I was honored to be invited to the February 2026 American Association of University Women’s board meeting to offer brief remarks about my AAUW Fellowship year (1986-87), what that experience meant to me, and how it has shaped my career and current work.
Preparing for those remarks took me on quite a trip down memory lane! I found myself weaving together multiple threads: the reality of being a working graduate student in the 1980s; the profound professional impact of a nationally competitive fellowship; and the stories of two grandmothers born in the 1890s, women whose educational paths were shaped, and constrained, by the policies of their time.
Here, I share the images I could not share at the AAUW board meeting, but that belong with the fuller narrative. Together, they offer a reflection on women’s education across generations, higher education as a public good, and why broadening access to educational opportunity remains central to my work as an educator and dean.
This is the typed form letter that E. D. Hirsch, who was chair of the English Department at the University of Virginia (UVA) at the time, wrote, explaining for tax payment purposes, how I was compensated as a graduate student “apprentice” in 1983. It now hangs in a frame in my office at George Mason University.
I was what we would now call a “contemporary student” when I started graduate school in 1980. I worked multiple part-time jobs throughout graduate school. In addition to teaching for the English Department, I tutored engineering undergraduates in writing, I assisted a sociology faculty member with finalizing for publication a study of disability services, and spent one summer working the front desk at Sygma News Agency in New York City while living rent-free with a friend of my sister’s. I also worked as a copy editor in a local law firm and as a cashier at a wonderful independent bookstore.
In 1987, getting an $11,000 AAUW dissertation fellowship, which Google AI tells me is equivalent in purchasing power to about $31,400 in 2026, gave me an opportunity to work full time on my dissertation. Just as importantly, it gave me something my top-five-ranked PhD program could not—namely the cache of receiving a nationally competitive graduate fellowship award. That credential mattered. It helped me finish my graduate education and research training and allowed me to stand out in my first foray into a highly competitive academic job market.
Two grandmothers, two educational histories
The other two images I would have wanted to share at the AAUW board meeting are of two women—both born in the 1890s in this country—whose stories I have come to know more fully only in recent months, as my 96-year-old mom has begun sharing parts of our family history that weren’t part of the tapestry of stories I heard growing up.
My mom’s mom, Olliebelle Steppert Rau, was the daughter of a German immigrant farmer who believed that women needed no more than an eighth-grade education. Her father paid her 25 cents an hour to clean the chicken coup on the farm where their family lived as hired help. She saved all of her earnings to cover the cost of normal school tuition, earned her teaching degree, and taught in a public school in Peru [“Pee roo”], Ohio until she married my granddad. At that point, she had to give up her teaching job because it wasn’t legal for married women to be teachers. My grandad was a farmer with an eighth-grade education who eventually started a small trucking company. What I know now that I didn’t know growing up is that he didn’t care whether his four children went to college or not. But my grandmother did! And when their oldest son came back from Italy after serving in the Air Force during World War II, he was the first member of their family to complete a college degree, the trendsetter for his siblings.
Ethel Layer Ardis, my dad’s mom, started college during World War I to study metallurgy but “lost her place when the men came back from the war” (as my mom told this story to me at Thanksgiving 2025). She was a voracious reader throughout her life, still reading the Wall Street Journal and tracking the stock market when she died at 94 while I was in graduate school. She peppered me with questions about my research (and my life choices) while I was a PhD student at UVA. But she never finished a college degree.
“What are you going to do with that?” is a question I heard often from my parents as well as all of my aunts and uncles as both an undergraduate and graduate student. I was an English major, and the third child in a family of four. My older siblings went to nursing and medical school. All of my cousins on both sides of my family were pursuing engineering, science and business degrees. So there was always an edge to that question every time it came up at family gatherings. A just-under-the-surface skepticism about the usefulness of a humanities degree as what we now call “workforce readiness.”
I know now that this question was meant kindly, that it was informed by my parents’ generation’s desire to see their children enjoy a return on investment on a college education similar to what they themselves experienced as first-generation college-goers. College degrees, and graduate professional degrees in medicine, law, and engineering, had changed the trajectories of their lives. They had opened opportunities for economic and social mobility, and moved my parents’ generation beyond the experiences of their grandparents, as immigrants to this country from Germany, Scotland, and Ireland in the nineteenth century, who worked as farmers and day laborers.
My aunts, uncles, and parents were keenly aware that they themselves had benefited substantially from America’s grand expansion of the public higher education system post-World War II. They were, one and all, committed to helping their children get a four-year college degree. My cousins, my siblings, and I benefited enormously from the relatively low cost of public higher education tuition in the 1970s. My undergraduate tuition at the University of Kansas was about $275/semester, for example, and while my dad’s career as a VA hospital administrator and physician took our family all over this country over the course of his career—from Michigan to Ohio, from Ohio to California, then on to Minnesota, Illinois, Maryland, Kansas, and finally to Virginia when my youngest brother was in high school—I myself am keenly aware that my siblings and I benefitted from very strong K12 public education systems in all of these states in the 60s and 70s.
Why this still matters
Today, I have the privilege of serving as the dean of a College of Humanities and Social Sciences at an access-oriented public Tier 1 research university that serves, graduates, and launches successfully into a diverse array of careers in a global knowledge-based economy, high numbers of demographically diverse students, many of whom are first-generation college goers, military veterans and/or dependents, Pell Grant recipients, and transfer students from Virginia’s superb community college system.
At a moment when the idea of higher education as a public good is increasingly questioned as perceptions of its value relative to cost continue to shift, and as the cost of a college education continues to skyrocket, I remind my faculty as often as possible of our fundamental purpose: our educational mission, at George Mason in particular, is to widen the aperture of opportunity for the contemporary students we serve.
What I know now, in 2026, about how my grandmothers’ educational history was impacted by both the history of public education and the evolution of legal policy related to women’s employment opportunities in this country, lends a new dimension of deeply personal poignancy to my lifelong passion as an educator for supporting the “next generation” successes of students for whom education is a lifeline, an opportunity for economic and social mobility for their families, not simply or only for themselves.
I offer a special shout-out of thanks to all grandmothers who stand behind and support our contemporary students’ dreams, and to AAUW for its longstanding and impactful advocacy for women’s education at all levels, and equally importantly, across so many different fields of study—since 1881!