http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0107/feature.html
Volume 11, No. 4-July/August 2001
Gender Trouble
Who's afraid of gender studies in eastern Europe?
by Laura Secor
THE JOB MUST CERTAINLY HAVE sounded enticing.
Location: downtown Budapest, a short walk from the
Danube in a
city whose architecture is rivaled only by its food.
Employer:
Central European University (CEU), founded by the
financier,
visionary, and philanthropist George Soros to foster
open
academic inquiry in the formerly communist world.
Colleagues: a
distinguished interdisciplinary faculty from all over
the world,
supplemented by high-profile visiting lecturers-among
them Joan
Scott, Natalie Zemon Davis, Juliet Mitchell, Peggy
Kamuf, and
Betty Friedan. Mandate: to shape the future of central
and eastern
Europe's only graduate program in gender studies.
What scholar of European feminism wouldn't jump at the
opportunity?
Susan Zimmermann, a German-born historian, did. Yet by
the time
she officially assumed the directorship of CEU's Program
on
Gender and Culture last September, she found herself
firmly
grasping a hot potato. And not just any hot potato.
Judging from
the invective pouring in from world-renowned gender
scholars-comparing both Zimmermann and the rector who
appointed her to Joseph Stalin, threatening action
against the
university in legal and academic forums, and encouraging
students
to protest-this was the mother of all hot potatoes on
the feminist
job circuit.
Why the ruckus? As it turns out, CEU's rector and
president,
Yehuda Elkana, had unilaterally demoted the program's
previous
director and fired its only other full-time professor.
According to
Elkana, these actions were for the long-term good of the
program's
scholarly profile. But his opponents saw them as a
violation of
academic freedom and a danger to gender studies in
eastern
Europe.
Protest movements, boycotts, crackdowns, and threats are
common coin in politics. And administrative imbroglios
bedevil
academia. The combination, Elkana was to discover, can
be
toxic-even at CEU, which has long located itself at the
intersection of politics and academe. Founded in 1991 in
cooperation with Vaclav Havel and the then president of
Hungary,
Arpad Goncz, CEU normally encapsulates the best of both
worlds-the electricity of an activist project, the
permanence and
gravitas of an institution of higher learning. Its 829
students come
from forty countries to study with top scholars on CEU's
immaculately restored Budapest campus; its faculty
members are
paid more than five times Hungary's going rate, but they
don't have
tenure. It's the perfect expression of Soros's
philanthropic vision:
generous funding, inspired content, and maximum
flexibility. The
Hungarian-born billionaire pumps an estimated $350 to
$400
million a year into the region of his birth, and of all
his projects
CEU is undoubtedly the one with the greatest potential
longevity.
Who would choose to look that gift horse in the mouth?
Meet Joan Scott, the distinguished historian of France
from
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, author of
Gender and the
Politics of History, and one of the most respected names
in the
American academy. As a visiting scholar at CEU, Scott
was
dismayed by her experience on the search committee that
appointed Zimmermann director of gender studies. The
conduct of
that search, combined with the rector's treatment of the
program's
previous director and its full-time historian, spurred
Scott to resign
in protest. She also initiated an aggressive and
well-organized
e-mail letter-writing campaign. Yehuda Elkana, Scott
insisted, did
not have the right to wrest CEU's gender studies program
from
leading specialists in the field.
"Soros's utopian vision is entirely laudable," Scott
reflects a year
later. "He opened a space in CEU where exchanges of the
most
extraordinary kind can happen." But Elkana's
"autocratic"
leadership style, she protests, flies in the face of the
university's
professed goal of exporting the experience of a
democratic,
"open" society to the formerly repressive countries of
central
Europe. Chartered in New York but housed in Budapest and
Warsaw, CEU is subject neither to American academic
conventions nor to those of Hungary's state
institutions. As a result,
says Scott, "it's an enormously unstable place. People
can be fired
on a moment's notice with no recourse." Miglena
Nikolchina, the
Bulgarian poet and Julia Kristeva scholar whom Elkana
removed
as program director, puts a finer point on this
complaint: "You get
the same sort of instability in commissar structures.
Anybody at
any time can be thrown out behind the curtain."
YEHUDA ELKANA is a charismatic and idiosyncratic leader,
impatient with checks and balances, firm in his
convictions, and
quick on his feet. "The force of his personality is
huge," one former
colleague remarks. "He's a double of Soros-a big guy who
talks
fast. Five minutes with him is a long time." A Yugoslav
Jew who
survived Auschwitz as a boy, Elkana spent most of his
life in Israel,
where he studied physics, mathematics, and the history
of science.
He became a public figure in Israel's intellectual world
as the head
of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; he also directed
the Cohn
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and
Ideas at Tel
Aviv University.
When he became president and rector in 1999, Elkana hit
CEU
like a cyclone. He presented the university's trustees
with a plan for
the "reorganization" of several programs and
departments, and he
lost no time in executing it, starting with economics
and history. He
then moved on to the department of environmental
sciences. "I
simply decided that three professors supervising seventy
master's
theses is charlatanry," he recalled when I met with him
in
November. He hired two new professors and halved the
department's student population. Some students and
faculty
protested that Elkana acted alone, consulting experts
only
informally and neglecting to convene the necessary
committees.
But whereas the changes to the environmental sciences
department outlasted the protests, tampering with gender
studies
would prove much thornier.
Miglena Nikolchina had been running the Program on
Gender and
Culture for a year when Elkana became CEU's rector. Her
scholarship earned accolades within CEU and
internationally.
Scott describes Nikolchina's Meaning and Matricide:
Reading
Woolf via Kristeva (University of Sofia Press, 1997) as
"dazzling...the best piece of feminist literary
criticism I'd seen in
years." As director, says Nikolchina, she aimed to build
an
international community of feminist scholars around her
program
and to accord theoretical concerns their "proper place."
After all,
she explains, "central and southeastern Europe have a
strong
theoretical tradition. It's a part of the world where
theory was
always an important thing, and from the beginning it was
important
in gender studies." Within a year and a half, CEU's
program had
earned its place along the field's cutting edge.
Implementing that vision for the program was not always
easy,
however. Founded in 1995, the Program on Gender and
Culture
could grant M.A.'s but not Ph.D.'s, and it was required
to make its
appointments jointly with other departments or else to
hire lecturers
on short-term contracts. Nikolchina opted for the
latter. Her
short-term faculty consisted of a mix of social
scientists and
theorists, including the Serbian philosopher Branka
Arsic, whom
Judith Butler has hailed as "arguably the most important
Eastern
European feminist philosopher to emerge since Julia
Kristeva."
Butler herself, along with Scott, was among the
high-profile
Western feminist scholars Nikolchina scheduled for brief
visits.
The program's students wrote theses on such topics as
the
self-immolation of Tajik women, domestic violence in
Slovakia,
and the rhetoric of the Ukrainian women's movement, as
well as on
literary works by D.H. Lawrence, Fay Weldon, and A.S.
Byatt,
among others. The number of student applicants to the
program
increased by about a hundred each year during
Nikolchina's
directorship. And Nikolchina did make one long-term
appointment
to her faculty: Andrea Peto had taught in CEU's history
department
for seven years before Nikolchina offered her an
indefinite contract
in gender studies in 1999.
Nikolchina had loyal supporters among her faculty. But
not
everyone was happy. One professor complains that she
"rejected
the social sciences, ignored them, because she didn't
feel
competent in social science." (Nikolchina objects that
the program
actually offered most of its courses in social sciences
and history
and included only one literary scholar besides herself.)
Says
another, "She was really influenced by some people and
ignored
some others. She could not separate her personal
relationships
from the professional."
Elkana, too, had reservations. It did not escape his
attention that
Nikolchina had run afoul of the previous rector.
(According to
Nikolchina, the dispute stemmed from that
administration's bid to
dissolve the program.) Nor was Elkana pleased with
Nikolchina's
offer to Peto. But Nikolchina recalls that she did not
take the
rector's disapproval terribly seriously. When Elkana
told her that he
did not like Peto's scholarship, she says, "I'd think,
it's impossible
that everybody likes everybody, but it's not his
business to fire
people."
Elkana says he planned from the outset to turn Gender
and Culture
into a full department with a research emphasis. But he
could not
for the life of him understand exactly what the existing
program
proposed to research. When he asked Nikolchina, he
claims, "I
couldn't get an answer out of her. Every time I asked,
she told me
how awfully difficult it is for women in the world. I
said, Look, I don't
have to be convinced. I used to be considered a feminist
all my life.
But this is not a research program, I said. Grievances I
know. What
is the research program?"
In early March 2000, at Elkana's behest, Nikolchina
agreed to hold
a workshop at which gender studies would be defined and
"researchable problems" delineated. As Joan Scott later
wrote,
"The group listened respectfully to [Elkana's] repeated
demands
for 'researchable problems' and then proceeded to
demonstrate
what he refused to see: that Gender Studies as practiced
by these
women was always already serious, rigorous scholarship
however
diverse its methods and theories and however informed it
was by
feminist concerns with equality and fairness." The
scholars at the
workshop resolved to re-theorize the public/private
distinction, the
relationship of liberalism to feminism, and the concept
of gender.
They also called on the program to engage in comparative
research on gender-related subjects in different
localities.
Still, Elkana was not satisfied. "A research program is,
for
example, to study scientifically, in economic terms, and
to
counteract scientifically the arguments many employers
make
about why they should pay women a lower salary [than
men] for the
same job," he tells me. "Which is an international
scandal of the
worst kind. This can be researched, this can be argued,
there's
lots of work to be done. Just to see them complain about
how awful
it is is what I call complaints and not a research
agenda."
To the assembled gender studies scholars, Elkana's
demands
seemed insulting and anachronistic. Why didn't he trust
experts in
gender studies to define their own discipline-and would
he treat a
male-dominated field with similar high-handedness?
Scoffs
Andrea Peto, who was perhaps the program's most
empirically
minded scholar, "And what is objective research at the
beginning
of the twenty-first century? This is very dubious."
Scott concludes:
"Miglena and her colleagues are in the process of
challenging
older forms of knowledge, not producing outcomes that
will change
policy directly. Elkana perceived that as weak."
AS FAR AS Elkana was concerned, the workshop had
confirmed
his suspicion that Nikolchina could not or would not
build the
program that he envisioned. His next step was clear.
Within a
week, he called Nikolchina to his office and informed
her that she
would be replaced as director of the program. Later he
explained
his position in a report to the board of trustees as
follows:
[Nikolchina] had a letter of warning from the
[former]
Rector.... [S]he did not make any appointments to the
Program, could not formulate in a coherent fashion
the
research orientation of the Program, and was not
interested in (or capable of) developing the Program
in
a direction of concentration on gender issues in the
Social Sciences and Humanities as a whole.
At first, Elkana recalls, Nikolchina did not protest her
demotion;
rather, she gave her consent and agreed to participate
in the
search for her replacement. According to Peter Krasztev,
an
anthropologist in the program, Nikolchina was relieved:
"She said,
Oh, okay, so now I don't have my administrative
position, I was not
for this anyway, I'll get my same contract with the same
money, I will
teach, that's great. But in two or three weeks, she
changed her
mind."
Nikolchina explains that her initial nonchalance merely
reflected
her belief that it would take a full year for Elkana to
carry out all the
required procedural steps to demote and replace her.
"East
European universities succeeded in preserving whatever
autonomy they had during communism through observing
meticulous democratic procedure," Nikolchina would later
write. It
was unthinkable to her that the letter of these
procedures would not
be followed.
It was thus with some surprise, says Nikolchina, that
she reported
to Elkana's office for a meeting in early May 2000, only
to find that
he had assembled two potential candidates for her
position. One
of them was Susan Zimmermann, then a professor in CEU's
history department. To Nikolchina, the meeting seemed
premature: There had been no formal review of her work
and no
search announced for a new program director. An opening
had
been advertised, but it was for a senior professor, and
the
procedure for appointing senior professors differed from
that for
program directors.
For the senior professorship, Elkana named a search
committee
that included two external members, Joan Scott and the
Slovene
anthropologist Svetlana Slapsak. Both Scott and Slapsak
recall
that the committee proceeded without their
input-meetings, they
allege, were scheduled for times when Elkana knew they
could not
attend. But Elkana insists that when the committee's
external
members missed a meeting, he followed up with e-mails
soliciting
their opinions. Even so, replies Slapsak, "My opinion
was not
respected as a whole or in any of the details."
From early on, Scott, Nikolchina, and Slapsak regarded
the search
with suspicion. They were especially struck by the fact
that
Zimmermann had submitted the only application that was
clearly
intended not just for the advertised senior
professorship but also
for the position of director. Zimmermann was in fact
selected as
program director on June 6.
Nikolchina was still in charge on June 30, however, when
Elkana
went ahead and fired Andrea Peto from above. Peto's nine
years
at CEU ended in an afternoon; she was even disconnected
from
her e-mail and the university's computer network, where
she'd
stored much of her work in progress. There had been no
formal
peer review and no warning, according to Peto. Because
Peto has
filed suit, university officials will not comment on any
aspect of her
case. But one colleague speculates that her troubles
originated in
the history department, where some particularly
traditional scholars
may have objected to her oral-history-based research.
When
Peto's last contract with the history department had
expired, the
department had declined to hire her for an appropriate
opening in
her field. Elkana may have concluded that Peto was a
weak
scholar to whom Nikolchina shouldn't have offered a
full-time
position.
Peto was stunned by Elkana's seemingly unilateral
decision. When
we meet at a trendy, American-style cafe on the Pest
side of the
Danube, she punctuates her conversation with a
mirthless,
sardonic laughter that eventually turns to tears. "I
wrote-because
of these unfortunate events, I counted-I wrote more than
thirty-seven articles in eight different languages,"
Peto tells me.
"But you know, that was not the point. I was not given
the
opportunity to have a fair review. Neither was Miglena."
THE QUESTION of peer review and democratic procedure was
to become a leitmotif in CEU's gender studies conflict.
Elkana's
reports to the board of trustees emphasized informal
consultations
with trusted colleagues; Nikolchina and Peto called for
investigations, evaluations, committees, and reviews. At
an
assembly convened to address the situation, Elkana
bluntly told the
program's students that a university was not a
democracy-a
statement that upset many observers, given how they
understood
CEU's mandate as an arm of Soros's Open Society
Institute.
"I believe fundamentally that universities are
meritocracies and you
should advance people according to their quality,"
Elkana explains
in an interview. "And the university has to have
somebody who
decides.... I'm ready, in politics, to accept the price
for being in a
democracy. Not in universities. Yes, you have to get in
other
people's judgment, you have to listen to many people,
you have to
weigh the other side. But somebody has to make
judgments."
To Scott, the upshot was clear. As she would write in a
letter to the
program's students, "The sad thing is that a university
that was
supposed to bring democracy and an 'open society' to the
region
of East/Central Europe is being run by an autocrat who
has only
contempt for the principles his university is supposed
to teach and
represent."
In Scott's view, the situation at CEU crossed a line in
early July,
when Elkana appointed himself acting director of the
program until
Zimmermann was to take over in September. Scott resigned
from
the university and, with Slapsak, from the search
committee. In her
resignation letter to Elkana, which she also sent to
CEU's board of
trustees, Scott pulled no punches. "Unfortunately, your
administration of this university has been a disaster
from the start,"
she wrote. "[I]t is terrible to me that someone with
your own history
resorts to measures that are typical of the behavior of
self-justifying
autocrats."
Given Elkana's wartime experience, the possible
implications
must have infuriated him. To the trustees he wrote that
Scott's letter
was "bordering on the unacceptable." Another of Scott's
letters he
described as "written in a style of almost being
obscene." In
person, Elkana seems bewildered, even hurt, by Scott's
stance.
Why, he wants to know, did she and her allies never
invite him to
explain his actions? "Even pro forma," he says, "they
could have
phoned and said, Well, how did it look from your side,
and let's
compare it."
Scott laughs when I tell her this. "Personal phone calls
are not how I
operate," she says. "The fact that he wanted me to do
that
suggests the extent to which personalized exchanges
substitute for
procedural regularities at CEU. Once he violated all the
procedures, I didn't think he needed to explain why he
did that."
In July, Elkana apologized to the university's grievance
committee
for disconnecting Peto from the computer system. And he
convened the interdisciplinary committee that was
supposed to
have conducted the internal search for the program
director. This
committee withdrew Zimmermann's appointment due to
procedural irregularities but appointed her acting
director, in place
of Elkana, until the search could be completed.
Nikolchina walked
out of that meeting and refused to participate in the
continuation of
the search-a process that would swiftly conclude with
the
appointment, once again, of Zimmermann, who was the only
applicant.
As September approached, Nikolchina and Scott began
circulating letters not only to the university
administration and
trustees but also to students, urging them to protest.
During the
department's introductory course presentation at the
start of the fall
semester, Nikolchina indicated that she might not stay
to teach her
class. It was news to Zimmermann. When the students
asked why,
Nikolchina detailed her dispute with the rector. It was
a move
Zimmermann found galling. "What she did to students was
more
than unfair," she fumed when I met with her a month
later. Elkana
wrote in his report, "When Professor Nikolchina abused
the course
presentation session by involving the students in the
stories of her
grievances, I wrote her a polite letter asking her to
stop this, to
which she replied in a letter distributed by her to all
the students
with the usual inaccuracies and false accusations."
Perhaps that
was the letter one of her colleagues passed on to me,
wincing at
Nikolchina's inclusion of the following paragraph:
But there is also the unforgettable story, the comedy
of
a small parochial, very limited...satrapy implanted
by a
dilettante, self-designated philosopher-king, an
anachronistic encyclopedia survivor who wants to
implement amidst the dramas of transitional Central
and Eastern Europe his eighteenth-century vision of
Grand Knowledge.
No love was lost between Nikolchina and Elkana when she
announced her resignation on September 29. She
compressed
her course into a month's time and returned to the
University of
Sofia, where she is today. "I got an Andrew Mellon
Fellowship at
the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences and a ten-month
fellowship at Princeton," she tells me via e-mail half a
year later.
"Personally I gained more than I lost through this
conflict." But what
still bothers her, she says, is "the injustice of what
happened."
ELKANA HAD NOT heard the last of the matter when
Nikolchina
left. Not only was Peto's lawsuit still pending, but a
flood of protest
letters from an international network of feminist
scholars soon
deluged the rectorate and the board of trustees. What's
more,
these letters circulated by e-mail to a vast number of
gender
scholars.
The heads of women's studies centers in Zagreb,
Belgrade, and
elsewhere in the region voiced their disappointment and
concern.
Other letter writers threatened the program with
censure, whether
at the American Association for the Advancement of
Slavic
Studies, the American Association of University
Professors
(AAUP), or CEU's sister institution, the Open University
in London.
Judith Butler questioned the replacement of Nikolchina
with
Zimmermann, writing, "It does strike me as incongruous
that the
very person whose scholarly work and institutional
accomplishments has earned her an international
reputation has
been replaced by someone who has no such name
recognition as
far as I can tell." Elizabeth Minnich of the Union
Institute wondered
why Elkana had taken "the kind of actions one takes only
when
there are drastic problems." And Oklahoma State
University's
Arthur Redding concluded his letter with the following
words: "It
would still be a shame to see the immense promise of CEU
scuttled by a conspiracy of fence sitters,
power-mongers,
mediocrities, and intellectual cowards. Demand better of
yourselves."
Nikolchina and Peto filed grievances with the AAUP, a
move that
could affect CEU's bid for accreditation from the Middle
States
Association of Colleges and Universities. But given what
some
faculty describe as CEU's confusing welter of
contradictory
regulations, the alleged violations may be hard to
prove. According
to Peto, the letter terminating her contract explained
that her
courses had been canceled. "The rector had no right, no
authorization, to omit the accredited and already
advertised
courses from the program," she contends. "That is the
basis of my
law case." Peto has also filed a complaint within the
university,
where the issue is whether the terms of her contract
supersede the
faculty compendium in which the university's operating
procedures
are detailed.
CEU's short-term contracts appear to accord the rector a
fairly
sweeping prerogative, and Elkana knows it. "It's bad
manners not
to renew a contract without doing a proper survey," he
says simply.
When I ask if the international outcry concerns him, he
responds in
a similar way: "Ah, it would be impolite to say no."
Nonetheless,
says Elkana, one aspect of the campaign is bothersome:
"That
many women whom I respect highly as scholars-like Joan
Scott
herself, despite what she said of me-are now not ready
to teach
here or come here. Alas, too bad."
The result, for a time, was isolation. Numerous visiting
scholars
pledged not to return to Budapest. Butler helped bring
prize
theorist Branka Arsic to SUNY Albany. The faculty that
remained
found themselves scorned by some former colleagues.
"They were
not the best that stayed," says Nikolchina flatly. "I
don't really have
anything to do with them," says Peto. For Peter
Krasztev, the
destruction of collegial relationships has been a high
price to pay
for staying at CEU. "I still love Miglena and I love
Andrea and I love
all those people," he says ruefully. "But of course I do
not agree
with some of their professional decisions."
The scholars who took part in the boycott felt that
Elkana had
brought a state of crisis on the program-but to Elkana
and
Zimmermann, the crisis was the boycott. "For the
students," says
Zimmermann, "it has had the effect of making them
insecure, as it
was announced all the time that the program is dying."
Her voice
rises slightly when she talks about Scott's lobby. "The
campaign
interprets itself as including everybody who is in favor
of human
justice in gender studies. That's not true," she
insists. "It's a
distorted view where the camp involved with the campaign
becomes so huge and the world of gender studies becomes
so
small."
IT COULD NOT have been easy to assume control of a
gender
studies program that had so polarized its constituency.
Zimmermann, proud and uncompromising, did not exactly
have a
healing touch. What's more, she agreed with the rector
about the
need for reorganization. "Independent from having some
good
scholarship and some very good scholars here, the
program was
lacking purpose," says Zimmermann.
The author of three monographs, including The Better
Half?
Women's Movements and Women's Endeavors in Hungary
Under the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918, and countless
journal
articles on poverty and social policy, Zimmermann had
proposed
to refocus the program's research. She felt that the
field needed to
develop a more truly global framework in order better to
integrate
gender studies scholarship from "peripheral" and
"semi-peripheral" countries. It sounded
reasonable-though not
strikingly more "researchable" than the proposals
offered at the
March workshop.
Despite the protests, Zimmermann managed to host a
lecture
series that included speakers from Croatia, Bulgaria,
and
Yugoslavia, as well as Germany, India, England, and
Norway. A
surprising number of scholars wrote to her, she told me,
expressing their support for the program and pledging to
come
teach as soon as the events of 2000 were forgotten. But
the
students I spoke with were glum; they had come to
Budapest to
study with Arsic and Nikolchina, who were now gone. With
those
departures, many of the program's courses in theory had
evaporated.
Some faculty I spoke with distrusted Zimmermann and
found her
management style abrasive. They complained that she was
rigid
and remote, communicating little with them or with the
students. An
ugly anti-German sentiment sometimes accompanied these
remarks: One professor described Zimmermann as
"authoritarian"
and "colonial, very colonial, German." Ironically, some
of the same
scholars rejected Zimmermann on account of her leftist
politics,
saying that her emphasis on class was off-putting to
scholars from
the former communist bloc. Explains Nikolchina: "She's
leftist in a
way which gives us the creeps here."
Zimmermann did not attempt to extend an olive branch.
Rather,
she returned tit for tat in a notorious correspondence
with Joan
Scott. In an August 1, 2000, letter, she wrote: "The
current
campaign is a textbook example of power play, which is
global
only in its self-proposed name, but in reality dominated
by
influential tenured female professors mainly in the US
and a few
more 'Western' countries.... This results in a boycott
of the
unfolding of a Program in Gender Studies in Central
Eastern
Europe...." Quoting from a letter in which SUNY
Buffalo's Elizabeth
Grosz called on Zimmermann to resign and informed her
that she
would find herself unable to hire visiting scholars to
the program,
Zimmermann retorted, "So soll es sein-to blackmail and
harassment I won't give in. If there is something like
'feminist
mainstream postmodern essentialism' disregarding the
minimum
standards of professional and political ethics, the
current
campaign represents such worldview and action at its
best/worst."
CEU, noted Zimmermann, is still a work in progress: It's
a "young,
heavily under-institutionalized university," she wrote,
and the
ambiguities in its regulations allow the campaigners to
pursue their
own interests by alleging procedural violations. But
were they really
protesting the procedure, or the outcome? "The
campaigners do
no good for any of the involved women," she concluded,
"and they
are engaged not in argumentation and democracy but in
demagogy. They do not know what they are doing to gender
studies."
Scott's reply was brief and pointed. Zimmerman's letter,
she
remarked, could as easily have been written by Elkana
himself. But
Scott was especially taken aback by one implication:
"Why do you
assume that a Western feminist conspiracy is at work
here for bad
ends?" she demanded. "What interest would we have in
harming a
'fledgling program'? Has it not occurred to you that
there might be
massive injustice at work...? And that I am protesting
injustice?
Why, I wonder, are you unable to perceive the issues in
those
terms?"
Scott's extended response to Zimmermann's letter was to
come in
another forum. At a feminist research conference in
Bologna, Italy,
at the end of September, Scott gave a complex and
thickly argued
paper on the happenings at CEU-specifically, she
addressed the
letter she'd received from Susan Zimmermann. "That
[Zimmermann] is a westerner, that the protagonists in
the
struggle-the two fired women and the rector-are
'easterners,'
that complaints have come from West and East, are
irrelevant to
her," wrote Scott. "In reaching for political terms that
will be
recognizable to those she wants to rally to her side...
Zimmermann
chooses cliches associated with political/regional
nationalism (and
also, unfortunately, with Stalinist polemics)."
That Zimmermann accused her of "feminist mainstream
postmodern essentialism" proved especially rich fodder
for Scott's
analysis. Scott interprets the accusation as
"Zimmermann's
attempt to protect 'eastern' Gender Studies from a
structuralism
and post-structuralism that she designates as
'western.'" In Scott's
view, this effort puts Zimmermann "on the side of
'feminist
mainstream essentialism'-a dominant current in the West
that
has declared 'postmodernism' to be antithetical to
feminism-and
it pits her against at least one very powerful 'eastern'
philosophical
tradition-the linguistic/structuralist tradition
associated with the
defeat of many communist regimes in the region."
"I am not primitive," Zimmermann replies when I ask her
if she
believes post-structuralism to be a Western imposition
on eastern
Europe. To Scott her response was short, acid-and in
Hungarian.
"Tisztelt Prof. Scott," she wrote. "Tulajdonkeppen
ertjuk-mi
egymast?"
"Well," it translates, with heavy sarcasm implied. "Do
we
understand each other?"
THE EXCHANGE between Scott and Zimmermann was, no
doubt, the best theater to emerge from what Elkana
dubbed
"l'affaire gender." But the real conflict plays out on a
larger stage.
Scott and her allies have, after all, bitten the hand
that feeds
gender studies all across the formerly communist world.
Was their
campaign an act of courageous independence-or of
misguided
intimidation? It depends whom you ask.
George Soros is the foremost benefactor of eastern
Europe's
libraries, literary journals, humanitarian projects,
Internet
development programs, Roma rights campaigns, health-care
projects, arts programs, scholarships, research grants,
and
scholarly exchanges, among other things. His Open
Society
Institute (OSI) also funds gender studies programs or
centers in
numerous countries. After a mere ten years, it is hard
to imagine
eastern Europe without OSI. Kim Lane Scheppele, a former
director of CEU's gender studies program, has speculated
that
"the influence of the Soros Network exceeds the
influence of all
bilateral efforts of states outside working with states
inside the
former Soviet region."
Nikolchina worries that Western foundations, including
OSI, have
come to loom too large over the region's public life.
Eastern
European intellectuals and civil society leaders, she
points out, risk
brokering away the freedom to set their own priorities.
It's an
important point. But Nikolchina strikes it with
considerable
hyperbole: In an e-mail to me, she compares George Soros
to
Stalin-unfavorably. "Stalin," she wrote, "hypothetically
could be
replaced, while Soros's power (his money) is protected
by the
larger structure of Western democracy."
Scheppele's critique of OSI is a bit more measured. The
institute's
projects, including CEU, were designed to absorb the
shocks of
rapid political transitions. Accordingly, as Scheppele
describes
them, they are adaptable, expandable, and collapsible.
This very
plasticity allowed the university to accommodate an
influx of
professors fired from the University of Belgrade in
1998. "They left
Belgrade for political reasons. And at that point, CEU
was the only
institution in that part of Europe that wanted to take
care of them,"
recalls Branka Arsic, who came to CEU around that time.
"I was
hired without a committee," she reflects. Who disputed
the
procedural informality then?
And yet, as in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, the
downside of
flexibility can be instability. Argues Scheppele, "There
is no
security of expectation in anything within the [OSI]
network. Things
change suddenly, without warning, and everyone simply
has to
adjust." For a university, it's a fairly novel way of
operating. As
Arsic notes, at CEU "they don't give tenure, so people
cannot feel
safe and free. They are thinking of an academic
institution as a
place for eternal competition and uncertainty. It's not
a very
academic logic." Academia, after all, is supposed to
furnish a
haven for free inquiry. And institutions of any kind
offer safety and
comfort precisely because they are impersonal,
inflexible, and
predictable. CEU, says Arsic, "is an institution that
escapes the
logic of institution."
CEU is not a predictable place-and at least for now, the
boycott
of its gender studies program doesn't seem to have had
the
predicted effect. This March, Elkana approved a budget
increase
that will allow the program to make several new hires.
Zimmermann has filled one senior position, and she is in
the
process of hiring one or two junior faculty. The history
department
now offers a joint Ph.D. with gender studies.
Nonetheless, as
Zimmermann acknowledged by phone in May 2001, "There are
always tensions and conflicts in the scholarly
community." As she
noted in a recent report to her higher-ups, the OSI
Women's
Network Program, which includes a number of women's
studies
programs across the region, "seems to have withdrawn
silently
from any form of cooperation" with the program. So have
some of
its former contacts in the West. As long as Elkana is
rector, Scott
says, she cannot in good conscience urge anyone to
cooperate
with CEU.
For Elkana, meanwhile, the battle has entered a new
phase. To
promote gender studies to full departmental status, he
observes, "I
have to fight inside to convince people to accept it.
Because as we
very well know, gender studies is not the most popular
university
department."
Laura Secor is a senior editor of LF. Her article
"Sofia's Choice"
appeared in the March 2001 issue.
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