Item Information
Title
Dr. Gillian Cell, former Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC, from an oral history conducted in 2007
Description
Dr. Gillian Cell, former Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC, discusses her experiences as a professor. Voiced by Julia Gibson with Gwendolyn Schwinke as interviewer
Creator
PlayMaker’s Repertory Company in collaboration with the University Archives at Louis Round Wilson Library
Source
Interview with Gillian T. Cell by Rachel Martin, 17 July 2007 L-0274, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Series L: University of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/04007L/
Date
2021
Language
English
Identifier
Transcription
Interviewer/Gwen: Dr. Gillian Cell, former Professor of History and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC, from an oral history conducted in 2007.
Cell/Julia: There weren’t many other women to find, and the consequence is, looking back, the friends I have from the 1960s are men, people like Dick Soloway, Don Matthews, people who came in after I did, as a matter of fact. And my women friends are from the ‘70s because that’s when significant numbers of women began to come into the university, after Title IX. You see, my first year of teaching was the first year that women had been admitted to the freshman class. Prior to that, you could come to the university as a freshman if you were a nursing student or if you lived with your family off-campus. You could come also as a junior. If you’d done two years at a junior college, you could then come in and do your last two years at Chapel Hill, but virtually no freshman. So the first year I taught, I had classes with no women; I had classes with maximum, I think, three women. I was told by an eighteen-year-old, “I was taught by women in high school. I did not expect to be taught by women in college,” to which I think I said in effect, “Get over it.” (laughs) It was very interesting.
Interviewer: How did the other male faculty in the history department respond to you? You’ve mentioned some who were very supportive. Was that a widespread experience?
GC: Many of the older faculty, I think, were very traditional. And interestingly, a number of them had wives whom they had met in graduate school, but those w omen had then given up when they got married, certainly when they had children. I was told at one point by the chair of the department that he did not understand professional women. His wife actually subsequently published a book with the Cambridge University Press, and I think nobody was kinder and seemed happier when my appointment as dean was announced than she did. It was very interesting. So, I think the older faculty, they weren’t hostile. I think they just didn’t know how to relate to a woman as a colleague and accept that she was serious. And of course, I was, I had another child, and that, I think, struck them as quite odd. (laughs) But we were hiring a succession of young faculty. The ‘60s, of course, was a time of tremendous growth in the university and in universities in general. In ’68, we hired six new faculty members, and from that cohort particularly I found a lot of friends. But I think, as I say, for the olde r ones it was just something they weren’t used to, and they just didn’t quite know how to deal with it. I think it would have been beyond their imaginations to think that I could ever have been chair of the department, let alone dean of Arts and Sciences. They just wouldn’t have been able to conceive of it. Of course, I couldn’t have either. (laughs)
Interviewer: Okay. How did the Association of Faculty Women evolve? Were you part of that process?
GC: You know, I really don’t remember because we tried so many times to get a women’s group, faculty group going, and it would go for awhile and then it would kind of fall away and then we’d start it up again. We did it in different ways. At one point, we had a much more umbrella women’s group that had sort of these like separate chapters of faculty and women and staff. That didn’t work. But yes, I think it was just from the feeling of the women there, that particularly for junior faculty there needed to be something there that would support them. I think I mentioned in my earlier interview something called the Class of 1974, which was a significant group of women who were brought into the university, including some African American women, and by the time I was in affirmative action, you could see them. Some of them had left before the tenure decision. Many of them were denied tenure. I talked to one woman in psychology who had waited two years expecting to be asked what kind of a lab she needed, and it wasn’t until she was in her third year and getting panic-stricken that she went and said, “I need a lab.” Well, of course, at that point she was significantly disadvantaged. So those were the kinds of things, I think, that we felt that younger women needed to know: there were older women who had made it and who would be willing to help them and mentor them, because very often they were very isolated. And particularly with women where there were no senior women in the department. I think once you got a couple of tenured women, the atmosphere of the department tended to shift somewhat. But if you were brought in as an assistant professor and there was nobody else, and some departments did have a succession of a single assistant professor female who, they rotated them.
Cell/Julia: There weren’t many other women to find, and the consequence is, looking back, the friends I have from the 1960s are men, people like Dick Soloway, Don Matthews, people who came in after I did, as a matter of fact. And my women friends are from the ‘70s because that’s when significant numbers of women began to come into the university, after Title IX. You see, my first year of teaching was the first year that women had been admitted to the freshman class. Prior to that, you could come to the university as a freshman if you were a nursing student or if you lived with your family off-campus. You could come also as a junior. If you’d done two years at a junior college, you could then come in and do your last two years at Chapel Hill, but virtually no freshman. So the first year I taught, I had classes with no women; I had classes with maximum, I think, three women. I was told by an eighteen-year-old, “I was taught by women in high school. I did not expect to be taught by women in college,” to which I think I said in effect, “Get over it.” (laughs) It was very interesting.
Interviewer: How did the other male faculty in the history department respond to you? You’ve mentioned some who were very supportive. Was that a widespread experience?
GC: Many of the older faculty, I think, were very traditional. And interestingly, a number of them had wives whom they had met in graduate school, but those w omen had then given up when they got married, certainly when they had children. I was told at one point by the chair of the department that he did not understand professional women. His wife actually subsequently published a book with the Cambridge University Press, and I think nobody was kinder and seemed happier when my appointment as dean was announced than she did. It was very interesting. So, I think the older faculty, they weren’t hostile. I think they just didn’t know how to relate to a woman as a colleague and accept that she was serious. And of course, I was, I had another child, and that, I think, struck them as quite odd. (laughs) But we were hiring a succession of young faculty. The ‘60s, of course, was a time of tremendous growth in the university and in universities in general. In ’68, we hired six new faculty members, and from that cohort particularly I found a lot of friends. But I think, as I say, for the olde r ones it was just something they weren’t used to, and they just didn’t quite know how to deal with it. I think it would have been beyond their imaginations to think that I could ever have been chair of the department, let alone dean of Arts and Sciences. They just wouldn’t have been able to conceive of it. Of course, I couldn’t have either. (laughs)
Interviewer: Okay. How did the Association of Faculty Women evolve? Were you part of that process?
GC: You know, I really don’t remember because we tried so many times to get a women’s group, faculty group going, and it would go for awhile and then it would kind of fall away and then we’d start it up again. We did it in different ways. At one point, we had a much more umbrella women’s group that had sort of these like separate chapters of faculty and women and staff. That didn’t work. But yes, I think it was just from the feeling of the women there, that particularly for junior faculty there needed to be something there that would support them. I think I mentioned in my earlier interview something called the Class of 1974, which was a significant group of women who were brought into the university, including some African American women, and by the time I was in affirmative action, you could see them. Some of them had left before the tenure decision. Many of them were denied tenure. I talked to one woman in psychology who had waited two years expecting to be asked what kind of a lab she needed, and it wasn’t until she was in her third year and getting panic-stricken that she went and said, “I need a lab.” Well, of course, at that point she was significantly disadvantaged. So those were the kinds of things, I think, that we felt that younger women needed to know: there were older women who had made it and who would be willing to help them and mentor them, because very often they were very isolated. And particularly with women where there were no senior women in the department. I think once you got a couple of tenured women, the atmosphere of the department tended to shift somewhat. But if you were brought in as an assistant professor and there was nobody else, and some departments did have a succession of a single assistant professor female who, they rotated them.