Syrett.N.2564_7.1.2025_Transcript

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0:01
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: All right, could you state your name, age, association with the department, and, well, how long you've been here?

0:09
Nicholas Syrett: Sure, my name is Nick Syrett, and I am 50 years old, and I am the incoming chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Department, and today is my fifth day at work, so I am pretty much brand new.

0:25
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: All right, okay, let's start with, what drew you to Gender and Women's Studies initially? What was happening in your life, your family, your community, or the world at large that made this feel important to you?

0:37
Nick Syrett: I had a vague idea, sort of toward the end of high school, that I was interested in gender and women's studies. It didn't exist at my high school, as it didn't in most people's in the 1990s. But I think it's sort of a combination of a few things. My mother was a feminist. She volunteered for a number of different organizations, including the local Planned Parenthood chapter and Planned Parenthood of Ontario. I am from Ontario, Canada originally. And two other factors I think were pretty important. One, I was, you know, not particularly gender-conforming boy growing up in a world where I would never have used the word gender, but I could tell that I wasn't doing boyhood, the way that other boys were, and in the end, that's about gender. And so I was conscious of that without perhaps being able to name it as such. And then, really decisive, I think, for me, in the early 1990s, Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States, and it became clear that he had sexually harassed a woman named Anita Hill, then in his employ at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and this led to a series of televised hearings before the nation, and indeed the world, because I watched them in Canada, in which we learned about what sexual harassment was, gender, race, power, all of these things, and I was just transfixed. And I wrote Anita Hill a letter, as a high school student. I did not hear back, sadly. But I, it was a crash course education in the way that gender and race and power and politics all worked all at the same time, and I think that, in combination with my own sense, gendered sense of self just led me to be curious about the field of gender studies.

2:35
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: How did you take that forward, that interest and curiosity in gender? What was that trajectory for you like?

2:41
Nicholas Syrett: So, I graduated high school in 1993, and that was, you know, in the wake of these Hill hearings and my gendered sense of self, and I took Intro to, what was then called Women's Studies, my very first semester in college. So in 1993, at Columbia University, I took that first class, and I had declared a major in women's studies, which then became at Columbia, at least, women's and gender studies, I think about halfway through my time there, and so I graduated with an AB in Women's and Gender Studies, and I've kind of been doing something related to it pretty much ever since.

3:20
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: You, as you mentioned, it was initially, it was for the longest time, a lot of these programs were called Women's Studies, and those were its roots. How do you think the subject of the then Women's studies to the now mostly gender and women's studies evolved?

3:36
Nicholas Syrett: I think, so, when women's studies came about in most universities, it was in response to all kinds of feminist demands, made by women students, faculty, staff, and so forth. And I think, as the field came into its own, and sorry, that was my, I'm gonna repeat, because that was a text message just there. So, as the field came into its own with practitioner studying all kinds of things related to the state of women and other people who are gendered, we just expanded. And so, I don't know that I was super conscious, even at the moment that my major changed from being women's studies to women's and gender studies about the political import of that, but it's clear that the things that, and the people that people in this field study is just so much larger than it had been in its infancy. So, in many depart-- the department I used to teach in was a women, gender, and sexuality studies. There are lots of people who really focus more on sexuality, but clearly also, race has become an important category of analysis, social class. The rise of transgender people across the world has meant that we even think about gender in ways that we had not before. So I think we have just grown bigger and more inclusive as the knowledge itself has grown.

5:01
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, by then, would you characterize the field as emerging or established, and what did it feel like to be part of it? And were there professional academic risks? Because I'm, from what I've gathered, you're, by discipline, you're a historian, am I right?

5:15
Nicholas Syrett: That's true. I have no degrees in history, but I, and I definitely was not a historian when I was an undergraduate. I was interdisciplinary and pretty sociological more than anything. I became a historian in graduate school.

5:30
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, and what was it like to sort of be in gender and women's studies, and to do and engage in gender and women's studies, either as an emerging or an established field?

5:40
Nicholas Syrett: I think, at least initially, I mean, as an undergraduate student, I don't know that I thought of the consequences of being in the field. It definitely, people thought it was strange that a man was a gender, or a women's and gender studies major. There were only, like, 5 majors in my year, so it was just uncommon to major in it at all in my school at the time that I was there. And I did not get a PhD in women's and gender studies. My PhD is in American Studies. But I did a graduate certificate in women's studies. My first job was in a history department, and then my second, and now third, are in gender and women's studies departments. I think, as, in ways that are similar to the way that we train students here at Wisconsin now, we ask them to, and I was asked, as an American Studies PhD student, to also pick a method or a discipline in which to specialize, and part of that was about methodological grounding and knowing literature, but it also was about preparation for a job market that might not have lots and lots of jobs in American studies or women's studies. And it prepared us to be qualified to get jobs in other fields as well. So, hence, I did teach in a history department for 11 years. I don't know that I would have thought American Studies or Women's Studies was necessarily precarious. I do think that there have been political risks to it, but I'm sure, I believe I was probably naive enough not to necessarily understand what those were.

7:16
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, I wanted to shift gears a little bit to talk about, you know, you coming to UW-Madison, so how did you hear about this job? What was going on at that time, and what prompted you to, you know, hit the button, so to speak?

7:32
Nicholas Syrett: Sure. So, as you likely know, job ads are posted in these sort of, like, central repositories of jobs, and I found the job ad there. At the time, I was an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas, and it was a job I loved. But it was really a 12-month contract job, and I was missing time for research and teaching, which I had been able to do when I was chair of my previous department, also at the University of Kansas. So, the job was appealing in a sort of less administrative, even though I recognize that being a chair is an administrative position, but somewhat less than I had been doing. And at the University of Wisconsin, which is one of the nation's best research universities. So, those were the things that were really appealing to me. Also appealing, I think, is this department itself. So, once I did a little research, I was shocked and impressed at how the number of faculty, the sheer breadth of the things that the faculty here study. There had been an MA program here for many years, but the PhD program was new. That was exciting to me, to get a chance to, both to work with PhD students, as I'd done before, but to help shape the program itself, as it, as it grew up.

8:58
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, what did you know about the department's reputation or history, before coming here?

9:06
Nicholas Syrett: So, I did not know a lot. I did a little research to determine, it's among, you know, it's having its birthday this year, which is around the time that a number of departments are hitting that 50-year mark, so it's clearly been around for a long time. I knew that the PhD program, we had a PhD program where I was already, was the PhD program was a little bit younger, but it had this pre-existing graduate program as well. I think one of the things that's really impressed me about the department, and this I learned, sort of, just from doing research, is not just the breadth of what everyone studies, but that it runs the gamut, really, from social sciences all the way through to visual art and all kinds of things in between. It's both multidisciplinary in that some people hew more closely to, sort of, the disciplinary roots in a variety of other fields, but also really interdisciplinary. Some people, I would be hard-pressed to categorize what their method is in any kind of traditional way, and having a department where students get exposure to all of that is pretty exciting.

10:19
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay. Talk us through how you got the offer from the department, what that process was like, what was your feeling about it, and the, what led you to make the decision?

10:33
Nicholas Syrett: Sure. So, some of this you may or may not want to use for the actual video, but, so I came in December of this past year. I was one of three finalists, and then the department did offer the job to someone else first, and so, and that person accepted the job, and that was probably in, like, January or February. And so I thought that I, that ship had sailed. And then I, in early April of this year, I got a phone call from a Madison, Wisconsin number, but that's what it said on my cell phone, and I didn't really know anyone in Madison, so I didn't pick up. And then Judy texted me and said, this is Judy Houck, I'm wondering if we could actually talk, so I called her back at that point. The only, I was enthusiastic from the get-go, I just thought that it wasn't gonna happen. The only tricky thing was that it was April, and I was not at all sure I was going to be able to resign from my job, sell a house, buy a house, all within a few months. And my partner also had been planning on going to law school at the University of Kansas. It was too late to apply to go to the law school at the University of Wisconsin, so that was sort of the part of negotiation, was seeing if we could get him to be able to apply to the law school. That was successful. House was sold, house was purchased, and I arrived here in late August.

12:00
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What was the process like before you, like, when you had come here for the, for the job talk and the research talk, and meeting, God knows how many people that you met in that whirlwind of a few days. What was that like for you, to see the department?

12:15
Nicholas Syrett: So, job interviews, campus visits are among the most exhausting experiences I know. The planning is done by others, and they pack the schedule as well they should, because lots of people are interested in who these candidates are, especially if they're gonna come in and be chair. It was frigid when I was here in December, and very windy. I met tons and tons of people, most of them in person, some of them on Zoom. And I learned, first of all, that everyone was just very friendly and welcoming, and I immediately thought that that, that was incredibly positive. One thing that a person wonders when being interviewed for a chair job, which I had done before, is, why does this department need to hire a chair, and why is someone in the department not necessarily wanting to be chair? The suspicion is generally, like, is something wrong? I think the answer is no. I think everyone seems to get along really well, the outgoing chair has done two terms of chair service, and absolutely deserves a break. We also have lots of assistant professors in this department who haven't been tenured yet, and so can't be chair, so I think those are the circumstances that account for why the department was interested in hiring a chair, and my impressions were positive. I was exhausted, but I really enjoyed meeting everyone.

13:43
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I've, this is something that, when I interviewed Judy, Judy would not say what advice she had given you about the job, if at all, she had given. And so, I wanted to ask you, have you received any advice about this position? Either from Judy or anybody else.

14:00
Nicholas Syrett: Oh, sure. So, I only got here 5 days ago, but Judy [Houck] and Jamie [Gratrix] and Lindsey [Hoff] and I have been meeting for the last month, twice a week over Zoom, and so I, a lot of the advice is, like, not fascinating material, because they have walked me through, like, every policy known to man, and all of the, like, faculty teaching. I mean, just all kinds of stuff that I took lots and lots of notes on. I have a big Google Doc about it. But Judy said, Judy affirmed that, first of all, that, the hiring an outside chair was not a result of, like, a rift or disagreements within the department, which was very good to know. She told me that I was in store for some wonderful colleagues, in the realm of staff, students, and faculty. And she said, you can always count on me if you have questions, and I've already asked her questions. She is just down the hall, and she's already been helpful.

15:01
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, what are you looking forward to the most and least, in your new capacity?

15:07
Nicholas Syrett: The most, no question, is just meeting people. Some people were not here for my job interview, and even the people that I did meet, I didn't get to talk to a whole lot. So, I'm excited to meet people here in the department. I just have come from 3 days of orientations where I met a bunch more people. One of those people happens to live across the street from me, that was kind of fun, so I like meeting new people. I also am fac-- I am fascinated by, like, how the culture of universities are, is different from one another. So, we all kind of do the same things, but the way that we do them often differs, and so it, to me, it's a bit anthropological, and I find that fascinating. You also have things here at the University of Wisconsin that we did not have at any place I've taught before, like all of the agricultural departments are brand new to me, and I got to talk to, you know, an entomologist about the extension school and the work that they do with farmers, which was totally brand new to me and kind of blew my mind, so, for me, it's learning about how this university is different, meeting all the people. That's most looking forward to. Least looking forward to is just, like, bureaucratic nonsense. So, in the same way that each university is different, I'm gonna have to learn, like, all of the forms and the systems, and I understand you're all learning Workday, which is a new system for you. All of that kind of stuff is, like, not much fun for anyone, but, you know, you get through it.

16:38
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Right. One thing I thought you might find fascinating is that women's studies at UW, it was prior to the department become, prior to the program becoming a full-fledged program, it was actually in continuing studies that women's studies courses really started becoming a thing and became very popular, so I thought that's something you should probably know.

17:00
Nicholas Syrett: Yeah, interesting. Thank you.

17:02
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I wanted to ask a couple of questions, now, that respond to some of my past interviews with this project. These are some, I would say sticky issues, so to speak, that every gender and women's studies department in this country faces. These are debates that I think are perhaps never-ending, but, generative nevertheless. So to that end, I wanted to first ask you, because this is an interesting time, so to speak. Probably, and I was telling this to Judy, it's the best and the worst time to start a PhD program. But I wondered what you thought it's like to be chair of a gender and women's studies department in a politically uncertain time. What does that, what has that been like for you?

17:50
Nicholas Syrett: I have some experience with this. Yeah, I think it is challenging in, in some ways, it's gotten more challenging much more recently, because of the, you know, Trump administration and just his followers focus on this idea of gender, and quote-unquote, gender ideology. At my last institution, they were just forbidden from putting pronouns in their email signatures by the state legislature, because that is supposedly, like, a symbol of gender ideology. So I think conservative regimes are challenging for women's and gender studies more broadly because we are interested in critiquing and questioning conservative values around gender, and sexuality, and all of, and race and class and so forth, so, our critique is not welcome to conservatives. I think it's gotten worse in some way, or at least the critique of us has gotten worse, because it's become so focused on trans issues in particular, but also just this idea of gender that I'm not convinced that conservatives necessarily really understand in the first place. So what does that mean? I think sometimes that means campaigns to eliminate programs that we've seen in other states. Certainly, it means threats about funding. It sometimes means very directly, people filing Freedom of Information requests about professors that they think are doing nefarious things. It means sometimes getting hate mail, which happened at my last job. Some individual professors over email, phone calls, that sort of thing. So, I think it is challenging to do that right now. I hope that, you know, in the dream world, we're not doing that, but my hope is that we, it at least brings us closer together, and that we realize the value of what we're doing, and that if we are so threatening, it is because some of the questions that we're asking do upset fundamental conservative notions about the supposed sort of biological innateness of gender and sexuality and so forth, and that, that we're causing a certain amount of discomfort that is good discomfort for the country to be having.

20:09
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: You've alluded to this, but there does seem to be a sense of internal solidarity and cohesion within the department during times of political uncertainty outside. Is this something that you've also seen in your past capacity at KU?

20:27
Nicholas Syrett: Yeah, absolutely. So, one brief example. At KU, my colleagues were successful in getting a really nice Mellon grant of a million dollars to start what they called a trans studies initiative, in part based on a bunch of trans study scholars who were there, we got an enormous amount of pushback in the state of Kansas. People wrote letters from elsewhere. We all came together in support of our colleagues who were involved in that. It, you know, it was deeply unpleasant for them, especially, but it did bring us together in solidarity, and the university was very supportive of us, even as I think some administrators perhaps wished that we had not, you know, been successful in getting this because it was bringing attention to us in a state that is more conservative than Wisconsin is, as well. But we got nothing but support from the dean of the college, from various people in communications offices and so forth. So I, it was heartening.

21:32
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What is the role of administrators, you think, in making your job either easier or more difficult? Because currently, in UW-Madison, there is a view that Chancellor Mnookin and the administration has been toeing a very fine, neutral line, so to speak. And what do you think that'll, how do you think that'll impact your position and how you do this job?

21:57
Nicholas Syrett: That's a great question. I have some sympathy having now worked in administration myself, for the toeing of the fine line, only because I think we've got two things competing simultaneously. There is both, there's the right thing to do. There's the standing up for what is right and just, and that's academic freedom, that's the rights of all kinds of people, minoritized people, marginalized people. And the things that we study, and I am obviously deeply sympathetic to that. And then there's the part of an administrator's job that wants to make sure that we still get our money, and that our budget is fulfilled, and that we are not further targeted, and that sometimes means being quieter than many of us would like to have happen. And I don't know at all enough about what's going on at the University of Wisconsin, or what goes through the Chancellor's mind, but I can imagine it might be things like that. I will say, certainly, that in my interview here with the Associate Dean, my discussions, I was just at the Inclusive Excellence Summit yesterday, at which the dean spoke. And I am very convinced of their support for programs like our, departments like ours, Gender and Women's Studies, but also all the ethnic studies programs who get targeted for similar kinds of attention as well. So I think I would look to the messages that we get internally, even if sometimes, the public support for our field is not as vocal as we might hope for.

23:33
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: That's a very interesting answer, because it brings me to my next question about navigating the, sort of, the tension between social justice activism, that is so in the fabric of Gender and Women's Studies departments, but also maintaining academic legitimacy. How do you see that balance?

23:53
Nicholas Syrett: That's a hard one. As you allude to, obviously, our field exists because of feminist activism. That's why we're here. At my last school, the department was established, a program at the time, at the same moment that a childcare center was established that gynecologists were hired to work in the health center, and that more women administrators were hired. Those were the demands of the activists who sought out a women's studies program. So, and those are all political. And I, we owe a debt to them. I think, I guess I have a few answers. One, some of the functions of that early political moment have shifted to other, other divisions within the university. So there are services for all kinds of students that the Women's Studies program doesn't have to provide anymore. And in one way, that's great, because those people are trained for those sorts of things in a way that professors are not necessarily. We have therapists, we have doctors, we have all kinds of people who have real training in helping people with gendered violence, with women's health, all those sorts of things, and I'm grateful for them. And we're an academic field. We study, we do research. I do think that the knowledge that we gain through our studies, however, leads us and should lead us to critique things in the world and within our university. And I think that, while I am probably more leery of big statements, because I don't always see the political utility in them, I absolutely believe in using my feminist knowledge in all of the committees that I'm going to be asked to be on, that will influence the way all those committees that do influence the way that students get treated, the opportunities that faculty and students and staff have within the university, so my preference is to use the influence in a local way, because I feel like I have more influence that way, but I have great respect for people who want our department to come out in favor of bigger, national, international, global issues as well. It's not my impulse most of the time.

26:16
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: How do you think that impulse would translate?

26:20
Nicholas Syrett: You mean my impulse not to do that? Yeah, I mean, to me, I am a representative of the department. I'm not, I mean, I'll do what, democratically, we all want to do. So, I really think this is a bit of a cliche, but I think the chair serves the department. I do some of the work that other people don't really want to do, and I also am our representative in the college and the university more broadly, so I may end up disagreeing with what the majority of the department wants to do, and I may work to counsel the department toward a vision that I can support more, but, you know, I may lose that battle, and that's okay, too.

27:03
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, thank you. That was a hard question to answer, and I appreciate you engaging with that. But it brings me to another question, you know, that one of the terms used to describe women's studies has been, and its relationship with the university, is infiltrative, in the past, at least. Which makes me want to ask you, do you think the infiltrative nature of a women's studies department has been sort of co-opted into the university?

27:30
Nicholas Syrett: I think in some ways, yes, inevitably. Like, the thing that, and I don't know as much about the history of this department, but if it's similar to others, you know, one of the things that people wanted was both questioning knowledge, status quo, but also legitimacy, and to be treated seriously as a real field of knowledge. And that means playing by the rules, and doing things like going through curriculum committees, and hiring people using the standards of the university and tenuring them using those same standards, which inevitably means getting other people to give approval to the scholarship, and saying that this is legitimate. So, I think we're playing at least two games simultaneously, which is the infiltrative trying to change things, but also there is a legitimacy seeking that comes from being a department instead of a program, that comes from tenure, that comes from all of those sorts of things, and I think the key is balancing those. And I think we can, but I don't think you can avoid it.

28:39
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: What do you think the relationship of gender and women's studies today is to other social movements, and what do you, that's one part, and the second question, second part of that question is, what would you like it to be?

28:50
Nicholas Syrett: So, do you, I guess, point of clarification, relationship of gender and women's studies to, like, to a feminist movement, or to all kinds of other movements?

29:00
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: To all kinds of movements, because they also become more diverse in how we engage with social movements.

29:05
Nicholas Syrett: Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that I think is really great about gender and women's studies and the way that it's changed is that it has been responsive, not fully, but definitely responsive to critiques from women of color, to critiques from lesbians, to critiques from trans people, much more recently, so that those parts, those critiques, and the knowledge that come from those people has become incorporated into the field of gender and women's studies, such that it would be, one would not conceive of teaching introductory classes without talking about all of those groups of people, and indeed the knowledge of, like, what women are, or what gender is, has been pretty fundamentally transformed by the knowledge of people who might identify with some of those categories and some not. So I think that's good. I think that, not without headaches or growing pains, the field has been transformed. I do think that sometimes the field of women's and gender, gender and women's studies, but I think this is in some ways true of all of the studies, because we're in academia, is not always as closely related to activist movements on the ground. I don't know that it needs to be, though. I think, you know, do people with a GWS degree go and become activists? Sure. Were they already that? Yes, as well. I think sometimes we're critiqued for being hard to understand that the theory that we use is not, you know, absolutely applicable all the time to movements on the ground. I think that's a reasonable critique. I think it's best to acknowledge that there is something different about getting a PhD or indeed a BA, that is different from being an on-the-ground activist, and one can do both of those things, but they're not the same thing. And that, to me, is fine.

31:03
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Okay, I wanted to come back to some questions about, you know, that are more forward-facing, and I wanted to know what aspects, and you've sort of spoken about this a little bit earlier, but if you want to collate those again, what aspects of GWS at UW-Madison feel sort of unique compared to other institutions, and how do you think we're positioned, nationally?

31:30
Nicholas Syrett: So, one thing that I don't know if everyone else realizes, I now have taught at two different universities, and if you haven't taught at, I mean, and that's not even that many, but this department is huge! And that, in terms of the number of faculty and also the number of majors, the number of certificate students, it's just really big. And I think there are, especially at smaller schools, of course, like, sometimes the GWS department is, like, one person, one and a half people. We have in the 20s here, and that's really big. That is impressive and signals a commitment by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that this matters as a field of knowledge, because they have allotted us the money to be able to hire and pay for all these people. A thing I alluded to earlier, but I'll repeat, is that, in some ways, the department does a really good job of balancing both multidisciplinarity, that is, there are people here, and I would count myself among them, like, I study the past, I basically only study sex and gender in the past, but I am recognizable as a historian by other historians. Then there are people who are so interdisciplinary and so of WGSS or GWS, that they are not recognizable as coming from one disciplinary tradition or another, and I think that we offer students all of that in one package, and so classes are gonna be different, research methods are gonna be different, and it gives students skills to tackle the kinds of questions that interest them in a way that, you know, best meets the needs of whatever the questions are, or whatever the subject matter is. So, those are pretty exciting things. I think, you know, so as we all know, the PhD program is relatively new, no one has finished yet. But I think that the strength of the University of Wisconsin positions graduate students here for the kinds of careers that they're interested in, and that could be academic, and probably is going to be for a fair number of PhDs, but also, alternative careers outside of academia as well. I think that's based on the strength of what we've got going on in the department, but also just the reputation of the University of Wisconsin as a top-notch research university that manages to place its students from other programs in all kinds of fantastic careers as well.

33:59
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: It is an interesting time, like I said, to be doing a PhD program. What do you have to say about that? Because it is, that higher education in the United States seems to be going through a phase. So, what do you think is in store for the PhD program, if your political compass is bringing up anything?

34:19
Nicholas Syrett: I think that there are at least two trends that influence education right now. One of them has sort of been growing steadily, and one of them is much more recent. And the growing steadily is that state legislatures have been paying, or allotting less money to higher education for a while. We know that attitudes toward higher education are souring across the United States. There's been a bit of a jobs crisis for some time, that's getting worse. None of that bodes well. But I do think that what most studies show is that graduates within the humanities and social sciences actually do very well in the long term, even though their degrees seem less legible to some students, parents, and employers at the outset, what employers really like is the skills that people earn in these programs, which are skills for the long term, as opposed to perhaps more narrow and niche pre-professional skills that students are learning in some professional schools. So, I think our job here is to translate the value of interdisciplinary, social sciencey humanities degrees, so that people know how to talk about them and their usefulness. The much more recent past is what we're seeing under the Trump administration, targeting institutions, not yet the University of Wisconsin. So far, it's mostly been private schools, but also UCLA. And that is worrisome. Also, the lack of funding and halting of funding, which is more acute for the sciences than it is for the humanities and social sciences, but is going to affect this university as well, already has. So I think that, my hope is, is a four-year problem that could be solved or alleviated with new leadership. And even perhaps, like, lessened, depending on the results of the midterm elections. But also something to consider. My hope to, I've been long-winded, to bring it back to the PhD program here in Gender and Women's Studies is that we can equip our students for a variety of careers, even if we don't quite know what those are going to be yet. I've been very pleasantly surprised by the success rate of the PhDs at my last program that I would imagine would be true here, too. That is, there have been a fair number of jobs, and they've been very successful at getting them. So, there's still, I'm very hopeful about that still, but I also want students to be prepared to do things that they might not have considered doing when they started the program, depending on how things change in the world.

37:09
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I wanted to quickly shift gears, and we'll come back to these questions, because you reminded me of something about sort of the relationship between the university and the wider public, and to that end, I wanted to ask, how do you think the department should respond to ongoing challenges? You spoke about this earlier, ongoing challenges around gender as a concept, and beyond a sort of a Democrat, Republican, beyond that binary, where is the opening for talking about gender in a way that is generative? I know you've engaged with media in the past to talk about your work and to relate it to current issues, so I'm hoping you can throw some light on that.

37:51
Nicholas Syrett: Sure, I think-- I have great faith in our faculty and students to be able to talk about gender and sexuality in nuanced ways that are also not threatening. And I don't mean not threatening in a way of, like, dumbing it down. I mean that I think so much of the rhetoric about gender and sexuality is wildly overblown. And so, we can just bring some sense to the issues, and explain what I think many people would actually perceive to be relatively common sense ideas. That, you know, all boys are not made the same, all girls-- like, gender is a spectrum. These are not revolutionary sorts of ideas, but I think we can be articulate about them with a broader public. The question is, like, where do we get those opportunities to be so? Because I think we can all do it. So I think the answer there is, to the degree that any of us become experts in something in particular, we can respond to media inquiries. I've done a fair bit of that, because I've written about things that have gotten attention. And so I happen to be an expert on them. I also think, though, that we can write op-eds. We can write letters to the editor, we can respond to events that are happening. We can become active on social media. That's not so much for me, that's not my strong suit. But I also think that we should take opportunities to talk to audiences across the state. This seems to me, like, part of the Wisconsin idea that I'm learning lots about. Our department gets asked by libraries and book groups and various civic organizations to come and talk about fill-in-the-blank, XY, like, could be the history of women's rights, or voting, or the current controversy about trans rights, or something like that. Like, if we can supply articulate speakers to talk about those issues in ways that make the issues more comprehensive and seem less scary and threatening than they are sometimes portrayed as being. I think that's our way to be helpful, and to talk about gender with our fellow Wisconsinites.

40:07
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: A follow-up to that, do you think that's sort of like bringing a pen to a sword fight?

40:14
Nicholas Syrett: Oh, yeah, maybe so, but I think these are our skills. We are academics. We study, we think and we write, and this is the skill set that I have. I'll add to that. I think that it is definitely possible for academics to become involved in legal fights as well, so I'm right now, serving as an expert witness, providing a historian's context that's challenging abortion laws in the state of Kansas that, generally speaking, are totally unnecessary and restrictive. Kansas is actually decent on abortion, but some of these laws, there are hoops that women have to jump through in order to receive, to terminate a pregnancy, and so the Center for Reproductive Rights is challenging those laws, and I'm serving as an expert witness on the history of gender and abortion and reproductive rights in the state of Kansas. So that's my way of getting to contribute based on expertise that I developed only through doing research and writing. And if we win, it'll be amazing, and it will mean that abortion care is much more readily available, not just to Kansas women, but to, now the majority of women who terminate pregnancies, or pregnant people who terminate pregnancies in Kansas are from outside Kansas, because conservative states surrounding it have restricted abortion care. So, there are ways to put our expertise to use that is more than just talking, but I actually am a big fan of talk, education, learning.

41:50
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: All right. What vision do you have for the department's future? This is the million-dollar question. And where do you see opportunities for growth or evolution?

42:00
Nicholas Syrett: This is the-- my answer is going to be partial, because I am only in my fifth day on the job, and so I don't want to speak for all of us before, I mean, there are literally people I have not met yet. So I don't want to speak for a department before I've met all of its constituents. I think that one of the unique things about gender and women's studies as a field, and this is in part true of other fields, I mean, all fields grow and develop and change. But I think one of the things that's pretty cool about gender and women's studies, and the reason it looks so different now, is that the people around us have changed, and we, as practitioners, have been studying, researching, and teaching about them, and I think that the people around us are going to change in ways that we haven't yet predicted. So, my one hope for the future is that we keep up. So, for instance, like, a gender and women's studies program, or department here, 25 years ago, I think probably would never have envisioned that we were talking about trans and non-binary people in the way that we are now, teaching about them, researching them. That's a change in the way that faculty have approached their research, it's new faculty who are doing that research who would not have existed before. But I think we're gonna keep changing, or the world's gonna keep changing in a way that, in ways we haven't anticipated. I want us to be able to keep up with that so that we are able to present a full picture of Gender and Women's studies to our students, who are going to be experiencing those changes as well. I am also excited about the move to Levy Hall, less because it's a fancy new building, though that's something to celebrate as well. But also because we're going to be sharing space with a number of our ethnic studies colleagues, and I am excited about more collaboration with those units. We already have a number of faculty who are jointly appointed with Asian American Studies, with American Indian and Indigenous Studies, with Chicano and Latino Studies, but I want more stuff happening between those units to take advantage of the overlaps in the things that we do, and I think, I'm hopeful that this space will allow for some of that as well.

44:20
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: I think the next question would be perhaps a little bit more suitable, because, in the next 10, I'm gonna assume that, like, how 10 years ago there was a 40th anniversary documentary, now, we're doing a 50th, I'm hoping in 10 years, there'll be somebody else looking at all these interviews. 10 years from now, what would you like to say to Nick Syrett of the, of 10 years from now, if he's still chair? If he's still around, doing what he's doing. What would you like to see for Nick 10 years from now, and for the department, if possible, 10 years from now?

45:01
Nicholas Syrett: Oh, God, that's a good question. Well, Nick, I hope that you survived. I trust that you did. I hope that, in a very basic way, that you've made friends, that you've learned, you've come to know all of, I've come to know all of my colleagues and grad students. 10 years from now, we will have graduated a number of classes of PhDs, so I'm super excited to see where they have gone and what they've done in the world. It was, at my last job, super, super exciting. The first PhD who published her book, and then a second one right on the heels of her. We had a party, we brought her back to give a talk, that was a momentous, wonderful event for the PhD program, and in 10 years, we're going to be able to do that here, too, so I'm excited for something like that. I hope, personally, that I will have also been able to dig into my research, and will be hard at work on, or maybe having finished a book 10 years, that seems doable. And I hope that we will, I mean, inevitably, it's 10 years, we may have, some colleagues will have retired, some may have moved on. I hope that we will replenish our ranks, and that doing so will bring us new ideas and ways of thinking, as the field itself has progressed. Yeah.

46:26
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: All right, is there anything else you wanted to add?

46:29
Nicholas Syrett: Did I write down anything else? Hold on. Not really. The only thing, like, the first thing I did, and I'm super excited for this, is I've already met with most staff members, but in the next 2 weeks, I am hoping to meet with each and every faculty member and graduate student just to learn all about who everyone is, and what brought them to Wisconsin, what their research is about, and importantly, I think, like, it's my turn, it's my time to take the temperature of the department and to hear about what things really work well. What things maybe need some improvement, and if people just have ideas of things that could be done here to make a positive impact. In these past 3 days of orientations that I've been at, I've heard from other department chairs and already heard some great ideas that I'm keen to, like, float with all, with everyone here, and see if people are interested in those. If there are takers, we'll do them. If people have other ideas, I'm game for those as well.

47:37
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: Your first department meetings' coming up pretty soon, so, how are you looking forward to it?

47:41
Nicholas Syrett: Yeah, the one, the thing I'm actually pretty nervous about are the department and executive committee meetings, because the structure is a little bit different here than what I'm used to, and so I think I'm gonna breathe a sigh of relief when I've made it through one department, one executive, and one personnel committee meeting, because I don't know all the exact processes and procedures for everything. But I'm absolutely looking forward to, like, being in a big group of people.

48:08
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas: All right, thank you so much.