ABSTRACT
In the midst of the 1964-1965 sabbatical year that I spent in the Congo, I reached the decision that the time had come for me to leave Barnard. The pleasure and meaning that I experienced in teaching Barnard students, and from my relationship to them, had not diminished. Rather, they were enhanced by the ways that I found to share with them what I was experiencing and learning from the research and writing that I was doing in the sphere of medical sociology, and from my wide-ranging fieldwork in Belgium and the Congo. Furthermore, in 1964 I had been promoted to a tenured associate professorship, at a time in American academic life when very few women in sociology, or in most other fields, occupied such positions. My new formal status notwithstanding, I was still viewed by my colleagues as the junior faculty member in our small, four-person department, and partly because I was, I was obliged to continue to fill certain needs in the curriculum, which involved the perpetual teaching of Introductory Sociology and Methods of Social Research. I valued teaching these courses because they were fundamental, and they brought me into contact with most of the Barnard students who took sociology, and all of them who were sociology majors. But being expected to teach them every year curtailed my opportunity to develop new courses associated with the sociological phenomena and questions and the research with which I was most intensively involved. Cramming materials drawn from my ongoing work into the crevices of the required courses for which I was responsible, as I tried to do, no longer seemed a satisfactory solution. In addition, I had the impression that once my sabbatical year ended, my colleagues would expect me to stay geographically close to the Barnard campus, as well as pedagogically close to a standard curriculum. The system did not seem flexible or daring enough to allow for sustained periods of field research in Africa, Europe, or even in the United States.
