Mary Childers
Visiting Prof, Women's Studies, U. Cincinnati; former Director of Capital Giving and Affirmative Action Officer at Dartmouth

Professor Childers describes her talk on "The Humanities and the Human Dollar" as a commentary on the ways humanists feel about, and use, money. Most artists and humanists, she suggests, enjoy living in the material world. But many have ethical qualms about pursuing the almighty dollar. Humanists should have a "calling"; our love of our subjects and our commitment to education are supposed to come before our desire for professional prestige and remuneration. How, then, to go about earning a living and securing financial support for the Humanities? Childers will discuss alternative employment options for humanities Ph.D.s as well as the public sphere's needs and fears regarding the things humanities Ph.D.s have been learning. In doing so she will address student services and development, and recent theories of bureaucracy and administrative control.

Childers has a Ph.D. in literary studies, and continues actively to publish and give presentations on modernism; she also publishes on public sphere issues and has appeared in a variety of media, including radio shows and an appearance on the McNeill-Leader News Hour commenting on race in contemporary America. She has held academic as well as administrative posts: she was Director of Dartmouth College's Women's Center, its chief Affirmative Action Officer, and Director of Capital Civing. She recently resigned from this post in order to finish a book manuscript and have more time for fund-raising for nonprofit that support Humanities education for economically disadvantaged students.

Selected Publications:

• Recent articles include:
  • "A Spontaneous Welfare Rights Protest by Politically Inactive Mothers: A Daughter's Reflections," Radical Mothers: Activist Voices from Left to Right, ed. Alexis Jetter, et al. (Univ. Press of New England, 1997)
  • "-ISM (N.): Lessons Learned from the National Video Diversity Project," Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 29, no. 2 (March/April 1997)
  • "Virgina Woolf on the Outside Looking Down, and Out: Reflections on the Class of Women," Modern Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (1992)
  • "A Conversation about Race and Class," with bell hooks, in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (Routledge, 1990)
  • "The Response to Sexual Harassment Claims in One Women's Resource Center," Handbook for the University and College Women's Center (forthcoming, Greenwood Press)