00:00:05A.B.: I'm going to introduce myself and let you introduce yourself, first. I'm Amy Brainer. I'm an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and I direct LGBTQ Studies.
00:00:19L.L.: Now me?
00:00:20A.B.: Now you, yeah.
00:00:22L.L.: I'm Lora Lempert. I'm professor emerita in Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
00:00:33A.B.: And we are connecting after, what has it been, 10 years? [Laughter]
00:00:38L.L.: Yeah, I retired 10 years ago.
00:00:41A.B.: That's wild. So, it's exciting to -
00:00:44L.L.: But you were my hire, Amy.
00:00:46A.B.: Yeah, I know. You're part of my story.
00:00:49L.L.: I feel like I hired all the good people.
00:00:52A.B.: You were very instrumental for so many of us. And you still are a figure here.
00:01:00L.L.: Really?
00:01:01A.B.: Yes. Your name still carries weight.
00:01:04L.L.: Wow. That's a surprise.
00:01:08A.B.: No, not at all! [Laughter] I'm thinking you served as director of what would have then been Women's Studies from '98 to 2000. Does that sound right?
00:01:23L.L.: Yes.
00:01:24A.B.: That would have been after Jackie.
00:01:26L.L.: Right. Right after Jackie.
00:01:29A.B.: I know we're going back quite far, so feel free to pass on any questions that aren't still in your memory. Tell me what you remember about how you became director of Women's Studies. For example, was this a position you volunteered for? Were you asked to do it?
00:01:52L.L.: Ah. You know, this is like a long time ago when I'm old. So I had to pull up all my old end of the year reports.
00:02:03A.B.: Yes. Oh my gosh.
00:02:04L.L.: To look at, what was I doing? [Laughter] What did I do? Because I was totally blank. So, yes. What happened was, as soon as I got tenure, I mean the day after, I became director of Women's Studies. Mostly because Katie Anderson-Levitt and Sherry Pearson had been carrying the ball forever. Jackie [Vansant] had filled in. Mostly it was if you were female, and in any way could be seen as a feminist, you got slotted in there because there was no institutional support. One of the notes I had in one of my end of the year reports was that the four faculty members who served as director before me, not one of them was able to publish while they were Women's Studies directors.
00:03:16A.B.: Wow, that's really important to know.
00:03:19L.L.: Because there was so much to do, and there was no institutional support. I mean, I just got tenure. I stepped in, and my thought, and the direction to go, was to make Women's Studies look bigger than it is. Deal with smoke and mirrors here for these folks out in the ether of the university. Because as long as we were little, and they could frame us as irrelevant, then they didn't have to give us anything. You want a list of what we did to make ourselves visible?
00:04:12A.B.: I would love that.
00:04:14L.L.: Okay. Once I became director, the first thing I did was hold the first Women's Studies retreat. We did that, I think actually, we did it at Pat Smith's house. I can't remember where we did it, but we did it for a whole day. We invited all the female faculty and Jim Gruber. And then went through, what are our goals? What can you commit to? Stuff on the walls, putting our initials down for what we would sign up to do and be responsible for, that kind of thing. Then other things that happened that year, we got - I got Suzanne Bergeron's appointment, part-time appointment in Women's Studies.
00:05:11A.B.: That's a huge step.
00:05:13L.L.: That was huge, because we all know how central Suzanne has been to everything. It was a part-time appointment. Not a part-time, a shared appointment with Econ, and they didn't want her, and I had to go beat on them for a while.
00:05:31A.B.: Yeah. What was that like?
00:05:33L.L.: Well, it was difficult with the economists, not with Pat [Smith], but with the male economists. But it had something to do with the internal politics with Bruce [Pietrykowski, also an economist and Suzanne's husband] that I never understood. I went, eventually - Don Bord was either the associate - yeah, he was the associate dean then, because [Paul] Wong was the dean. I went to Don Bord and said, "Look, we cannot lose these two people. They're too central. And Suzanne is a firecracker and we want her," and blah, blah, blah. He said, "Well, you go talk to the economists," so I had to go talk to them. And oh, god, what was his name? Mike something was just adamantly opposed to her for something to do with Bruce, but I don't remember what that was. I just really leaned on him with everything I had. And because I knew his wife outside of the university, I leaned on her too. I am persistent and relentless.
00:06:57L.L.: Then another thing that we did, I brought in two consultants to evaluate the program. Because I knew they were going to say that you didn't have enough, blah, blah, blah. Then we had something external that we could take to them. Kate Meharan and Maria Solitanko were the two consultants, and they came up with 60, 6-0, recommendations. Okay. That was important to say - to pass those out, to give those to the dean, to give them to the provost. Say, look compared to other places, we are just way too under resourced, and it's time for you to come into the 21st century. Then, I started a feminist scholars lecture series.
00:07:54A.B.: Wow. Lora, you did so much [laughter].
00:07:59L.L.: These are only the first three things.
00:08:01A.B.: I know [laughter].
00:08:04L.L.: These [lectures] were - Deborah Smith Pollard was one. But I also brought people in from Ann Arbor and from Eastern and whatever, so we had 15 speakers over the course of the two semesters, three, two, whatever, September to May. We publicized those all over the place, right? Feminist lecture series. Then this was also the time when Matthew Shepard was pilloried. We put together, I put together a hate crimes panel with Eric Bolling and Elias Baumgarten and somebody else I can't remember, to talk about hate crimes and LBGT issues and blah, blah, blah. Then we did a book drive for Southeast Asian Indian women's studies programs, because they wrote us and said they didn't have any books and they needed books, so we did a book drive for that. Then we started the feminist theory group, which we met and, you know. We did a bunch of grant writing initiatives. I don't have the list of all of those. We also supported Women on the Move, which Nancy Lemkie started, but we were part of that. Then I initiated certification in Women's Studies, so that we would have a certificate luncheon, and our Women's Studies minor, because that's all we had at the time, a certificate that they could then list on their CVs or whatever, rather than just have it all be part of their transcript. Deborah Smith Pollard brought the African American read-in chain and Women's Studies co-sponsored that, so that we read for half hour periods and we got our students to read African American writers or whatever. We got MALS [Master of Arts in Liberal Studies] 580 approved as the - I think Suzanne took the lead on that - as the intro to the master's program, as the Women's Studies intro to the master's program. We raised scholarship monies for re-entry women. We wrote a bunch of joint appointment position papers.
00:10:57A.B.: What do you mean by position papers? Were these internal to the university?
00:11:02L.L.: Yeah. Women's Studies was meeting a lot of distribution requirements for other disciplines. But because they were located in those disciplines, they had more control over the content of the courses than Women's Studies did. We wanted joint appointments so that we could have some of our own courses, but also have more impact on the courses like Suzanne's that was Econ and Women's Studies, how you build in some of that. We were able to get Women's Studies 275 as a distribution requirement so that people had to take it. Then I enlisted Maureen [Linker] - I can't remember who taught it, was it Maureen? - to do what we called a "why gender" workshop for faculty and students. It was a day long. You could come in the morning or in the afternoon, but it was - these folks didn't know what gender was. They didn't understand it. They didn't know why it was important. They didn't know anything about it, so we did a why gender workshop, what you should know if you're a reasonably educated adult at a college. Then we started the Women's Studies Student Alliance, which was the precursor to WILL. We did that. Then I also created an advisory panel. It never went anywhere because there wasn't anything [laughter] they could advise on, but it brought people from the outside. We had a student rep; Julie Dziekan from business was from the Commission [for Women]; we had another faculty member; I was ex officio. Then I'd invited women from the community who were known to the university, like the woman who was the director of the Fairlane Mall. She was on it. But it sort of fell apart. It went on for several months, maybe even six months, but then there wasn't anything for them to advise on. Because we didn't have any resources. It was just informing them about all this stuff that we were trying to do to make ourselves visible. [See the index for a selection of event flyers.]
00:14:13L.L.: Let me see. What else did we do? I've got the report here. Well, I did the Clothesline Project, but that was because I do that in my class. Yeah, it was Suzanne [Bergeron] and Marilee Parsons [now Benore], who did the Women's Studies Student Alliance. They took action and started that. Let me see, what else do I have here? Yeah, and Deborah [Smith Pollard] did the African American reading train. These are the courses, these are the evals. Okay. Here are some numbers that were the student evaluations of the courses indicated. Seventy-six percent would recommend Women's Studies courses to their friends. Seventy percent found Women's Studies courses to be more demanding than other CASL [College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters] courses. Twenty percent felt that Women's Studies courses were, quote, "much more demanding" than other CASL courses. Then do you want to know what they said, students said, in response to the question, anything that you would consider unique in terms of your learning experience?
00:15:43A.B.: Yes, I would.
00:15:44L.L.: Okay. They said, extra academic demands of a more personal nature, freedom to express their opinions, unique subject matter, hands-on experience, a variety of educational tools, high expectations. Many said, "Best course I've taken this semester." Some said things like, this is one of the quotes I use, "I almost wish I could retake it. Like a really good movie, you get something you've missed every time you see it." Then somebody said, "It's like comparing apples and oranges. It was unlike any other class I've ever had."
00:16:33A.B.: Yeah, you all had created something totally different from the status quo.
00:16:38L.L.: At that time, we were team teaching the intro class. For a long time. I don't even know when that stopped. It stopped after me. People from two different disciplines, so that students would get different perspectives on the same issues, depending on where you were coming from as you were doing it. That's where I was with this. Smoke and mirrors, make us appear bigger than we are.
00:17:21A.B.: But I don't know if smoke and mirrors is the right metaphor, because this is all real stuff.
00:17:28L.L.: Yeah, it was. But it was also, we had no resources. Pat Smith came after me, and she got Drew Buchanan, who was our institutional development person, and Drew gave her the money for a course release. We had no course releases until then. We had no office. We had no supplies. I did get somewhere for the certificate luncheon, I can't even remember where, but I beat $6,000 out of somebody.
00:18:03A.B.: What about all the speakers you brought? You brought 15 speakers. Did they do it for free? Or were you able to give them honoraria?
00:18:12L.L.: You know, I don't remember, and I don't know if I have - well, some of them were our people. Let me see. I have a list of who they were. Let's see. Okay. It was Jackie [Vansant] who secured the CASL grant to provide support -
00:18:34A.B.: Okay. You guys got a grant.
00:18:35L.L.: - for MALS [Master of Arts in Liberal Studies] 580. Yeah, let me give credit to all these other people. Okay. That grant supported meetings twice a month for me, Judy Heady, Bruce [Pietrykowski], Cam Amin, and Sherry Pearson to develop, and Maureen [Linker], to develop multidisciplinary approaches to the topics in the courses. The discussion was facilitated by Karen Morgan, the Women's Studies Librarian. Okay. The group was so successful that it continued unfunded winter term attracting other faculty members as well. So that was our feminist theory group, and Rashmi [Luthra] facilitated the continuation of that group. Okay. Let me see who, okay, this is Sol DeTanco, and she was from Pitzer, and Kate Meheran was from EMU [Eastern Michigan University]. Okay, those were the two consultants. Did I lose a page here?
00:20:01A.B.: All right. I'm going to ask you kind of some broader questions, because this is a lot that you did, and without support. You mentioned early on that the people before you were not able to do any research while they were director. Was that the case for you also?
00:20:21L.L.: No. No, I continued to do research.
00:20:26A.B.: Yeah. How, Lora? [Laughter] How did you do all this?
00:20:33L.L.: I don't know. Amy, I'm a high energy person.
00:20:38A.B.: Yes, you clearly are a high energy person. [Laughter]
00:20:42L.L.: Partly it's because I'm single. I was single then. I didn't have family commitments, and so I threw myself into this. It's the same thing I did with the prison program. [See the index for information about the prison program.] I mean, when I left, five people had to replace me. I was moving the hats around [laughter] the whole time, so yeah, I don't know. It just is what I did. You know?
00:21:26A.B.: Yeah. Did you feel like there was alignment for you between what mattered to you and how you spent your time?
00:21:37L.L.: Yes. At one point, we had a Sociology meet and greet with the students, and as their icebreaker they had us answer these questions. One of the questions was, what would be your ideal job? I sat there and said, I have my ideal job. They pay me to read. They pay me to interact with students. I mean, when I came into academia, I was much older than most people coming in, and I had this vision that we were all going to sit around and talk about ideas and not be into petty politics. The only place on campus that that happened was in Women's Studies, where we literally - we had a feminist theory group, but we also even informally talked about ideas and things.
00:22:48L.L.: And this was not part of Women's Studies, but when I got there, I started a writers group, and that group is still going on. We all published, got promoted. I think everybody in the group has written books. But that collective community, really, yes, I felt very - in that community, very supported. In the wider campus community, I mean, they thought I was some kind of an anarchist, and they - it used to throw them off that I'd come to meetings and bring cookies, because in their heads feminists didn't do that. We just stood outside and burned bras.
00:23:39A.B.: Burned bras, yeah. [Laughter]
00:23:42L.L.: I mean, I can remember somebody, actually, in political science, I was at one of those things that you have to do, the open house at the beginning of the term, and he was at the table next to me, and we were chatting. I said something about my children, and he almost fell off his chair. [Laughter] He was like, "You have children?" Wow, either he thinks I'm terribly unattractive, or he just can't get that a feminist - and they just thought I was some kind of an anarchist, a feminist from California. You know?
00:24:24A.B.: Yeah. Support came up a few times. You mentioned not having institutional support, or support outside the intellectual community, and then you mentioned that community being a source of support. How would you say, or by whom were you supported as director? This could be materially, or in terms of mentoring, friendship?
00:24:48L.L.: Oh, my god. Katie, absolutely, Katie Anderson-Levitt, Sherry Pearson, Jackie [Vansant], Rashmi [Luthra] later, Suzanne [Bergeron] when we got her appointment, Judy Heady, Karen Morgan, Jim Gruber, my SOC [Sociology] colleagues, our SOC colleagues, were all very supportive.
00:25:15A.B.: Great, so you had a supportive home department?
00:25:18L.L.: Yeah. They were very supportive. Don Bord was always - I love Don Bord. Don was always supportive, whatever position he was in, and he was the associate dean, then he was the dean, and he was the provost, and he was the associate provost. I mean, Don was all over the place. He was always, always supportive.
00:25:43A.B.: What did the support look like from these people?
00:25:49L.L.: It was emotional and psychological support. It was always a place to vent, to show up and say, "I can't believe those damn morons." I think I probably said that a bunch of times. Don was supportive. They were all supportive of any initiative that I put forward. So it wasn't like I did 15 speakers all by myself. I mean, they recommended people, they sent their classes, they did all that stuff, because we were all working -especially after the first women's retreat, we were all working on these defined goals that we had agreed upon by consensus, and so everybody was doing what they could to manifest that. Materially, I was not successful, but Pat [Smith] was. Well, I was in that I can't remember where I got that $6,000. [Laughter] I must have shaken it loose from the dean somehow, to put on the luncheon and some other things. Yeah, whatever. Pat was the one. Once Pat got that course release, then she also was able to - I think she got us an office too. I think that happened during Pat's time. Pat was not a feminist. I'm not sure that I would even now call her a feminist. She certainly didn't know anything about fem theory. But she was a female who wanted to do good and, you know.
00:27:53A.B.: That's really interesting.
00:27:54L.L.: She ended up being very successful because Pat, in her quiet, unassuming way, is a rock you cannot move.
00:28:05A.B.: What do you remember about the students at the time? What kinds of students were taking these courses?
00:28:20L.L.: Like our colleagues, they didn't know much about gender and hadn't thought a lot about that. Many of them were - I had never, okay, I had never been in an environment that was as White as Dearborn.
00:28:46A.B.: Wow.
00:28:46L.L.: I'd look at my classes and there'd be a few Black people. The students would say, "This is the most integrated place I've ever been." And I'd be like, "I'm living in Sparkle Valley here." I mean, there wasn't at the university at that time a lot of diversity. [See the index for an article on the changing racial and ethnic composition of the student body.] People, the women especially, were also very partnered. I mean, they would say things to me like, "He's a really good guy. He's kind of a racist, but he's really a good guy." I would be like, oh, time out. That's an X. No, partially racist, not good. But they were so focused on needing to be partnered. They were the first, many of them, most of them, I would guess, were the first people in their families to get higher education. The younger ones, especially, felt a lot of pressure from home. The night before an exam, mom would say, "Oh, let's go to Target and go shopping." And they'd say, "I got to study for my Women's Studies or my SOC exam." "No, come on, you take it too seriously, blah, blah, blah."
00:30:18L.L.: A lot of our students worked full time and took my night classes. They had families. God bless 'em. I don't think if that were me, I would have done it. God bless 'em. They did it. They didn't have a reduced workload because they had other commitments. I mean, they had to step up. We had a lot of people because we met distribution requirements, they took our classes. They might take them for Psych credit, for example, but they were also Women's Studies cross listed so they got exposed. Sometimes they were really unhappy about that. [Laughter] Because, I mean, because the challenge they - we used to have this joke. They'd start out, let's say they'd start out with me, and they'd go, "Oh my god, she's just a crazy person." Then they'd take a class with Suzanne and then they'd go, "Well, they're both crazy." [Laughter] Then they'd get Maureen [Linker], and they'd go, "Well if they're all saying the same thing, maybe there's something to this." At first, I think there was this resistance and characterization of any of us. Once they got rolling, and they got a few of us - "oh, maybe there is something to this."
00:32:13A.B.: Right. It started to be more a field than just a person or somebody's idiosyncrasy.
00:32:20L.L.: Right.
00:32:23A.B.: What did you learn about yourself as a result of doing this work?
00:32:30L.L.: Oh my god, so much. So much. I learned that I needed to do more situational analysis. I come from an Italian family, and we talk over each other all the time. You don't see that interruption as being rude. I mean, it's like, I got it. Yeah, let me - you know?
00:33:06A.B.: Right. It's energizing.
00:33:09L.L.: Right. But academically, the men did not like to be interrupted. [Laughter] They just thought I was incredibly rude. It took me a while to figure that out, because especially Dan, oh god, who always thought he was the smartest person in the room. That was one of the things I had to learn, that I was - I needed to be more culturally sensitive to the environment. I also learned that I was more competent than I thought I was. I could do more than I thought was possible. That, I think, comes from my mother, who would always say things like, "You'd be surprised what you can do when you have to." I learned that lesson. I also - I don't think I learned it, but it reinforced my sense of how valuable community is. I could not have done it without the support of the other Women's Studies faculty. It's not necessarily that we were bosom buddies. We were colleagues in support of one another, and we were not going to let somebody run somebody else down. It reinforced that sense of it takes a village to raise a child. I think it takes a collective to make a university a safe place for non White men. People who are not White men. That's what I meant to say.
00:35:43A.B.: I got it, yeah. Part of this project is getting the history, and part of it is to pass down intergenerational knowledge and tools. I'm thinking how - for those of us carrying this on, what are some things we can do to foster that kind of community? Do you have strategies for us?
00:36:32L.L.: Well, I think something like the retreat is really important to bring the central people - because it's easy to let the central people take everything and you just kind of be on the periphery doing your own thing. You have to bring those people in because they don't always feel safe. I think a retreat that has both - that doesn't waste people's time. That's important because you're going to give up a Saturday. It's like, oh my god, I could finish that paper, I got papers to grade, whatever. But also that builds in time to just hear from each person. We did that at the retreats. What was your big success this year, so we can applaud you and celebrate that? What was the thing that was hardest, and what can we do to help you with that? So that every person in the room was able to say academically what the issues were. You're having a divorce, I get that, but we can't help you with that. But I get that that impacts your work. That kind of thing. I think those sorts of events are really important. I think they get undersold a lot because it's what, I'm going to spend Saturday with these people I see at the university all the time and blah, blah, blah. That's critical.
00:38:31L.L.: For me, the writers group saved my life. Because we met every two weeks, and so we got to be really good friends and colleagues. It was focused on our work, but you also get people's life, and you share that life. If you're having a hard time, for me, those were the people I could share it with. I think you have to create those kinds of small communities. I also think especially for untenured faculty, having a writers group is critical. Not a big one.
00:39:34A.B.: Yeah, small enough that everybody can read and contribute.
00:39:38L.L.: Yeah.
00:39:44A.B.: I asked you what you learned about yourself. What are some things you learned about the college or university as a result of this work?
00:39:52L.L.: Oh god.
00:39:54A.B.: [Laughter] Yeah, I was excited to ask you that.
00:39:57L.L.: How conservative a place it is. How slow to change and how resistant. I can't tell you how many times, "Oh, we tried that years ago." [Laughter] I mean, I'm like, [makes exasperated noise]. How very gendered it is in that, and I still think, I don't know now, but certainly when I left, it was still male dominated and male controlled and defined in their parameters. I think they gave strong women - like I think about Kate Davy. I like Kate a lot, but I had issues with Kate and her style too. That's different than just disliking her because she's a strong woman and you think, who the fuck does she think she is? Men would say that. I'd say, "She's the provost. That's who she is." Yeah. That was hard. Trying to protect. We did try to protect new female hires. Somebody in a discipline we knew was difficult, like political science. Okay, let's start taking her out to lunch. Let's invite her to our Women's Studies event, or let's let her know that we got eyes on her. We know who these guys are and serve notice on them so that they know we've got eyes on them, and that we're helping her.
00:42:07A.B.: Yes. Yeah, that's important. What are some things you learned about Women's and Gender Studies as a field as a result of this work?
00:42:32L.L.: That there are some really brilliant women, and men actually, in it. The early Women's Studies conferences - it was like living in San Francisco, you know where - they'd have butterfly wings around the pool. [Laughter] I was like, oh my god. How do you expect anybody to take you seriously? I mean, it's really fun, but oh my god. But also, how many women are in the trenches at places that were more under resourced than Dearborn even. At the community college level, or at the state college level where they're not doing research, because research isn't supported. It's a lifeblood for them to come to the Women's Studies conferences, and just have this community of people who thought what they were doing was important, and they didn't have that at home. I mean, as much as I complained about the externals not being supportive at Dearborn, I was not at a place like that. That became really clear to me. God bless these women because they're doing the digging and the shoveling and the building and the ramparts. I'm up here waving a flag.
00:44:24L.L.: Also, how the field has developed so much. I mean, and how trying to stay on top of - I can't stay on top of the pronouns now. Because I was an English major. They is a plural pronoun! It just exploded and burgeoned and I think, as it always has, it makes a lot of people really uncomfortable. This moron in the White House that says you got to be male or female, and there's nothing else. That's on the website of the, what is it? Homeland Security that we have to put the stuff back in, but it's all wrong.
00:45:30A.B.: So we're starting to touch on some of the things that are going on politically now. If you can remember, what were some of the things going on politically when you were directing the program or helping to shape the program, that you saw the program respond to or not?
00:45:52L.L.: You know, I don't even know how to answer that, I can't go back that far. The Matthew Shepard thing, because we did the hate crimes panel. [We were not able to find this flyer. But see the index for a list of new Women's Studies courses in 2000, under Lora's directorship; the Men and Masculinities course includes gender-based hate crimes and the murder of Matthew Shepard in its description.]
00:46:06A.B.: Right. That's a great example.
00:46:07L.L.: So there was that sort of thing going on.
00:46:14A.B.: I mean, in a way, just carving out the space for research on women and gender at all was a kind of political action.
00:46:25L.L.: Yeah. I mean, that was still when the major biomedical research was all on men. They'd say to women, "well, you take an aspirin, too, if you have heart problems," but they had no idea whether that would work for women or not. That was going on then. Demanding that women be included in research models. It certainly was true in prison. I mean, there was nothing on women. I mean, except the stuff that characterized them as monsters or weird or whatever. Not a whole lot on domestic violence.
00:47:35A.B.: Yeah, a totally different landscape.
00:47:37L.L.: Yeah, it is. It's a total[ly different] landscape now. But, yeah. And nobody knew about trafficking. But I don't remember actually what the larger landscape was that we were working in. There was - I don't think it was during my time, though, I think it was later - that the legislators, they actually targeted Ann Arbor for their LBGT classes.
00:48:12A.B.: Oh, really?
00:48:13L.L.: Yeah. That they were recruiting and turning people. I mean, people who had themselves high school diplomas, had no idea what the hell. Everybody who went to school thinks they know how schools should be run. They called a couple gay professors teaching LBGT classes of one sort or another. I don't know if that was during my time or if that was later. [See the index for Inside Higher Ed coverage of this controversy and earlier remarks by a UM regent opposing gay inclusion in University policy.]
00:48:50A.B.: That doesn't sound too different from now, to be honest with you.
00:48:57A.B.: So this question, I feel like you've answered, but I'm going to ask it just in case you want to add anything, which is what advice would you give to a director of Women's Studies today?
00:49:18L.L.: Keep your program inclusive. Fight for all the resources that you can get that other departments are getting. Don't be a pig and ask for more, but if other people are getting it, you ought to be getting it too. And don't apologize. Never apologize. It's always been a rule of mine. Maybe this takes us back to the very beginning of our conversation. I don't ask permission, because if you ask permission, they can say no. I just do it. Then when they don't like it, I say, oh, [laughter] I didn't know. Oh, sorry about that. But never - and I would say that to a director - don't ask for permission, because they’re gonna deny it. Just do it. Then afterwards, if they say, well, you shouldn't have done that, blah, blah, blah. Oh, sorry. [Laughter] What are you going to do? Somebody apologizes, you got nowhere to go. Yeah. Don't ever ask permission.
00:50:45L.L.: And support your - don't fall into the trap of the clique of the people that you're the most comfortable with. You've got to hold the hand of those new faculty members, and build that into the structure of however you direct.
00:51:16A.B.: Thank you so much.
00:51:18L.L.: Oh, you're welcome.
00:51:23A.B.: I have a final question, then I'll just see if there's anything else you want to add. It's a broad one. How do you see the Women's Studies program fitting into the larger picture of your career and life?
00:51:40L.L.: Oh, wow.
00:51:42A.B.: I know.
00:51:44L.L.: I think, wow, it's probably defined my career and my life. I talk about this with other women frequently, that I think men have, what's your five year plan? What's your 10 year plan? I'll be a vice president. Women are like, what are you doing next week? [Laughter] I think that my life, it's always been like that. What gets put in front of you, by whomever and however, and do you take advantage of those opportunities? Do you move towards them? I think that the strength of Women's Studies, and that collective of thinking and theory and support, is what I think defines my life, but also has enabled me to do what I've done. When I was doing the prison program and I started with the women, when we got that money and I said, "What should I do with this?" They all said unanimously, "Take it to the men." Those gender trainings of those men have reaped rewards because I'm still in touch with them. I see it just in my own family where I have a feminist son, obviously, a feminist daughter, my granddaughters.
00:53:43L.L.: Here's a wonderful story, I think, about my granddaughter. She was a junior in high school, and her friend was a senior and involved with this young man, first love. He wants her to go to the college he's going to. She calls my granddaughter, Esther, and says, "What do you think, Esther? I wanted to go here, but whatever his name is, James, wants me to go with him." Esther's response was, "Hell no. You tell him to go where you want to go. What the hell. You're not gonna go where he wants." Yes, it's all around me, and it's how I'm defined by the people around me, and how I define myself. I mean, it just is so central to my being, I couldn't separate it. I feel immensely grateful to the women at Dearborn for mentoring me, supporting me, the whole - they were - it's a wonderful group of women.
00:55:04A.B.: Yeah, I'm getting to know some of them. I mean, some of them I already knew. But, for example, I'm interviewing, as soon as you and I wrap up, about 30 minutes later, I'm interviewing Katie [Anderson-Levitt].
00:55:19L.L.: Katie was fundamental. Katie and Sherry Pearson kept that program alive, on life support. Without her, would not have happened. It would have died.
00:55:39A.B.: I mean, it's really becoming, for me, a map of these stories and each one touching the other in so many ways.
00:55:48L.L.: Right. We're all standing on somebody's shoulders.
00:55:52A.B.: That's right. Yeah.
00:55:54L.L.: None of us did this on our own. She I'm sure will talk about, I can't remember the woman's name who started, I want to say October 1957. Maybe it was '67, probably '67, who started Women's Studies at Dearborn. I can't remember her name, but Katie will know it. [Helen Graves founded the program in 1976.] Katie was absolutely fundamental. Without her, it would have - she rallied the troops. She kept people. She was the one who kept saying to me, "You have to do this, you have to do this." I was like, "I'm not even tenured." [Laughter] It was like, "When you're tenured then."
00:56:46A.B.: Then it was the day, like the day after [you got tenure], they were like, "Here you go." [Laughter]
00:56:51L.L.: The day after. Yeah, exactly. Katie's a very special person. Very low key. Very humble about her own contributions. So whatever she tells you, you can magnify.
00:57:21A.B.: I'll magnify it. I'll keep that in mind.
00:57:26L.L.: Thank you for doing this, Amy. This has been really fun. I mean, when you first sent that out, I sat for two weeks thinking, "I have no idea what the hell I did." No idea at all.
00:57:36A.B.: Oh, my gosh. You did so much. [Laughter] Incredible.
00:57:46L.L.: I thought, "What am I gonna do?" I thought about calling Katie and saying, "Katie, do you remember what I did?" Then it occurred to me, I still have that in the iCloud or whatever the hell it's called now. Then I found them and I thought, "Oh, I actually did do a lot."
00:58:07A.B.: Well, it has been so inspirational to me to talk to people and really, especially now. You know, I conceived of this project in a different moment, but during this particular historical moment, it means a lot to me to hear from these role models and mentors.
00:58:26L.L.: Who's funding it?
00:58:28A.B.: There's something out of University of Michigan called the Inclusive History Project. It's collecting histories around UM, tri-campus, voices and people who have been maybe left out of the history.
00:58:49L.L.: Right. Oh, that's terrific. Good for you for finding that and doing something with it. This is really worth it. Because I do remember when I won the Sarah Goddard Power Award, one of the things that I had said we were doing - What's his name? The provost then. With the beard. [Laughter] They wrote this whole thing up and they left Women's Studies out of it. When I did that presentation - Mary Sue Coleman said, "I don't know how you can write a report on the university and leave out Women's Studies." I said, "But they certainly did, and they had no shame about it whatsoever." My family was there. My son-in-law was sitting back there and he said, "I think I saw her write a note that said, never let Lora Lempert near a microphone again." [Laughter] Because I was like, I'm gonna burn their asses. You know? Do your job. That's all I ever ask of people. Do your job. Anyway. Simpson. That was the provost's name. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for doing this. Do we get to get a copy of this?
01:00:19A.B.: A hundred percent. All of the interviews are going to be - I'll be working on that this summer. Right now I'm just getting the interviews. Then we're going to get them all online in a digital archive, and that will be shared with you and also with our current faculty and students, and future faculty and students.
01:00:38L.L.: Oh wow. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. If you need anything else, let me know.
01:00:46A.B.: I absolutely will.
01:00:49L.L.: Be well, Amy. Keep up the good work.
01:00:51A.B.: You too.
01:00:53L.L.: Keep hope alive. And resist. That's a key word for this year.
01:01:01A.B.: I got it. Yes. I receive it. [Laughter]
01:01:05L.L.: Love you, sweetie. Bye bye.
01:01:06A.B.: Love you too. Bye.
