Ann Markusen, UMN, was just awarded the Margarita McCoy Award at the ACSP (Assoc of Collegiate Schools of Planning) Conference in Kansas City, MO. You can go to this url for information about Margarita, who herself just won the Diana Donald Award at the last APA National Conference. http://www.planning.org/awards/2005winners.htm Scroll down the page to find the award. Here is the url to the article in Planning about Margarita http://www.planning.org/planning/member/2005mar/women.htm
Here is the url about the McCoy Award http://www.acsp.org/awards/margarita_mccoy_award.htm
It’s thrilling to receive this award. Advancing women in planning in higher education is such a collective enterprise. The evidence is in the remarkable emergence, durability and shared leadership of the Faculty Women’s Interest Group, which has done so much to change the gender and color mix of planning educators in this room today. In these few minutes, I couldn’t possibly honor all the women and men who have been so important to me personally. So just a few larger-than-life characters. Kate Stimpson, for provoking me to do my 1979 Signs article, “City Spatial Structure, Women's Household Work and National Urban Policy” which has probably been reprinted more than anything I’ve ever written. Janice Perlman, for demonstrating mentorship by handing me a hand-written paragraph on each of my future Berkeley colleagues when she picked me up at the airport for my job interview. Dolores Hayden, who created the first ever curriculum for women in planning at UCLA and invited me down for a quarter to teach women and economics, which I continued to do for years. Karen Polenske, role model, mentor and close colleague in regional development and regional science. My best ever colleague Susan Fainstein, intellectually, in friendship and in joint mentoring of students. The generations of women and men students who have taught me so much. Despite the nicks and bruises, the exhausting battles, the tragedies, and the anxiety, we have also had great fun along the way. At Berkeley in the early 1980s, Judith Innes and I and several staffers and graduate students planned a skit about women and planning. Sitting one night around my dining room table eating pizza, we shared the more awful things that had happened to us as women in our university careers. Judith’s, by the way, were by far the worst. We decided to constitute a search committee forced to hire a new faculty member for a “Men in Planning” position--men students argued that they had particular sensibilities and needs that were being ignored. To make it good theater, we each modeled ourselves on the personality of one of our colleagues – I played Alan Jacobs, Judith played Mel Weber and so on. We studied their speech and body language for a few weeks, surreptitiously. Not to be sexist, Amy Glasmeier played Janice Perlman, and we recruited a male student to be the token man on the committee. In the skit, each of us advocated a fictional candidate – mine was a woman-identified man who believed that women should control household planning and location decisions, because men had their garages and basements, after all; Amy’s was a Giorgio Armani look-alike; Rafael’s was a woman. It was very cheeky. We were nervous about performing it, which we did twice, but it went over very well. Perhaps it made the point better than our more earnest forays on this front. At any rate, the number of women on Berkeley’s Planning faculty climbed thereafter. At eye-level on my office shelf at University of Minnesota sits a framed photo of three of my Rutgers students – Laura Wolf-Powers, Marla Nelson (both here today) and Julie Buckley - upside down, standing on their hands in frumpy yoga clothes. One of them is charmingly out of alignment. It was taken at a little weekly yoga session we shared at my house and given me when I departed from Rutgers. Nearby sits a similarly-sized but more expensively framed photo of Bill Clinton and I having a rousing policy debate at the Council on Foreign Relations, one on one, on the Monday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in the New York Times. (Never lose an opportunity to lobby the President on what you think he should do about cities and regions!) It makes us both look good – the White House photographer always squats and takes Bill from below, because it makes his jaw look prominent. And so, well.. mine did, too. I am very happy to say that the former photo is much dearer to me. And, visitors to my office remark upon it ten times as often as the do the other one. I feel lucky to have been lured away, long ago, from an economics department into City and Regional Planning. It is so marvelous to be part of a profession and an academy in which women are steadily increasing our ranks, our leadership roles, and our impact. I will treasure this award, and I look forward to continuing to be a part of this great enterprise.