Protecting Our Futures: Challenges & Strategies for Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Political fights over higher education’s purpose continue to roil institutions throughout the United States. These specific attempts to curtail our field are occurring within a broader national context that is seeking to silence critical discussions on race and ethnicity, promote settler colonialism, and deny lifesaving medical care to trans youth. Women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) has long been one of the disciplines at the center of these discourses. Facing not only derision but also attacks upon individual scholars and WGSS scholarship by conservative leaders and reactionary organizations. In 2022, this began to manifest itself with yet another resurgent effort to delegitimize and defund WGSS. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) embarked on an effort to respond to direct threats to WGSS departments in 2022 and decided to conduct a survey and prepare a report. The questions within this survey covered topics including department structure, budget, faculty lines, staffing, enrollment, and perceptions of support by key institutional leaders. In addition, data from The Chronicle of Higher Education was used to track anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) legislation and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) was used to explore institutional data including characteristics, revenue/expenditures, and Carnegie classification. The complete survey instrument is included as an appendix with this report.