Neglecting the obligation to best serve society

Feminist authors have explored the tension between academic work and activism when reflecting on the role of Women's Studies. Women's Studies programs were created in many universities in North America to transform higher education institutions and break down the academic-community divides that perpetuated gender, class and other discriminations (Orr, 1999). In spite of those initial ideals, Women's Studies programs had to maintain the separation of their scholarly and outreach functions to develop a legitimate place within the academy (Orr, 1999; Krajewski, 1999). Orr (1999) cites from an interview with Anne Truax, the Director of the Women's Centre at the University Women's Liberation (UWL) of the Minnesota campus to describe the motives behind this decision. "So we were trying to make sure that women's studies was so damned pure that nobody could doubt for a minute that it wasn't scholarly and worth pursuing" (in Orr, 1999, p. 2). As feminist discourses and methodologies have become part of academic life, feminist researchers have re-examined the separation between their conceptual work and their practice. Several authors (Haney, 1999; Fernandez, 1999; Orr, 1999) argue that it is essential for Women's Studies programs to include an activist component.

[A]n academic women's studies program with no activism component conveys the idea that feminism is only about ideas, not about working with those ideas (Haney, 1999, p.11).

The critique of academic structures and practices is not exclusive to feminist authors. In the past decade, there has been a considerable increase in the examination of academic practices. A comparative review of the subject index in the two editions of the Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, 2000) can illuminate the increasing interest in the study of the academy. The 1994 Edition does not show any entries for the subjects "academy" or "academic." The subject "university" shows several entries, all of them for specific universities (p. 632). These refer to specific projects carried out by the universities. The 2000 Edition of the handbook, however, shows 6 subheadings under academia/academics and includes one article that explores universities' mandates and their potential to support research with participatory components (Greenwood and Levin, 2000) and another that examines the issues surrounding funded research (Cheek, 2000). The subject "universities" includes 10 subheadings including "power relations and universities," and "action research and universities." This edition includes only one entry for a specific university, the University of Chicago. These are examples of the shift in interest in the study of academic structures and the topics researchers are concentrating on.