Spring 2012 - Clarion University

N
ucLeus
mpoweRment
ofE
Kathryn graham, Ph.D.
retired Faculty, english
chair, Ws Founding committee and advisory council
In our quest to establish a Women’s Studies Program at
Clarion, it became evident early on that what we needed first
was to see what other schools had done -- what other Women’s
Studies Programs in schools like ours looked like. I remember a
cold, snowy trip to Edinboro with Sylvia Stalker to meet with other
women from PASSHE who shared our interests. I believe that might
have been our first contact with Maureen Mchugh from iuP, who
was establishing Women’s Studies there. She turned out to be a
tremendously useful and resourceful friend and later came to the
Clarion campus to help us further.
We also traveled to the Tri-State Women’s Studies
conferences at Chatham College and Seton Hill to see their
programs. Deb Burghardt, anne Day and i attended the
National Women’s Studies conference in Akron, Ohio, a group
which Deb eventually became very active in.
Other useful sources of information were the program
proposals for Women’s Studies Programs that other schools shared
with us. april Katz, for example, was able to get us a hard copy of
the program at Arizona State which she had been involved with. I
remember long working sessions in Carlson Hall conference room,
poring over such documents as we struggled toward a vision.
And then there were the open forums we held on our campus. We
sent out an open invitation to all interested departments in order to
explain our goals, answer questions, head off resistance and garner
support campus-wide. Maureen Mchugh again provided useful
as a featured speaker at one such forum. Lynn Goodstein, director
of Women’s Studies at Penn State, was another valued consultant
who helped us to shape our program. After one such open forum,
Donna Ashcraft opened her home to us for refreshments and some
wonderful kibitzing with these accomplished, knowledgeable
women.
I remember lunches at my house in Clarion where we met
to hammer out our proposal, each of us having drafted copy
to be integrated into the whole. I remember Myrna Kuehn’s
excellent sense of logic in these meetings where collaboration
was not always easy and feathers could be easily ruffled. The
Women’s Studies Program -- which evolved through many hours of
discussions, forums, and revisions -- was truly a collaborative effort,
reflecting the thought and cares of a broad spectrum of faculty
and administrators.
Jim Scanlon, Dean of Arts and Sciences at the time, was in
my mind our single most important and influential collaborator and
ally. When he agreed to be our advocate and took such a keen
interest in the shaping of the program, I felt, as I believe we all did,
that we would succeed and that the Women’s Studies Program
would become a reality and be institutionalized sooner rather than
later. We felt fortunate, indeed, to have such a powerful ally and
advocate in the administration. Hence, the program won campus
approval and was sent to Harrisburg in the fall of 1991.
It’s difficult to believe that 17 years have passed since
then or that the Women’s Studies Program is 20 years old. In that
time it has helped hundreds of women at Clarion to recognize their
full potential as women and as human beings. And who knows
how many others have been shaped by it because of the efforts
of the hundreds who have gone beyond the academy to carry
the message to the larger community, to the world The Women’s
Studies Program has served as the nucleus of empowerment for
women at Clarion, the agent for change to a new paradigm. It
has become everything and more than the founding mothers and
fathers hoped it would be. Its future is something that we couldn’t
have even imagined in 1992!
11