Feminist leader and Ms. Magazine founder is honored with historic and eponymous Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers.
[Alison] Bernstein, who was the director of Rutger’s Institute for Women’s Leadership, began a dogged effort to create the chair in 2014—hoping to establish a multidisciplinary teaching role across fields of media and social change as well as honor a living feminist icon. (The chair is the first academic position named for a living feminist.) “Endowing chairs, centers and programs ensures a permanent institutional presence for women’s studies,” Bernstein wrote, “especially in perilous budgetary times. Individuals able to give major sums will make a huge difference, but so, too, do smaller donors, because university leaders are influenced by the sheer number of donors committed to a program or faculty… The good news is that women are increasingly moving into the forefront of philanthropy as individual donors, in a position to put their funding where it can do the most good for the greatest number of other women.”
