Using a feminist poststructuralist perspective, this study investigates academic feminism as a case of transformation in higher education. Narrative analysis was used to examine the transformative role of feminist scholarship in the contexts of disciplines, departments, and the university, illustrated by the life histories of nine diverse feminists and their perceptions of transformation in sociohistoric, generational, and multiple structural contexts. Assessments of progress must consider the relative nature of a values shift in institutional transformation.

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This exploratory analysis involved more than 300 publication abstracts, with special attention given to 100 documents selected from the ERIC database and published since 1980. Based upon their analysis, the authors define six primary author groups (or voices) that contribute to the literature on community colleges: community college faculty, community college institutional research staff, state agency personnel, national association staff, university professors, and journalists. The contributions made by each author group to the literature on community colleges are discussed. Based on their findings, the researchers assert the need for an annual synthesis of the literature produced by these diverse author groups that would be written by a skillful author and published in a journal read by a broad audience.

Over the past several decades, academic feminisms, like other emancipatory knowledges (Bensimon, 1994) that have gained legitimacy in the academy have contributed to a transformation on American campuses that is challenging traditional norms, values, and assumptions across the disciplines in an effort to build communities centered on differences. As a new paradigm for inquiry, feminist scholarship has addressed the relationship between knowledge and its social uses and how patriarchal values have shaped the content and structure of knowledge. Through an in-depth exploration of nine feminists’ worldviews and approaches to teaching and research, this study examined the meaning of transformation for diverse feminists in the setting of a large, urban research institution. Three types of feminism were identified: liberal, critical, and dialogic. Beyond providing rich descriptions of how these different feminists enact a feminist culture, insights about the process of institutional transformation are revealed. The transformative role of internal differentiation and the dialogic process in this feminist community and the significance of an emerging dialogic, feminist discourse have important theoretical implications for understanding how the transformation of an institution is sustained over time.