Just a week before Joan Roberts presented the speech recorded on this tape she had been denied tenure, for the second time in less than three weeks, by a committee of the Educational Policy Studies Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The speech, delivered on March 6, 1974, was entitled “On Building a Feminist Future in Our Time”, but for the most part it described the political lessons Roberts had learned in fighting for tenure in a department in which she was the only woman.
Joan Roberts joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1968. In the early 1960s she had been employed by Teachers' College, Columbia University, as a member of the research staff of the Teachers for East Africa Program. Between 1964 and 1967 she was a research associate in Teacher Resources for Urban Education Project, Hunter College, New York. Born in Salt Lake City in 1935, Roberts earned a B.A. at the University of Utah (1957) and an M.A. (1960) and an Ed.D. (1970) at Columbia University.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison Roberts led the effort to establish a women's studies program, she taught the first such course on the campus, and she founded the statewide Association of Faculty Women. In both her tenure hearings, the faculty of the Educational Policy Studies Department approved strongly of her “community service” record and her teaching, although there was some feeling that her lectures were too polemical. She was denied tenure, however, on the grounds that her published work consisted mainly of programmatic statements rather than analytical research. The first hearing was held on February 8, 1974. The committee vote was 7-4 (with two abstentions) against granting tenure. The next day the Madison Capital Times reported that an “overflow crowd” participated in the proceedings to the extent that they degenerated into “utter chaos.”
On February 27, 1974, the committee met to reconsider its decision. On that occasion the vote was 12-3 against granting Roberts tenure. A group of 350-400 of Roberts' supporters either attended the meeting or listened to it nearby through a closed-circuit relay. After the vote, some of the crowd blocked the exits from the meeting room, assaulted some of the committee members and Ralph Hanson, chief of University of Wisconsin Protection and Security, and forced eight of the committee members to watch a guerrilla-theater presentation called “The Terrors of Tenure.” Roberts herself left the meeting before the disturbances, after thanking the committee for their conscientiousness. She was, however, deeply dissatisfied with the composition of the committee and with their evaluation of her. Roberts fought her dismissal in the courts but was never re-hired by the university.
