Part-Time Work and Part-Time Leave

The Modern Language Association convention in December 1977 included a panel on the subject of Women and Part-Time Work. Joanne Spencer Kantrowitz, moderator, explained that, in forming the panel at the request of the Commission on the Status of Women, her one objective was to create a group where men and women could discuss, together (and dispassionately, if possible), an area where women are consistently used. In recent years, Kantrowitz noted, the part-time category has become a male professional problem, too, as some institutions have seized on it as a convenient cost-cutting device which uses the surplus of Ph.D.\u27s as cheaply as possible. However, as a permanent position in professional life, this job category has traditionally been the lot of married women who have continued for years to be department housewives teaching at the lowest levels of the academic hierarchy for pin money

Liberal Studies in Engineering - Workshop Report

On the 30th and 31st of January, 2015, some sixty scholars from the humanities, arts and social sciences as well as engineering met at the National Academy of Sciences building in DC to discuss the possibilities for establishing an undergraduate, pre-professional degree program — a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies in Engineering — meant to attract students undecided about choice of a major who still have sufficient interest to enroll in a program that keeps open the possibility that they might pursue a career in engineering. The workshop over the day and one-half included six sessions, each led off by a panel of from three to six project participants. The first part of this report contains summaries of panelists’ remarks. A second part provides a narrative of themes discussed and questions raised during the discussion sessions.Support for this event was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Improving Under- graduate STEM Education program (award no.1451399 made to MIT), by the Teagle Foundation, and by the Deans of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Educational Studies

Wesleyan Conference Considers How to Evaluate Women\u27s Studies

What is the general impact of women\u27s studies? Is our investment in women\u27s studies courses the best way to improve the higher education of women? Concerned and curious about these questions, a group of Wesleyan University faculty began in March 1973 to look into the possibility of evaluating women\u27s studies. After preliminary discussion and research, the group decided to invite teachers of women\u27s studies to meet with social scientists knowledgeable about evaluative research to raise the question of evaluation. With the assistance of the Ford Foundation, which made a small grant available for preliminary conferences, a meeting was held on the Wesleyan campus, June 14-17, 1973

Esther Manning Westervelt: A Memorial Minute

As a colleague Esther Westervelt was a joy to work with. Her good looks, combined with her energy and her quick mind, put a lie to any stereotype one might have had about a successful woman of her generation. Long before I met her personally, I had already encountered her spirit through one of her students, a young woman who had not only been directed to a new career by Esther\u27s teaching but who had learned to trust her own judgment by Esther\u27s example

Affirmative Action under Attack

It is doubtful that serious discussion of Richard A. Lester\u27s book on affirmative action (Antibias Regulations of Universities: Faculty Problems and Their Solutions, McGraw-Hill, 1974) can ever undo the damage caused by the flurry of misleading articles that appeared about the book in the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Chronicle of Higher Education six months ago. Minority Hiring Said to Hurt Colleges, the New York Times headlined its front-page piece, continuing that minority hiring had caused a lowering of standards and an undermining of faculty quality. Readers were left to assume that Lester had hard data to prove that affirmative action ... is elevating unqualified persons beyond their abilities and discriminating against white men of higher qualification. Yet there are no data in his book to document any of these allegations. Indeed, Lester, Professor of Economics and former Dean of the Faculty at Princeton, does not have and never claimed to have any more information about who has been hired and who has been overlooked than do the rest of us. Instead of a systematic study, the book is another in the series of dire predictions that we have been getting ever since Sidney Hook denounced affirmative action some years ago. Lester projects a lowering of quality if affirmative action programs, as currently being written, are carried out

In Defense of Sarah Lawrence College

The following letters were written in response to a recent attack in the media on Sarah Lawrence. They were sent, as a group, to the Coordinating Council of the National Women\u27s Studies Association. The staff of the Women\u27s Studies Newsletter has decided to give them national circulation

Philosophical and Educational Perspectives on Engineering and Technological Literacy, IV

In this fourth edition of Philosophical Perspectives on Engineering and Technological Literacy, the divisional publication of the Technological and Engineering Literacy and Philosophy of Engineering (TELPhE) Division of ASEE, is trying a new format. Over the years members of the division have noted that many of us keep coming back to the annual ASEE conference year after year not only for the technical papers, but the deep and wide-ranging conversations that crop up organically and spontaneously at the conference like flowers in the desert after a rain. This may be an appropriate metaphor since within our own academic institutions the opportunities to have wide ranging conversations with others who have similar interests in the larger questions that underlie engineering education are often difficult to start or hard to find. Such conversations matter; dialog is fundamental to the practice of both philosophy and literacy. It is a truism to say that we learn through interacting with others and refine our own ideas by sharpening them against those of others. However the practical reality of a conference is to at least not lose money and that of today’s academic life is to publish one’s work. In conjunction, however, these have the effect of steering academic writing towards papers and presentations rather than free ranging dialog. For TELPhE, a group focused on the ideas and narratives that underlie the learning of engineering, it is not clear that such outward facing, many-to-one, ways of communicating are by themselves meeting the Division’s needs. As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.” This edition begins with an anchoring paper, John Heywood’s Why Technological Literacy and for Whom? which was presented at the 2016 ASEE Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans, Louisiana. In this paper Professor Heywood’s intent was “raise questions about the intent of technological literacy in society at the present time.” Following the ASEE conference a call was put out to all members of the TELPhE Division asking for short responses to Professor Heywood’s paper. These responses, in random order, follow the anchoring paper. Unlike more traditional journals each author was free to comment in the style and form they best saw fit; instruction for style and formatting were minimal to non-existent. The author’s papers have been left mostly “as is” with only consistency between fonts, layout, and similar issues addressed. In cases where a title was not provided by the author one was inserted; apologies to the authors in advance. It is hoped that this form of “dialog journal” will enable a wider ranging conversation within TELPhE that spans not only those who can attend the ASEE conference and whom stumble in to conversation, but also those whose time, circumstance, and resources don’t give them opportunities to attend. The larger goal of this format is to stimulate ongoing dialogs and capture them in ways that are both readable and archival.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ece_books/1003/thumbnail.jp

Women in Physics in the United States

Presents an overview of the status of women in physics in the U.S. Under-representation of women; Highlights of the report \u27Women in Physics, 2000\u27; Efforts to increase the number of women in the profession; Issues for women activists