Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Read This And Then Go Bang Your Head Against the Garage Door



From Daily Texan:
In 1967, 26-year-old attorney Sarah Weddington joined forces with the Women’s Liberation Movement and took on one of the most perpetually controversial Supreme Court cases in American history — Roe v. Wade.
She was the first woman to represent Austin in the Texas Legislature and the first woman to hold the title of General Counsel to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She served in the White House as an adviser to President Jimmy Carter before coming to UT to teach in 1988.
And how is she doing now? She is losing her teaching position due to budget cuts:
After 23 years at the University and more than a dozen state and national leadership awards, UT officials told Weddington, an adjunct professor in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, that she would no longer have a job at the end of the spring semester.
Weddington said she was aware of the looming budget crisis but was surprised to hear her position was in jeopardy.
“I always thought that tenure for me was not that important because I thought as long as you were really good at what you do and did a lot to work with your students, you’d be OK,” she said. “Now I know I was wrong.”
Do a gender reversal (or reverse her to an anti-feminists) here and ask yourself if the same would have happened to a man (or an anti-feminist) as famous as she is. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Though he might not have assumed that all would be well if he just did his job really well. There's lots more to academic politics than that.

Still, I find all this a disgrace.