00:00:00A.B.: I’m Amy Brainer. I’m associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and I direct LGBTQ Studies here at University of Michigan-Dearborn.
00:00:10G.H.: I am Georgina Hickey. I am a professor of History and affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies and Urban and Regional Studies at University of Michigan-Dearborn.
00:00:21A.B.: I’m thinking you served as director of WILL, Women in Learning and Leadership, from 2009 to 2011. Does that sound right to you?
00:00:31G.H.: I think it was ’12.
00:00:32A.B.: Oh, it was to ’12. So it’s a three-year term. [See the index for annual program reports from those years.] Tell me what you remember about how you became director of WILL.
00:00:42G.H.: Well, so I came to campus in 2001. And I came, I’m hired, my line is officially in History, but I was hired - Suzanne Bergeron was on the committee that hired me - it was always explicit that I was coming in part to serve Women’s and Gender Studies. Then it was Women’s Studies. And so immediately was a part of that faculty and always going to those meetings. Somewhere early on, Suzanne was talking about creating a WILL program.
00:01:17G.H.: They wanted a signature class for the students. I had some teaching that I had done at my previous institution, and I tried to find a place for it here and hadn’t really settled in, on social movements. I’m like, “Oh, I got this. Can I teach about women’s leadership in social movements?” That became the core WILL class for a number of years. I knew all the WILL students from the beginning because I was teaching this core class. The first time I taught it, there were like 25 students. It was huge and not quite what we’d envisioned. It settled down after that. I was always involved, and so I think - Suzanne was first. Then I think it was Marilee Benore was second, and then it was me. [See the index for a 2009 WGST/WILL newsletter announcing Georgina's directorship.] I feel like I was just the next logical person in part because I had been teaching this core class in the program. I was a little nervous because it was a co-curricular program. I wasn’t just going to be interacting with the people in the program as students, and that’s of course mostly what I had done. Having students who have my phone number and things was new. And they had needs and feelings. [Laughter] And they wanted me to share in those, and that was unfamiliar territory for me.
00:02:43A.B.: Yeah, so you’ve started to answer the next question really well, which is tell me about yourself at that time. What did you specifically bring to the role of director? It could be academic background, but also your personal background, your personality, other things.
00:03:00G.H.: What did I bring to the program? Well, I always had a deep commitment to the basic mission of the WILL program. Here are these people from a variety of backgrounds who wanted to change the world. They just felt like these are my people. In that sense, it was just validating to be able to integrate something that was so personally meaningful to me into my career. It goes as a line on the CV. It goes in the annual report, makes the institution recognize this is a thing. In that sense, it made perfect sense. I hadn’t done a lot of leadership myself, oddly enough, even though I was teaching about it. But we do that all the time, right? We teach about all sorts of things that we don’t [laughter] do ourselves.
00:04:00G.H.: So I had a lot of ideas, and it was really interesting to try and do it, especially because I’d spent a lot of time working on movements for social change and looking particularly at feminist movements for social change, where they intentionally tried non-hierarchical organizational models and things of that sort. Then it’s like, “Here, direct this group.” How are you going do it? Who’s going speak for the group? Consensus is hard, so trying to teach them things like consensus building as a skill, but also things like Robert’s Rules of Order because if you know how meetings are run, you have power. It wasn’t for our meetings, but it was when they went to student government meetings and things like that. Do you know how to get something you want on the agenda? Do you know how to move conversations in certain directions, when to call for quorum, and stupid stuff like that. I’m like, “I can do this.” It turned out to be much more chaotic.
00:05:03G.H.: There were a lot of personalities in the WILL group, and there had been some leadership clashes between students that I walked into rather unprepared. I was thinking about this. I don’t even know how I - we just felt our way through. But there were definitely things that were way outside of what I thought I was ever going do in my job.
00:05:29A.B.: Right, tell me about some of that. Part of this project is about identifying the invisible kinds of labor that go into this. One of the things I picked up early on was this emotion work that maybe became part of your job. Can you talk a little about -
00:05:45G.H.: Well, there were a lot of emotions. And I feel them too. And I’m sure you do too. There are things I teach that it’s hard for me sometimes to access that dispassionate academic tone, especially teaching right now. That was definitely true. I did feel like I was supposed to be the grown up in the group, and I was supposed to have all the answers. The reality was that I didn’t. It was a good lesson. It was okay. But there were definitely some uncomfortable conversations, and there were some factions within the group.
00:06:30G.H.: There was one leader in particular who really had caused some friction with other folks. But the response from the other people was absolutely not productive. I did have to intervene and bring people together to have a conversation back when we had a space, a lounge on the third floor of the CASL Building. That was really helpful that we had a physical space in which to sit together and work through some things. But I did feel like there were a couple places where I had to get people to pull back and really had to work to get people to listen.
00:07:03G.H.: But there were a lot of emotions. I can remember walking into the lounge once, and two of our WILL students, who did like each other a lot, were both having a hard time, were laying on the floor in the dark crying. And you know it’s just like - [Laughter] My shy person instinct was to close the door quietly and run away. But that wasn’t it. Suzanne Bergeron always handled those things it seemed with such grace, and she was always there to talk with. She was also always working with the students as the director of Women’s Studies at that point. So I always had backup. But it’s difficult. I don’t know where the boundaries are. I remember having one of the students from the WILL program, who was also in one of my classes, had an abusive partner who would stalk her on campus, and I locked her in my office to go get security. It was scary. It was terrifying for them, and I was scared for them. I think teaching the kinds of things we do and connecting with the students, we get more of that than a lot of faculty do. And it’s a privilege, but I have never felt well trained for it.
00:08:28A.B.: Yeah, we didn’t get trained for it. This wasn’t part of graduate education.
00:08:33G.H.: There were no feelings in graduate school, not when I went to graduate school, anyway. History has since discovered that there were some feelings, but that came after me.
00:08:40A.B.: Yeah, I think we’re starting to change - that came after you. [Laughter] Again, we’re in a way in our conversation predicting the questions. I’ll just ask this and see if you want to add anything. What expectations and goals did you have going into the role, and how did these change as you did the work?
00:09:11G.H.: First, try not to screw it up. [Laughter] I mean honestly.
00:09:15A.B.: That was mine too. [Laughter]
00:09:16G.H.: Oh, okay, really? Oh, good, I was about to say - [Laughter] I was so impressed with the creation and launch of WILL, and I really loved my little corner. I got to teach stuff that I was super passionate about. There’s hundreds of students I’ve now introduced Ella Baker to. And it was great. Being the director was asking me to do different things. I hadn’t done a lot of work with student groups, and of course, this was an unusual student group, but - oh, no, I lost the thread of your question.
00:09:51A.B.: Oh, how your expectations and goals changed as you did the work.
00:09:55G.H.: Don’t screw it up, right. But I did have one thing that I really - I wanted to do, and that was interesting because I needed to get the students on board with something that was meaningful to me. I didn’t want to railroad them into it, but I wanted to invite them in to see what I saw, why I thought this was something to do. While doing the other things that the people before me had already established, working at Phoenix [Academy], at the middle school, for example. That was already set up. I could coast on that. For me, and I think we were largely successful, Take Back the Night had been hollowed out and was not very meaningful. So I started my take back Take Back the Night campaign. [Laughter]
00:10:55G.H.: It made me nervous because the students - it wasn’t driven by their passion. It was mine, but I wanted them to do it. A few of them really did get onboard with it, and it’s interesting to see how some of the things that we developed in those couple of years became the new standard. They owned it. I did a lot of pushing and a lot of structuring initially, but then they took it over. Like they were really reluctant - it was hard to find someone who was willing to emcee it, things like to step up and be in front of a group and things like that, but they did. And it was great. [See the index for sample Take Back the Night flyers from these years.] I brought them a resource person from Eastern Michigan who ran a very robust Take Back the Night. Fortunately, they did theirs like most people in April. So asking them to come talk to us in September was fine. Then Shareia Carter was very willing to support a new vision for Take Back the Night. That part was all good, and I - one more piece about expectations.
00:12:04G.H.: We do our luncheon at the end of the year, and we celebrate all our graduates and our certificates. The WILL director gets up and says, “Here are all the amazing and wonderful things we did,” which I was super excited to do for the students and also really, really intimidated, but it was wonderful. That’s where my feelings probably came out. I remember there was one year that I came, and I brought my camera. It was back when we used to have separate cameras. [Laughter] My camera and my box of tissues, and I put them right on the lectern. I used them both during my little speech about how WILL had been. It was scary going in, but the students were generally really gracious in their response and really into it. And they, particularly my daughter, adopted my kid as the mascot of the group. Some of them still remember her as a little kid, and she’s 26 now.
00:13:03A.B.: That’s awesome. You actually had that connection between your work life and your home life was happening.
00:13:11G.H.: Which I did not have in any other part of my career. I generally keep firmer boundaries than some. I don’t always mean to. It’s just the way it’s evolved, right? More students than colleagues had my phone number while I was directing WILL.
00:13:29A.B.: So that pushed you a little bit.
00:13:31G.H.: Oh, it did. I was definitely outside my comfort zone. And it was fine.
00:13:40A.B.: Did you feel like there was alignment between what mattered to you and how you spent your time as director?
00:13:47G.H.: [Pause] Yes, I think so. I mean I got nothing but support from the Women’s Studies faculty. At that point, WILL had gotten recognized as a student org, and we were being pretty effective at dipping into student government money for some of the things we were doing. The group one of the years I was director won the student award. The thing where they have the nice cupcakes. [Laughter] I was really proud of them for taking this somewhat unusual organization and making it legible in student life world. Generally I got to do it, to the point where - So I became department chair in the last year that I was WILL director. I couldn’t take the course release associated with it because I had course releases. I just had more jobs than I was supposed to have in that year between the teaching I did need to do, directing WILL, and being department chair. But I did ask to do it, and I’m glad I did. The WILL students were a tonic to the chairing of the big multidisciplinary department. It was hard though, I probably couldn’t have done it more than one year. [Laughter]
00:15:16A.B.: You were doing a lot, yeah. Wow.
00:15:19G.H.: Fortunately, it was like I’d been - I’d had two years to be WILL director. It was not my first year.
00:15:25A.B.: But still. Did the amount of time you spent on other things change, like research?
00:15:33G.H.: Oh, undoubtedly. The book that I was working on during that time I finally published at the end of 2023. That book should’ve had a driver’s license by the time it got published.
00:15:46A.B.: [Laughter] You know it was probably a better book for it, but yeah. [See the index for Georgina's book!]
00:15:50G.H.: Yeah I’m sure it slowed things down, but it was kind of hard to see. I was also in that amorphous world of an associate professor. And going up for full professor near the end of that, but honestly, I didn’t know I was going to do that. That was a last minute thing. It was in that nebulous world of being an associate professor where it feels like you have to do all the things. Maybe in some ways, I just stopped paying attention. But I’m sure that I did less work on my research for working on the group, especially when we did things over the summer. Just interviewing the students to come into the program, at that point, we - I can’t remember how many interviews we did, lots of interviews, 30 maybe. We talked to lots and lots of students. We were maintaining a cohort of 30 students. That was every spring after classes had ended doing those interviews.
00:16:58A.B.: Did being director influence your life outside of work in any way?
00:17:04G.H.: Well, my kids came to Dearborn more. [Laughter] Because the students, the WILL students really liked to plan and have social things. And I told them, I said, “That is not my jam.” But they wanted to meet on Sundays. Well, I’m a single parent, and I have kids. The kids are coming. They thought that was great. They’d sit there and color with the kids and hang out with them. I really appreciated, the students were always welcoming to me as a whole person. But I think I carried some of that trauma from an earlier generation being a woman in a field that was dominated by men. And then doing a field, a subfield that sometimes people easily dismiss, women’s history. That’s not real history, right? So I had - I think that’s part of where my professional boundaries, really strict, came from. And the students, they didn’t have any of that. They didn’t care. They thought it was neat that I had kids. They thought my kids were fun. They were very open. It was good. Yes, it stretched me at times, but overall, I enjoyed it.
00:18:20G.H.: I’m really proud of the things the students did, and I was really proud to be associated with a program that had the ambitious - we had Grace Lee Boggs come to the opening.
00:18:32A.B.: Yeah, that's incredible.
00:18:33G.H.: The advisory board, Gerry Barrons is still a friend to me and has opened many doors on that book I just published and the one I’m working on now. It made great connections for me and was a good lesson in it’s okay to let your guard down a little bit.
00:18:55A.B.: You’ve talked a lot about the students already. Tell me a little bit about them. What were they like? What kind of people were drawn to the program at that time?
00:19:04G.H.: I feel like I could almost see it in the first couple weeks of a class, who I was going to recommend for WILL, whether I was director or not. I was director for those three years, but I’ve been involved with the program all the way through. Most of the students were - the language you used to use is nontraditional in some way. Some had taken a not straight path into college. We had a lot of divorces. Sometimes, this gets a little hazy for when I was director and when I was just teaching the seminar.
00:19:53A.B.: You can include it all, yeah.
00:19:55G.H.: The seminar, the class, gave us that structure. We’d meet once or twice a week for an entire term. But yeah, I do remember several divorces in the way of people changing their lives. I also remember being really worried about some of the students that they were so over committed because you could see the stress cracks. I had one student that I remember in particular. I had her in a couple of classes. She said, “No, no, no, everything else in my life is hard and stressful. This is my joy. I want to do this. I want to be in the middle school. I want to talk about readings in this class.” It helped me a lot because I was always worried about asking too much of them. They were good students. At that point, we asked them to have a 3.0 or better. We wanted them to have their academics in hand before they came into WILL. We softened on that a little bit over the years.
00:21:09G.H.: A good number of them were SOAR [Support, Opportunities, Advocacy, and Resources for adult learners] students. Lots of them were SOAR students. You just had this mix of people who had some life experience, but also were ready for the next thing. A lot of people were on some sort of transition path when we met them. For some of them, it was a gender transition. For some of them, it was a sexuality transition. For some of them, it was a marital family status transition. Then we had a few who were really struggling with their families of origin, and it might have just been for their paths of study or their political beliefs, but not a lot of support at home. There’s that element of the students pulling together.
00:21:56G.H.: But there were a couple of types. We definitely had the loud type. When we did the interviews, we’d ask them, “In group settings, what role do you tend to play?” Their answer across the board was, “I’m always the leader.” [Laughter] What does that mean to you, right? We definitely had some strong personalities. A few I can think of in particular. And then we also had those people that you could just see wanted something else in the world and hadn’t found it, which is kind of a big extreme, and so then figuring out that mix. But because they ended up in the same cohort - other than that friction that I described that first year that I walked into, where basically someone was trying to be too much of a traditional leader and telling other people what to do, and telling them when they weren’t doing it right, didn’t go over well - but once they’re in, there was that cohort-shared identification. That meant that sometimes those louder, more forceful people became very protective of the shyer, more questioning people in a good way. If you’d put them in a class, they might’ve, just a regular class, they might’ve been on opposite sides, but there was a way that they pulled together. Which I just think about, they made us get sweatshirts. They’re like, “We have to. We’re team WILL. We have to have - ”
00:23:31A.B.: That’s where they would’ve lost me. I would’ve been like, “I can’t do a sweatshirt.” [Laughter]
00:23:36G.H.: Yeah, actually, I was just wondering what happened to that sweatshirt. It was yellow, which is not usually my jam, but it was a nice pullover sweatshirt. And then they did baseball shirts a number of years after that. I figure anything they get together and figure out, that’s great. These are students who wanted stuff. They wanted to do things. They wanted to change the world, but they actually meant it.
00:24:12A.B.: So a lot of these changes are things that are ongoing, not like a one-time political thing. But were there currents, political currents, cultural currents, that you feel like WILL was really responding to? For example, now there would be a lot of things we would point to and say, "That was shaping what the students were thinking about or doing."
00:24:38G.H.: Remember I was director 2009 to 2012? It was a very different moment.
00:24:45A.B.: It was, yeah.
00:24:48G.H.: Ah, those were different days. In some ways, we had the luxury of not feeling quite so embattled, I think. There were things that fired students up, but I don’t know that they were so much the political moment as much as the process of going to university and exposing yourself to wider parts of the world. One I remember. I had a student who was a part of twins, and she was in my class. I don’t know if the brother was here. I think he was here, but I don’t remember meeting him. We were doing the Equal Pay Day Bake Sale, where we sold the cupcakes for 72 cents to women and $1 to men. And we didn’t really sell them, we were asking for donations and making the point, right? I do remember an African-American woman coming up and knowing the difference for African-American women. I’m like, “You get your cupcake free.” But that twin, she was just - something about the fact that here she is a twin to a male, and she [learned she would likely make less than him] statistically. And we were looking at the gap that emerges the first year after graduation in particular. She was so pissed. She was just livid, and it was really funny. Those moments are a privilege to get to witness where people - and it’s funny because we always talked about aha moments, when people realize that the world doesn’t work the way they were told it was supposed to work. And just the privilege of getting to witness some of those partially by what I teach, but also partially by the group that WILL attracted.
00:26:39A.B.: Yeah, I have vivid moments like that too. Those really stick with you.
00:26:42G.H.: They do, yeah.
00:26:44A.B.: How were you supported as director and by whom? It could be practical or emotional support, all of the above.
00:26:56G.H.: On the practical, what I got, I got release time to be director, and I wasn’t able to use it all in that moment. I was able to use it - I think at least one of those course releases I had to save, but I got to use to extend a sabbatical. That was great and is gone. Did I also get a stipend? I honestly cannot remember at this point. Time was probably more meaningful to me because I do remember that. I had that. I also had a home discipline, History, that never questioned the effort I put toward any Women’s, then Women’s and Gender Studies project. Like I said, my role, in part because I came in to fill a line that had been held by Leslie Tentler, that I was going to be integral to Women’s and Gender Studies was there from the get-go, which not everyone has had. Nobody said, “Why aren’t you being discipline rep for History right now?” Because I was doing other things, and that was - maybe they said it privately, but nobody said it publicly. So that was good support.
00:28:20G.H.: But the Women’s and Gender Studies program faculty are really the key people there, particularly Suzanne Bergeron as - she was kind of all things. We all knew we probably shouldn’t make her do everything. We shouldn’t let her do everything. We should all do stuff, but she was so good at it, and the students loved her. But it really was a team effort. Just from the very get-go when I got here, there was a Women’s Studies retreat, and just meeting all these people for the first time and the energy in the room. It was great, and that just carried through. Because the program is one that drew people because they were passionate about it, not because they had to be there. So the connections made through there were amazing. I’ve been in an interdisciplinary writing group with people from Women’s and Gender Studies for, it’s probably 20 years now. It’s a generative space, and that was always there for when I was directing WILL or when I was just teaching classes or doing my other things.
00:29:42A.B.: Whoa, a 20-year writing group, that’s incredible.
00:29:46G.H.: It IS incredible.
00:29:47A.B.: I love that.
00:29:50G.H.: And it’s an interesting range of people. Not surprising, we have retired people now who are in it, which is sort of different. They have to hear us talk about campus events. [Laughter]
00:30:04A.B.: That's right. They’re like, “I just have time to write.”
00:30:06G.H.: That’s your penance. You can stay in the group, but we’re going to -
00:30:09A.B.: You have to listen to the politics.
00:30:11G.H.: We need to process a little bit what’s going on.
00:30:15A.B.: Was there support you felt like you needed, but didn’t get?
00:30:20G.H.: I feel like there was probably more support out there for me if I had known to ask for it. Like I said, I didn’t feel wholly prepared for taking on the group and what was going to be asked of me. Marilee [Benore] and Suzanne [Bergeron] were very generous with their time. I love Marilee, but her record-keeping was sort of seat of the pants. [Laughter] So like just figuring out who’s in the group, there were [laughter] - it was a little bit of a struggle. But what’s funny is she was deeply connected to the students. The problem was you had to just - there was no record of it. You had to pick it out of her brain. I suppose, it maybe [would have been] better if I had onboarded for a semester before or something like that kind of stuff, but whatever. We figured it out.
00:31:24A.B.: Actually, now that you say that, so I’ve never directed WILL, but I think I would want an onboarding. I like that idea. We should think about that as a strategy for the future.
00:31:38G.H.: I think there’s the assumption that you’ve just - you’ve been around it.
00:31:42A.B.: Like that you’ve got it through osmosis. I don’t feel like I really fully know. I feel like I’m even going to learn about WILL through this.
00:31:49G.H.: And honestly, I would’ve made that mistake about you. I would’ve assumed that you’d be fine probably the same way that people assumed I would be just fine because I was teaching a class. I had all these students. But I also had other students. I didn’t even always know who was in WILL and who was not in WILL because that class was open to other students as well.
00:32:09A.B.: WILL's really - I mean I think that anyone who listens to these [interviews] in the future is going to be interested in WILL, because it’s a really extraordinary program.
00:32:23A.B.: What are some things you learned about yourself as a result of this work?
00:32:27G.H.: I won’t die if they have my phone number. No. [Laughter] I don’t know. It’s mixed in with a lot of other experiences from that time in my life. It’s a little bit hard to pull one thread.
00:32:50A.B.: Yeah, well, and also you became department chair.
00:32:54G.H.: Yeah and then started promotion to full.
00:32:58A.B.: I was interviewing Katie [Anderson-Levitt] yesterday, and she was like, “Well, then I became dean.” I was like, “Oh, we should talk about that!” You know? [Laughter]
00:33:08G.H.: I stepped in for Marty Hershock [as department chair] for one term when he took a sabbatical and was interim chair, and Katie was the dean. Yeah, let’s just say this. I was way better prepared for WILL [laughter] than I was for being department chair. Because there were elements of being a teacher. But I think I learned from WILL that it’s okay to let things go a little bit more, and trust that the students will get it, will pick up the slack. Or they won’t, and we won’t die. [Laughter] Honestly, I probably need to be reminded of that lesson. I think there were moments where I thought I had to be in all places and do all the things because that’s more of a professor role, but that really wasn’t what I was here, right? This is a program in leadership. They need to own it and take it. And so for me, I did learn probably some of those hard lessons about letting it happen, letting other people do things. Just like those, in the interviews when they all said, “Oh, I’m a leader.” Well, that would’ve been my answer too, which really meant I did all the work.
00:34:30A.B.: Uh huh.
00:34:32G.H.: That’s how you get As, Amy. Did you know that? We’re very good students. [Laughter] There were those kinds of life lessons, and then it’s - I almost had to in that third year, because I was department chair, and those plates had to keep spinning. I was worried, am I letting them down? I don’t know. Nobody died. It was okay.
00:35:00A.B.: It’s kind of like parenting. I say as someone who hasn’t parented, so take it with a grain of salt. [Laughter]
00:35:05G.H.: There are great lessons from parenting for running a program or a department. The key among them is to say, “What do you want to have happen here? What are you hoping for?” A lot of times it’s, “I just want to talk.” And that was one of the problems I had with students when they had feelings. I felt like I had to solve their feelings. I realize this sounds perfectly obvious, but honestly, it was a life lesson to be like, "I can’t solve your feelings, but I can listen to your feelings."
00:35:35A.B.: What are some things you learned about the college or university as a result of this work? I’m actually interested in both your work with Women’s and Gender Studies and WILL, and then moving into more administrative positions. Those are a lot of hats.
00:35:54G.H.: Yeah, they are a lot of hats. One of the things I learned about the institution is just how incredibly separate the student life side of the house is from the academic affairs side of the house. That’s something I’d actually been working on since very early in my time here, because I was one of the original people in what was then called the civic engagement project, which then led to hiring Carla Vecchiola to -
00:36:26A.B.: Wow.
00:36:27G.H.: Yeah, that was us.
00:36:29A.B.: Thank you! You gave us such a gift.
00:36:32G.H.: But what was interesting about the civic engagement project, so you can see how this lines up with WILL, we were bringing what was then called service learning, and we hired Carla who was steeped in that pedagogy to run a faculty fellows program and to support the work of faculty who were trying to do community engaged projects. It used to be faculty, because of the work we did, they spent a term as fellows. They had readings. They met. They discussed. They had kind of a teaching circle around service learning. And so when people are like, “And we’re going to do PBL,” whether you think that’s project- or practice-based learning, I’m like, “We’ve been doing that.” [Laughter]
00:37:24G.H.: But, I mean, that’s the way. That’s one of the things you learn. But anyway, that project brought together a few people, from Kris Day, from the student life side of the house - I’m trying to think of who else was on it that’s still here. Oh, and Patti Martin who at that point ran co-op, now it’s internships. Which was a real opportunity for me to interact with staff people, which I really don’t. And that helped me, as well as the alliance between the Women’s and Gender Studies program and the Women’s Resource Center. I’m pretty sure that was the name back then. So having the connection to that office.
00:38:13G.H.: Because I think a lot of us as faculty exist in this world that’s completely removed from staff, other than maybe the staff in our home department that helps us file expense reports. It was really interesting because in the civic engagement project and WILL and then in many things that have come since, Foundations in particular, which has also been something I’ve been involved with, right, since the beginning, along with you, right? How many times did we encounter that people on the student life side of the house were doing things that were a lot like what we were trying to do? Just completely disconnected. That was part of why I was so proud of the WILL students for actually figuring out how the student org system works, for jumping through all the hoops they needed to jump through to get recognition, and to get access to the resources that recognition came with, and then to win an award at the end of the year. I was super proud of them for - it was like, I don’t feel like I’ve mastered that infrastructure.
00:39:16A.B.: That was a well-deserved award, for sure. And WILL is an important bridge in what you’re describing, because those silos are detrimental, for sure.
00:39:26G.H.: And you know as faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, this is a fight that’s ongoing for us, that we have done again and again, and that we’re not always listened to. This is something I’ve encountered in many places because I’ve never been very high in administration. I take on administrative roles, but I direct programs. I chaired a couple of departments. I’ve never gone higher than that. I’ve not been an associate dean. I’ve not been an associate provost, definitely not been a dean or a provost, right?
00:39:58A.B.: Do you have - do you want to?
00:40:00G.H.: No. [Laughter] 2020 cured me of any ambition. [Laughter] No, being chair during a pandemic, it took it out of me. It did. But what I learned from all of that is, and probably what you were expecting to hear, you have people who are a little bit above many things that are going on. And the people who are way up at the top, who are really making the big important decisions, do not use us. They do not listen when we say, “This is what’s happening on the ground.” And I know that anyone who’s been director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program has felt that. I definitely felt that most strongly as department chair. That I had - especially during the pandemic, but not only then - I can tell you because I’m talking to all these people, I’m seeing all these classrooms, I’m seeing all this stuff. And nobody wanted to hear it. It was frustrating. [Laughter] I’ll just let that sit there.
00:41:13A.B.: Yep. I resonate with that. What advice would you give to someone coming in, either to direct WILL specifically, or just into one of these positions that you just described?
00:41:30G.H.: Oh, those are probably different answers. [Laughter]
00:41:33A.B.: They can be two different answers, yeah.
00:41:35G.H.: Coming in taking on a student group, I do think people have to be careful, and I was not very careful with my time, as you probably heard in my answer. “Whatever, we can do it all, right?”
00:41:47A.B.: "We can do it on Sunday. I’ll bring my kid."
00:41:48G.H.: Sleep’s for chumps. Exactly. Of course, I can come to campus another day. No, I did not draw that. I did not answer my phone after 10 p.m., that was about the only boundary I drew. Honestly, you call me after 10, I’m calling you at 6 a.m. [Laughter] Consequences. Okay. I think encouraging people if they want to take it on to do it. Maybe a little onboarding, you know? Spend a little time informally or formally as an assistant director or whatever. But going ahead and putting some boundaries on your time and making that clear in gentle ways. Even if I had thought to do it, I don’t know what boundaries I would’ve put. I’m still bad with this. I still aspire to that, just like I aspire to be a good packer in my next life. I’m going to be able to pack everything in a backpack, one suitcase. I'm not there currently.
00:42:47A.B.: [Laughter] Oh my god. I’m so far from both these things.
00:42:51G.H.: But I think I want there to be a little footnote on that though, because I think it’s also fine to have fun with that because you can’t do it in those other positions, right? There are very few opportunities to have fun as chair [laughter], direct fun.
00:43:13A.B.: Yeah, I’ve not heard someone describe being chair as fun.
00:43:17G.H.: No, being chair, if you really like knowing what’s going on, although that broke with the pandemic. That was interesting. And if you like learning things. I’m an historian. I went and chaired natural sciences for 15 months, and it was kind of fun, because we’re academics, right? We’re in it to learn things. And it’s like, “Hey, can I figure out the rules of a department that has nothing to do with mine?” In some ways, it was freeing that I don’t understand organic chemistry. I was really attuned to that job candidate’s mannerisms and things because I don’t know what the words they are saying. [Laughter] So I do think, in general as an academic, finding some fun where you can. If you know who your people are that are going to support you, learn about what’s expected, think about what you want out of it, if you can be that intentional, you know, give it a whirl.
00:44:25A.B.: Yeah, I like that spirit.
00:44:29G.H.: I mean, I wish I could do it more freely. But I think that a group like WILL is exactly the kind of place, just because of the process that has led to it existing, the culture. There’s room for it.
00:44:49A.B.: Is there anything you hope changes for future directors of WILL?
00:44:55G.H.: [Laughter] It feels like a loaded question. Yeah, but it’s not the directorship or the students. I want the stuff around it to change. This is not a happy moment in our college, and I think a lot of our faculty feel quite embattled, and that so many of the messages we’re getting are, you’re doing it wrong, or you’re doing the wrong thing. I think right now, it would be very hard for someone who is looking to - certainly someone looking to get tenured, but possibly even someone looking to be promoted to full, to look at what’s happening in the college right now and say, “I can make space for this thing that aligns with my values that I want to do.” That’s where the change I think has to happen, is we have removed - it feels like even though we’re talking about more inclusive definitions of scholarship and things of that sort, that conversation seems completely at odds with everything else that’s going on.
00:46:17G.H.: We don’t have the atmosphere in which people can try things that are maybe slightly outside of their comfort zone or don’t have a direct pathway to a traditional scholarly output. That’s the stuff I would change. It’d be great if our jobs were more fun. I actually have one group of students that I meet in-person this term, and it is so energizing to actually have conversations. Clicking a mouse to make a Canvas site work does not energize me.
00:46:50A.B.: Yeah, my campus days, days with students, are the days I come home with energy at the end of the day.
00:46:58A.B.: What do you hope stays the same if anything? What do you want to preserve that’s special about WILL?
00:47:05G.H.: These delightful students who want to change the world. If I didn’t continue to encounter what I say with love is do-gooder students, I don’t know if it would be - So much of our job has become transactional, including what happens in the classroom. Students who are in my face over, why is this not a 100? I’m like, “Because I teach humanities stuff. There’s always room for a little more. C’mon. It’s still an A.” [Laughter] But they’re like, “Where’s my 100?” You get that from students. You get similar versions of that transactional nature of things from the administration. And so WILL now, it’s always been, but particularly shining brightly, as not that. [Laughter]
00:47:59G.H.: I hope the students don’t feel - I assume they do, but I hope they don’t feel quite some of the same pressures we do, to have these really direct outputs. Because let’s face it. You know this in your teaching. Sometimes students are going to get troubled by what they’re encountering and feel frustrated, feel like they can’t make a difference, or none of this - there’s nothing here that can be changed. Or they learn things that make them uncomfortable. And that won’t get sorted out for years. Some of the things that are going on right now, we don’t know where they’re going to land. That’s five years down the road. It’s 10 years down the road. It’s when they have kids. It’s when they are teaching themselves, you know?
00:48:48A.B.: Mm hm. How do you see the WILL program fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
00:48:58G.H.: Oh. Well, I’m really proud of having been a part of it. And it was definitely time when we let the seminar go, to let it go, because we needed the structure of the program to change a little bit, and having students take that one class was actually creating more roadblocks. Then with the enrollment pressures the way they are, it was very hard to put the course in there. I understood, and I was fine. Also, I taught it a lot. Someone else was supposed to come along. [Laughter] It wasn’t supposed to be me until I die.
00:49:36A.B.: [Laughter] 20 years later, 30 years later, you’re like, “Wait."
00:49:41G.H.: "Did I tell you this already? No, it was the students 10 years before you." It was definitely time to let it go. And we talked about some other ways that some of the things I had done with students - because I still believe a lot of them found studying women in the early labor movement, in the civil rights movement, I think they found it really inspirational in the best way, and useful to have all these other models of leadership that were counter to - These are all kids, right, who’ve gone through school and been Martin Luther King-ized. So I wanted to hang on to some of that, but we needed to let it go. Now, I teach all this stuff in my other classes, but there’s nothing - there’s no guarantee that any of them will wander through. Anyway, we needed to let the seminar go. We didn’t really come up with another, with a different way to fit some of this stuff in. That has made me feel much less connected to the program, and I am sorry about that.
00:50:54G.H.: I’m very proud of having been a part of building it up. And I absolutely think I was, that class was there from the launch. And then directing it. I’m very proud of that part of my career. Maybe my hope is, can I get myself out of some of the things that are going on now that are making my job very hard and frustrating, to the point where I could step back in? It wouldn’t be in that way maybe, but maybe it’s a different way. I’d like to get back to the spot where it felt accessible to me.
00:51:35A.B.: And back to some of the energizing aspects of the work, especially now. That’s the end of my questions. What else would you like to add, if anything?
00:51:52G.H.: What else would I like to add? I do very much hope it continues. It’s been interesting to watch the program shift and change, which I think is absolutely crucial, and part of why I understood that it was time for my class to rotate out. Because it needed - the program needed to become something else. I’ve been excited to see some new people who I wasn’t maybe expecting, like Lara Rusch, to rotate in. It is sort of weird that you weren’t there, but I understand that you were doing a lot of other really important things. You were WILL adjacent all the way through.
00:52:29A.B.: I was WILL adjacent, yeah.
00:52:32G.H.: Hiring you and hiring Lisa [Martin] were so important in putting the program on - I mean, it always existed for all of us there, but having lines more than just Suzanne [Bergeron] in the program has been important. Maybe not revolutionary, as it turns out. [Laughter] But it’s been important. Anyway, so yeah, I hope it continues on, and continues to evolve and change. I really hope that as faculty, we encourage that. Because I worry about us getting old and stuck in our ways like, “This is what it’s been. This is what it needs to be.” But I don’t - it’s not really ours.
00:53:22A.B.: That’s right. Well, thank you so much.
00:53:26G.H.: You are welcome. This was fun.
00:53:27A.B.: This was fun.
