Law firm forces Mary Dalys
hand
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff
Feminist author Mary Dalys stormy 33-year career in the
theology department at Boston College may be coming to an end. Her nemesis is a
single male student who has demanded entrance to one of her women-only classes,
challenging her 20-year policy of teaching men separately.
The student, Duane Naquin, is a pro bono client of the Center for
Individual Rights, an aggressive, conservative, Washington-based
public-interest law firm that has warned Boston College of a possible lawsuit
on Naquins behalf.
Rather than admit the student, Daly asked the university to cancel
her spring semester classes. She is on paid leave and, saying she is
effectively being forced to retire, is negotiating terms with the university.
Daly said she is being deprived of her right to teach freely.
Daly, who has often clashed with officials of the Jesuit school
since she began teaching there in 1966, accused administrators of caving
in to the law firm. The firm is engaged in a legal assault on affirmative
action at universities around the country. In a recent fundraising letter, the
center promised to devote increased energy and resources to
fighting radical feminism.
Daly, a self-proclaimed radical feminist, lesbian and
post-Christian, said she is deeply disappointed that Boston College
had buckled under to pressure from a right-wing group. They bully
institutions, she said. Daly said she is confident Naquin had no interest
in the content of her course in feminist ethics. She remains adamant about her
women-only classroom policy.
Federal law
I am caught in a double bind, she said. Either I
go in and teach men who would ruin my classes, or I find a way to negotiate a
solution.
Jack Dunn, director of public affairs at Boston College, said
Dalys policy violates university policy and federal law. Administrators
had not been swayed by the centers involvement and would have taken the
students side regardless, he said. Dunn said a second student had also
challenged Dalys policy.
Our position is that all the educational resources of the
university are available to all students regardless of race or gender, he
said. Separate is inherently unequal.
Federal law backs us, specifically Title IX, he said.
It would be wrong to make an exception. Dunn added, Mary Daly
has a unique perspective, and we think all students, including males, should be
able to avail themselves of it.
Dunn said the university is not trying to push Daly out. It
was she rather than us who raised the issue of retirement, Dunn said.
Daly, who has published seven books but been denied full
professorship at Boston College, has taught men separately since the late
1970s. She said she uses a time-tested feminist strategy of
preserving a place where women can talk freely without the presence of men. She
offers men separate instruction using the same books and materials as she uses
in the class, she said.
Daly said her policy is not anti-male. Rather, she said, it
derives from her discovery that women are less focused in her classes when men
are involved, directing part of their attention to the way men are reacting to
class material.
I never refused to teach a male, she said. But
after I discovered how the dynamics changed in the classroom, I taught them
separately. Usually, she said, just one or two men would be
interested.
The university and its male students have tolerated Dalys
policy over the years, although it has been one source of her intermittent
clashes with school officials. Dunn said Dalys policy had stood because
it had gone unchallenged by students. This year, though, Naquin, a senior at
the university who signed up for Dalys introductory course in feminist
ethics, wasnt buying it. Shortly after Daly explained her teaching policy
to him, a letter arrived at Boston College from the Washington-based center
threatening legal action unless Dalys classes were opened to men and its
client, Naquin, was allowed to attend classes with women in Dalys spring
semester course.
The letter was sent in mid-October to Jesuit Fr. William Leahy,
president of Boston College, Daly said, but she was not informed of the
centers involvement until late December. Boston College officials
sat on it for two-and-a-half months. That didnt leave me time to
strategize or consider my options, she said.
Daly said Naquin had lacked the required prerequisite for her
course but had nevertheless been admitted by the theology department chair. She
said she finds it shameful that Boston College would give in to pressures from
the right wing.
Diversity a hallmark
I am calling on Boston College to do the right thing and
stand by faculty and students against assaults that would violate academic
freedom, she said. The right wing is trying to make this an issue
of discrimination when it is about refusing to dumb down education and about
the right and obligation of faculty not to be forced to accept students in
their classes who are not qualified and do not have the prerequisites.
One of the hallmarks of a great university is that it allows
for diversity of methodology, she said.
Naquin refused to talk with NCR. The theology department
chair, Donald Dietrich, said he was unable to discuss a legal matter and
referred NCR to higher university officials. Terence J. Pell, senior
counsel at the Center for Individual Rights, said he had no comment
on the Boston College situation.
The Center for Individual Rights gained national recognition in
1996 when it won a case that signaled a halt to affirmative action polices and
stunned higher education officials around the country. According to the U.S.
Supreme Court ruling in that case, known as Hopwood v. State of
Texas, the University of Texas Law School was barred from using racial
quotas in deciding which applicants to admit but was allowed to consider an
applicants race as a plus among many other factors.
The center is behind lawsuits challenging race-based admission
policies at the University of Michigan and the University of Washington. In
late January, the center released a handbook instructing readers how to
initiate lawsuits against institutions whose affirmative action policies
allegedly violate the law. The handbook was advertised in campus newspapers at
14 major institutions. In its fundraising letter last fall, the center charged
that the courts, on practically every issue, had ratified
feminisms most extreme demands. Examples, the letter said, included
holding employers liable for sexual harassment the employers never knew
about and declaring all-male colleges to be unconstitutional.
In meetings with university administrators in late December, Daly,
who turned 70 Oct. 16, decided that, rather than change her long-standing
teaching practice and admit a male student who had already threatened to sue,
she would ask the university to cancel her spring semester classes, go on paid
leave and evaluate her options. One option, Daly said, is to work toward a
retirement settlement with the university, although before the recent conflicts
she had planned to teach indefinitely. I want to stress that it was never
my intention to retire at this time, she said.
Daly said she hopes to be compensated for what she describes as
years of low salary due to conflicts with university officials. Further, she
said, during her 33 years at Boston College, she has taken 14 years of unpaid
leave to produce her books, resulting in a significant loss of retirement
funds.
Daly declined to state the amount of her salary. In 1989, she
earned $33,800. The average salary then for associate professors was $40,600.
Daly said she had received few increases in the past 10 years.
Daly, who holds a masters degree in English from The
Catholic University of America, a doctorate in religion from St. Marys
College, Notre Dame, and four degrees from the University of Fribourg,
Switzerland, including doctorates in Sacred Theology and philosophy, was the
first woman on the faculty of Boston Colleges theology department.
She points out that during her first three years at Boston
College, from 1966 to 1969, she taught only men because women were not admitted
to the school, except for nursing programs, until 1970. Daly was denied tenure
in 1969, following publication of her book The Church and the Second
Sex. Daly describes that book as a mild exposition of the churchs
misogyny.
Student support
Ironically, she points out, it was demonstrations by some 1,500
students, nearly all of them men, that saved her job. Fifteen hundred of
those young men marched and demonstrated for me in 1969, she said.
Some 2,000 professors and students signed a petition. Thats how I
got promotion and tenure. Now, she said, one male student is trying
to undo what they did. Daly was promoted to associate professor following
those demonstrations, the rank she still holds.
Daly said her decision to cancel her spring semester classes had
been difficult for other students. I regret that, she said. The
present situation had come as a complete shock after several years
largely free of the conflicts of the past, she said. Ive been
treated wrongly, and the students are deprived of my voice, a radical
voice, she said.
She was denied full professorship in 1975 and again in 1989. The
six-member promotion committee that rejected her application in 1989 said she
was undistinguished in every area, including teaching and
publication. In 1979, following publication of her third book,
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, faculty members and
administrators monitored her classes and students again demonstrated in her
support.
Daly has contended that the university has punished her for
pushing the boundaries of theology and philosophy while benefitting from her
high profile. In an article she wrote for the Feb. 26/March 4, 1996, issue of
The New Yorker magazine, she said Boston College had served as my
laboratory for the study of patriarchal tricks.
In the most recent controversy, a group of 14 female students
demonstrated support for Daly in a letter published in the Feb. 15 issue of the
campus newspaper, The Heights. The students described the impasse
between Daly and university officials as symptomatic of a much broader
problem, that being a disrespect for and stifling of the multiplicity of
perspectives crucial to academic freedom.
The students wrote, Throughout her 33-year career at Boston
College, Professor Daly has provided insight, inspiration and mentoring as a
world-renowned philosopher/theologian and radical lesbian feminist. In refusing
to support Professor Daly against the potential lawsuit threatened by the
Center for Individual Rights, the administration is silencing Mary Daly and
negating the very ideals that it proclaims invaluable.
Kate Heekin, one of the signers, said one class with Daly
absolutely changed my life. She added: I consider it a
tragedy that shes not teaching here anymore. I really do, Heekin
said.
Heekin acknowledged, though, the difficulty of mobilizing broad
support for Daly in the current academic environment. I cant tell
you how difficult it is to get even 20 women who have taken Mary Dalys
classes and consider themselves pretty radical to mobilize, she said.
But there are about 10 of us, all seniors, who wont graduate
without letting the university know we are not happy about this.
Megan Niziol, another signer, said Daly is invaluable
as a professor. She provides the environment to examine everything in
your life in a way I had never done before, Niziol said.
Daly said she would use her leave to write a sequel to her most
recent book, Quintessence ... Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical
Elemental Feminist Manifesto (Beacon Press 1998).
Other titles of Dalys books, many of then notable for
creative wordplay, are Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of
Womens Liberation; Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy;
Websters First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English
Language; and Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage.
Dalys work, though it has not earned her full professorship
at Boston College, is known internationally. There are dissertations and
books about my books, she said. She is frequently invited to speak at
universities and conferences in the United States and abroad.
The only place my work isnt recognized is at Boston
College, she said.
National Catholic Reporter, March 5,
1999
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