GENDER BIAS SUIT AT SEMINARY
Sheri L. Klouda, a former professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has filed suit, alleging that her contract was not renewed because of her gender. Her complaint states that Southwestern's new president had publicly announced that he would build the faculty with "God-called men" and that he had informed Klouda that "he would not renew her contract to teach or recommend her for tenure based solely upon the fact that she was a woman."
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education 3/12/07

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Case Updates UC News COGNITION AND BIAS REPORTS ON FACULTY and CLIMATE SURVEYS
SEX DISCRIMINATION: NEW BOOK CSU NEWS A PERPLEXING TENURE DECISION THE BRIDGE BETWEEN AMBIGUOUS, SUBTLE FORMS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND AN INVISIBLE CULTURE OF GENDER BIAS


Welcome to Newsletter 25
By Pat Washington, Co-cordinator

 For more than 13 years, WAGE has been a strong voice for the equitable treatment of women and minorities in the academy. WAGE began out of the recognition that women in the UC system needed an advocacy organization. But, as soon as WAGE began, its founders became aware of inequities outside the UC system, and offered advice and support to those outside of UC. We have since come to acknowledge this more consciously in our mission statement, and in our attention to inequities in the csu system and community colleges. Although we do have a dedicated Governing Council that is devoted to educational equity, we rely on the engaged support and reinforcement that comes from our members and allies. So, I want to begin this welcome by thanking each and every individual that values and sustains the work that WAGE does.

 Many of us experience WAGE as a supportive network of women and our allies who offer moral and financial support; encouragement and frank conversations about how individual experiences of academic discrimination are linked to a broader assault on educational access. We are afforded opportunities to understand the financial, emotional, and career costs attached to standing up to academic discrimination so we can make realistic decisions about how to engage in these struggles on behalf of ourselves and others. WAGE is all of that.

 WAGE is also a learning community. Our most recent WAGE forum in San Diego is an example of this. The WAGE Forum was held on Saturday, November 11, 2006 at the Malcolm X Library in San Diego. Our speakers inspired us with stories of hope, perseverance, lessons learned, and relevant information about key developments in legal, activist, communications, and socio-political arenas that either help us advance equity in the academy or that make our work just a little more difficult. At the end of an invigorating day of workshops focused on issues that included understanding subtle communication cues that impact academic success, building meaningful coalitions, effective use of technology to promote our work, legal perspectives on the backlash against educational equity, strategies for protecting whistleblowers, Filipina contributions to educational equity, and much, much more - workshop participants exchanged contact information and, we hope, planted the seeds for ongoing engagement with the issues presented. The Governing Council is grateful for the way our workshop facilitators gave us energy and power to persevere in this work. They inspired us to forge stronger relationships with you, our WAGE members. We'd like to work more closely with you to do the work that remains if we are to make educational equity a reality for women and girls.

 Please let us hear from you. If you would like to sponsor a WAGE meeting, have news to share with WAGE members, can distribute WAGE materials on your campus, would like participate in Governing Council meetings, or become more integral to the work of the organization in any way, please contact Mary Singleton maryhas@juno.com or 505 689-1099.) or myself ( PatWashingtonPhD@aol.com or 619 582-5383) or any Governing Council member.

 We look forward to hearing from you.

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