Living When Everything Changed
My Life in Academia
Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Rutgers University Press
Published:9th Aug '19
Should be back in stock very soon
Entering the academy at the dawn of the women’s rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first generation of feminist academics had a difficult journey. With few female role models, they had to forge their own path and prove that feminist scholarship was a legitimate enterprise. Later, when many of these scholars moved into administrative positions, hoping to reform the university system from within, they encountered entrenched hierarchies, bureaucracies, and old boys’ networks that made it difficult to put their feminist principles into practice.
In this compelling memoir, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault describes how a Catholic girl from small-town Nebraska discovered her callings as a feminist, as an academic, and as a university administrator. She recounts her experiences at three very different schools: the small progressive Lewis & Clark College, the massive regional university of Cal State Fullerton, and the rapidly expanding Portland State University. Reflecting on both her accomplishments and challenges, she considers just how much second-wave feminism has transformed academia and how much reform is still needed.
With remarkable candor and compassion, Thompson Tetreault provides an intimate personal look at an era when both women’s lives and university culture changed for good.
The Acknowledgments were inadvertently left out of the first printing of this book. We apologize for the oversight, and offer them here instead. Future printings will include this information. (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/29185420/Thompson-Tetreault-Acknowledgments.pdf)
"The strengths of this memoir lie in the author's honesty about her ambition as well as her insecurities. We follow her interior and outward struggle as she advocates for herself and her career while navigating a minefield of departmental territorialism, faculty egos, institutional hierarchy, cultural norms, and power dynamics, as well as emerging pressures of gender and race diversity in the world of higher education."— EqualwRites
“Living When Everything Changed is a remarkably candid account of an academic and administrative career filled with both successes and failures. While it offers a sometimes-painful picture of academic conflicts, paralysis, and betrayals, over the course of her career Tetreault and her colleagues grappled with many of the most important issues in higher education over several decades. In this sense it is surely true that Tetreault’s career (including her preparation for her career) took place in “interesting times,” and this volume offers readers a rare glimpse of the complicated mix of motivations, personalities, values and ideologies that animated both challenges to the status quo and resistance to those challenges.”— Abigail J. Stewart, co-author of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence
“This is one of the bravest books about the long trajectory of leadership in higher education that I have read in a long time. Tetreault takes us on both a personal and professional journey through her triumphs and tribulations as she balances essentially three worlds every day; that of administrator and leader, academic, and wife and mother."— Yolanda Moses, co-author of How Real is Race: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology
"Selected New Books on Higher Education," compiled by Ki-Jana Deadwyler and Ruth Hammond
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Selected-New-Books-on-Higher/247595— Chronicle of Higher Education
ISBN: 9780813594903
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm
Weight: 463g
276 pages