Reckoning; or, the Distressing Transformation of Harvard (and American Academia)

We present here the fourteenth and final chapter from the memoirs-in-progress of the renowned scholar and author Ruth R. Wisse. Earlier chapters can be found here.

By the early 1990s, when I moved from Montreal to take up my new position at Harvard, I was able to participate in campus life more than I could during the decades when I was raising a family. At McGill I had scheduled classes and office hours to coincide with our children’s school day; now I was freer to behave more like your typical male—or at least that’s what feminists might say, except that almost none of the male members of my Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures showed any interest in campus affairs.

At a university, many if not most professors function strictly within their own departments, leaving faculty-wide policy to be made by those who regularly show up to make it. It would not have occurred to me, either, to attend my first meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) had Charles Berlin not insisted that I appear in person to receive my new degree.