Greene to focus on gender equity, faculty development

When Linda Greene broke into the collegiate teaching ranks in the late 1970s, she was a trailblazer.

Linda Greene

Fresh from a stint as a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, she began teaching law at Temple University as one of the first African-American female law professors in the nation.

“I only knew three or four minority law professors, and certainly not any female minority law professors,” says Greene, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “At first it was extremely difficult, being alone.”

Greene says that several professors provided crucial mentoring for her in those early teaching days, and because of this encouragement and mentoring that has extended throughout her career, she has focused on helping other faculty develop their skills. That focus has now been sharpened, with her appointment as an associate vice chancellor concentrating on gender equity and faculty development.

Greene’s half-time appointment begins this week and she will continue to teach two classes at the law school. She will build on the work of Professor Betsy Draine, who has left the position to return to the Department of English.

Specifically, Greene will function as the university’s point person on issues involving women faculty, including pay, mentoring, promotion, tenure, family issues and improving the climate for female professors. Among other things, she will administer the Faculty Strategic Hiring Initiative, which primarily seeks to hire minority professors and female professors in the sciences. She will lead the provost’s work group on human resource issues such as workforce diversity, climate, professional development and quality, and will work closely with the Equity and Diversity Resource Center.

Overall, Greene will help coordinate the university’s efforts to maximize its human resources, one of Chancellor David Ward’s priorities for the next decade.

“Professor Greene is an outstanding member of our faculty, and her background, experience and desire to assist other faculty members, especially women and minorities, will be of great value to the university community,” says Provost John Wiley.

Of the university’s 2,135 faculty members, 22.5 percent are women and 10.4 percent are minorities. Greene wants to increase those percentages, saying that a diverse faculty benefits not only students but also the entire campus.

“I recognize how important proactive efforts are to recruit, retain and develop new faculty based on my own experience,” Greene says. “Many people of extraordinary quality don’t get positions because they are not recruited.”

Greene’s background is rich and varied. She is a graduate of the famed Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California-Berkeley, and has taught at Temple, the University of Oregon, where she was tenured, and at Harvard and Georgetown universities as a visiting professor. She then served as legal counsel for U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee while continuing to teach part-time, and in 1989 she returned to full-time teaching at Wisconsin as a full professor.

While at the law school, Greene has twice chaired the faculty appointments committee and has served on its tenure committee. Additionally, she has been a member of and has chaired the university’s Social Studies Divisional Committee, which recommends promotion and tenure for professors in those disciplines. She just finished terms on the Campus Planning Committee and the University Academic Planning Council, where she represented the Social Studies Division. For five years, she was a member of the UW–Madison Athletic Board. This spring, she was elected to the Faculty Senate’s University Committee but resigned when appointed associate vice chancellor.

Greene is well-known in national legal circles and is a member of a number of organizations, including the Society of American Law Teachers, where she is president-emeritus, and the Midwestern People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference, of which she is president. A former track standout at the California State University at Long Beach, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, Greene is the former chair of the United States Olympic Committee’s legislation committee. She currently serves as vice-chair of the USOC’s audit committee.

With her new appointment, Greene plans to scale back her national activity to focus her energies on developing and enhancing the UW–Madison faculty.

“This is a great chance to build on my work,” Greene says. “I thought this was the very best opportunity for me at this stage in my career.”