Former GSE Dean Jerome T. Murphy said at the time Fonda announced her $12.5 billion pledge that he hoped to fill Gilligan’s chair by this school year—but the position, rejected by University of California Professor of Anthropology Emerita Sarah B. Hrdy, has remained vacant.
For two years, the GSE has had three empty chairs in gender studies—a junior chair, the chair Fonda donated, and the chair Gilligan vacated.
Gilligan departed Harvard to become a university professor at New York University in June 2002, a move she announced the same day Fonda pledged her donation to GSE in Gilligan’s honor.
Donation Inspiration
Fonda, a well-known activist who led an anti-teen pregnancy campaign in Georgia and traveled to Vietnam to promote peace, said she first encountered Gilligan’s work—the ultimate inspiration for her donation—when writer Gloria Steinem gave her a copy of In a Different Voice, Gilligan’s book on female psychology.
At the time of the 2001 donation announcement, Fonda called the gift a “thank-you” to Gilligan for helping her recognize the “toxic” effect of gender roles.
Gilligan taught at Harvard for more than 20 years and held the University’s first endowed chair for gender studies.
Through her studies of human development, Gilligan offered new ideas of male and female psychology which questioned existing views that held women to be less developed in their moral sense than men.
But Gilligan’s departure—and the vacancies in both her Graham professorship and the chair in her name—left GSE without the leadership in gender studies that it once had.
In fact, among the 15 people GSE lists with gender studies as a research interest, not one is currently a full professor except for GSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann herself.
Lagemann could not be reached for comment over the weekend.
Gilligan has repeatedly said that she never felt free to leave Harvard until the Fonda donation created a mandate for future work in gender studies.
“When Harvard takes a step, a path opens,” Gilligan said in October. “What’s important is not to dribble away these resources.”
—Lauren R. Dorgan, Claire A. Pasternack and Elisabeth S. Theodore contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.