Castellani dissertation final final format approved lw 4 15 16

DECONSTRUCTING EVE: A CRITICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF MID-LEVEL FEMALE ADMINISTRATORS IN CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL UNIVERSITIES Dissertation Submitted to The School of Education and Health Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Leadership Jennifer Lynn Castellani, M. UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON Dayton, Ohio May 2016 DECONSTRUCTING EVE: A CRITICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF MID-LEVEL FEMALE ADMINISTRATORS IN CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL UNIVERSITIES Name: Castellani, Jennifer Lynn APPROVED BY: ________________________________________________________ Molly Armstrong Schaller, Ph. Committee Chair ________________________________________________________ Carolyn S. Committee Member ________________________________________________________ Kathryn Kinnucan-Welsch, Ed.

Committee Member ________________________________________________________ Sheila Hassell Hughes, Ph. Committee Member ________________________________________________________ Kevin R. Dean, School of Education and Health Sciences ii ABSTRACT DECONSTRUCTING EVE: A CRITICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF MID-LEVEL FEMALE ADMINISTRATORS IN CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICAL UNIVERSITIES Name: Castellani, Jennifer University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Molly Armstrong Schaller Research demonstrates that female staff in conservative, Christian colleges experience gender discrimination in a variety of forms, and this oppression is often because evangelical theology dictates women are ontologically second class citizens.

This qualitative critical feminist dissertation specifically focuses on the gendered experiences of female mid-level administrators in evangelical academia. Interviews and participant reflective exercises were used to collect data, and findings demonstrate gender inequality exists within Christian academia. Female mid-level supervisors reported difficulty balancing home and work responsibilities, pay disparity, thwarted promotional opportunities, and covert and overt discrimination. Recommended strategies to address gender inequality include leadership development programs, mentoring, advocacy for balanced hiring and salaries, gender equity task forces, climate surveys, and internal and external coalitions.

iii Dedicated to Dr. Molly Armstrong Schaller. Thank you for being love. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It has been said that, “It takes a village to raise a child.” I contend that it also takes a village to write a dissertation.

First and foremost, I want to thank my committee members whose insights, critiques, and praise resulted in a work far better than I could ever pen on my own. Molly Armstrong Schaller, Carolyn Ridenour, Sheila Hassell Hughes, and Kathryn Kinnucan-Welsch, I am forever grateful. Second, I want to thank my participants whose stories inspired me, whose vulnerability honored me, and whose strength encouraged me. Thank you for sharing your truth.

Finally, there is a co-hort of women who have mentored me, emboldened me, and invested in me throughout my lifetime. Without them, I would never have made it this far. Renee Davenport, Kim Ahlgrim, Janet Hamilton, Kim Longo, Lou Ann Horstman, and Caroline Russell Smith: “I’m everything I am because you loved me.”1 1 Because You Loved Me by Diane Warren and sung by Celine Dion, 1996. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………….

INTRODUCTION: THE EVANGELICAL OPPRESSION WITHIN CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION ……….……………………………… 1 Patriarchal Evangelicalism: Study Context …………………………… 3 The Study Problem: Hidden Voices of Female Mid-Level Administrators in Evangelical Higher Education ……………………………………. 5 Eve Speaks Up: Study Question …………………………………. 6 History of Evangelical Colleges ………………………………………. 8 Where is our Declaration of Independence?: Study Rationale & Justification ………………………………………………………….

10 Female Faculty Member Experiences …………………………………. 11 Female Staff Member Experiences ……………………………………. 15 Embedded Inequality: An Explanation of Evangelicalism …….… 17 Erasing Eve: Ingrained Inequity in Evangelicalism …………. 20 Reclaiming the Second Sex: A Brief Rationale a Critical Feminist Approach ……………………………………………………….……… 23 vi Feminine Foundations: Study Assumptions ……………………….

24 Freedom in Pieces: Study Limitations …………………. LITERATURE REVIEW: HEGEMONY – THE HALLMARK OF HIGHER EDUCATION ………………………………………………. 30 Same ole’, Same ole’: A Brief History of Women in the Academy…… 31 Patriarchal Prejudice: Challenges Faced by Female Faculty Members ……………………………………………………………………. 37 Sanctified Sexism: Challenges Faced by Female Faculty Members in Christian Higher Education ……………………………………….…… 45 Inequality in the Trenches: Challenges Faced by Female Staff Members………………………………………………………….

52 Opaque Oppression: Challenges Faced by Female Staff Members in Christian Higher Education …………………………………………. METHODOLOGY: A WAY THROUGH THE WILDERNESS .… 64 Eating the Forbidden Fruit: Epistemology Explained. 65 Renouncing My Own Cross: Researcher’s Positionality & Reflections 69 Stringing Words Together: Methodology ………………………. 76 Painting Eve: Methods ………………………………………………….

76 Painting Eve Inside the Lines: Ensuring Quality ……………. ANALYSIS, INTERPRETATIONS, AND SYNTHESIS OF FINDINGS: HERSTORY ……………………………………………………………. 90 Meet Eve: Description of Participants ……………. 90 Eve’s Environment: Description of Colleges …………….

92 vii Not a Women’s World: Findings ………………………. 93 Summary of Findings …………………………………. CONCLUSION: STUDY IMPLICATIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS ……173 Why Eve Matters: Implications …. 174 In Their Own Words: Participant Recommendations …………….

177 Moving Eve Forward: Future Research Suggestions ……. 214 APPENDIX A: Participant Recruitment Email ………………. 214 APPENDIX B: Informed Consent …………………………………. 216 APPENDIX C: Interview Protocol ………………………………….

219 APPENDIX D: Reflexive Exercise …………………. 221 APPENDIX E: Email to Participants Requesting Data Feedback …. 222 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE EVANGELICAL OPPRESSION WITHIN CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION “It is hard to be a female at a denominational school that denies that females can serve the church according to gifts, not plumbing.2” “This has not been an easy post to write. Religion has shaped every aspect of my twenty four years on this earth.

In those twenty four years I have seen such brutality committed in the name of God that it is sometimes all I can remember. But I’ve seen redemption, too, and it is this, only this, that led me through the fundamentalist wilderness… I’m a veteran of the American religious right and so when I write ‘Christianity,’ I refer to a version of it you probably only know from a Daily Show skit. Until I began my MA in London last year, I’d spent a total of three years of my life in secular education. I got taught at home, with creationist science lessons and history books that dedicated chapters to the Protestant Reformation and half a page to Islam.

I attended a Christian university that mandated Bible study, banned dancing, and openly discriminated against gay students. By the time I entered that university, I’d already drifted toward the margins. American evangelicalism is not particularly tolerant of independent women and I’d felt a steady but muted rage at the restrictions placed on my gender for so long that the struggle felt like a second skin [emphasis mine]. But fear is a powerful force, and so I clung, under threat of hellfire, to the beliefs that women should submit to their husbands and that other relationships, including those with the same sex, were simply not an option for the truly born again.

A divine binary governed all of human experience. 121 1 But if Christianity is responsible for enforcing that binary, it’s also responsible for showing me that religion isn’t so easily limited to such narrow categories. Despite my university’s prejudices it’s also where I first met openly gay Christians: usually alumni whose identities challenged everything I’d been taught about religion and sexuality. It is through my interactions with them I finally understood that my own fight to be heard could not be separated from their fight for the same recognition.

Fundamentalism erased us. We inhabited the gray spaces in a black and white world. These days, I’m a statistic. I left the church three years ago and never looked back.

But when people ask me what I believe now, I tell them my beliefs haven’t really changed. I tell them that I still believe human beings have intrinsic worth, and so everyone has the right to be heard. I believe that people have the right to live a life free of fear. I believe that when someone says they love the sinner, not the sin, they have no idea what love really means.

Above all, I believe I’ll always choose gray spaces. It is a deliberate choice now because if I’ve learned anything at all from my experiences, it is that fundamentalism is best defied from the margins. I defy it because I know that it is fundamentalism, not religion itself that seeks to erase whatever it finds uncomfortable. For those of us raised with religion, faith is our mother tongue.

It is the vocabulary that defines our identities from our earliest days. And it is a perversion of faith to use that same vocabulary to demean or even ignore someone else’s identity. It is an act of cultural violence and there is nothing holy about it. So as a person irrevocably shaped by faith, I am proud to stand with [an inter-faith organization that fights homophobia].

It reminds me of the best I’ve witnessed in Christianity. And it is my hope that universities like my alma mater will embrace its message and acknowledge, finally, that faith is not a monolith. There is always room for gray.” This blog post was written in August 2012 by a fellow graduate of a conservative evangelical university. Her name is Sarah E.

Jones (name and blog post used with permission), and as I type these words in my dissertation, she is penning her Master’s thesis on postcolonial theory and global policy. She graduated from our alma mater in 2011. Our undergraduate careers never overlapped. Yet, our childhood, church, and academic experiences are remarkably similar.

The thread tying our lives together is conservative evangelicalism and our eventual departure from that worldview. Evangelicalism forged our family life, sustained 2 our secondary education, supplied our spiritual life, and overshadowed our college student experience. As girls and later as young women, Sarah and I often subtly skimmed the wall (or glass ceiling) that hedges us into a gender-repressed ontological and epistemological landscape. On occasion, we crashed head first into the glass.

Prescribed theology, to be explained later on, relegated us to a life secondary to our brothers, fathers, pastors, male teachers, boyfriends, and boy friends. Even in the world of academia and higher learning, a place where open inquiry, freedom of expression and exploration, and more questions than answers allegedly reign supreme, we found ourselves bound to the very convention and traditions our spirits writhed against. We both eventually realized we were not suffocating alone. Conservative evangelical colleges and universities are rife with oppression, repression, and even explicit gender discrimination (Absher, 2009; Eliason, Hall, & Anderson, 2012; Garlett, 1997a; Garlett, 1997b; Hall, 2012; Hall, Anderson, & Willingham, 2004; Hall, Christerson, & Cunningham, 2010; Joeckel & Chesnes, 2009; Johnson, 2011; McKinney 2012; Pedersen & Jule, 2012; Sequeira, Trzyna, Abbott, & McHenry, 1995; Walker, 2001; Wood, 2009).

Patriarchal Evangelicalism: Study Context Females in Christian higher education are both overtly and covertly oppressed (Absher, 2009; Eliason, Hall, & Anderson, 2012; Garlett, 1997a; Garlett, 1997b; Hall, 2012; Hall, Anderson, & Willingham, 2004; Hall, Christerson, & Cunningham, 2010; Joeckel & Chesnes, 2009; Johnson, 2011; McKinney 2012; Pedersen & Jule, 2012; 3 Sequeira, Trzyna, Abbott, & McHenry, 1995; Walker, 2001; Wood, 2009). Of course, one might question why female oppression in the evangelical academy is cause for alarm. The answer is simple: students. College students represent not just their 19-year-old selves but the future of the planet.

This world is much larger, considerably more complicated, and far more pluralistic than conservative evangelicalism. That means college students, regardless of their gender, backgrounds, or particular religious beliefs, need to function adequately and prosper in such an environment if global and national societal issues are to be effectively addressed. Yet what happens when the 122 Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) colleges and universities propagate female subordination and inequality within their walls (Joeckel & Chesnes, 2012), impacting over 400,000 pupils (CCCU, 2015a)? Plainly, the answer is that students become further entrenched in those social and theological mores and perpetuate them into the next generation (Hall, 2012; McKinney, 2012; Pederson & Jule, 2012). The discrimination continues.

Perhaps one female faculty member also had students and society in mind when she cautioned, I think the administration disregards women, but I think there’s a bigger disregard. It is about theology and conformity. So which layer do you start with? To make it just a feminist or women’s issue doesn’t even begin to define it. I would actually use the world evil.

I hate to use that word, and I know that I’m on tape, but sometimes it feels evil [to be at a so-called Christian college].