MLA Off Guard

Philadelphia, Pa.—In their unguarded moments, college professors say the darndest things. Of her recent ascendancy to department chair, Sandra K. Stanley says, “In that position I had very little time for ideological assumptions but I tried” to make the time.

Dr. Stanley spoke at the Modern Language Association conference here. “Last semester I became the Ethnic Diversity chair at Cal-State Northridge,” she remembered. Of her first meeting in that post, she recalled, “I could not find the gavel so I used a Peruvian oven mitt and they laughed because I was the first woman chair and had replaced the phallic gavel with a feminine oven mitt.”

One adjustment that she had to make in her new administrative role is to a new type of academic jargon. “As department chair, I went through a discursive transformation in which I started using words like ‘learning-centered university’ and ‘development,’” she said. “I have to ask, ‘What were we before we became a ‘learning-centered university’?”

“‘Value-added education’ is another term I came to know.” Dr. Stanley made her remarks in the MLA panel on “Gender and Race in the Corporate University” which was sponsored by the group’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession.

For her part, Valerie Hegstrom portrays herself as something of a Trojan horsewoman or undercover agent. In an MLA panel that followed the one on which Dr. Stanley spoke, Dr. Hegstrom, who teaches at Brigham Young University, gave a talk entitled “Teaching Spanish Women Writers and Feminist Theory at a Religiously Affiliated University.”

“Since I am among friends, I can tell you that I wanted to call this, ‘Teaching Spanish Women Writers and Feminist Theory in the heart of the Patriarchy,” Dr. Hegstrom said. “Students in one class included 32 white males, all of whom looked alike to me,” Dr. Hegstrom says.

“When people ask me how I can stand it, I say that I believe in striking out in the heart of the patriarchy,” Dr. Hegstrom explained of her decision to stay at BYU. “I believe in working for change from within.”

“I have to teach my female and male students to think like women.” Believe it or not, Dr. Hegstrom teaches about “St. Theresa’s spirituality” and uses “biblical passages” “in order to show mystical sexuality in positive terms.”

“For the past 12 years I have often asked myself what I’m doing here,” Dr. Hegstrom admits. The payoff, as she sees it, is that she is imparting to her students the value of “women writers, feminist theory and perhaps most importantly, women’s social issues.”

Twelve years in residence would put Dr. Hegstrom in the tenure zone. Ironic, isn’t it, that when critics accuse professors of the practices those pedagogues themselves admit to, the observers are frequently accused of chasing “a solution in search of a problem.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.