Two vignettes from the recent visit of a respected scholar to my department:
First: Our guest has aggressively managed his department's recruitment for many years. He believes that in the currrent national budget climate, any school with even pennies to spare should be trying to steal faculty who are dissatisfied with their pay. "If there's someone you've had your eye on for a few years, this is the time to try to get 'em! Time to build!" Meaning departmental strength, of course.
This is a foreign point of view at Granolan. How foreign? A colleague, who had spent most of lunch sitting next to, but ignoring, the visitor, responded, "Yes, we've been trying to build dormitories, but..."
Second: At dinner, I sat next to the guest. At a conversational lull, he turned to me. "You're a woman! Tell me, what happened on Sex in the City?" (Thank goodness I don't own a television.)
As we were packing up to leave, I left my purse hanging on the chair as I put my scarf on. "Don't forget your purse... I always leave mine behind, of course! [wink]"
And I realized: there are many male faculty of the same generation at Granolan. Whether through their own enlightenment, or thanks to vicious correction by my female predecessors, I can't say, but they never, ever, ever say things like that. I can't remember a single similar remark here. Not that there isn't an occasional leer. But they basically can handle having professional conversations with women much younger than themselves. This is how PC was supposed to turn out, right?
While we're on gender relations gone wrong, two brief and deeply irresponsible reactions to the Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom discussion: first, who hasn't been patted or pinched by someone world-famous? (Okay, I admit, the surreptitious spank in a public hallway I once got is pretty different in, um, impact from the kind of incident she describes.) Second, an immediate reaction of vomiting instantaneously? Wow! You go, girl! That must have hit his, um, ego pretty hard.
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