Ceil M. Pillsbury had never been a troublemaker. And she certainly was not a feminist. She was a conservative Republican, a born-again Christian, and a little-known assistant professor of accounting when she was denied tenure in December 1989 at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
In short, she was not a woman you might expect to orchestrate a three-year campaign against sex discrimination at the university.
Three years later, Ms. Pillsbury’s politics haven’t changed. And while she still won’t call herself a feminist -- the term has too much baggage, she says -- she now considers herself an “equitist.”
“I always believed that if a woman got the job done, everything would be just fine,” she says. Women who complained of job discrimination, she thought, either couldn’t get along with the guys or couldn’t get the job done.
“I wouldn’t have believed in a million years it could happen to me.”
Her world was shaken when the tenured professors in the business school -- all men -- voted down her tenure application: 6 in favor, 14 against. At the same time, they recommended three male colleagues for tenure. She sued in federal court, claiming that she was as qualified as the men but that her record of scholarship had been judged by a different, more stringent standard than theirs.
After years of acrimony, the case now appears resolved. The university reached a settlement with Ms. Pillsbury last month that granted her a new tenure hearing by a panel independent of the business school. That five-member panel voted unanimously to grant her tenure. Wisconsin’s Board of Regents was expected to affirm the panel’s decision last week.
Come fall, almost four years after being rejected, she will rejoin the business school as a tenured associate professor.
“It’s been a horrible ordeal and I’m thrilled that it’s over,” says Ms. Pillsbury, who has been teaching at UW-Green Bay. “I’m thrilled because it had a positive outcome for me personally, but also because I think it will make a big difference for women in the Wisconsin system.”
Ceil Pillsbury has become to Wisconsin what Anita Hill was to the nation: a sym bol of a lone woman challenging the system and speaking out for other women.
Their cases differ. Ms. Hill’s allegations against Clarence Thomas involved sexual harassment. Ms. Pillsbury’s central charge was that the business school denied her a promotion because she is a woman and was pregnant at the time of her tenure review. Unlike Ms. Hill, Ms. Pillsbury says she kept a “paper trail” to support her claims. “I’m an accountant,” she says. “Proper documentation is everything.”
Faced with what she deemed an injustice, Ms. Pillsbury became her own best advocate. She turned into a one-woman publicity machine -- faxing reporters regular updates on the progress of her fight and calling to alert them that the NBC television news show “Street Stories” would be featuring her case.
The university is now picking up the tab for her campaign.
In all, Wisconsin is providing Ms. Pillsbury with $40,000 in back pay and $86,000 for her expenses related to the case. Her legal costs came to $25,000. The remaining $61,000 includes $7,000 for telephone bills, $13,000 for postage, $3,000 for faxing documents, and $10,000 for copying fees.
Ms. Pillsbury’s dogged quest to publicize her experience has resulted in a wave of negative publicity for the Milwaukee campus as well as intense scrutiny by state legislators and federal officials.
Public pressure mounted in recent months as a state lawmaker and a local newspaper began accusing Milwaukee Chancellor John H. Schroeder of inaction. State Rep. Barbara L. Notestein, a Milwaukee Democrat, urged the chancellor to resign if he was unwilling to act on Ms. Pillsbury’s case and similar complaints on the campus.
But the strongest motivation for the university to settle with Ms. Pillsbury came in the form of a threat from the U.S. Department of Labor.
A routine investigation by the department revealed that Milwaukee had failed for five years to file a federally required affirmative-action plan. Department officials issued a report last fall that identified “patterns and practices of discrimination” in Milwaukee’s hiring and promotion of women. The department said it could ultimately freeze federal grants for the entire Wisconsin system -- some $350-million worth -- if Milwaukee refused to take certain steps to remedy the problems, such as reinstating Ms. Pillsbury with tenure.
That’s when Katharine C. Lyall, president of the system, stepped in. She began direct negotiations with Ms. Pillsbury. They reached a settlement after two meetings.
“As I got farther into reviewing the Pillsbury case,” President Lyall says, “it became apparent to me that there had been an injustice done and we ought to correct it. When it began to have systemwide implications, it seemed to me appropriate for us to get involved.”
Since the settlement, Chancellor Schroeder has promised to cooperate with the Labor Department. And he has announced a series of measures aimed at improving the climate for women at Milwaukee, including mandatory training for administrators on handling sex-discrimination and harassment complaints. Another program starting in the fall will provide new faculty members with mentors to help them through the tenure process. Only 33 of Milwaukee’s 291 full professors are women. Of 319 associate professors, 102 are women.
Mr. Schroeder strongly disagrees that he was slow to address Ms. Pillsbury’s case, and says it was she who resisted a settlement for many months.
“As President Lyall and I have said, we need to acknowledge that mistakes were made and get beyond that,” Mr. Schroeder says. “No question this has hurt the reputation of the university. We want to take the steps needed to improve the climate for women.”
To some, the story of what was said about a sweater that Ms. Pillsbury wore to an office Christmas party symbolizes the climate for women in the business school.
The story begins with a memo written by the school’s tenured professors -- collectively known as the executive committee -- defending the decision to deny her tenure. Much of the memo was a review of what the professors saw as her scholarly shortcomings. But Ms. Pillsbury also had complained that some male professors disapproved of her having a second child and had made inappropriate remarks. The memo said Ms. Pillsbury complained of the remarks only after she was denied tenure.
A section of the memo purported to show that she had always welcomed sexual banter. Among other examples, the memo said Ms. Pillsbury had attended the office Christmas party wearing “a sweater that had a small boot suspended from each breast.”
Eleanor M. Miller, an associate professor of sociology, calls the statement an “embarrassing” indication of the level of discussion in the business school.
“This sweater has three boots hanging from what appears to be a fireplace,” says Ms. Miller, who is also assistant vice-chancellor for equal opportunity. “It’s not a seductive sweater in any way.”
She adds: “Even if it had been a seductive sweater, what had it to do with her record?”
Nothing at all, says Paul M. Fischer, a professor of accounting in the business school. He and other business professors continue to maintain that neither her wardrobe nor her pregnancy played a role in their deliberations. He says the memo’s reference to her sweater was only included to respond to Ms. Pillsbury’s complaints about inappropriate comments.
Mr. Fischer says the executive committee felt she had overstated her resume, that she hadn’t produced enough original research since joining the Milwaukee campus in 1987, and that some of her published research articles were simply different versions of the same material. Last fall, President Lyall put together a committee of business scholars from across the nation to review Ms. Pillsbury’s case. It, too, found her scholarship did not merit tenure.
“If you don’t look at her articles,” Mr. Fischer says, “you won’t understand what troubled the executive committee.”
In Ms. Pillsbury’s view, what troubled the committee was not her scholarly output, but that she had had two children within 11 months.
“The second pregnancy was the killer,” she says. “Once I had that second baby, it was like, `There’s no way in heck she’ll ever be a committed colleague.”’
A grievance committee at Milwaukee sided with her. It found that the executive committee had rated her scholarship on different terms from the men’s. According to the grievance committee’s report: “Duplication of articles -- use of the same data base in more than one journal -- was apparent in the documents of three of the four assistant professors.” But questions about the ethics of such duplication, it said, were raised only in Ms. Pillsbury’s case. The Labor Department also sided with Ms. Pillsbury, as did the most recent panel created to review her case as part of the legal settlement.
The Milwaukee business school has no women among its 26 ten ured professors, but it will soon have at least two. (Ten of its 34 assistant professors are women.) Besides Ms. Pillsbury, the business school’s executive committee has voted to recommend tenure for Patricia Arnold, an assistant professor of business administration.
Besides her own promotion, Ms. Pillsbury’s campaign has led to other changes.
* A new state law has set up an independent appeals process for Wisconsin scholars who feel they were denied tenure on “impermissible” grounds, such as race or gender. Under the old state law, faculty members who were denied tenure by their departments had no recourse but to sue. Campus officials supported the change, saying the old law prevented them from turning Ms. Pillsbury’s case over to an impartial panel.
* New rules at Milwaukee now allow faculty members to stop the “tenure clock” to take a leave for a pregnancy, to care for a sick relative, or for other reasons. Faculty members have seven years to obtain tenure before they are let go.
* The Association of UW Professionals, a non-bargaining union for professors and academic staff members in the Wisconsin system, is raising money to create a Ceil Pillsbury Legal Fund. It will be used to support other women who have filed discrimination or harassment complaints in the UW system.
Most women who file sex-discrimination cases don’t have the financial means to fight, Ms. Pillsbury says. She did. (Her husband is a bank executive in Milwaukee.) She says she plans to make a donation herself to the Ceil Pillsbury Legal Fund. She also has refused all speaking fees and has instead urged groups asking her to speak to donate money to the fund.
Had Ms. Pillsbury been a liberal feminist, it’s unlikely her case would have attracted as much attention, says Merry Wiesner-Hanks, director of Milwaukee’s Center for Women’s Studies. Her politics made her more believable to some people.
“For the younger generation,” she says, “it’s instructive that Ceil Pillsbury was not someone who started life as a feminist. She’s someone who has a nice house in the suburbs who really did hit a glass ceiling.”