Bonnie Morris is a professor of women’s studies.
In late November, as I prepared to head home for Thanksgiving, I was summoned to a meeting with the directors of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Since it’s been a very good year for me – three book releases, seven articles, literary prizes, all classes overenrolled – I hoped for recognition: a promotion or a raise.
Instead, I learned that my teaching contract will not be renewed after this year. My colleague Todd Ramlow received similar stunning news.
We have serious grievances about the process we experienced and the message it sends to our students. At a University with a majority female enrollment and a substantial LGBT presence, we question the symbolism of dismissing the two long-time instructors who built enrollment in the women’s studies major and the LGBT minor.
I am grateful for the opportunity to address the chilly winds of change. And I direct these words to my beloved students – the men and women, LGBT, black and white, Pakistani and Latina, Arab and Jewish, Native American and Korean, returning military veteran and teenager, Democrat and Republican, learning-challenged and living with cancer – who as individuals made the bold decision to take a women’s history course in college. You are one of more than 6,000 Colonials it’s been my privilege to mentor since 1994.
For 22 years, this campus has been my home. I am not a typical adjunct. Throughout most of the past two decades, I have taught five women’s history classes a year – an overload even for a full-time professor – on a three-quarter time contract, with a half-time salary pay. By accepting this mathematical challenge, I received unequal pay for an overload of work.
My reward has been total immersion in my chosen field, women’s history, and daily interaction with dynamic students. I played for the love of the game, as my student athletes might say, never expecting to get rich. I dug in, learning to live big on a budget. And when fan mail arrived from First Lady Michelle Obama in response to my book about teaching GW students, I knew that the White House valued my efforts.
There’s no price that can be attached to loving what you do, or to the joy of spending each day as an adult intellectually engaged to capacity. Every day I leap out of bed and run two miles downhill from my Connecticut Avenue apartment to Foggy Bottom, glad to greet your smiles. Every fall, the first day of Women in Western Civilization signals the start of something special – the coming together of a diverse crowd of (mostly) first-year students who gain a safe space to look at women in world history.
Every spring I walk into graduation ceremonies awash in pride with seeing you complete your education – an education which included scholarship on how our differing foremothers overcame obstacles and challenges. There is no greater honor than calling myself your teacher in these times. When violence, race-baiting and intimate assault threaten our dignity and focus, the classroom must be a warm space of hope which transcends hate.
In reading your first tentative papers on the history of the world, I find comfort in your questions, resilience in your solutions and refreshment in your humor.
It takes courage now to rise each day and walk to campus after being made to feel expendable, rather than prized, by an administration I have served from age 33 to 55. But courage is a quality Todd Ramlow and I know well, as faculty who have shared LGBT history (and the example of our own lives) with students in search of lesbian and gay role models.
As I quote Sappho every fall, “Some one in some future time will think of us.” I quote Abigail Adams, too: “If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion.”
Thank you for the many concerned emails and inquiries you have sent as we all continue this difficult dialogue about GW’s future. Know that that you are unique, valued and loved for who you are, and you can raise your voice. So, raise high.
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