[Vwoolf] Fw: Some female profs

[Stuart N. Clarke]

From: Stuart N. Clarke 
Sent: Saturday, December 1, 2018 3:00 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 
Subject: Some female profs

Just by chance I came across yesterday the 1977 Calendar of one of my old universities, which brought back some no doubt unreliable memories.

Although it was a large university, there were very few women full professors in 1971 (and about the same 15 years later).

Wilma Radford, Librarianship, ‘a nice old lady’ according to a colleague.  That’s not what I heard – a tough political in-fighter from way back.  When she retired she reverted to Miss Radford, for she didn’t have a PhD and they didn’t award her an emeritus.  She was succeeded by an overweight cheery American, who may or may not have liked books, for he wasn’t Professor of Librarianship, but of Information Resources, or some such.  A few years later he died in a US airport.

I think the professor of Social Work was a woman then, but I can’t remember, perhaps because she was nice.  Although it was Wilma who carried a shopping basket, I like to think it was the professor of Social Work with a basket - filled with calves’ foot jelly (“For your own feet, madam, I presume”).

The professor of French was tall, elegant, possibly Antipodean, but with those long complicated French qualifications.  She married a son of Paul Valéry and returned to the university to be awarded an Hon. DLitt.  If she’s still alive I expect she lives une vie la plus distinguée, in Paris, no doubt.

The professor of Russian was small and white-haired.  It was said that she (Tatjiana Cizova) was a White Russian and that she ruled the department despotically.  Our faculties were divided into schools, which were divided into departments, but there were some autonomous depts, which weren’t big enough to be schools.  She fought for her dept to become a school, and eventually succeeded – a pyrrhic victory, as a few years later there was a Russian Revolution: she was deposed and side-lined.

If you were a woman and wanted to get on, you had to be tough.  But, to be fair, the same applied to men.  That university wasn’t a place for weaklings.  “Vae Victis!”  It was said that the reason academic politics were so bitter was that the stakes were so low.

Stuart

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