Composing a Life

interdependence and respect across difference, the best possibility offered by our culture seems to be the hope of equality. Johnnetta and I compared notes on our experiences in academic administration. Both of us were sometimes handicapped and sometimes helped by complementarities. She worked as associate provost at the University of Massachusetts under a provost named Loren Baritz. “That man and I really hit it off. I was not afraid of Loren like most people, so I served as a very valued member of his staff. People in high positions are often surrounded by loyalty and hypocrisy, people who tell you you’re great, but we had a straightforward honest relationship built on mutual respect.” I commented that there was another side to this. Julian Gibbs, college president during my time at Amherst, simply could not tolerate disagreement from a male in his age range. He would react to the symmetry of the relationship and go immediately into an adversarial mode, like a fighting cock. He depended on me because his need to play rivalrous male games made discussion and criticism nearly unavailable to him, except from women.
    “Not just a woman, in my case,” Johnnetta said, “a black woman. I say that because Loren had a very similar relation with Esther Terry, one of my closest friends. The three of us were quite a team. Loren Baritz never ever patted me on the head, and I never saw him figuratively pat Esther on the head. I would literally have walked out of that office the first day he did. This man just did not treat us in a paternalistic or a racist manner. We were on his case, and he could take it because we were black women, but he didn’t need to put us down to bolster his ego.
    “My problem at U. Mass. wasn’t Loren Baritz, it was lots of men with extremely tweeded minds. I tell you—well, I don’t have to tell
you
—there are some very insecure white males in the academy who are deeply threatened by anybody that looks and sounds like me. Or you Somebody that’s smart and male and white is bad enough, but you should come around with that in the other gender and my God the other color! When Loren Baritz asked me to head up a process of curriculum reform, he knew quite well that he was putting me up for the task that is surely the most threatening in the academic world, because it fundamentally questions the value of what people are doing. To ask faculty to change a curriculum is like asking someone to move a graveyard. It can be done but it is a funky, messy, complicated, long process. That was my main task—to lead that faculty through education reform, something in which I did not succeed, if by that is meant that the faculty voted for the general education program I led them in creating. That faculty basically said, hell no. I think they were voting on several things, how they felt about Loren Baritz, how they felt about Johnnetta Cole, and how they felt about themselves. Eventually the faculty passed something that is just mush. If I had gone through the general education vote five years earlier, I think I would have been absolutely crushed by it all. But by that time I think I had a pretty fair understanding of how things work in the academy. Some of that stuff was incredibly nasty, with all the things you know about and went through at Amherst—distinguished colleagues grinning in your face and going behind your back and stabbing the hell out of you. All of which is OK if they wouldn’t be so self-righteous, if they wouldn’t keep separating themselves from the corporate world, from those
nasty
people in business!”
    Talking with Johnnetta made me think back over a series of my own collaborations. One of the most productive was with Dick Goldsby, an immunologist with whom I coauthored a book,
Thinking AIDS
. I met him at Amherst, but he was far from being one of the old boys there, for he was already a respected researcher when he was recruited to fill a professorship endowed specifically for a distinguished black scientist. Shortly after I left Amherst, he moved to the University of Massachusetts to find a better research environment. Our work on AIDS started with my asking him questions about the medical aspects of the epidemic while he pressed me on its meaning to a social scientist. Four years and many questions later, Dick telephoned and suggested that we write a book together. I sent him the draft of an essay I had just written about AIDS and minorities. Six months later, we went to