Photo credit: Brown Alumni Monthly
Louise Lamphere vs. Brown University 1977
Louise Lamphere vs. Brown University 1979
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Becoming a Squeaky Wheel
I can still remember the day on May 24, 1974 when I sat across the desk from Philip Leis, Chair of the Anthropology Department at Brown University, and he told me that I would not be getting tenure. I would have one more year of teaching at Brown and then be out of a job. He measured his words carefully when I asked him the reason that the six tenured males in the department had not recommended me to the Provost, Merton Stolz, who had in turn ratified their decision. He said that the faculty had been “evenly divided,” that my teaching was “poor but not so much worse than others,” and that my essay in the newly published collection (Woman, Culture and Society, (1974, co-edited with the late Shelly Rosaldo who taught at Stanford) revealed “an extremely weak theoretical orientation.”
The department had held off the decision until late in the semester (a bad sign I suspected) and I was just learning of the decision a week before graduation. My initial reaction was one of anger. “This can’t be happening to me,” I thought, yet I felt I had to do something about it. I remember leaving his office shaken but with determination. I spent the next ten days frantically trying to contact Provost Stolz, Donald Hornig, Brown’s President, and Jacqueline Mattfeld, the only woman administrator. I was told that there would be no appointments during the next week before graduation. After receiving a letter giving me the gist of the department’s reasons for not supporting tenure, I wrote a letter to President Hornig that was never answered. I spoke briefly with Jacqueline Mattfield, on her way home for a pre- graduation luncheon. She told me “her hands were tied.” My memory of this period is one of knocking on a number of doors, but being refused. I felt I had no one to turn to and no place to go within the university structure.
On the bright and sunny graduation afternoon, I attended the departmental ceremony on the lawn outside our building and asked Phil if I could speak to him privately in his office. I told him I had hired a lawyer; I intended to sue. This was my squeaky wheel moment, letting the Department know I was not going away quietly and propelling me on a trajectory that resulted in a Title VII sex discrimination lawsuit against Brown University.
Louise Lamphere 