ABSTRACT
When the meeting takes place, Jill will be on the other side of the continent, so only Christina and I and the two administrators will be talking. Christina is an assistant professor in my own department; for her this is also a meeting with three men who will be deciding, two years hence, whether she gets tenure or not. She is our junior by twenty years (as is Jill). My relation to the administrators-Nat and Colin, thank you-is rather different: one of them was my subordinate, the other my counterpart, when I was in the administration sixteen years ago, and when Wesleyan was an all-male college. You could say that the three of us are part of the old boy network. To the likely readership of this volume, I don’t think I need underscore the strange yet familiar power dynamic of the upcoming meeting, or the implicit contradictions of my local work in women’s studies.
