Faculty approves name change to Program in the Study of Women and Gender

Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin presented the proposal on behalf of the Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy. Members of the program voted unanimously to institute the name change at their own executive committee meeting in September.

Developed originally in response to the national feminist movement in the late 1970s as the Program in Women’s Studies, the program adopted its current name in the 1990s.

Program director Jill Dolan explained in her written proposal to the committee that the faculty felt that a second name change was appropriate and necessary.

Dolan said that the faculty chose to change the name entirely, rather than add to the existing one, because “an additive approach to our name will never be sufficient but will always exclude identities, politics and practices that we in fact do address in our scholarship and teaching (such as race, ethnicity, ability, class and so forth).” She added that the titles of some courses offered by the program will still include the words “women,” “women’s studies” and “feminism.”

“The newly renamed Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton will continue to address each phase of the field’s development, maintaining its historical commitment to the specificity of women’s experience while offering feminist analytic tools across disciplines,” Dolan said.

Undergraduates seeking the certificate must take WOM 201: Introduction to the Study of Gender; WOM 302: Topics in the Study of Gender: Religion, Gender and Sexuality; and four elective courses in the discipline, and they must incorporate issues of gender and sexuality into their independent work.

Also addressed at the faculty meeting were curriculum changes in 14 departments of the Graduate School, as well as in the undergraduate departments of sociology and of ecology and evolutionary biology.

At the meeting, the Office of the Registrar presented the academic calendar for the 2014-15 academic year. Also, Politics professor Robert George read a memorial resolution for the late Walter Murphy, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus, who was a professor at Princeton for 37 years. The faculty stood for a moment of silence to honor Murphy’s passing last April.