Remarks to the University's Women's Studies 20th-annual conference, Columbia
March 2, 2007

On behalf of the faculty, staff and students of the University of South Carolina, I extend a warm and hearty welcome to the Women's Studies Program Twentieth Annual Conference. It took a long time for the white males who dominated the American professoriate from its inception to wake up to the fact that women are absolutely essential to higher education, and that the future of our institutions rests on the shoulders of women and men of all races, creeds, sexual orientations, and other characteristics by which we typically distinguish ourselves from one another.

I began my professorial career at a historically black university and then sequentially taught at two women's liberal arts colleges: parenthetically, an increasingly endangered species. One of the women's colleges had a male president, and in both of these schools more than half the faculty were men. I am delighted that we have seen substantial changes in the gender composition of faculty not only in women's colleges but throughout the academy in the 40 years since I received my first university appointment. But we continue to do an inadequate job of establishing opportunities for women in all administrative ranks of our universities and colleges, as well as in the professoriate. And contrary to the opinion of the most recent president of a prominent institution in Massachusetts, I most emphatically and categorically reject his allegation that women are genetically impaired in some fields of scholarship!

I am a huge believer in leadership by example, and that begins at the top. I became president of the University of South Carolina in summer 2002. Since then, the number of tenured or tenure-track women faculty members has risen by over 21 percent! During precisely the same period the number of men who are tenured or tenure-track dropped by 9 percent. In other words, women have gone up by more than one-fifth and men have gone down by about one-tenth. We're not where we need to be, but we're making progress. We obviously don't have final numbers for next fall, because recruitment is currently under way for the upcoming academic year, but I fully expect that those trends will continue year after year.

Another way of leading by example is offering opportunities in our administrative ranks. When I became president of this University four and one-half years ago, there were only four women as senior administrators: Mary Ann Parsons, dean of the College of Nursing; Pat Moody, dean of the College of Hotel, Restaurant, and Sport Management; Shirley Mills, director of government relations; and Jane Jameson, vice president for human resources. After Mary Ann Parsons retired, I named Peggy Hewlett as her successor. During the past four years, we merged the College of Liberal Arts with the College of Science and Math, and I appointed Mary Ann Fitzpatrick as dean of by far our largest faculty, the College of Arts and Sciences.

I also appointed Donna Richter, dean of our Arnold School of Public Health; Shirley Carter Staples, director of the School of Journalism; Samantha Hastings, director of the School of Library and Information Sciences; Madilyn Fletcher, director of the School of the Environment; Christine Curtis, vice provost for faculty development; Elise Ahyi, assistant provost; Rosemarie Booze, associate vice president for research; Michele Dodenhoff, associate vice president for University development; and Deborah Beck, executive director of the Student Health Center. With one exception, each of these persons is the first woman in the history of this University to hold her position.

As a result of all the above decanal appointments, over 55 percent of our tenured and tenure-track faculty and the overwhelming majority of department chairs and institute directors report to women deans. As these deans acquire administrative experience, it is my hope that -- in spite of what is often an extremely hot seat, dealing with conflicting claims from competing constituencies and long days that stretch into long evenings -- they will choose to become university provosts and presidents.

The message to all our faculty, staff, students, and alumni reflected in the appointments of these 10 senior women administrators during the past three years is very clear: we highly value the leadership women provide. I wish you well in all your endeavors, and trust that we will all work together to establish greater prominence for the field of women's studies and provide leadership opportunities for women in every nook and cranny of higher education.