by Sara Russo

Actress, exercise guru, and North Vietnamese sympathizer Jane Fonda recently announced that she will be donating $12.5 million dollars to Harvard University to fund the creation of a Harvard Center on Gender and Education. The center will study how concepts of gender affect children's learning and development.

The gift was inspired by Harvard Professor Carol Gilligan, best known for her book In a Different Voice, which argues that girls lose confidence and begin to censor their opinions during adolescence. Fonda credits Gilligan with helping her to realize the "toxic" effects of gender stereotypes, and considers the donation to be a "thank you" gift to the researcher.

"This project is very close to my heart," Fonda explained. "It's taken me a very long time to see the impact gender roles have had on my life, and if I, as a privileged, white, aging movie star, have had to wait this long, I can't even imagine what young women who are less fortunate than I am have had to deal with."

The bequest includes $2.5 million set aside to create an endowed professorship for the center that will be named after Gilligan, who will serve as an honorary "chairwoman" of an advisory committee to the center. Gilligan recently announced that she will be leaving Harvard for New York University in June of 2002.

Despite the failure of others to duplicate Gilligan's research and her refusal to produce the data on which that work is based, arguing that it is too sensitive to be released, her conclusion that girls suffer a loss of self-esteem during puberty had broad repercussions on educational policy in America.

Fonda herself noted the international scope of Gilligan's influence. "Many women around the world have been influenced by her work," the actress commented. "I have seen her books on their shelves in places like South Africa, Nigeria, and China."

Critics of Gilligan attest that the researcher's influence is undeserved, and charge that Gilligan and Fonda are seeking justification for their desire to androgynize society and delegitimize traditional gender roles.

In an interview with online magazine Salon.com, Christina Hoff Sommers, prominent author of The War Against Boys and a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that Gilligan's work portrays masculinity as a pathology.

"With friends like Carol Gilligan and Jane Fonda, boys need no enemies," Sommers claimed. "These two women are convinced that in order to help boys, we have to rescue them from their masculinity, which they view as dangerous and toxic....I simply see no evidence that the average Little Leaguer or Boy Scout, the average boy, is pathological or disturbed in the ways that Gilligan and Fonda are suggesting."

In discussing the new gender center, Fonda charged that our society fails in its instruction of gender differences. "I recognize the need to bring some of these lessons home," Fonda said. "We still have a culture that teaches girls and boys a distorted view of what it takes to be women and men." Officials at Harvard lavished Fonda and GIlligan with praise at a press conference where the donation was announced. "We are enormously grateful to Jane Fonda for this gift, and enormously proud of Carol Gilligan, whose pioneering work inspired this gift," declared Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Jerome Murphy. "Thank you, Jane, for making the impossible possible."

But Sommers criticizes Harvard's acceptance of the gift as unbefitting the University's reputation as a powerhouse of academic rigor. "That is simply unacceptable in empirical research," she commented on Gilligan's failure to make her data accessible to other scholars. "You have to show others your original data, and she hasn't done this for the three studies on which she based her claims."

Sommers also took note of Fonda's insistence that the new gender and education center bear Harvard's name. "I know that Fonda insisted that the center have the word 'Harvard' in its title, so it's going to carry the prestige of Harvard. People are going to assume that it meets the high standards that Harvard usually insists upon. But they should look more closely at Gilligan's work, and ask themselves what standards were applied to her work."

Fonda freely admits that she chose Harvard to be the beneficiary of her gift because of the leading role the institution plays in American academia. "When Harvard makes an opening, it becomes a path," she said. "What Harvard does reverberates around the world."