Women faculty discuss ‘earning space’ in higher ed, from undergrad to today

Faculty reflect on encounters with sexism, finding community with other women

BY SOFIA BARNETT UNIVERSITY NEWS EDITOR

Content warning: This article includes references to misogyny and instances of sexual assault.

When Susan Smulyan, professor of American studies at Brown, first stepped foot on Yale’s campus in 1971, “there was a change in the air.”

Smulyan’s first year of college was marked by the “second women’s movement that was just gathering steam,” she said. Smulyan graduated from Yale in 1975 as part of the college’s third class of women to spend four years as undergraduates following its transition to a coeducational university in 1969.

While Smulyan noted that misogyny and anti-feminism still pose obstacles for female college students, she remembered her time at Yale as “completely bizarre because there weren’t many women.”

“I always say that if you weren’t a feminist when you got to the campus, you were one about five minutes later,” she laughed. “Things weren’t all that easy.”

“It was amazing to be a pioneer in some way,” Smulyan added. “But with that came enormous pressure on us.”

Over 50 years later, Smulyan and countless other female trailblazers continue to traverse sexism in higher education — a problem that has diminished but still exists today, Smulyan said. Three faculty members who completed their undergraduate degrees in the early years of coeducational learning at the university level talked to The Herald about their experiences as women in academic spaces from then to now.

Coeducation and sexism

As she moved through her education at Yale, Smulyan recalled multiple instances of misogyny from classmates and faculty.

“The sexism was different than how it often looks today,” she said. “It was more overt … it was really nasty. There were bets on who would sleep with which freshman girl.”

Smulyan also recounted sexual assaults against female students, as well as predatory behavior from graduate students pursuing younger women.

It was “much of the same kind of nastiness around gender that I think you can still see now,” she said. “But it was worse.”

Dore Levy, professor of comparative literature and East Asian studies at Brown, also made similar observations about her time at Yale, having been in the same graduating class as Smulyan.

Women at Yale often devised thorough plans on how to protect themselves from men on campus, Levy said, describing a method known as the “martial arts of the coed.”

“When we would go to parties, we knew to never take a drink,” she said.

“What we all learned to do was make a beeline for the pitchers of ice water to then hold in your hand. And if any man ever got too fresh, it was 3-2-1, splash. We’d dump the ice water all over him.”

“We even had practice sessions to make sure we had it down,” she added.

Navigating the classroom Levy said she expected to navigate Yale with ease, having been exposed to the world of higher education early on. “I was a faculty brat,” she explained. “My dad was a professor of sociology at p rinceton, so I was brought up close to an all-male university. I even sat in on some classes as a high school senior because of my father, so I was much more accustomed to the atmosphere.”

But not even prior familiarization could dull the effects of institutional misogyny for Levy.

“The ratio of men to women in my class was 1-to-13,” she said. “You had to set out your place in class or stake out your territory.”

Levy recalled her unique experiences as one of the first women studying Chinese language and literature in the Ivy League. “The classical Chinese professor hated girls,” she said, adding that harassment was common in the classroom setting. “We just thought that a professor propositioning us was the price of doing business.”

“Everything you said had to count as part of your mission as a woman at Yale earning space,” Levy said. “The stakes were high, and you had a lot of women who didn’t even make it past their freshman year.”

Levy acknowledged that the shared experience of being a woman often brought her and other students together.

“We felt very special and as if we were chosen, to a certain extent, which now feels sort of weird,” Smulyan said. “But the women I met, you know, those bonds are strong. A lot of us celebrated our 70th birthdays this year together. We’ve vacationed together and stayed in touch.”

Finding community

Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain of the University and director of the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life, emphasized the development of a female academic community throughout her time as an undergraduate student at Wellesley College, and now as a faculty member at Brown.

Cooper Nelson completed her undergraduate degree at Wellesley in 1971 and later returned to women-only higher education as a religious leader at Mount Holyoke College before coming to Brown.

She explained a vastly different experience from her peers who went to coeducational colleges. “In women’s colleges, all these women know each other,” Cooper Nelson said. “They’re all teaching at all these places and are a community together.”

Cooper Nelson explained that while her generation of women were trailblazers at their institutions, the women who paved the path for their inclusion were an even smaller bunch with greater responsibilities.

“We were a huge group though, by comparison to the women who were out here founding these places and making these changes,” she said. “There were only a few actors, but I think these folks all knew how important it was.”

During Cooper Nelson’s time at Wellesley, she watched as her peers left the school for “better opportunities atlarge,” leading her to think about what it really meant to be a women’s institution.

“Creating a space of hospitality for women in any form of their body, mind and soul has been what women’s institutions (are) about,” Cooper Nelson said. “That mattered to me because nobody really thought then that we could go to school and be a fully comparable person.”

Misogyny as a symptom of higher education

Cooper Nelson, Smulyan and Levy each acknowledged that the individual men they encountered as students and academics within higher education institutions were not always the sole perpetrators of misogyny. Rather, there was a systemic culture throughout higher education that presumed that women should not be there.

“While some of them were terrible and harassers or worse … the men were much more used to us being there than Yale was,” Smulyan said.

Instances of misogyny in male-dominated spaces continued beyond undergrad for Smulyan and Levy, impacting their experiences throughout their careers in academia.

Levy explained that climbing up the academic ladder was especially difficult for women. She described how at times, promotions felt reliant upon sexual favors rather than academic work or intellectual projects.

“We felt that our consent was taken away from us. And if we tried to assert it, we were b*tches,” Levy said. “I have always acted as if I have had some measure of consent, and that has hurt me professionally.”

Levy, who came to Brown in 1981, noted that she has had to assert her value at the University as well.

“I’ve been around higher education for a long time, you know, in the early days of women at Brown too,” she said, adding that even when they were represented in discussions, female faculty had to fight to be heard.

Smulyan expressed a similar sentiment, encouraging community members to remain critical of the institutions around them.

“What I’m always afraid of is that, because we’ve moved like half a step closer to sort of a normal world,” she said, “we trot.”

“This is women's history. This is the history of coeducation, which is indisputably the history of Brown,” Levy said. “We wanted the best, and a lot of us went into academia, partly because it was the highest thing. And partly because we thought it was time for women to do so.”

Brown Concert Agency, a student-run board of 17 members, is currently responsible for curating, staffing and running the two-day music festival, which is free for all Brown students. Along with the help of the Student Activities Office, the Undergraduate Finance Board and several other organizations on campus, the club works over the course of the academic year to put on one of the biggest events at Brown.

The event has typically been held on the last Friday and Saturday of April but this year’s Spring Weekend will take place on Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30.

According to Co-Chairs of BCA’s board Ellie Barksdale ’23 and Adi Thatai ’23, the call to not have a Friday concert was made primarily by SAO, but BCA members approved of the decision.

Because BCA could not close down Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center until 4 p.m. on Friday, last year’s set-up was extremely rushed, according to Thatai. The entire stage ended up being built slightly off-center — which caused more crowding on one side than the other — but there had been no time to fix it.

Barksdale also explained that having two daytime concerts will make it much easier to monitor the crowd, allow Brown Emergency Medical Services to find people quickly and get Event Operations workers out at a more reasonable hour. “Nobody’s having fun if they’re feeling unsafe,” she said.

Unlike past years, this spring students will only be allowed to purchase a ticket for one day of the festival when the first batch is released, according to Barksdale.

“Everyone will be able to know that they’re going to at least one day of Spring Weekend after the first tickets drop,” she explained.

The second batch will then be released a few days later, once a rain call has been made. “We’ll drop the rest, so everyone can get their second day,” Barksdale said.

“Hopefully, it’ll make people less anxious,” Thatai said, referring to the fact that many students were not able to get tickets until the second batch was released last year. “If we do have to go to rain plan … I would like an event more where everyone can go to it, at least for one day.”

Ultimately, BCA expects that everyone who wants a ticket for both days of the festival will be able to get one. According to Barksdale, they plan to release 6,400 tickets in total, which covers almost the entire undergraduate population. Last year, the club even had a few left over.

‘A lot of different genres, a lot of different kinds of music’: the art-

ist-selection process

According to Barksdale, the process of selecting artists for the festival begins as early as August.

BCA works with booking agent Jack Reich — who also works full-time at the Met and the Strand Ballroom name, the compensation the club is willing to provide and the date and time of the performance. With SAO’s approval, BCA then sends this form off to Reich, who passes it along to the artist’s agents. Back-and-forth negotiations can aligns with the values of Brown’s student body.

As with any process, Thatai cited certain strengths and challenges with how BCA selects artists for Spring Weekend. “One thing we’re going to change for next year is

“a lot of it is (about) what kind of genres we are interested in,” Thatai said. “I think a lot about who’s culturally and musically relevant right now.”

BCA also likes to think of the line-up in the context of a festival, rather than just as a list of big names. “There’s a kind of balance that we’re trying to strike here,” Thatai said. “We’re trying to make Brown students excited about the actual artists that we’re getting. … We also want somebody who’s going to be a good performer and put on a good show for an audience.”

Both Barksdale and Thatai felt that last year’s line-up reflected this balance especially well, in addition to BCA’s general values.

“The shows spoke for themselves,” said Thatai. The artists are all “very forward-thinking in their genres.”

“A lot of us were most proud (of) the fact that five out of six artists were black, nobody was white, we had one cis man but everybody else was a woman,” Barksdale said. “It was the first time we had Afro-beats. It also was the first time we had music in Spanish on the Main Green, which was super exciting for us.” back with a quote, or estimate of how much it’d actually cost to book the artists for Spring Weekend.

BCA also aims to introduce Brown students to new artists, Barksdale said, explaining how music by Tems, a member of last year’s line-up, can be heard throughout campus now — in the Sharpe Refectory, at the Nelson Fitness Center and at parties off-campus.

Moving forward, both Barksdale and Thatai said that they would like to figure out how to incorporate more student input into BCA’s general selection process. Thatai suggested creating a collective Spotify Wrapped, which is something that Yale has done recently. Barksdale added that BCA is always open to receiving suggestions via email or direct message.

Unlike past years, students will only be allowed to purchase a ticket for one day of Spring Weekend when the first batch is released, according to Brown Concert Agency Co-Chair Ellie Barksdale ’23.

“Generally, we get all these quotes and then we say, ‘okay, what aligns most with what we’re trying to do both for this slot and also what it says about the festival as a whole,’” Barksdale said.

After receiving a quote, BCA’s co-chairs bring it to the entire board and open the conversation up for a vote. If the majority of the board is in favor of the artists and potential costs, BCA will create a bid form, which includes the artist’s rap — and is set to take the stage on Saturday of the festival. total budget of $350,000 for selecting the six artists, designated by the Student Activities Fund through UFB, according to Barksdale. “We understand that the University, UFB (and) the student body is trusting us with a lot of money and a big decision,” Thatai said.

The festival overall has a budget of nearly $500,000, according to UFB.

Thatai explained that this money is going directly into the artist’s pocket, helping to build their name and their career. According to Thatai, BCA seeks to support talent that dope lineup, and I'm definitely very excited.” trying to speed the process up,” he said. This year, the Spring Weekend line- up is being released a couple weeks later than usual due to the prolonged negotiations that can often occur when trying to finalize contracts with artists.

Barksdale also said that the club can sometimes get bogged down in debate. “We have to navigate wanting all the voices to be heard … with the fact that when you go around in a circle of fifteen people, it takes kind of a while,” she explained.

When it comes to actually choosing the artists who will perform,

Both Barksdale and Thatai are extremely excited for the upcoming festival. “We don’t see this year’s Spring Weekend as an isolated event from last year’s Spring Weekend,” Thatai said. “We want to make sure those are cohesive events — they make sense together.”

“We have a lot of different genres, a lot of different kinds of music,” he said. “We’ll also hopefully have a lot of songs in there that a lot of people will be able to sing along to.”

Thatai added that there is something particularly special about holding the festival on what is arguably Brown’s most prominent space on campus.

“Seeing the people dancing, having a good time, letting loose on the Main Green of all places … it’s a really special opportunity,” he said. “It’s a ton of work, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.” gone viral on TikTok with her song p hoto ID.”

JID made his hip-hop debut with his E p “Dicaprio” in 2015. He has since released several studio albums and collaborated with Imagine Dragons to release “Enemy,” which reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100. He is also a member of Spillage Village — a music collective hailing from his home city, Atlanta, that focuses primarily on hip-hop and

Although Visaal Leeman ’26 p ersonally, I think I'm a little bit disappointed because for me at this stage in my life, I'm not trying to listen to lyrical stuff. I just want to turn up,” said Devendra p eyrat ’26. “But it’s still a really

— who attended the BCA release party — did not recognize many of the artists, she was encouraged by her friends that “they are really good,” and is still looking forward to Spring Weekend.

Sing-songwriter Ethel Cain is slated to perform on Sunday of Spring Weekend. She is known for producing ethereal tracks inspired by Christian music and Gregorian chants. Many of her songs, including her 2022 debut studio album p reacher’s Daughter,” draw upon her own experiences as having grown up as a trans woman in a Christian family.

Rapper and singer Doechii will be performing on April 29. She has opened for SZA, reached virality on TikTok with her song “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” and performed at Afropunk, an annual festival featuring alternative work by Black artists. She has also released two studio albums and was listed as an Artist To Watch by Spotify in 2022.

Alice Longyu Gao is a Chinese singer, songwriter, DJ and performance artist currently based in Los Angeles and New York. Their music is labeled as hyperpop but their sound encompasses several genres. Outside of the music industry, Gao has expanded their artistic reach to create pieces such as a salon-art-installation at MOXY NYC Times Square Hotel. They will be performing on the Saturday of the festival.

Rapper and singer 070 Shake released her debut album “Modus Vivendi” in 2020. She has been featured in songs by Kanye West, p usha T and Raye — several of which have held positions on the Billboard Hot 100 — and will take the stage on Sunday, April 30.