It may be difficult to imagine a time before university campuses were as diverse as they are today, but the time when they were the sole preserves of men is still well within living memory. Dr. Louise Lamphere, professor emerita at the University of New Mexico, can vividly remember those days. In fact, she was one of the catalysts for effecting more egalitarian representation at universities nationwide.
Brown University celebrated Lamphere’s achievements at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women with two days of talks and a symposium, March 5-6.
Lamphere started out at Brown University as the only female member of the anthropology department in 1968. She was denied tenure in 1974—her department chair said her work in the classroom had not met their standards and that her academic work was theoretically weak. Lamphere was blindsided by the criticism—she had never had any sort of teaching review, so she had no inkling that others thought she needed to improve, and she was deeply engaged in her academic work. The book she published that year, Woman, Culture, and Society, would go on to sell tens of thousands of copies.
So Lamphere sued the university, arguing that she was the victim of widespread sex discrimination on campus. In the mid-‘70s, there were only 25 women on the entire Brown faculty.
“At the time, the whole hiring process was done through an old-boy network,” Lamphere said. “If you were [a department chair] looking for somebody at Brown, you’d call up the department head at Harvard, Princeton, or Penn and ask, ‘Who’s got a Ph.D. and who would you recommend?’”
Though Lamphere was a graduate of Harvard herself, due to the opacity of the hiring process, she could never be sure what was going on behind the scenes.
“At Harvard, they had something called the ‘Harvard List.’ I could never tell [whether] I was on the list or not, because it was kept secret. But that’s how people got hired,” Lamphere said.
