Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy

In her foreword to Coming of Age in Academe, Gloria Steinem shares Jane Roland Martin's laments about the current state of the academy, among them the exclusionary theoretical jargon that has taken over academic speech and writing. "Perhaps there should be signs on every road leading to Yale, Harvard, and so on," she suggests, "Beware: Deconstruction Ahead." In her clear, accessible argument about what has happened to women in academe, Martin never stoops to jargon herself. In fact, her devotion to plain speaking may at times remind the reader of George Bernard Shaw's devotion to simplified spelling. But in her 30 years as a college professor and philosopher of education, the author has achieved a clarity of vision that is well served by her unadorned prose. She asserts that "the academy charges an exorbitant admission fee to those women who wish to belong." Even worse, she contends, "in turning male and female members alike away from the lived experience of real people in the real world, and especially from society's desperately urgent problems, the academy creates a brain drain within the culture at large." An intelligent summary of familiar problems that also features some unfamiliar proposals for solutions, Coming of Age in Academe should be required reading for college administrators and feminist scholars from the post-Kristevan to the neo-Bovarian. --Regina Marler