development economics and feminist work and talking to people in the English department, working on the rhetoric of economics. I could talk to all kinds of different people across the campus because of that, and I also had this history of engagements with different feminist ideas and strategies dating back to the '80s. I lived in a house with three women's studies majors, and we would debate different feminist theories, and we would argue about the sex wars and whether you could be heterosexual and be a feminist. [Laughter] All these things in the '80s. Then also going through - needing to be more attentive to third world women's voices. And anyway, I brought all that and I could talk across those differences too.
00:09:32S.B.: Then the third thing I would mention is, I had this unique understanding of how the university worked as a sort of outsider within. Because I was the first hire outside of traditional departmental structures, and I fell through so many cracks. I got to identify them without opening my eyes. I also confronted a lot of troubling power dynamics like the institutionalized sexism of the university. There was institutionalized sexism, there was sometimes overt sexism. And I think you and I - I mentioned this to you before. I was once invited for a mentoring lunch by a senior colleague who had an enormous amount of power in the university. And the mentoring lunch consisted of us ordering lunch and then him telling me, "Leave the university. No one wants you here. There's no place for you here." Because he was very, very much against hiring people in interdisciplinary programs. He saw it as the fall of western civilization, like these African American Studies and Women's Studies [programs], the decline of academia as we know it. That was overt. I wish -
00:10:39A.B.: Do you remember how you responded?
00:10:43S.B.: Well, I didn't eat my lunch, and then he had it boxed up and took it home, and then -
00:10:49A.B.: He took your lunch home?
00:10:51S.B.: Because I didn't eat it. "Do you mind if I take this?"
00:10:53A.B.: Okay, Suzanne, this story is wild. [Laughter]
00:10:56S.B.: It is wild. I didn't tell you that part. I was speechless. But then he would always come by my office and say, "Oh, I'm really worried about you because everyone hates you," and I would say to him, "Actually, everyone loves me."
00:11:09A.B.: You would say that?
00:11:10S.B.: Oh, yeah. I would say, "I'm having such a good time here. Things are going great. Look at all these students coming in and out of my office. My colleague Marilee [Benore] has introduced me to everyone on campus, and they're so excited I'm here." And he would just seethe. [Laughter]
00:11:30A.B.: Wow. You were very strong.
00:11:33S.B.: Thank you. Well, I came from a long - I had a lot of experience with marginalized programs and the faculty in them, and I saw how they handled themselves.
00:11:44A.B.: Yes. No, this is really good for us to hear.
00:11:49S.B.: And you know, I had a lot of people who would give me advice. It was very helpful at that time. So I had that. But most of it wasn't overt. I almost wish it was, because that institutionalized sexism, chipping at you day-to-day, then people don't - they think you're overreacting or something. I feel like I got to really feel it because of my position. I really had to learn how the university worked to protect myself and survive in my job, and that's what I mean by the outsider within perspective, what Patricia Hill Collins would tell you how - she was talking mostly about Black women in certain workplaces or other institutional structures. They needed to always be attentive to how that structure was working in order to survive that job. I felt like that's what I had to do. And I mourned my lost sense of privilege, Amy. I would've loved to have been a faculty member who never had to know any of that. But that was not to be. Also, my students had these unmet needs, and naturally wanting to help them thrive, I had to try to figure out the university and change the structures for them too. You can relate to that.
00:13:10A.B.: Absolutely. And so coming from that place of relating - how did you learn the university structure?
00:13:18S.B.: I mean, I think I learned the university structure by making a lot of mistakes and not knowing where things happened and then just asking questions. "Where does this happen? Who's in charge of this? Why are things set up that way?" But also being that person who - people were surprised I didn't hear about X or Y or Z, really important thing I needed to know. From there, me saying I didn't find out, and then talking to other people and realizing it was because I didn't have an appointment in a department. Or realizing that the paperwork processes were only set up in a particular way where I didn't fit, you know, for the students. A lot of it was mistakes. Figuring out why mistakes happen and fixing them. And then on the student side, thinking you were going to get the answer from one office, and then realizing often that there might be one or two people with a ton of institutional knowledge who are going to help you negotiate. So I'm glad you asked this follow up question. There was a woman in the provost’s office [Maggie Martin] and she really loved Bruce. I’m married to someone who worked at the university [Bruce Pietrykowski]. He was there about 10 years before me. Then she came to really love me, and she knew where all the bodies [were]. She was African American, she herself probably had an outsider within perspective and learned all these things. And she would help me figure out how to get things done, where things really happened. So it was people like that.
00:15:00A.B.: That's really helpful. What expectations and goals did you have going into these roles?
00:15:07S.B.: With WILL, I think my goal was to get students engaged in social change projects, to deepen their Women's Studies learning. But I also had the specific expectation of it always being a group that engaged in co-generational mentoring. I think that flavor's been lost now, but that was it. That was my goal, one, to create this co-generational mentoring and learning of aspiring or potential feminist students. Because I felt like there was so much knowledge among some of our returning women students in Metro Detroit. We explicitly recruited half traditional-age students, half students from the SOAR program. In terms of my expectations of how this would work out, or what activities they would even do, I remained really open. People said I was brave, and maybe I think it was more foolish. [Laughter]
00:16:04A.B.: Often those are two sides of the same coin. [Laughter]
00:16:07S.B.: But I wanted just to be there to facilitate whatever the students wanted to do, and while I hoped they wanted to do the things that I knew stuff about - like, let's organize an anti-sweatshop campaign or a boycott divest action - that is not what happened. The first day of WILL, I went to the meeting with the first group of students, and I said, "What do you want to do?" They said, "We want to work with women in prison," because they had been - of course they had taken one course with Lora Lempert, so their lives had been changed completely.
00:16:41A.B.: Yes, that's what I've heard about courses with Lora Lempert. I still hear that.
00:16:46S.B.: She was teaching a course that incorporated a lot of her work with women prisoners at that time, and she was teaching at the correctional facility. She eventually got me in there, and I was teaching in there. They wanted to do that, and they wanted to prevent young women from taking a life path that would lead them to prison. I was like, "I don't know anything about these things. Oh, crap." [Laughter] I had to then reach out and figure it out, and what they wanted to do. And then I said - I had had this small group of students a couple of years prior who were in the Women's Studies Student Alliance, the precursor of WILL, and they had created this body image workshop for high school students. I said, "Oh, we can do things in high schools." And then the students in WILL said, "No Dr. B, we gotta catch 'em earlier."
00:17:40S.B.: I was like, how do I do this? I don't know anything about kids [laughter], and the educational system in Metro Detroit [laughter], or women in prison. So Lora plugged us into this pen pal project, and then I went to other faculty, and I went to our community advisory board. We had this community advisory board I mentioned earlier of women leaders from nonprofits, in the arts, in business. There were these incredible - the poet Gloria House was part of it, and she eventually came to Dearborn to work. The union leader/novelist Lolita Hernandez was in there. The chair of that board was Vincenza Mueller, who herself had worked with the founder of the Women's Studies program [Helen Graves] as a work study student and was a business leader. I can't name them all, but there were incredible - the veteran feminist leader [from] NOW, the National Organization for Women, key liberal feminist in Michigan, Gerry Barons. Really a diverse group. I would go to them, and then they'd put their brains on and think, "Who are my connections? How do we plug the students in?"
00:19:00A.B.: Oh, that's great.
00:19:02S.B.: That was great. Then we did these leadership workshops for them, and we did these networking opportunities. But what did the students do? They completely exceeded my expectations. They said, "This is what we wanna do," we created the opportunity, and then they ran with it. They did this after school program at a middle school in Metro Detroit where they did a photo voice project where the students documented their lives, did a health module, a "cool careers" workshop. Lolita [Hernandez] worked with one of the WILL students to create a writing workshop for these kids. So that was amazing. [See the index for a brochure about this after school program.]
00:19:38S.B.: They mentored women at a local prison. One thing that happened was that Lora Lempert went to the provost and said, "I wanna have a program where we teach in the prison, and then they can take their credits to UM-Dearborn, and I want a little money for it." Lora was not shy to ask for resources and that's great. He said, "I will support you if you bring in WILL students as mentors," because the word was already out about how cool these students were. So they were mentors in our classes. They came into the prison with us. They had a pen pal project with women in prison as well. They did a Vagina Monologues production with the Players Club [student theater group at UM-D] and raised $2,000. They took over Take Back the Night from the Women's Resource Center because - I think I told you this story before. The then-Women's Resource director - of course we don't have a Women's Resource Center now.
00:20:36A.B.: No, we don't.
00:20:37S.B.: Yes. Women's and Gender Studies along with key staff people were the force behind that happening, by the way.
00:20:44S.B.: Behind getting the center in the first place.
00:20:46S.B.: Oh, yeah. We did all this really great work to make it happen, but then it was launched, and mistakes were made. We learned from them. But someone brought in a man to give a self-defense workshop who prefaced the workshop by saying, "Once I teach you these simple techniques, you'll never be a victim of gender-based violence again." Some of our WILL students had come in to us because they'd experienced gender-based violence with their intimate partners and said, "Wait a minute now. That's just wrong." Of course, they'd taken classes with Lora and had some expertise from those classes. They said, "Oh no, they need us students, Dr. B, 'cause we know things." [Laughter] And they did a lot more.
00:21:36A.B.: Take Back the Night was one of the biggest events on campus when I came in 2014, with WILL leading it.
00:21:43S.B.: Yeah, so it was great. They went to Washington DC to lobby for reproductive rights. And this kind of came from them. None of these were my ideas. We just supported whatever they wanted to do.
00:21:55A.B.: That's really answering the next question. I think you answered it really thoroughly, but just in case you want to add anything - how did your expectations and goals change, if at all, as you did the work?
00:22:06S.B.: Yeah, I think they changed insofar as - I felt like it really exceeded my expectations. I started to think it could grow. And it didn't, but that's not the fault of anyone. If we were going to grow, it would've had to be institutionalized. And we wrote grants, and we just didn't get them. We just couldn't do it without the resources.
00:22:30A.B.: This may be something you don't know, but I know that WILL is a national program. Do you know if that's been a common experience? Is WILL as strong now nationally as it was back when you launched it?
00:22:43S.B.: No. We became WILL, Women in Learning and Leadership, as a way to institutionalize the Women's Studies Student Alliance informal student org that was taking what they learned in their classes and applying them to social change projects. We decided to call it WILL because one of our WSSA students had gone to University of Richmond and knew about the WILL program and said, "Dr. B, they have actually a workshop to replicate it." And I went to that. I've been in touch with those directors around the country. And I would say, no, it's not as strong as it was then for various reasons.
00:23:23A.B.: Do you have any hypotheses about the reasons?
00:23:26S.B.: Part of it is, I think, that the program [when it was launched at Richmond in the 1990s] was actually targeting the fact that women's sense of self-efficacy and leadership opportunities really fell off when they came to college, and I think that changed. So programs had to grow and change with that. We never really fit that mold. But I also think there was this big excitement in universities to institutionalize, to think about the pipeline of women leaders, and interruptions to that pipeline. And then I think that was like a phase in higher ed.
00:24:03A.B.: I hear you. So you're talking about expectations and goals going into WILL. What expectations and goals did you have going into Women's and Gender Studies?
00:24:14S.B.: Perfect. Okay. In terms of my expectations as director of Women's and Gender Studies, I want to focus with you on mostly one thing, and that's institutional support of a particular kind. Then we can talk about other things, but this is a complicated story, and so I just want to be able to focus on it. I feel like my own earlier experience in the university from 1998 on, and being assistant director and director of WILL, and everything that I had experienced up to the time I came in, led me to expect certain forms of ongoing institutional support that really let me dream big. It made me imagine a lot of things that I was actually able to accomplish, I think, in the first few years I was in the job.
00:25:04S.B.: By support I don't mean a lot of resources, although the fact that we in the program actually expected to have more resources is worth mentioning, because we had no thought we wouldn't get more growth. We were on a growth path. Not a de-growth path. What I refer to is not support in terms of money, because I think other people you're interviewing here would say, "We had like no money, and we had to fight for everything." But previous directors had fought for space. They fought for a budget, they fought for course releases, and we thought that fight would be ongoing, and then we would get on par with what people in departments had and maybe more because we were doing more. Not a whole department, but you know what I mean.
00:25:50S.B.: I'm referring to working in an atmosphere where there was this appreciation of our performing valuable educational and other kinds of university work that was not quantifiable in the usual term of numbers of majors or amount of dollars brought in through grants or anything like that. Coupled with that, I feel like campus leaders were attentive to the political landscape we were working in, the ways the field, like other social justice-oriented fields, were subject to conservative attacks of various kinds inside and outside the academy. There was this will—they were protective. There was also a willingness, with a nudge or two or ten [laughter] to key administrators, to defend and even celebrate our social justice contribution as a political act.
00:26:39S.B.: Our programs at that time were held up as a shining example of the best of UM-Dearborn. We were always in the university publications. I made presentations at the regents' meetings. We got money for special projects from the provost and the chancellor. [See the index for the PowerPoint Suzanne presented at the regents' meeting.] I told you before this story, I went to the provost and said, "I want to take the students to the National Women's Studies Conference to present on their cool work, and I need $6,000 because we already have a couple thousand in our budget, and I can borrow it from here and here, and the students will each kick in a couple hundred." He said, "Why don't you take $8,000 and the students don't have to pay anything and you can pay your own way?"
00:27:21A.B.: Wow.
00:27:22S.B.: I know. We directors of programs were sought out all over the campus for our expertise when social justice or discrimination issues came up within the institution. That was thought of as our job. Not that we were - not like I was a big feminist on campus, but that I could direct - if there was a problem, I would know who in my faculty had expertise. Or we want Women's and Gender Studies eyes on this, or we want African and African American Studies to weigh in on how we can improve recruitment. And we got lines. There was not a thought we wouldn't. We knew we had to fight for them, we knew it was marginal, we were scrappy, and there was this sense of possibility.
00:28:07S.B.: I mention this because that changed over my time as director. There was this overall shift in institutional culture where there was - I don't know what to call it except for a new common sense that took over. Like a new imaginary of what the university was in which I think our program's contributions became increasingly illegible. Not all of our contributions. I could always trumpet the huge number of students that we taught every year, and I would figure out how much money I personally brought in the university and often show them that was far less than I was making. [Laughter]
00:28:46A.B.: Far more than you were making.
00:28:48S.B.: Oh, yeah, that's what I mean. Far more, like 10 times more. Yeah, sorry. [Laughter] But that shift almost exclusively focused on only bottom line and measurable outcomes. Number of majors, credit hours generated, students retained. Sometimes we would get a little argument in, "oh, yeah, we retain," you know? Learning goals assessed. And then there was the vocationalization of higher ed coming from all sides, like students who already were seeing it as a [vocation] through that lens. Even more so, vocationalizing. Then there was this increased focus, I feel, on self-responsibility and competition rather than an ethic of care and cooperation. I think about this often because I think about the diverse economies of the university, and I've actually written a paper on that.
00:29:39A.B.: That we will link to. [See the index for this paper with Özlem Altan-Olcay.]
00:29:42S.B.: How the pandemic could have changed that when we started to realize -
00:29:46A.B.: Oh I know.
00:29:47S.B.: "Oh, what makes us run is actually cooperation and care." Not this competitive BS. And a bunch of other things we might associate with the word neoliberalism.
00:29:58A.B.: That's right.
00:30:00S.B.: But I don't want to say neoliberalism without putting some meat on those bones. So I was trying to spell it out, and how it unfolded here and for our program. Because yes, we were doing some of those things, generating credit hours, blah, blah, blah, number of majors. But we'd always done so much more than that, about retention for students across the campus, about creating a culture on the campus, about bringing attention to gender equity issues that could improve lives on and beyond the campus and way beyond the major, and the programming we did.
00:30:40S.B.: Then you'd try to talk to your leaders about this, and they were all like, "Oh, we love Women's and Gender Studies." And that's all great, but do you really love me? Because you're presenting yourself - I mean, sure, I think they really did love the program. We weren't ever working in an atmosphere where there were hostile leaders. Because I have done many program reviews and seen that, and it's terrible. People were like, "You guys are great, but I'm a victim of all this outside pressure. The cuts in public support to higher ed, declining interest in the liberal arts, an inappropriate budget model. I have to do these things." They would engage in discourses and practices that made them complicit in recreating and really cementing that neoliberal mandate. The kind of support we had experienced in my earlier years in part withered away.
00:31:42S.B.: Of course, neoliberalism is never a complete project, and none of this was inevitable. I think about the terrible budget model of the school that then says, CASL isn't worth blah and blah. That's a deliberate choice. That's not anything that's outside of power, and deliberate choices that are made about what's valuable. That's what all of this is. People use market. Talk about, "Well, it's the market and we have no choice." As an economist, trust me, that's a smoke screen for something else. And it always is. The market is something we negotiate ethically as a society, and thank you [laughter]. I'm sorry about my speech, but this is really important to me.
00:32:30A.B.: Yeah, so important.
00:32:31S.B.: This withering away. Again, I saw none of this as inevitable. So I never rolled over, I just fought it. It took me a lot of time to process the fact. I fought it, but even though I knew better, like I knew it was structural, I kept thinking I failed. We lost the office under my watch. We lost the student worker under my watch. We lost the staff support under my watch. We lost the course releases under my watch.
00:32:58A.B.: I have those thoughts too. I lost - I feel the same way. This is actually really helpful to me, because I would never have perceived you that way, Suzanne.
00:33:08S.B.: Yeah, and I think I'm gonna talk later in this about how I hid that from people, except for a couple of key people. Because I didn't feel like anyone could hear it. I felt like whenever I uttered it, people said I was overreacting or something. I felt like the personal pain of that was not really acknowledged that much. I always felt that I was standing on the shoulders of these giants, from the founder of the program Helen Graves on down, who had fought for everything, and I was letting them down. I was letting the foremothers down.
00:33:47A.B.: Well, and you're the foremother that I feel like I've let down.
00:33:50S.B.: No, not at all.
00:33:55A.B.: [Laughter] Being the foremother, you can feel that that's - I'm sure if you were in my seat, and Helen Graves was in your seat, she would say the same thing to you.
00:34:05S.B.: Thank you. I think you're right. At the time I just felt so, like, I've let them down and anyway. Yeah, it's generational trauma. [Laughter]
00:34:17A.B.: It is.
00:34:20S.B.: So that's my expectations I wanted to talk about. I just think that was a big expectation, that I'd be working in a particular kind of environment, that then changed right in the middle of it. I think there's a book in there, but I think it's like an academic novel. It's funny, not like the speech I just gave. [Laughter]
00:34:38A.B.: No, the speech is great. There's sort of two places my brain is going while you're talking, because I pitched this in my grant as an institutional ethnography. What you are offering here is that exactly, which is the interview is a text that points us toward a critical analysis of what's happening in the institution. You beautifully narrated that.
00:35:06S.B.: Thank you. I worked on it. It was hard.
00:35:10A.B.: There's another side of this project, which is coming from me, who is historically prior to this, a qualitative researcher who focuses more on the ways that what's happening in institutions and structures are touching people very personally and interpersonally. And so the other part that I'm interested in is what it feels like to be a person, to be yourself, doing this work during the neoliberalization of the university. And you gave me a little bit of that too.
00:35:47S.B.: Right. I think maybe rather than doing it later, I'll just tell you now about how - the pain part. I always joke that I like tilting at windmills. But that's a joke that covers up a lot of pain. Because I don't really. Everyone likes to be working in an environment where they can be a winner. [Laughter] But I did feel like I had this unique perspective to stand up for a set of values that I and many people in my life believed in. I'm doing that, and then there was hostility, and there was, I think, people would say you're overreacting. Or a lot of people in Women's and Gender Studies in the meetings would say, "Suzanne, suck it up. We're just gonna lose resources. You're just not going to get course releases. We're going to lose the space. The university's changing, get with the program." Some of these people were department chairs, and department chairs actually got more release time and more summer money. I was like, okay, so that feels a little bit like you're not paying attention. Why are you getting more money? Because increased surveillance [laughter] and things - like, why is there the shifting of resources around? Then people would say, "Look, it's just the demographic cliff, and we all have to realize there's belt tightening," like I'm not a realistic person. I didn't feel like there were many people I could talk to that really understood how bad I felt about these losses to the program and the erosion of the culture that I'd started out in.
00:37:33S.B.: But Marilee [Benore] was someone who really understood that, because first of all, feminist work never got valued in Natural Sciences. So she in a way had always experienced that. Then to see the creeping devaluation of it across the college. She was a person who had been an associate dean and had been in so many leadership roles. Lisa is just like - she was the second person with a line in the program. She fell through some of the cracks I fell through. But she also saw how doggedly determined I was for her not to fall through those cracks. That was my mission. But then there were things I couldn't fix, and things that were eroded in ways that, like our needs were ignored, then her needs weren't taken care of in a way. I was having to fight even harder. But she just really understood it, and she's really empathetic, and she really understands how institutional structures work, and she and I have the same values. This whole talk could also be a love letter to four or five people, and Lisa [Martin]'s among them. There won't be enough time for that, I don't think, or energy because I'm focusing on this other stuff. She could really hear it. Bruce [Pietrykowski] of course could really hear it, because he really knew how the institution worked, and he's a radical economist like I am, so we had the analysis. He was fighting some of those fights in other parts of the campus in the work he was doing. Then Rashmi [Luthra], who had been the chair of the program and was seeing how austerity was harming the humanities, and who also really got me, who I have all these shared values and histories with, was a really important sounding board.
00:39:35S.B.: It's something I really felt like I could never bring to the Women's and Gender Studies faculty as a whole because - oh, and I will say also, the other College Wide Program directors Sally Howell, Deborah Smith-Pollard, and Claude Jacobs, who was the director of Religion and Society, who was there in some of the early years of the austerity. Then he was like, "I'm outta here." Smart guy. Then Margaret Willard-Traub, who was the director of the writing program for many years, and they were experiencing some cuts. They validated my reality. But in some ways - I would bring this to Women's and Gender Studies, and I'd get this response like, suck it up, the thing is changing. And that really hurt my heart. People would come to my office individually and talk about their own struggles with austerity, their own pain, and the enormous amount of empathy they had for what I was going through. It's not like something we had in a meeting. I also think it's because I was trying to protect people from it because I thought I could fix it. I was trying to protect people, and everyone else was under siege and they were overworked. I just thought, well, we can do more with less. I know how to do that. We can still be vibrant, and eventually we'll win because we're right. But I always carried this pain with me.
00:41:03S.B.: The day I was packing up my office to move out, a faculty member from the Math department happened to walk by because we're on the same floor as him. He was probably going to his car, and he saw me packing up. He had been on CASL Exec [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters Executive Committee] with me. He had been in some leadership roles. He was hired the same year as me. We weren't close friends or anything, but he had seen me. He had seen some of the cuts in the university. And he told me with tears in his eyes that he was so sorry for everything that he had seen me go through and how mistreated I had been because I had stood up for things. I had stood up for things, and there was sometimes personal blowback where people were trying to undermine my credibility. People were trying to undermine my perspective and make it seem like I was crazy. I don't think they ever won, but the fact was that I had to deal with that. He had maybe been in a couple spaces where he saw that happen. And he said, "I want to apologize on the part of the university for what you went through. You never deserved that. This university was lucky to have you." I'm not saying that so that anyone listening to this will think, oh, she's so arrogant, the university is lucky to have her. I'm telling you this because that was the biggest gift anyone could have given me as I was walking out the door. To be seen. To know that it was seen by more than just my close confidants. That was a story I was going to save for later, but you drew it out of me now. [Laughter]
00:42:42A.B.: Thank you for that story. Yeah, I do have questions later that might bring us back to it in small ways. I appreciate that. I'm thankful for that person who walked by.
00:42:57S.B.: So we talked about expectations. Can I talk about goals?
00:43:00A.B.: Yes, please.
00:43:02S.B.: Okay. At the beginning, goals. I wanted to get more students in the program and so did the people before me. When I was hired in '98, there were like two students [who were getting the minor, although many more students were taking the classes]. We engaged in a lot of recruiting activities. I went to National Women's Studies [Association], learned some ideas about recruiting from other program directors. In the recruiting work, we had to address a lot of hostility from advisors, the advising office at that time. The people have changed now. I had a great relationship with advising in my last 10 years in the role. But other faculty would steer students away from us. And then students would come in with preconceived notions about what the program was, like man hating 101, as a common thing. [Laughter]
00:43:45A.B.: Yeah, still.
00:43:48S.B.: Really, you're hearing that?
00:43:51A.B.: Yes, absolutely. People still come in with expectations that it won't be friendly toward men. I think that's also like - maybe we had a period of time where there was less of that, and now since we're having a resurgence of misogyny in society, some of those ideas are coming back.
00:44:10S.B.: I think you're exactly right. I felt like there was a little break from that for a while, but that was kind of at the beginning. Then students also came in with their own career focused goals and their parents’ preconceived notions about what they should be doing in college. We had to address all of that. Another goal was developing a curriculum, which was to recruit folks to teach new classes. We had ongoing pedagogical development opportunities in Women's and Gender Studies, to enrich the existing classes as well and maybe inspire people to bring on new classes. Obviously, bringing in lines to enrich the curriculum. I had a goal that a student could graduate with a major in Women's and Gender Studies and never take a class with me, because when I first started, that was not possible. [Laughter]
00:45:00A.B.: I remember that goal from when I got here, and I understand it more and more.
00:45:08S.B.: I also worked to have Women's and Gender Studies taken more seriously as an academic field. That was a real important goal to me. Feminist scholarship and teaching kind of continued to be devalued on the campus in my early years by various folks across the departments. I did a lot of work trying to persuade others in the university the field was legit in various ways. Part of that was outside of the program. Some of the work was inside the program. Because prior to my arrival, I would say that a lot of the mission of the program coalesced around the goal of being a place for women faculty to fight gender discrimination in the university. As new faculty were coming in with certificates in Women's and Gender Studies doing feminist research, I felt like we had to put more focus - and with lines - on thinking about our mission as an academic program, what that looked like. So I changed the way that faculty were recruited. Before we would say, "Oh, there's new faculty being hired every year. Let's send a letter to all the women and invite them to join Women's Studies." I said, "Oh, I don't really think that works anymore." [Laughter] I worked with the provost's office, again, that woman I mentioned, who was my kind of helper and guide, Maggie [Martin]. "Do you mind if I come in and look at all the CVs of the newly hired faculty?" I looked at those CVs, and anyone doing feminist research or teaching or had that in their educational background, they got a letter from me. That's a real switch.
00:46:48A.B.: A big switch.
00:46:49S.B.: Then I strengthened ties with IRWG to support feminist research for the Dearborn campus.
00:46:54A.B.: The Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Ann Arbor.
00:46:56S.B.: Thank you [laughter]. Which we can link. [See the index for the IRWG website.]
00:46:59A.B.: Which we'll link, yeah.
00:47:00S.B.: Other goals, and I only have a couple more - Address the gaps in our curriculum. And my top goal was to hire a sexuality studies faculty member. Because that's what the students told us they needed. I think it's something really extraordinary about women's studies programs that the curriculum comes out of meeting students’ expressed needs. And that is also what I had had as an undergraduate. They constantly developed courses based on what we said we needed. Students were coming to me and saying, "Oh, you faculty are so cis het." [Laughter] "It's cute and everything, but we're not getting what we need in these classes."
00:47:41A.B.: I should give you the compliment here, just for fun, that I have described Suzanne in the Pride group chat as "the queerest straight person I know," and a bunch of students concurred. Just accept that compliment from the queer community. [Laughter]
00:47:57S.B.: Thank you. It's the milieu of feminism that I was brought up in.
00:48:02A.B.: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:48:04S.B.: Also during the HIV/AIDS crisis, you know, I was a young woman. So. And now I'm living like nine miles from Provincetown, Massachusetts. [Laughter]
00:48:15A.B.: It continues.
00:48:17S.B.: I really wanted that. Anyway, we kept asking for that line every year, because that was a time when CASL Exec faculty decided the ranking of the lines based on the amount of money. If you got in the ranking, you got the line. That's not how it happens anymore. It's a little more top down, just a little bit. After three or four years, we got the line, we got the money, and then the provost [Kate Davy] said, "I can't fund that. I can't. But I can give you a line for someone to do women's health." Because Marilee Benore and I had had this conversation with the head of women's health at Ann Arbor that resulted in this incredible collaboration with them, where they came over and team taught this women's health course, and it was wildly successful. The provost was like, "Well, you did that and it was really successful, let's hire someone from that." Then our faculty was really divided, because you let the provost decide what your lines are? I was like, what side should I come down on as the leader here and try to convince people? I was like, we could use that too, and we'll still fight for the LGBTQ line. Not everyone was happy, but that got the majority vote. And then we ended up hiring Lisa Martin, and no one ever thought it was a bad decision.
00:49:38A.B.: Yeah, she's incredible. Well, and in a kind of domino way, I sometimes have commented to Lisa, like, "Lisa, you hired or were on the hiring committee of the majority of queer and trans faculty that I know at UM-Dearborn."
00:49:57S.B.: That's true. Wasn't she on every one? [Laughter] When I think about it. At least the out ones.
00:50:06A.B.: Yeah, a majority for sure. In a way doors opened that we didn't even know would, bringing her in.
00:50:15S.B.: Well, and it's because she coached our representative to CASL Exec [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters Executive Committee]. I was on sabbatical, and she took the proposal request that we had written, but then she coached him and that's how we got the [LGBTQ Studies] line.
00:50:31S.B.: Other goals I had were to expand and enrich student experiences, to do more to nurture connections with off campus internship programming and speakers. Then I guess the final goal I would mention is to maintain that sense of community among the faculty that I inherited. I think for many people in the program back then, that was our raison d'être. To be a community of like-minded scholars. I did that through social events, like the welcome breakfast and the certificate lunch. [See the index for sample certificate lunch programs.] I used email announcements and newsletters as this informational channel, like, yay team, yay us. [See the index for sample newsletters.] You know me and email, my love of email. [Laughter] I was in full gear, and I had the student workers making these newsletters because a newsletter meant it only went out once a week and not me sending out 10 emails. [Laughter]
00:51:27A.B.: [Laughter] I still remember when I started. It was like my second year, and I was still on Facebook back in those days. I posted some status, maybe a little gif or something, like a joke about how many emails I was getting at the start of the semester. Then you wrote in a comment underneath, "Who on earth could be sending all these emails?" [Laughter] With a little emoji that let me know that you knew it was you. But it actually wasn't you I was complaining about, because your emails were great. But I still chuckled.
00:52:00S.B.: Oh good. The newsletter was a great idea because we'd consolidate all the events, kudos, and everything, and then the student workers would make 'em pretty. Then they could take them to jobs and say, "Look at my skills." So that was good.
00:52:18A.B.: Absolutely. Yeah.
00:52:20S.B.: But I want to say, I always approached this work with a critical eye of what community means. For me, whose first book was about nationalism and imagined communities in development economics. [See the index for Suzanne's book on the ways that communities are imagined and created at the level of the nation-state.] Everywhere - in nations and in women's and gender studies programs -there's going to be boundaries, there's going to be exclusions, there's going to be conflicts over who's in, who's out of the community. There's going to be hierarchies in terms of how we imagine and enact community. Historically, our program, like most others in the US, was formed around this category of universal woman who is White, middle class, cis het, western, able bodied, and so forth. That's going to make community seem more welcoming to some than others. I was like, "Okay, so how do we address that?" How do we address that beyond making sure that the people are in the room, and that if conversations center too much on one set of folks that somehow the director of the program could bring it back somehow? It's like an ongoing project. It's an unfinished project.
00:53:41S.B.: It was on my mind. Also, I think, the question of what do we mean by Women's and Gender Studies research and teaching? Who's in and who's out? We had someone who wrote a book about a sex scandal in his church, and then he insisted he should be added to Women’s and Gender Studies because he was doing feminist research. Then we as a committee had to decide, is he in or out? People had always been able to come to the director and kind of apply. This was before me. This was before I was director. But that happened a lot when I was director, where people would come in and say, I think I should be part of Women's and Gender Studies because I hand out a newspaper article about how cars need to be designed around the fact that women are shorter than men. Then I have to say, "I'm not sure that reaches the bar," but then that's hard. How do you draw that line? I feel like I took this really expansive view of what counted. Really a big tent of what counted as WGST research and teaching that also included people who maybe weren't even teaching WGST classes but doing things to support our students in adjacent work, like Ellen Judge-Gonzalez in SOAR [Support, Opportunities, Advocacy, and Resources for adult learners], who is a member and who I love. I love the work, and I love the SOAR program, and I felt like that person should be kept close in our business. That is a Women's and Gender Studies project. [See the index for the SOAR website.] I took this really expansive view, which is I think what I inherited. The previous directors had that expansive view. And because of that big tent view of that, I feel like we avoided a lot of the ideological and political divisions that maybe other programs had. But I also wanna say there are downsides to such an expansive view as well.
00:55:38A.B.: Right. Well, some of those divisions came into the program then, right? Because everyone's coming under the big tent. These are people with really different ideologies from each other, now all part of the same program.
00:55:50S.B.: Exactly. I feel like there was always a sense of common cause. I do post-structuralist feminist decolonial economics. I worked really closely with someone in Nat Sci who wouldn't know what any of those things are, and probably if I tried to explain a lot of the things I believed as a post-structuralist, would violently disagree with them because they're an empiricist. I worked closely with that person for every single year I was on the faculty. Those divisions never affected our respect for each other. I think there was a sense of being yoked to common cause, but I do think those divisions are always bubbling underground. And then there's always this question of like - when we're looking at course approvals, right? Whose course counts? And then how we're thinking about that scholarship and what they're bringing in, or I think we confronted some of that when maybe you were in some of those spaces of the steering committee.
00:57:07A.B.: Well, absolutely with LGBTQ studies, that's a huge consideration for me.
00:57:12S.B.: Right. What counts? And you were very specific with us, and we tried to be very specific so it just didn't seem arbitrary.
00:57:20A.B.: We talked about expectations and goals just now. We started to get into this next theme, which is telling me about aspects of the directorships that mattered a lot to you and aspects of the directorships that took up a lot of your time, and whether there was alignment between what mattered to you and how you spent your time.
00:57:43S.B.: Well, I think advising students and helping them to craft curricular and experiential paths that met their needs and goals, that was like the most important thing to me, and I spent a lot of time on that. I loved watching students thrive in school and after they graduated. I'm still in touch with a lot of our alums. That's something that really mattered a lot to me and my highest priority. Growing and transforming the curriculum, I think was a high priority that really mattered to me. That included getting lines in the program. It wasn't just getting lines to get lines, but it was curriculum to meet student needs.
00:58:26S.B.: Working closely with African and African American Studies, Arab American Studies, [and] Religion and Society directors, and developing intersectional programming and curriculum with them. Because we were all adjacent. We shared an office with African and African American Studies, we shared a student worker. Religion and Society was across the hall. Arab American Studies was across the hall. We would all be in there for office hours. Something would come up, we would brainstorm. We were always cooking something up, some kind of programming. Working closely with them was important to me to build an intersectional program and keep me honest in that regard, and to help them in their goals in doing the same thing, but it was also some of the most gratifying things I did. Working with our community advisory board I think was important to me. That mattered to me, especially in the early years, because even when I wasn't director of WILL, I felt like if we had an issue on campus - like we added the director of the Ruth Ellis House to our advisory board. They helped us, and they loved our students so much. They would just do anything for our students, and they would do these amazing networking dinners and really help with like the career side. Job shadowing women leaders in Metro Detroit, stuff like that. I would say those were the things that were my top priorities.
00:59:54A.B.: Yeah. What about things that took up a lot of your time?
00:59:58S.B.: Programming took up a lot of my time. Events like the certificate lunch, which I mentioned before. Bringing in speakers and hosting events, and there was a huge expectation I think that I do that. And at first, it kind of energized me, but then after about five years, it really felt like a slog. There was this big expectation that administrators would say, we're getting money in part to do this to enrich the community. And then there was declining interest in it.
01:00:29A.B.: Right. What do you think that was about?
01:00:32S.B.: I think it was that people's time constraints shifted, both students and faculty. It could also be the internet brought things to people's fingertips, and they didn't just have to get it on campus.
01:00:49A.B.: Both of those resonate with me. What are some ways you saw people's time changing?
01:00:54S.B.: I think students had to work more hours. Increasingly, students had care responsibilities at home, and I knew this from teaching intro and reading student papers and things, like a lot of that. Then they just felt more pressure to study and do really well. They just felt there was growing pressure, a changing economy. Then the faculty I think became more and more overworked. Where it used to be a pleasure for people to come to these talks, then it just felt like a commitment and a grind, you know? We'd more and more tie the talks to classes and that was great, but then sometimes I'd do something and the only people who showed up were the students in those classes. You felt like, "What am I doing this for?"
01:01:42S.B.: Advising took up a lot of my time because students needed so much support, but I didn't begrudge that. Then I did so much work that staff should have done, because we had really insufficient staff support. Booking rooms, ordering food, sometimes picking up the food. Managing the paperwork and budgets. So much time on this. Filing the evals in my early years, doing all the filing. Now they lost all of our files, so that's - The dean's office moved us out of an office and then lost all of the boxes of our paper files. But I started the digitizing. Thank god I started the digitizing project. Plus there were some folks in the dean's office who pitched in, but a lot of them did it out of the kindness of their heart, out of solidarity for the program. But this wasn't enough. I really feel like so much of my time was spent doing things that an admin assistant does at other schools.
01:02:43A.B.: Given this, you were doing all of this work, this programming, your core work, the work you really valued like mentoring students, you were also doing all of these admin-type tasks. You were also writing proposals to find a home for Women’s and Gender Studies in the college. Did the amount of time you spent on other things change while you were director? Such as research, teaching, or something else?
01:03:08S.B.: Yeah, I think that I spent less time on both research and teaching when I was a director because the role really nickel-and-dimed my time away. I remember your former chair, Jonathan Smith, he used to tell me, "Oh, just carve out 20 minutes every day to do your writing." But that's a process that worked for him.
01:03:27A.B.: Yeah, I know, they're always suggesting that. I have [received] that advice too, to write 30 minutes a day or whatever. And I have struggled so much, because I really need to go deep -
01:03:40S.B.: Me too.
01:03:41A.B.: - and kind of be in this zone with my writing.
01:03:44S.B.: Yeah, I need to be in the flow.
01:03:46A.B.: Flow state, yeah.
01:03:51S.B.: The [director] role kind of nickel-and-dimed my time away. I learned a little bit from you and Lisa how to better protect my time.
01:03:57A.B.: That's generous. [Laughter]
01:03:59S.B.: No, it's true, because you don't have to answer an email 30 seconds after it comes in or -
01:04:05A.B.: The alternative way to say that is, Suzanne answers email timely and I don't. [Laughter]
01:04:12S.B.: But it's good. I heard this professor being interviewed on a local radio show that I like to listen to, and he sets his email to come in once a day.
01:04:22A.B.: What?
01:04:24S.B.: Yes.
01:04:25A.B.: Smart. [Laughter]
01:04:29S.B.: Then he just deals with it. He sets it at the time he wants to do it. And I was like, "That's a revolution."
01:04:35A.B.: I know. That is revolutionary. Already my brain is like, "Okay, this is something to try."
01:04:40S.B.: Right, because he said he couldn't keep himself to just look at it once a day, so then he just holds it all back. So, yeah, [the director role] took my time away from everything, because it nickel-and-dimed my time away a little bit. In later years, in the last four years of my directorship, I had this particularly keen sense that the directorship was taking my time away from teaching. I felt like I was, for me, phoning it in more than I wanted. I was glad to get back in the groove in 2016.
01:05:17A.B.: Did being director influence your life outside of work in any way?
01:05:22S.B.: Well, I’m married to someone who works at the university, and I often brought work home, and that's - especially dealing with the director role and the everyday stuff. You know, bringing your work home is not necessarily a good thing. So that's something. Then we had to try to figure out how to deal with that. At first, we moved 30 miles away from school.
01:05:46A.B.: Yeah, you did.
01:05:48S.B.: So I didn't come in every day to create a distance. Then we moved like 900 miles away. [Laughter]
01:05:55A.B.: Maybe that was the move I was thinking of. You were practically rural.
01:06:02S.B.: Right. Boundaries. Yeah, but I was rural, like I moved to Milford, and that was intentional.
01:06:10A.B.: And were you able - like as a couple, were you able to create those boundaries with each other? You made the physical move. Were you able to make the mental move?
01:06:19S.B.: I think it was hard, but we were able to do it somewhat. But if there were crises, it was kind of all focused on it. Crises at work. That's not ideal. I don't recommend it. I would say other influences - my identity really shifted from Econ to being a more interdisciplinary feminist scholar, because I was always feeling like I had to learn stuff to bring in the good speakers and to understand people's research who were in the program, so I could maybe advocate for them in different spaces. My friendship circle in academia widened to include other program directors. So that was cool.
01:07:05S.B.: I would say the work took a toll on my mental and physical health. I think we talked about the mental health before. Part of that is because I treated the work as a vocation, which may be a me thing, is a generational thing, is a changing nature of work life thing, and especially changing nature of academic work life, where it might've made sense to see it as an all-encompassing vocation. And I think I've said this to you before that then I read the book Work Won't Love You Back [by Sarah Jaffe]. I thought, "Oh, that's my new mantra." I think your generation is more aware of that.
01:07:48A.B.: Yeah. I mean as I've shared with you, I think we both are more aware of that and we're not necessarily - I don't wanna blanket this over my whole generation, but we're not necessarily more peaceful or balanced. [Laughter] I think we're still - maybe the diagnosis is there, but there's still more to learn about then, okay, how do you do this in a healthy way? I would say for myself, I have not fully figured that out yet.
01:08:17S.B.: Right. I've been reading about these horrible layoffs [of government workers during the second Trump administration] that are just meant to be cruel and frightening. One of the ways they do it is by devaluing people's work. What's really interesting to me is the personal responses that people have to that. That that's going after the core of their being. That there's something about one's relationship to work and their work life, that no matter your generation sits very deep with you. Sorry, maybe that was unrelated, but I -
01:08:57A.B.: No, it's very related. Also, a little bit getting us to the next question, which is moving us toward thinking about the context, the cultural and social context in which this work is happening.
01:09:11S.B.: Right. You are working in a really different social and cultural context than I am, or when you were a director, whoever is gonna be director next. I'm gonna just name some random things in random order because there's so much. It was a 16-year period of time, and if we go back to the beginning - but I would say growing criticisms of White feminism and colonial feminism in activist spaces is huge and was something important for Women's and Gender Studies. Expanded LGBTQ rights, marriage equality, and then the growing recognition of trans subjectivities and rights. I learned so much from my students. Then widening inequalities nationally and then how it was falling on Metropolitan Detroit. The gentrification in Detroit and marginalized communities’ fight and resist responses. What that meant in the most racially divided metropolitan area in the country during the time I was director. There was an increased attention to gender-based violence, I think, that happened during that 16-year period. There were now better statistics. When I first started, people were like, "I thought that rape was this really rare thing," and then you totally couldn't say that 10 years later. Everyone knew. We had better statistics, better knowledge. But also more state-centered and carceral approaches to it, including in the university. That was a big thing for a director of Women's and Gender Studies. Then the armed conflict in various places such as the war in Afghanistan, which was often justified on saving women. The US role in all that. And then the never-ending heartbreak, of course, of the occupation of Palestine, and the activism around that in the US and the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement. And kind of related to the armed conflict, and just conflict in general, was shifting gendered migration patterns and rising inequality, those shifted migration patterns that were deeply gendered.
01:11:25A.B.: How did you see our programs grow and change in response to these things, or not?
01:11:31S.B.: I think we really did try to be less focused on White and colonial feminism, although that remains an ongoing project, and given the histories that I talked about before of all women's studies programs, and when we look at the demographics of who's in the program. When I was assistant director, I think someone, I can't remember who, maybe Rashmi [Luthra], brought in Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander just to do a workshop on this for the faculty. Rashmi was completely devoted to decolonizing higher ed, and she was a real force for that. This happened through programming and speakers and pedagogy workshops, and that went on through Maureen [Linker] and when I was director. We really tried to highlight Black feminisms, Detroit activist work. We brought in welfare rights folks from Detroit, water justice people, Black community farming folks when we would co-sponsor [with Health and Human Services]. We'd do these pedagogical trainings to try to, like, "LGBTQ up your curriculum." "Here's where transnational feminism might come on your syllabus." [Laughter]
01:12:47A.B.: Okay so have a question about that. This can be something we leave in or take out because it's completely a sidebar for my own desire to know. Do you feel like that went well? Here's the context of my question. Sometimes as a queer scholar, I feel like it's better for people not to try to teach queer studies than to teach it without really knowing what they're doing. Do you feel like giving people these ideas, like incorporate LGBTQ studies, incorporate transnational feminism, that they generated quality learning experiences, or - I mean, it doesn't have to be either/or. Did you have some of the concerns I have?
01:13:34S.B.: I did, but I think that the people who came to those [pedagogical trainings], because not everyone came to those -
01:13:39A.B.: Right, it's self-selecting.
01:13:41S.B.: - were the people who are already primed to do it and who already knew some things and wanted to be better. Lora [Lempert] did an LGBTQ integrated-into-curriculum training for us from a queer sociologist [Betsy Lucal]. [See the index for a handout from that curriculum training.] It was enormously helpful to me, but I was already reading, trying to figure it out -
01:14:00A.B.: That's right, that makes a lot of sense.
01:14:01S.B.: - for intro, and then it was also like baby steps.
01:14:05A.B.: Yeah. I feel like it's important not to make this mandatory, because then you do have the people who self-select and are the people who are going to do the work to do it well.
01:14:15S.B.: Right. About this issue in particular, LGBTQ, we also had safe trainings and that was a response, and that was WGST faculty and some of our staff people. That way, teachers might not ever teach about LGBTQ content, but then they wouldn't be assholes.
01:14:34A.B.: The don't be an asshole training.
01:14:36S.B.: I mean that as a technical term. [Laughter] Those took place all over campus, but we'd have specific ones for Women's and Gender Studies. Because we are gonna take a deeper dive if it's just us in the room. A lot of our programming brought in people who talked about armed conflict, war, Arab American feminist identities. We plugged students into the Arab American National Museum. We brought in a lot of Palestinian scholars, especially in the years where Rabab Abdulhadi was the director of Arab American Studies. We dealt with some of that. We brought in a lot of immigrant voices to talk about that, a lot of programming around that. Ideally, we would've wanted to have curriculum that dealt with some of that, but we couldn't do everything.
01:15:28A.B.: Yeah, so you were doing programming to do a wider sweep than you could get through your own classes. You could change your own curriculum, but you couldn't necessarily change your colleagues' curriculum, but you could offer programming.
01:15:40S.B.: So I think - And there were curricular changes that reflected some of this. From my first intro syllabus, which was kind of based on a textbook, to my last one. And working on those syllabi with you and Lisa to teach intro, I would say there were more women of color, there were more Black women than White women on the syllabus by the end. That was not obviously the case at the beginning. There was more decolonial and queer stuff on that syllabus than at the beginning.
01:16:17A.B.: Tell me about the students. What were they like? How were the students reacting to those changes? Or, you had described earlier how students were driving the things that WILL did. How did who they were shape how you taught, what you did? What priorities did they bring to the programs?
01:16:37S.B.: Right. A general statement, I would say from the very beginning of my time, students were diverse in age, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation. Over time they became more diverse. But I will say at the beginning of my time, our intro class was almost all traditional age students. I think they were all White except for one in intro.
01:17:01A.B.: Whoa. That's so different [from the makeup of intro to WGST classes now].
01:17:06S.B.: But then what we were bringing into our circles was from the SOAR program [Support, Opportunities, Advocacy, and Resources for adult learners]. There was an explicit emphasis in CASL [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters] on diversifying the pool of women in the college. Eventually SOAR became everybody, but at first it was women. Then those people were in our circle. As the demographics of Metro Detroit changed, more Arab and Muslim American students came in during my years as director, and more out queer students came in. Those two groups in particular really pushed us to think about our curriculum. To challenge transphobia in our curriculum because you know, liberal feminism had been so complicit. I learned so much from them about that and how important that was. The same thing with the queer students. And they asked for changes in the curriculum and courses and would complain if other faculty were not on the mark. That was a big change, and something totally worth noting when we look at things broadly. There was a lot of, I think I said earlier, co-generational learning going on when I was assistant director, and I always wanted to foster that. I think that's always been a part of the program. Not only in WILL, but also in more casual Women's and Gender Studies spaces in the lounge. Students learning from each other across race, across class, across age, across sexuality. One of our former students used to have this thing called Estro Fest - I never liked the name of it [laughter] - at her house up in Ferndale.
01:18:54A.B.: It sounds very trans-queer, so. [Laughter]
01:18:57S.B.: Okay, good.
01:18:58A.B.: But maybe that's not what it was.
01:18:59S.B.: She was queer.
01:19:00A.B.: Okay. [Laughter]
01:19:02S.B.: She’d invite all the WILL students and WGST majors up to her house. It was such a wildly diverse group. I probably have a picture somewhere. I'll try to find it so we can link it to the archive. [Later we decided not to link any candid/unpublished photos.] I was hanging out one night and young, old, whatever. I think students' connections to feminist activism prior to coming to Women's and Gender Studies shifted. It came in waves. When I first arrived, our classes were the spark that ignited their feminism. They hadn't had it before. I remember there was a protest against a really sexist newspaper article in the student paper. And one person showed - There was one person, I remember her name [Emelia Emerson], who was there marching with her sign. That was like in 1999. I feel like that's emblematic of how there wasn't a lot of activism. Then it shifted and more students came to campus already committed feminists. Over the time, I think our number of queer and especially trans students expanded, and they were really frustrated with our lack of offerings and frustrated with - I think it was you who changed, who said, "Look at our website. It's all binary."
01:20:17A.B.: I don't remember but it could've - [Laughter]
01:20:18S.B.: He or she, men and women. Then as soon as you did that, I actually went in, and I was so inspired by you that I went to Feminist Economics and saw their website was binary, and I rewrote it for them. [Laughter]
01:20:33A.B.: That's great. Yeah.
01:20:36S.B.: Those students would often do things like reading groups to teach themselves what they weren't getting in the classes. [See the index for a flyer advertising one of these reading groups.] All the students were in school, they were working, they were doing lots of care work at home, doing community building and leadership in disenfranchised, disinvested communities. We had to be attentive to those material conditions of their lives and limits on their time, as well as their own expertise as leaders for social change. We didn't always have the answers. This could be a really long answer, but I'm going to leave it there because I have many stories and examples of how amazing our students are, but they're in an hour and something minute talk I gave in 2023 where I talk about students claiming their education to make the university and our program a better place. So we can just link that talk. [See the index for a video of Suzanne's talk.]
01:21:25A.B.: We'll link there. That's great. Thank you so much for that. Alright. Let's turn the spotlight back on you. How were you supported as director and by whom? You have told me a lot of this already. But anything that you want to add, and it can include both practical and emotional support.
01:21:43S.B.: Right. Well, I wanna make clear that we did get forms of support like course releases, an office, a student work-study worker, and part of an admin. Although when I first came in, we didn't have any part of an admin. But over time we did get an admin who was assigned to like 12 programs, but we were one of them. That's important to note because you're working in a condition where you have little of that. That was what allowed us to do what we were able to do. It might be worth linking some of the annual reports from the years I was director, which I believe are in the archive. Perhaps the archivist can just put all the annual reports in one folder and link to that. [We did this! See the index for many of Suzanne's annual reports.] We were able to do that work because we had the time and space.
01:22:35A.B.: Yeah, the physical space seems important. The physical space of the lounge and the office.
01:22:40S.B.: Then of course the proximity, as I told you before, being close to those other directors created an opportunity for so much brainstorming. Just like being in the same hallway with you and Lisa [Martin]. And Sally [Howell], she was in the hallway. Even when things shifted, whoever was in the hallway, we were always cooking something up because we were in the same hallway. Proximity is important. I will say as director of the program, I was attentive to how that could create boundaries and exclusions. I used to at least once a month, book out some time when I was going to be on campus, let's say between class and an event, and I would walk the halls, and I'd go up to the fourth floor. I'd say, "I wonder if so-and-so is in their office," and I'd pop in and I'd talk to them, and then I'd go over to the little Anthro wing [laughter]. Then I'd go down to the third floor. Then sometimes I'd go over to the Social Sciences building because I was like, "Oh, I don't get to be in the hallway, but these are my people, so let me go to them."
01:23:44A.B.: Right. That's something I did not do. I'm putting it in my back pocket for the future.
01:23:50S.B.: Well, a lot of people aren't in much.
01:23:53A.B.: Yeah, I mean that's the other thing, is the expectations around how often we're on campus have changed.
01:24:00S.B.: I would say Katie Anderson-Levitt, as the associate dean, was very important to getting WILL off the ground, and just did many forms of moral support in really trying to create a space for me in my first years as assistant director. I would say that in different ways, Rashmi [Luthra], Marilee [Benore], and Lisa [Martin] were my most important sources of support in the director role on campus. Just in really different ways. And just briefly Rashmi because of - she saw me through tenure, I think. We created WILL together. We have shared values. We would overlap time together in the office because we thought it would foster a collaborative approach, and so then that led to - I mean, it was a terrible windowless office in this incredibly dry building. But we'd be in there with the student workers cooking things up and reminding each other to drink tea.
01:24:57A.B.: Yes. Stay hydrated. [Laughter]
01:25:03S.B.: She's just like - we have really different energies, but they really mesh together. We just had a lot of fun, and we got so much done. It was a really, really great collaboration. And then the friendship just stayed strong throughout my entire time there. Rashmi never hesitated to tell me when she thought I was on the wrong path, but she was so gentle about it.
01:25:26A.B.: That's such a valuable friendship.
01:25:30S.B.: Marilee, I team taught my first Intro to Women's and Gender Studies class with. We formed the Women's Studies Student Alliance together, which grew into WILL, and then she was the first WILL director [when Suzanne was director of WGST]. We worked so closely together. And then she remained close throughout my time here and brought that much-needed perspective from Nat Sci. Thinking things differently. Then when Lisa arrived, I didn't feel so lonely anymore. And I felt very protective towards her, not that she needed it. She just has such great acumen for this, and she's a great listener. She has a lot of great ideas. We felt like we were really in something together. And so that's like a very, very enduring friendship. Then I think I developed that with you, but that was after I was director, because I think that teaching intro - I would say if there's one thing I wish I spent more time on, it would've been curriculum development.
01:26:33S.B.: I love environments where we can all talk about teaching together. I love the idea that I teach a course, and then I know they go into your class and they get that, and they go into your class and they get that. I had actually had that at a previous job I worked at in an economics program in a business school, no less. I didn't know how lucky I was that we talked about pedagogy all the time. I just wish there had been more room for that, but I am grateful that the three of us wrote a couple of grants to rethink the intro class and then worked on that together. I would say Maureen [Linker] because I worked with her, and I used to refer to her as my work spouse, because we did a lot of overlapping things, and we had the first gen orientation [because we had both been first generation college students]. She was always a great sounding board, and she often brought a very different perspective than I did.
01:27:30S.B.: Jim Gruber was my faculty mentor, and he was an important mentor when I was a director. He really knew the university. He'd been on all these committees. The advisory board was an important source of support, the external advisory board. And I completely understand why we don't have it anymore because our programs changed and our time changed, and it just wasn't going to work anymore. I think WILL changed. In fact, WILL changed officially. We rewrote what WILL was. For many, many years, I developed a very close friendship with Vincenza Mueller on the board and just a very warm sense with many people on the board who were supporters. Other CWP [College Wide Programs] directors as I talked about before. Bruce [Pietrykowski], who himself is a feminist scholar. He always was very supportive and usually let me make my own mistakes and learn from them [laughter], and so many others.
01:28:32A.B.: Was there support you felt like you needed but didn't get?
01:28:35S.B.: I feel like I mostly covered that in terms of the lack of staff support. Then when I talked about how I really struggled personally with the ways that austerity fell on the program. Yeah, that's the kind of support I felt I needed but didn't get.
01:28:51A.B.: What are some things you learned about yourself as a result of this work?
01:28:56S.B.: So one thing I learned about myself is I never wanted to be an administrator above the level of this.
01:29:02A.B.: Yeah. Same. [Laughter]
01:29:05S.B.: Of course, I never thought I wanted to be administrator at all of anything, because I just really was in it for the teaching and the research. But then it did seem like a kind of low stakes thing at the beginning. And as I said, I thought I could maybe give a little back of what I got as an undergrad. Then I got in this role, and there's this funny thing in higher ed where people now think we're all aspiring to be administrators. I shudder at the thought. There was this idea that there was a natural progression, like you'd be the director of a College Wide Program, and then you'd become an associate dean [laughter]. A couple of deans asked me if I would run, and I was like, "I have important work to do." [Laughter] Same thing with associate provost. No insult to anyone who's ever had these jobs. More power to you. I was like, "Oh, I never wanna do that." I was like, "That's enough for me."
01:29:59S.B.: Other things I learned. I developed a strong sense of self-efficacy in the role. I came to believe that if anyone in my orbit needed anything, whether it was a junior scholar who was being bullied by their colleagues, or a student who needed LGBTQ support from the university, or WILL students who wanted - "We just want to mentor girls in a school somewhere in Detroit" - I felt like I could make it happen. You develop that sense of efficacy, and you just start to believe you can make things happen, and then you do it. I also learned about myself that I was best at advising and supporting that student who needed the push, who didn't have faith in themselves and their abilities. One of our graduated majors at the time said, she made fun of me in this regard, and she said, "Dr. Bergeron likes the bird with the broken wing." Okay, I guess there is truth in that. I nurtured plenty of students who were going to be winners anyway. I had a lot of success with students like that, but I feel like students who weren't that sure about themselves, those are the ones I tapped to be my student mentors in the intro class. Those are the ones I tapped to be the student workers. Those are the ones I spent more time with in advising, and I felt like there was a lot of payoff. Those are three good things I learned about myself.
01:31:25A.B.: What are some things you learned about Women's and Gender Studies as a result of this work?
01:31:30S.B.: Well, the incredible amount of effort that a program like ours has to put into creating and maintaining itself both at Dearborn and around the country. Because you know that old saying where they never had to have a bake sale to buy a B-1 bomber? You never had to go hat in hand in an economics discipline [laughter] to find your place in the university.
01:31:50A.B.: Right, or explain to people why your program should exist.
01:31:57S.B.: Every day. Groundhog Day. Time to wake up.
01:32:02A.B.: That is such a good analogy. [Laughter]
01:32:06S.B.: Time to wake up and justify the existence of the program.
01:32:10A.B.: Yes. [Sighing] Oh, my.
01:32:14S.B.: Maybe today I'll get it right and I'll turn them around. Oops. Another day. [Laughter] So I learned about that.
01:32:23S.B.: Okay, this might sound strange. I don't know if it does. But the importance of Black feminism to our work in the United States. I only came to appreciate it more and more over time. That kind of transformative vision that's the best that Women's and Gender Studies can be. I kept returning to the classics through my directorship and in different constellations of them, like Combahee [River Collective] and June Jordan and Audre Lorde and bell hooks. I kept returning to them for inspiration and guidance. I feel like I still am.
01:32:56S.B.: I would say the other thing I learned about, I don't think I would've gone to as many National Women's Studies Association conferences as I did if I hadn't been director. I think I even had some stereotypes about what that conference might be when I was first going. But those stereotypes - I think they were challenged, but also the organization was attending to some of the bad things, the problems of their past. I feel like I have a really good sense of the ever-changing and vibrant nature of this field, as it addresses new challenges, as it brings attention to new forms of inequity. It keeps growing and changing as a field, and those in it keep growing and changing as scholars and teachers and directors and directors of LGBTQ programs with these developments in the field. I just think about how, you know, I went to the Baltimore meetings after I retired, and it was right after the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, and nobody thought to organize any special panel on that.
01:34:08A.B.: Whoa.
01:34:09S.B.: Yeah. Then some Arab feminists and Palestinian feminists boycotted NWSA that year.
01:34:17A.B.: That's right. Yeah, I remember that boycott. Maybe we can link to that. [See the index for a statement about the meeting boycott by Feminists for Justice in Palestine.]
01:34:22S.B.: Yeah, and then the organization really addressed that. The organization has really stepped up, really stepped up after that. They actually centered Palestinian feminist voices at the last conference.
01:34:36A.B.: Well, and I missed Baltimore obviously because I didn't experience that, but in the years that I was going to NWSA, there were often plenaries and panels on Palestine, and NWSA had voted for BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] years before many other professional associations, which makes it especially striking to me that they had nothing that year. That makes that seem more and almost intentional.
01:35:00S.B.: Well, I know the two program coordinators, and I think they felt they had put together a program. There were some things on Arab feminisms and Palestinian feminisms, but they had put together a program and it just didn't occur to them that it was important to pivot and change a plenary, or add a plenary. They're really good people and one of them is herself a really powerful - she is an Israeli-born critic of Israel and really important pro-Palestinian activist for 20 years. It was a mistake she made as the programmer, but the leadership should have said, "You're going to have money and time and space," and they didn't. And the leader [of NWSA] at the time had made a Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
01:35:55A.B.: I remember that, reading about that.
01:35:58S.B.: That was against our BDS policy as an organization. [See the index for NWSA's re-commitment to BDS in 2014.] So we had a lot of soul searching to do. But we did it, the organization did it. I'm in other organizations, and I can't say that there's as much learning that goes on. I feel good about women's studies as a field. It's also obviously under siege. Not only as director, then I became a program reviewer for maybe a dozen programs. I just did one. They like retirees because we work hard for short money.
01:36:32A.B.: [Laughter] Oh my gosh.
01:36:35S.B.: I'm kidding. It was an awesome program I reviewed. So I feel like I learn a lot about the field and different ways that programs are struggling to survive -
01:36:45A.B.: What are some of the things you've learned from doing the reviews?
01:36:48S.B.: - in the past 10 years. Well, just like some programs have had to close down WILL programs because of lack of funding. Have had to make do with fewer lines and then to make some hard decisions about curriculum. Some have had to close down the major, but then they still survive as minors, and they're still meeting student needs. So, austerity. This is also in the right now moment of all those funding cuts. Oh, I guess the other thing I learned was, I learned from colleagues in Florida, and I think I mentioned this to you before, there are states where our kind of work is banned and you can't even name it in a way. And they're still doing it, but they're doing it - they call it "the work" instead of calling it DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] or feminism. They're still bringing it into the classroom spaces and the more informal spaces where they can.
01:37:43A.B.: I know. That's gonna really get at something you said earlier in this interview about early on thinking that you could just do more with less, and then having to face your own limitations. I feel like I’m probably standing close to that. Because I remember I told the Pride students, I said, "Well, if they cancel the LGBTQ Studies courses, I'm still going to offer this content to you for free outside the university, and we're just going to do reading groups," and I'm very sincere about that. And I also realize that I will still have to have a day job that's paying my bills. I'll have even fewer spoons, you know? What will that actually look like is something I'm gonna have to figure out if we get to that point.
01:38:23A.B.: Okay. What are some things you learned about the college or university as a result of this work? Again, some of this has already been covered.
01:38:32S.B.: I covered some of it. But I would add that I learned how entrenched gender, class, race, and other forms of privilege remain in the university even though we're being characterized outside of the university as woke spaces. I always think, where do those people work?
01:38:47A.B.: [Laughter] Where are these woke spaces? Sign me up.
01:38:51S.B.: Can I have a job at one of them? [Laughter] Because I feel like I encountered that so much during my years as a director. Often people would come to me when stuff would happen to them, when they'd bump up against the systemic racism or the systemic patriarchy or the - and I encountered that because I was a sounding board for a lot of people. "Who do I talk to about this stuff?" I think there's something more systemic about what we count as scholarship, or what we count as expertise, or what we count as useful knowledge, or what we count as important classes, and who we count in those roles. I feel like I learned how entrenched that was. I sometimes had to bump up against it personally because some people would see me as the big feminist on campus. So they would try to attack the work that we were doing, and that would be in my face. But it was also reflecting their attempts to insulate their own disciplines and departments from being infected by the programs, being infected by diversity of that kind, because then [they thought] they'd just be watering down their knowledge. Just seeing how people did not treat my colleagues with expertise. That was kind of a systemic idea of what knowledge counts as important, what work counts as important.
01:40:25S.B.: I would say they're - and this is in the paper I talked about - the kind of work that people do to care for folks from their community. And here I really want to flag the work of our African American faculty and especially African American women faculty. There's a lot of documentation on this. I think we can probably say if there were any Hispanic American faculty. And Arab American women faculty, there is an enormous amount of work. Because they're role models, and all the students are going to seek them out, and they're being asked to create a home in the university for all these students. That work is invisiblized. There is no reason for it to be invisiblized, but it is in structural, systemic gendered spaces. Gendered and raced and classed spaces in the university. Does that make sense?
01:41:16A.B.: Absolutely.
01:41:17S.B.: Okay. And so I think I've learned also about the college or university that some of our best work is done underground. Some of my best work was done underground in the casual advising, the every day, the helping neurodivergent students succeed by being that support person and plugging them into the resources, supporting the queer students in launching that reading group because it kept them from feeling completely insane and dropping out of college. The hallway conversations with faculty who are hanging on by their fingernails. A lot of this work isn't measurable. And it's not measurable sometimes because the university doesn't value it, but sometimes because we have to keep those people safe. Now I'm near tears, because that's true. We can't make it visible to keep those people safe, but we're doing that work. I was thinking about how sometimes we would pitch in when someone got kicked out of their house, and this was you brought us into this. You'd say, "Yeah, someone's homeless," and we would be like, "Let's kick in a few bucks for them to stay in a hotel room or something," but it was all underground. You can edit this out if you need to.
01:42:33A.B.: Yeah. No, this is fine.
01:42:35S.B.: We couldn't even tell the dean. We couldn't tell the dean we were doing that.
01:42:38A.B.: No.
01:42:39S.B.: We had to keep those people safe.
01:42:42A.B.: And same I think also with challenges that our junior faculty or colleagues might be experiencing. We might spend a lot of time and care with them, for them, but we're not gonna put that anywhere because we don't want that to be known for their sake.
01:42:59S.B.: You know, I got so much in the vault, I could be like a bank in downtown Detroit. [Laughter] I'm the Guardian Building. Of all the junior people and the terrible things and just having to keep saying, "No, you're valued and here's how you can negotiate it." But you couldn't tell anyone you were doing that.
01:43:23A.B.: What memories of Women's and Gender Studies and WILL do you cherish?
01:43:28S.B.: Okay. Purely visceral.
01:43:31A.B.: Purely visceral.
01:43:33S.B.: Hanging out with Rashmi and the student workers and the African and African American studies folks in that tiny windowless office. Getting it done and laughing our way through it. Relatedly, collaborating with Deborah [Smith Pollard] and Claude [Jacobs] and the directors of Arab American Studies on intersectional programming. To me, those are my golden years. The golden times for me. It was just everything we were doing felt so generative. We'd often collaborate with other people on campus too and bring them in.
01:44:04S.B.: I'll just tell one story. There was this unfortunate screening of an Islamophobic film by student activities. The students were quite upset. It was supposedly coming from a feminist perspective, the film. You know, saving brown women from brown men. Always a good idea. Then we were called in to try to brainstorm how to resolve this. The director of African American studies, we're in these hallway conversations. And then me and Sally [Howell], who was the director of Arab American Studies, go in with the chancellor and the vice chancellors and - but this came from all the brainstorming we did in the hallway. And then we came up with this event, two events around this, that were wildly successful for the college. Because we knew our stuff, and we were doing a check-in with other people who knew their stuff about what's going to resonate with the community both on campus and more broadly in Metro Detroit. That was really great, and that's what I mean by generative. We were helping to address issues that were coming up on the campus and putting our smarts behind it.
01:45:16S.B.: Hanging out in the lounge with the students and cooking up ideas for classes and programs was my favorite. Love that. Talking about Intro to Women's and Gender Studies pedagogy and student support issues with you and Lisa. Great memories. The end of my days and after I was a director. While putting together the certificate lunches was truly a drag, which I never really burdened many people with the draggy nature of it - I sure loved the drag show though.
01:45:49A.B.: [Laughter] That was a great one.
01:45:51S.B.: That was a great one. Of course, you did all the work to put that together, so maybe I enjoyed it because I wasn't used as a catering committee. [Laughter] The special certificate lunches where we had music, we brought in jazz a couple times, the drag show, and that year we dressed up as our heroine. When I just think in my brain, what are the things that warm me, that's what comes to mind.
01:46:16A.B.: Yeah. I learned after you did about all the work that goes into those luncheons. [Laughter] So I know about that.
01:46:23S.B.: I know. Well, yeah, and it was like you had to pick up the flowers because of course there had to be centerpieces.
01:46:31A.B.: I think the reason that I'm laughing about it is because there was a year that I did it all by myself, on purpose. I didn't even convene a committee because I was having so much trouble getting committees to do anything because people were so overburdened. I was like, "I cannot come with another committee request, so I'm just gonna do it." Then I was going through Faculty180, which for people listening, is just the really frustrating system where we have to quantify and itemize our work and pigeonhole it into these pre-created categories that no Women’s and Gender Studies work fits in. Your stuff from last year is there, or from years back. What I found was the year that I had done it by myself, I had written a note to whoever was going to evaluate me, listing - "Okay, I wrote that I created this event. Here's all the things it involved." And I had this list of all these things. [Laughter] I was having some feelings when I wrote that obviously, because I was like, "You don't understand how much time this took for me." [Laughter]
01:47:27S.B.: No. I mean, first you had to find out what WILL students were graduating. There was no official record. Then it took a long time to get the list of the minors and the majors from advising, and then the invitations, and then making up the program, and then always having to find the thing, was it music? Was it a film screening?
01:47:48A.B.: Printing the certificates, making sure everything was correct on those.
01:47:53S.B.: Getting the flowers, making sure everyone who did any little thing got a nod.
01:48:00A.B.: Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
01:48:02S.B.: I used to write speeches, and then when I was director of WILL, I wrote a bio for every graduating student. Then when I was director of Women’s and Gender Studies, I thought, "Oh my god, no way."
01:48:15A.B.: [Laughter] This is good to—I think I wrote something in the grant [for this oral history project] about, this is about the labor and love of building and sustaining a program like this. So here we have both, right? The love and the labor.
01:48:34S.B.: I will say, I feel like I've complained too much about doing the programming. We brought in amazing speakers, I met incredible people, and students met them. I think having students be able to meet some of their idols, some of these icons, or maybe someone they hadn't known about before. We would always build in an opportunity for the students to hang out with the speakers. When speakers came to our campus, they would say, "This is the best visit I ever had because I got to spend time with your students." No one ever makes space for that. They all think we want to meet with the faculty.
01:49:12A.B.: That's true, actually, when I think about when I've traveled to give talks.
01:49:16A.B.: What advice would you give to a director of Women's and Gender Studies today?
01:49:20S.B.: I would say my advice is there's no teleological history of this field or feminism itself, and there are periods in which there's more and - oh, and I want to say that because very often archive projects take this teleological view. You want to really make sure the way we present the material doesn't do that. Either, "We should have been on this growth path and more and more and more, and then we were derailed, but someday we'll prevail in our original goals." No, the goals change and the world changes and the program changes. And there's a tendency when you talk to people like me who used to do things, of people really romanticizing in their day, things were great [laughter], if only we could get back to what it was then. That's why I'm cautious to say there's no teleological history. There are periods in which there's more institutional support and periods of less. There are periods when certain issues are going to be salient and periods of less. I remember that Patricia Hill Collins piece on intersecting identities, and how she talks about in one particular conjuncture, this might be more important. In another conjuncture, that might be more important, and trying to explain that to students. I think that's true of Women's and Gender Studies as a field. It's not like it should always be the same thing that's important throughout.
01:50:55S.B.: And so be yourself. Don't feel like you have to do everything your predecessors did. I had that mentality. I felt like I had to be a [Lora] Lempert with the programming. Be a [Rashmi] Luthra in decolonizing the curriculum. Be a [Maureen] Linker in being attentive to discrimination of women in the university because she had led some conversations about that.
01:51:21A.B.: You weren't just trying to be your predecessor, you were trying to be your predecessors plural.
01:51:26S.B.: Yes. Be a Poonam [Arora] and be attentive to women of color and the kinds of issues that she brought. And then be what I wanted to be. It was additive, and it was insane. It took me a long time to realize that I didn't have to carry forth everyone else's projects. Neither should anyone stepping into this role. That was something that I made really clear in WILL. The students did this thing with me, but maybe your students will want to do something different.
01:52:07A.B.: And the students are always changing in what their priorities are, what their needs are.
01:52:11S.B.: So if you're going to make it a student-centered program, it's going to shift. I would say carve out your own path, the needs of the students and faculty now, the institutional conditions you're working in now, what your priorities are now. I want to reiterate the point I made before, that if anyone is thinking of taking this job in the future, the best work you do is going to be in advising and supporting colleagues and students. That's never going to make its way into an annual report. So be at peace with that. But also celebrate that.
01:52:44A.B.: Yeah, be at peace with that. That's important. In my experience, I feel like I get a lot of advice leading up to a decision, but I was just articulating to someone this week, a big part of it is also being at peace with the decision after you make it.
01:53:01S.B.: That's really true.
01:53:03A.B.: I had separated these two questions. I had another question, what advice would you give to a director of WILL today? I feel like you answered both. Would you say so?
01:53:12S.B.: I think I did, yeah.
01:53:14A.B.: What do you hope changes, if anything, for future directors?
01:53:19S.B.: Well, obviously a change in the political winds from what's happening today. [Laughter] I hope that little piece of the university that will never die, that's built around those things that our program values or those broader contributions that we make, I hope that bubbles more up to the surface somehow, and whatever can make that happen. And if that means a change in the ghastly and wildly inappropriate budget model - Soap box. Okay. Now the soap box is put back. [Laughter] That would be good. Because that budget model doesn't fit our gen ed program, and it's explicitly designed to destroy CASL, I think, and it's wrong.
01:54:03A.B.: I've heard more than one person say that who's very familiar with the budget model.
01:54:08S.B.: I just hope that the members of the program, if they're not already, really galvanize to nurture it through the tough times. I think it's hard in a university where people are overworked. It's a highly competitive environment now. At the same time, I think as a lot of people are going through this more recent round of austerity, will they develop more empathy?
01:54:34A.B.: It could go either way under austerity measures.
01:54:39S.B.: Yep. What I saw during my time, and I didn't really talk about this, was there were some people who grew apart from the program, I felt, in ways that I had described, but then there were some people who grew closer to the program. Some of them didn't even teach much in the program, but they were in literature, or they were in the writing program, and they were experiencing austerity. Then they were like, "Oh my god, this is what's happening over there. This is what happens when you're in a field that people feel like they can devalue, and they're not seeing your work."
01:55:15A.B.: What do you hope stays the same, if anything, for future directors?
01:55:19S.B.: I would say the amazing students that are drawn to the program. I hope they still come even though there's this attack on our field. Maybe there are ways to bring them in without them having a recognition that maybe they don't want to have something on their record. Even though I don't - I think there are a lot of spaces where people would still love folks with a degree in Women's and Gender Studies. We can't let [opponents of Women's and Gender Studies] drive the discourse. But you know, students come in with these preconceived notions. Can we still keep drawing the amazing students and frankly faculty into the program? How wonderful was it for me that not only did we get two lines when I was director, but some of the disciplines were smart enough to hire feminist scholars. Then I got to work with Rose [Wellman] and Francine [Banner] and so many. There's like 20 people I could list.
01:56:18A.B.: Some of whom will be in this project. Francine will be interviewed, and Rose will interview me.
01:56:27S.B.: Wonderful. So, they had the good sense to [hire feminist scholars]. I hope that stays the same.
01:56:34A.B.: All right. I have one final question. It's kind of a capping off of the interview. So before I ask you my final question, I want to ask you if there's anything else that we haven't discussed yet that you want to talk about?
01:56:48S.B.: I feel like it's been comprehensive, and then some. [Laughter]
01:56:54A.B.: And we can always add, we can always add something in. My final question is this: How do you see the Women's and Gender Studies and WILL programs fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
01:57:07S.B.: Well, I think if you ask this question of someone else who was in the role for three years, you'd probably get a different answer than someone who did various leadership roles in the program for 16 years. I would say it was career-defining. I'm in this professional association I've been in since 1983, and sadly, as we're getting older, some of our members are passing on. Someone died recently, and he was this incredible program builder in economics. But he built a radical program. When he died, a lot of people said to me, "Well you know, Suzanne, Joe [Medley] is like you. He was a program builder." He was a person who was focused - like that was his major contribution in academia. It's a self-identity for me, but also how other people make sense of me. And I think it was a career shifting moment, because while I was a transdisciplinary scholar, there's a way that I could have just taught my courses, not been the director, and been much more focused in an interdisciplinary economics direction. But I feel like it shifted, again because of the directorship, into a more broadly feminist scholar direction, giving me a broader range.
01:58:30S.B.: Then I think in terms of my life, I just hold that as being very grateful for an opportunity to learn a lot about myself and what I could do, in terms of helping to transform institutions. By the way, one of the things I do is I study how gender moves through institutions like the World Bank. Which is a little different, but I feel like I developed a good eye for understanding how institutions work through this job. And so I kind of bring that everywhere.
01:59:03S.B.: I think I might've had limited space for imagining alternative possible futures. What I'm going to say might be a little weird. Then I came into Women's and Gender Studies, and I think a lot of the people that we teach and read have these pretty radical ideas of alternative futures based on mutual aid, based on broader communities of care and concern, of really imagining life differently. There have been feminist experiments with that around the world, feminists working with radical economic justice and environmental justice and peace justice folks to imagine a radically different future. I just think I wouldn't have had that if I wasn't director and always thinking, you know, I've got to keep these different ideas in my mind.
01:59:56A.B.: Thank you so much for this.
01:59:58S.B.: Thank you, Amy. It's been delightful.
