问答题 Penny Gold: For three people thrown together by chance, it"s interesting that we all have spent part of our lives at the University of Chicago—me as an undergraduate student, John Komlos as a graduate student, and John Goldsmith as a professor. And the three of us are close in age and in the types of disciplines chosen—I am also a historian, with additional graduate training in literature and art history. A large difference among us, however, is that my teaching career has been primarily at a small liberal arts college (Knox College), an institution that puts its strongest emphasis on teaching, even while research is encouraged and expected. I"m also female and began my career during a period of time in which women were just beginning to enter academia in significant numbers; this has been a formative influence on my life in the academy and in my attitudes toward it.
I entered graduate school without a clear commitment to professional training. In the fall term of my senior year, I was suddenly caught up in my studies by a serendipitous concatenation of courses in medieval studies and cultural history, and I just wanted to keep learning. It happened that Stanford, where I chose to go, was giving full funding for four years to all entering history graduate students at that time (thanks to generous funding from the Ford Foundation, which was—unsuccessfully, it turns out—trying to speed completion of Ph.D. s), so I paid nothing for my graduate education, nor did I have to go into debt. The first year of graduate school was quite a shock, and if I had been spending thousands of dollars of my own money, I"m not sure I would have stayed in school. But in the end, I was very glad the financial support enticed me to stay, helping me through a rough transition. While Stanford then gave its graduate students no instruction in teaching (a situation now changed), I had the good fortune to experience excellent mentoring while I was there, and unlike John Komlos and John Goldsmith, I learned a great deal during graduate school about how the academy works. My advisor was beginning his first job as a professor in the same year I began graduate school, and I learned much from him about the demands, pleasures, and precariousness of academic life. Another professor I worked closely with was denied tenure while I was in my third year; I contributed a letter to her successful appeal and learned a good deal about academic values and processes along the way. I was at Stanford in the early years of the women"s movement (1969—1974), and my involvement in the History Graduate Students Women"s Caucus was also a crucial learning experience. The department at Stanford had only one female professor at the time, a Harvard Ph.D. who, because of nepotism rules (her husband had a position in another department), was limited to a non-tenure-track adjunct appointment. When this woman resigned, the Women"s Caucus organized an effort to persuade the department to hire a woman for a tenure-track appointment. We talked, we wrote letters, and we succeeded. Another student and I were members of the search committee that resulted. I think I learned more about how the academy works, and how one can work to change it, in that one year than in many of the rest. Also, within this early cohort of women in the academy, there was a strong sense of solidarity, amongst both graduate students and faculty, within and across institutions. We knew we needed to figure out all we could about academic institutions and procedures in order to make it as newcomers, and we helped each other out as best we could. Often without access to the "old boy" networks, we founded "new girl" networks, and these have been a crucial source of support, comfort, and help to me over the years.