By Eli Motycka
Why did the Pembroke Center form?
The Pembroke Center was established in 1981, though efforts to establish it began in the late 1970s. It wasn’t solely a response to the merger between Pembroke College and Brown University. It was really an effort to establish a central locus for a particular kind of intellectual inquiry — certainly in a moment of social and intellectual activism, but also a moment of real intellectual excitement — by thinking about questions of difference. [The Center] was founded as a center to think critically about the production of knowledge about difference:[particularly] sexual difference but also difference more broadly.
From the beginning it was a center with multiple aims. It drew support from women who were alumnae of Pembroke, and alumnae support remains an important part of the Center. But the Center from the beginning had a real research mission: it sponsored postdoctoral fellows, had research seminars, had research initiatives [and] had public lectures. Elizabeth Weed, who was the founding associate director of the Center, was [also] one of the cofounding editors of a journal called “Differences”, which the Center still produces. It’s a center that has been devoted to publishing new things, to fostering young scholars, and to bringing people together for critical inquiry. And [while] some of this was certainly explicitly tied, in its name, to Pembroke University and the merger [with Brown], it wasn’t formed in just one step—there’s a more complicated history there.
Does the study of difference at the Pembroke Center extend only within gender and sexuality studies?
No, it’s a center that has broadly been interested in thinking about sexual difference, about race, religion, nationality, and I think about difference as an analytic category, as well as difference as a human experience. So I think [difference is] thought about very broadly.
One of the main worries of Pembroke College’s merger with Brown was that women students would lose support systems or resources like female administrators and the opportunity to be taught by female professors, how is that related to the Pembroke Center?
Well there are modes of support that we, at the Center, don’t provide that might come out of something like the Office for Student Life, but I would like to think that this is a center that offers both women and men a space where they can think about issues related to gender and have that recognized as an important and valid intellectual set of pursuits.
For Brown’s 250th, the Pembroke Center is putting on an exhibit and symposium about Louise Lamphere and the case Louise Lamphere v. Brown University, Civil Action 75-0140. Louise Lamphere was a professor in the Anthropology Department who, as an assistant professor, was denied tenure and sued Brown for sexual discrimination. The University ended up settling the case and went under the “consent decree” that operated for a little over a decade, [and] required setting up a monitoring committee to review hiring practices and decisions to make sure that they were equitable. This is something that wasn’t directly related to the Center but that people at the Center now are quite interested in. Many centers and departments are doing things on campus for Brown’s 250th [anniversary] and this is what we’re investigating.
Why does the Pembroke Center consider preserving the history of difference and equality at Brown important?
Well, first I would say, “Do we consider preserving and promoting the history of women at Brown as part of our mission?” and I think, yes, in the explicit form that the Center has archives that are about the history of women at Brown. We have an archivist on staff, there are papers of women who were Pembroke and Brown graduates, these are papers of both Brown and Rhode Island. Preserving the history of women at Brown is part of the mission of the Pembroke Center. It’s built in [to the Center], and the events — the symposium and the exhibit — related to the Lamphere case are really about reflecting on a pivotal moment in Brown’s history that was a transitional period. It was a time of activism and a time of broader shifts in social and cultural trends — a moment of shifting representations of men and women. I think [the 250th anniversary] is a moment to reflect both on what happened at Brown and think about the events that had a national impact, and to think about how that case is a lens with which to view broader social, cultural and political changes. The impetus to focus on the Lamphere case for Brown’s 250th [anniversary] came from the associates [and] came from the alumnae supporters of the Center. They originally sparked it and it’s become a bigger project. It’s a time to say, “This is a case that was transformative for Brown—what are its implications?”