ABSTRACT
July 1990. Two versions of my leaving party. The first, for a feminist whose career had taken her from a Leavisite and New Critical training in ‘English’ to a job in one of the young polytechnics. There, after early years of liberal studies horrors, she helped design a humanities degree course and after seventeen years, as a new MA in women’s studies was about to get under way, she was off to a university post. At the party, she reflected on her years of growing up/older largely with the same group of people; on her personal intellectual growth, the department’s massive course expansion and growth in student numbers, struggles against cuts, development of new subject areas and the recruitment of new kinds of student-mature, non-standard entry, disabled, female, minority ethnic, etc. She had benefited from the support of her head of department and long-time colleagues, in research, teaching and administrative innovations. She was sad to leave behind a flourishing, lively department.
