Gail Thain Parker (born February 8, 1943, Chicago) is an American scholar of American literature, women's studies, author, and educational reformer. She is known for being the president of Bennington College from 1972 to 1976 and for controversies over educational reform.
Early life and education
Parker was born in Chicago to Richard and Jane Noyes Thain, but grew up in Evanston, Illinois. Her father was a journalist, professor of marketing, and later taught at the University of Chicago. He published studies of race relations in Evanston and books on management and job counseling. She graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1960. She later recalled that in her high-school commencement speech she attacked "specific examples of racism" in which a white classmate was ostracized for having a black friend. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 and went on to a PhD at Harvard. She then became an assistant professor of history and literature, one of the youngest tenured members of the Harvard faculty.
She married Thomas David Parker, June 9, 1964 (divorced, 1978) and later Paul Wickes, a lawyer.
Women's studies and American studies
Parker's first book, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War to World War I (1973), a group study of men and women who pursued psychological health practices, she described as "an essay in interpretation, rather than a full-scale study". (xi) Lawrence Buell, reviewing it in The New England Quarterly, called the book's attitudes toward these reformers "sympathetic yet critical". He found the discussions "at their best" to be "crisp and insightful", but "not entirely successful", since the analysis tended to "dissolve into anecdote". Her argument, however, was both "provocative and persuasive", different from earlier scholars who saw the movement as "essentially defensive retreat from practical realities". She saw the movement "in terms of an unresolved conflict between the desire for spiritual solace and the desire for a productive and successful life as the world measures it."
The Oven Birds: American Women on Womanhood (1974), her anthology of women's writings, used Women's Studies as an interdisciplinary approach. A review-of-the-field article welcomed it for using tools of both history and literary analysis.
Bennington College presidency
In 1972, after an extended search and discussion, the Board of Bennington College invited Parker to become president. Her husband, Thomas Parker, who had been senior tutor at a Harvard undergraduate House, was named vice president in charge of finance and administration. The New York Times reported that at the age of 29 she was the youngest college president in the country, which drew national curiosity. When a reporter asked whether her husband minded that she had a higher rank, she remarked "it's not everyone who gets to sleep with the president."
Bennington, founded in 1932 as a women's college, was known, and sometimes criticized, as a free-spirited and innovative place with nationally respected faculty, especially in its arts and writing programs, and affluent students. The college did not have required courses, majors, a college song, social clubs, or college sports. In the 1960s the board became concerned over financial problems, national unrest over race and gender, and changing student interests, and in 1969 decided to admit men.
Admitting men increased the size of the student body and pressure on faculty resources, and plans for major new construction created the need to borrow money at a time when interest rates were high and energy costs were rising. The new president thus faced a budget shortfall, demands for affirmative action and racial inclusion, maintaining or restoring academic standards, and construction of the college's Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) buildings. The Parkers, as young and innovative, were expected to deal with these challenges.
Affirmative action and the Black Studies Project
Parker's first concern was affirmative action to increase minority representation both in the student body and the staff and to hire more women. Her letter to the community of October 1973 warned that an Affirmative Action Program "in a narrowly compensatory spirit will surely fulfill the dire prophecies of those who fear quotas and reverse discrimination." In contrast, she continued, the plan she proposed was "one way of bringing the College closer to realizing its longstanding ideals of excellence, among them the ideal of an excellent diversity."