organizational expertise to negotiate with their home institutions and to help them
realize their objectives in ways that would give them a firm foundation while pro-
viding academic freedom and flexibility to explore.

These faculty leaders approached Radcliffe College, a longstanding leader in
women's education and research with unique resources for women's scholarship,
especially in women's studies, as a possible home for this new consortium. My
recent statements, as the newly installed president of Radcliffe, about my com-
mitment to explore collaborative approaches to advance society by advancing
women through education, research, and policy had caught their attention. They
were also aware of my previous experiences in fostering and overseeing gradu-
ate education, interdisciplinary research, and interinstitutional collaboration in
major university settings. An exciting collaborative exploration began.

As the president of Radcliffe College, I collaborated with the faculty orga-
nizers to design an organizational framework to protect institutional prerogatives
and to give a faculty board authority over academic policy within a carefully ar-
ticulated set of principles. Radcliffe agreed to offer credit for the completion of
courses; committed space, staff, and budget; and negotiated a Memorandum of
Understanding with leaders of the participating institutions.

Together the founding faculty members, from Boston College, Brandeis Uni-
versity, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern
University, and Tufts University, refined their ideas about organization, scholar-
ship, and pedagogy and engaged their colleagues and graduate students in iden-
tifying topics and themes of greatest interest and import to serve as the basis for
the development of new graduate courses. They designed the Consortium to of-
fer exclusively new, team-taught, interdisciplinary courses at the graduate level
as electives to students matriculating in graduate programs in these institutions.
Committed to deep collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, the founders de-
cided that each course would be led, not serially, but throughout the course, by
two or three faculty members from different disciplines and different institutions.
All courses would consider gender, race, age, class, sexuality, and ethnicity as
variables and all would address the links among theory, policy and practice.

A pilot course, " Feminist Perspectives in Research: Interdisciplinary Practice
in the Study of Gender," began the Consortium's offerings and came to serve as
a continuing core course that evolved each year as different faculty collaborated
to lead it. Additional course proposals would continue to emerge from workshops
convened around interdisciplinary themes in which faculty and graduate students
shared the directions and issues in their research and found collaborators to ad-
vance their scholarship and teaching in ways that penetrated disciplinary bound-
aries and enlarged concepts and methodological expertise.

In 1998 the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS) at Radcliffe
College celebrated its fifth anniversary and its splendid success in bringing to-
gether Boston-area feminist scholars and teachers to advance graduate teaching
and interdisciplinary scholarship in women's studies. The courses not only ex-
amine existing feminist scholarship, but they also open paths to the creation of
new knowledge. They provide crucial intellectual support for students pursuing

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