Living When Everything Changed

Entering the academy at the dawn of the women's rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first generation of feminist academics had a difficult journey. With few female role models, they had to forge their own path and prove that feminist scholarship was a legitimate enterprise. Later, when many of these scholars moved into administrative positions, hoping to reform the university system from within, they encountered entrenched hierarchies, bureaucracies, and old boys' networks that made it difficult to put their feminist principles into practice.

In this compelling memoir, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault describes how a Catholic girl from small-town Nebraska discovered her callings as a feminist, as an academic, and as a university administrator. She recounts her experiences at three very different schools: the small progressive Lewis & Clark College, the massive regional university of Cal State Fullerton, and the rapidly expanding Portland State University. Reflecting on both her accomplishments and challenges, she considers just how much second-wave feminism has transformed academia and how much reform is still needed.

With remarkable candor and compassion, Thompson Tetreault provides an intimate personal look at an era when both women's lives and university culture changed for good.

The Acknowledgments were inadvertently left out of the first printing of this book. We apologize for the oversight, and offer them here instead. Future printings will include this information. pdf)

“"This is one of the bravest books about the long trajectory of leadership in higher education that I have read in a long time. Tetreault takes us on both a personal and professional journey through her triumphs and tribulations as she balances essentially three worlds every day; that of administrator and leader, academic, and wife and mother."”

“This is one of the bravest books about the long trajectory of leadership in higher education that I have read in a long time. Tetreault takes us on both a personal and professional journey through her triumphs and tribulations as she balances essentially three worlds every day; that of administrator and leader, academic, and wife and mother." -- Yolanda Moses co-author of How Real is Race: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture and Biology
“Living When Everything Changed is a remarkably candid account of an academic and administrative career filled with both successes and failures. While it offers a sometimes-painful picture of academic conflicts, paralysis, and betrayals, over the course of her career Tetreault and her colleagues grappled with many of the most important issues in higher education over several decades. In this sense it is surely true that Tetreault’s career (including her preparation for her career) took place in “interesting times,” and this volume offers readers a rare glimpse of the complicated mix of motivations, personalities, values and ideologies that animated both challenges to the status quo and resistance to those challenges.” -- Abigail J. Stewart co-author of An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence
"Selected New Books on Higher Education," compiled by Ki-Jana Deadwyler and Ruth Hammond 
Chronicle of Higher Education
"The strengths of this memoir lie in the author's honesty about her ambition as well as her insecurities. We follow her interior and outward struggle as she advocates for herself and her career while navigating a minefield of departmental territorialism, faculty egos, institutional hierarchy, cultural norms, and power dynamics, as well as emerging pressures of gender and race diversity in the world of higher education." EqualwRites

Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault is provost emerita at Portland State University in Oregon. She is also the author or coauthor of several books, including The Feminist Classroom: Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Privilege. 

Entering the academy at the dawn of the women?s rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first generation of feminist academics had a difficult journey. With few female role models, they had to forge their own path and prove that feminist scholarship was a legitimate enterprise. Later, when many of these scholars moved into administrative positions, hoping to reform the university system from within, they encountered entrenched hierarchies, bureaucracies, and old boys? networks that made it difficult to put their feminist principles into practice. In this compelling memoir, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault describes how a Catholic girl from small-town Nebraska discovered her callings as a feminist, as an academic, and as a university administrator. She recounts her experiences at three very different schools: the small progressive Lewis & Clark College, the massive regional university of Cal State Fullerton, and the rapidly expanding Portland State University. Reflecting on both her accomplishments and challenges, she considers just how much second-wave feminism has transformed academia and how much reform is still needed. With remarkable candor and compassion, Thompson Tetreault provides an intimate personal look at an era when both women?s lives and university culture changed for good. The Acknowledgments were inadvertently left out of the first printing of this book. We apologize for the oversight, and offer them here instead. Future printings will include this information. pdf)

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