Audrey Bilger

My infatuation with public writing started relatively early in my academic career. As much as I valued publishing in scholarly venues, I also longed to be in conversation with a larger audience. In my view, feminist scholars have a mandate to connect with the public because theory can help make sense of the world around us and should be available in forms accessible to a broad readership.

The debate about the value of a liberal arts education is hardly over, despite attempts to be definitive via cuts in funding for the humanities. Higher education is about more than job training. A broad-based curriculum educates young people to be productive members of society who contribute to the overall well-being of those around them, from adding beauty through art to solving problems with the latest scientific breakthroughs. A liberal arts and science education is an education for life.

In a new essay, President Audrey Bilger makes the case that feminist scholars have a responsibility to expand their writing beyond academic venues and engage with the public in accessible ways. The piece appears in ‘Public Feminisms,’ an open-access book published in April by Lever Press.

President Audrey Bilger, the first woman president of Reed College, is a prolific author and inclusive leader. Bilger has held numerous leadership positions across higher education. She is an active member of LGBTQ+ organizations and local Portland organizations committed to breaking down educational barriers. We talk with President Bilger about learning and questioning with joy and having the courage to lead with heart.

President Bilger and Peri Joy Long '23 traveled to Washington to share the implications of a post-Roe society for college campuses. In August, President Audrey Bilger traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S.Vice President Kamala Harris and seven other college presidents to discuss how colleges are responding to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

For Reed College President Audrey Bilger, a positive lesson of resilience was how quickly the Reed community could mobilize to address pressing needs, such as the need for virtual instruction. “Prior to March of 2020, we had zero online classes,” Bilger says. “In the last decade, other small liberal arts colleges have increased their online courses. But that’s not a direction that we’ve taken. So when we had to make the move to send everyone to remote instruction, it was really turning on a dime.”

Perhaps you’ve seen them around campus: ceramic hearts, bright red, dangling from the arms of trees, glinting in the elusive sunlight. Reminders of love and loved ones that are perhaps more precious than ever right now as the global pandemic continues to disconnect us from one another. The secret agents behind this festoonery? President Audrey Bilger and her wife, Cheryl Pawelski. “Love is a superpower,” Bilger says.

Audrey Bilger owns a lot of “firsts.” First woman president of Reed College. First LGBTQ Reed prez. And, probably, the first college president to own a bigger record collection than her school’s entire student body. Bilger and her wife, Cheryl Pawelski, arrived on the 111-year-old school’s leafy Southeast Portland campus packing about 70,000 albums and CDs. Pawelski is a Grammy-winning record producer and music historian who co-owns the record label Omnivore (which Bilger named).

There was no script for Audrey Bilger’s career. So she wrote her own.

The Reed College Board of Trustees has unanimously appointed Audrey Bilger as the 16th president of Reed College. Bilger is the first woman to be selected for the post. She joins the Reed community from Pomona College, where she served as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college and professor of English.

The ACE Fellows Program can be hard to explain. For anyone interested in taking on the challenges of higher education leadership, it sounds too good to be true.

IN THE FALL OF 1996, I traveled from Southern California to London to interview Jeanette Winterson for the Paris Review. I was in my mid-thirties (one year younger than the author) and had recently left a heterosexual marriage to embark on what would become my new life as a lesbian. I had been teaching Winterson's novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in my college English classes since its appearance in 1985, when it catapulted Winterson onto the international stage as a serious literary figure, and so I was elated when I got this assignment.

AS PROPOSITION 8, my home state of California's ban on same-sex marriage, makes its way through the courts, it leaves behind a trail of documents that will be required reading for anyone who wants to understand American democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Now that Prop 8 has been declared unconstitutional for the second time and the Perry case may be headed to the Supreme Court, we can pause to take stock of this work-in-progress. The Prop 8 trial is, in fact, one of the greatest stories of our time.

Simply put, a woman who makes jokes -- much like a woman who seeks public office -- steps outside the bounds of traditional femininity. So when it comes to women using humor in the realm of politics, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Review of Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, Janet Todd (Columbia, 2000) and Frances Burney: A Literary Life, Janice Ferrar Thaddeus.