Book Details

Description

"Presents a social history of gender stratification at the University of California at Berkeley through a combination of organizational theory and biography. ""The book brings women into the story of American higher education, especially the research university. But what is special about this feat is that it also provides a new model for institutional history--it corrects or avoids all the predictable mistakes and misplaced emphases that have long plagued campus chronicles. For example, it cuts beneath the rhetoric of commencement oratory, it elevates departments and subfields as crucial arenas where academic battles and issues were considered; it makes a reader consider famous presidents, trustees, and scholars in the ways they really worked."" -- John R. Thelin, University of Kentucky The Academic Kitchen tells the story of the evolution of an all-women’s department, the Department of Home Economics, at the University of California, Berkeley from 1905 to 1954. The book’s unique focus on the connection between gender and the status of a particular academic department challenges organizational theorists and higher education specialists to reconsider their traditional analysis of academic departments. By incorporating gender in the analysis, Nerad reveals the process by which departments traditionally dominated by women, including education, library science, nursing, social welfare, and home economics, begin as separate (and unequal) programs and are subsequently eliminated (or sustained without economic rewards, prestige, and power) when administrators no longer regard them as useful. ""This is an unusually rich study--an analysis replete with historical nuggets that capture the ordeals that women academics were required to endure. The book, accordingly, is interesting, even fascinating, as the reader observes Professor Morgan’s struggle to gain respectability for her and her colleagues’ pursuits."" -- Jack H. Schuster, Claremont Graduate University"

 Maresi Nerad is Director of Graduate Research at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published several works, including Graduate Education in the United States (with R. June and D. Miller).