Practical Radicals

The Making of a (Tempered) Radical

Debra Meyerson grew up in Southfield, Michigan, where her father was a builder and her mom was a housewife. The Meyerson home wasn't an intellectual or political cauldron; nothing in her upbringing, in fact, hinted at the feminist path that Meyerson would later pursue. If there was any symbol at all of what her life would become, it came in the form of the 470-class sailboat that she raced with her dad. "We were always out in winds that were a bit too high to handle for our weight," Meyerson remembers. "And I routinely pushed a bit too far, so we'd end up capsizing, often with Dad out on the trapeze. He just wanted to push the edge and have fun; I mostly wanted to win. We had a blast."

Meyerson studied political science at MIT, then got her MBA at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Lacking any real career direction, she waitressed and skied for a year in Vail, Colorado. Then her consciousness was sparked when she taught skiing for Women's Way Adventures. Based in Squaw Valley, California, the travel/adventure company gave women the confidence to take risks, in part by letting them define their own adventure. "It planted the seed for me," Meyerson says. "I saw how people are constrained by their circumstances, how small interventions can change possibilities."

She worked for a consulting firm for about a year, hated it, and decided to return to school. She wanted to find a doctoral program in which she could study how social interactions between individuals and institutions occurred, and how social institutions could be made to be less oppressive. She had no thought of becoming an academic. "I was interested in being relevant, in making a difference." She landed at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

And there, her incipient radicalism festered. Stanford, like most business schools, was a fairly conservative place. Its core mission involved creating young captains for capitalist industry. Its language, which was rooted in war, dominance, and "win-lose," didn't easily accommodate equity and social justice, much less the feminist ideals that Meyerson brought to the table. Her dissertation, a study of social workers in hospitals, met with studied indifference. "As a student, I began to feel that I was really deviant for caring about this stuff."

Meyerson and Maureen Scully, who was another PhD candidate in organizational behavior, would spend hours in their cozy shared office venting their frustrations. The two women wondered what had happened to the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s. Had they disappeared? Had they been co-opted?

Neither, really. They had become ... tempered.

Exhibit A was Joanne Martin, Meyerson's Stanford mentor and thesis adviser. In 1984, Martin, who is now 53, had become the first woman ever to gain tenure at the business school. She was successful. She was respected. And she had quietly used her institutional credibility to help advance the following agenda: to open the doors of academia and business to more women, minorities, and men whose mind-sets were very different from that of the average business-school student. "I talked with Deb and Maureen about how I balanced the demands of a business-school culture with my values and the needs of my family," Martin says. "I was trying to conform enough to be effective, but not so much as to be co-opted."

Martin was, in effect, a prototypical tempered radical. Meyerson and Scully soon encountered many more people like her. Having finished her PhD, Meyerson took a junior-faculty position at the University of Michigan, where she met Sharon E. Sutton, an African-American professor of architecture.

Sutton, now 59, seemed strikingly out of place: Before entering academia, she had been in private practice in New York. She had concluded that building design should better serve the needs of users -- and so she had directed her efforts toward a more holistic design approach that depended on community participation.

When she arrived at Michigan in 1984, Sutton felt as if she was lost. "I thought I had gone to the edge of the earth," she recalls. Her offbeat ideas on teaching design weren't welcomed by the mainstream architecture department. At faculty meetings, she says, she was disparaged -- not least by two fellow African-American professors.

She lay low, steering clear of departmental politics. Over time, though, her work attracted national attention. "I didn't care anymore whether I got tenure," Sutton recalls. She won tenure anyway, but remained "a prophet everywhere but in my own camp." Even so, she stayed put until 1998. Michigan gave her a national pulpit from which to make change. It also allowed her to have an influence on future generations of architects. "I compromised myself in exchange for the power of the institution," she says.