Heather Shea shares how working in a women’s center and bringing feminist icon Gloria Steinem to campus shaped her personal, political, and professional journey. She reflects on the enduring need for activism and advocacy in women and gender equity centers.

Gardner, H. (Host). (2025, May 14) Here’s the Story: “Meeting Gloria, Finding Myself” (No. 270) [Audio podcast episode]. In Student Affairs NOW. https://studentaffairsnow.com/meeting-gloria-finding-myself/

Helena Gardner
Welcome to Here’s the Story, a show that brings Student Affairs to life by sharing the authentic voices and lived experiences of those who are shaping the field every day as part of the Student Affairs now family, we’re dedicated to serving and furthering the people who walk the walk, talk to talk and carry the walk that all of us find ourselves doing who work in Student Affairs in Higher Education. You can find us at studentaffairsnow.com, or directly at studentaffairsnow.com/heresthestory, or YouTube or anywhere you enjoy podcast, I like to start off by thanking today’s sponsor Huron. Huron’s education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial health and student success. I get to be your host today, Helena Gardner, and my pronouns are she? Her, her, and I serve as the Director of Residence, education and housing services at Michigan, Michigan State University. I live my life as a mom, a sister, a daughter, a friend and a mentor. I’m with you today from the ancestral, traditional contemporary lands of the Anishinabe three fires, confederacy of Ojibwa, Ottawa and Potawatomi peoples. The university resides on land seated in the 1819, treaty of Saginaw, home to Michigan State University. And I’m going to toss it to my co-host.

Neil E. Golemo
Howdy. My name is Neil Golemo. I use he, him pronouns, and I am blessed to serve as the Director of Campus Living Learning and Texas A name’s Sonny Galveston campus, and I’m just over here living hard and making it look easy,

Helena Gardner
making it look easy now, because today, today, we have a special guest for you. Today. Want to introduce to you, Heather. Shea, you may be familiar with Heather. Shea, we see her often on Student Affairs NOW, kind of a big deal. Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. Like, kind of a big deal, like, we got a special guest today. I’m really excited. I have the pleasure of seeing Heather probably a little bit more often in real life on campus, as we get to be great colleagues doing this thing at Michigan State. Don’t know, welcome Heather. Share whatever you want to share about you. And we’re real curious what you gotta say today, so you let us know, and then we will get started. Alright.

Heather Shea
Well, it’s so great to be here. Thank you for the invitation and for all of the work that the three of you are doing to create this, this amazing podcast, I think it’s just such a powerful way of bringing the field to life, right? Because we are nothing if we are not the stories that have have shaped us. So I Yes, work at Michigan State, alongside Helena. I have been here since 2013 but before that, I lived in the West. As I like to say, I’m from the west. My originally born and raised in Colorado, moved to Arizona, then moved to Idaho, which is where I was right before coming to Michigan State, which Idaho will play prominently in my story that I’m going to share with you all today.

Helena Gardner
Alright. Well, Heather, we so you do this, and we typically see you get into our scholarly and practitioner land. Mm, hmm. And so, you know, tell us a story from the heavenly Alright, with that slide, all right.

Heather Shea
Well, this is the story about how I met feminist icon Gloria Steinem. And I’m going to share this story because it was one of the probably most um. It was one of the most formative times in my life, for sure, but it was also just like, you know, when you ever meet somebody who you’ve only ever read or heard about or like, you know, their reputation proceeds, it’s just, it’s amazing. So okay, so that’s where the story is going, but I’m going to give some back story to kind of tee it up a little bit. So I think the first thing to know about me is that I am the daughter of and was surrounded by and the granddaughter of strong women. My mom was a teacher when I was in high school, she went back to get her master’s degree because she wanted to be paid more money. That was important for me. Formative lesson my two grandmothers, my experience of them was both as widows, or Yes, widows. So Both my grandfathers passed when I was young, and as I was growing up and kind of figuring out who I was. I saw them living their best lives as 67 year old women living independently, making their own decisions. They have both passed, and I miss them every day. So that’s the context, right? My brother and I were raised in a household where there weren’t boys chores and girls chores, like everybody did all the things. We had some livestock animals, and we were all out there cleaning up the in the corral, right? So that was not just a one person job. And I think that that, like, equality was amazing, right? I mean, I don’t know, in the in the this is, I was born in 1974 y’all, so I don’t know, in the early 80s, if you know, there was really parenting that really kind of thought about this, but it was something that was really important to my parents. So fast forward to college, and I double majored in graphic design, so I have a BFA in fine art, and I also double majored in marketing. So if you know me, you know I have a lot of interests, and my double major is a perfect example of kind of interested over here in marketing. I’m kind of interested over here in art at some point during, I think it was my sophomore year, my advisor said, you know, if you just take two more classes, you’ll have, you’ll have a minor in Art History. And so I was like, That sounds amazing. So double minor plus or double major plus a minor. So I was lining out my courses for finishing up my minor, and at that point I’d probably taken four or five art history courses, and that one semester it happened to be offered. It wasn’t offered every semester it was offered, like every three years, there was a class called Women in our history. So I’m like, Well, that sounds cool. I’ll take that class. So Courtney Martin is a, is a an author who wrote a book about feminist click moments. This class was my feminist click moment. So as I said, hadn’t really thought about the ways that gender equity was playing out in the larger world, because I lived in this very equal household as a child, when I started thinking about why I had to take a class to learn about women in art history, I started thinking back to all of the art classes, art history classes I’d already taken up to that point, which is like four or five, and I could count on one hand the number of women artists that are In the canon of our history at that time. And this, like, first of all, it just made me mad, right? I mean, it made me mad, and then it made me kind of question, well, why? Well, is this the same in other disciplines? Turns out, whether it’s music or literature or you can go across the humanities and see the ways in which women’s contributions have been either ignored, erased, etc. So this is the this is the backdrop. So I ended up doing nothing with either of those two majors. I didn’t ever work as a graphic designer, and that’s another story. I never got it. I never worked in a C suite or did marketing, because meanwhile, I was also an RA, right, and I was working on campus as an RA at Colorado State at the time, a couple RAs got it elevated. Rams, go, rams, go, rams. Couple of RAs got elevated. To be assistant hall directors at least when I was there, and then a hall director. And so I ended up deciding I wanted to go into Student Affairs. And so I applied to one school and went immediately into the sahe program at Colorado State. So All right, so now I’m going to fast forward a little bit, because I started my career in student affairs, and I, you know, did a lot of work that I think wasn’t necessarily tied to my identity, and I had an opportunity when I was probably about eight years in to my career, to move to a new campus with my then partner. And there were a couple of different options. You know, it was kind of one of those spousal hire situations, right? And I could say all kinds of things about that too. We’re not going to go there today, necessarily, but I took a series of lateral moves throughout the previous eight years around the country, following my mind to then partner, right? And at the time, when we started at the University of Idaho, there were two positions that were available. One of them was the interim director of the Women’s Center. So I was like, I felt that moment Right. Like, you know, when you are are super excited about something, but you kind of are also really scared, and you kind of like reverberating. I remember sitting in my office going, Oh my God. Like, could I do this job? Like, I don’t have a background in women’s studies like I take this one women in art history class, right? That that was like a significant moment. So I, like some of you may know Sharon Chia claros. Sharon had been a women’s studies person she, like, brought in all these books I was reading, and one of the books happened to be Gloria Steinem book. Anyway, I get to Idaho, and I at some point, I transitioned from the interim director to the permanent director. That women’s center, just to give a tiny bit of context, is one of the was one of the oldest women’s centers in the country at the time. It was founded in 1972 it was founded as a result of a lawsuit that was brought against the institution by a group of women who and one man who took to the President of the University at the time a list of things that they wanted to see happen the president of that university at the time had the foresight to say, if I just create these things, the next president could come in and undo them. So he actually encouraged them to take it to the Idaho Commission on Human Rights. And then he along with the four signers, or all the all the four mothers of the of the space signed a conciliation agreement. That conciliation agreement didn’t just establish a women’s center. It also resulted in equal salaries and back pay. It resulted in a female physician in the health center. It resulted in the permanent establishment of a women’s center with a director salary that was paid commensurate to the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. That’s important. And so as I was learning about this and learning about the women who are part of this, we started kind of tracking the dates, and we’re like, oh my gosh, 2012 this women’s center is going to be celebrating its 40th birthday. Like, how cool is that? Right? I got to be the director of a women’s center is having this milestone birthday 40 years so I remember sitting in my house because there had just been a documentary released by HBO about Gloria Steinem, and I think it was another staff member. We were doing a watch party. It clicked for us at the same time that Ms magazine was founded by Gloria Steinem in 1972

Heather Shea
and we were like, oh my god, wouldn’t it be so cool if we could bring Gloria Steinem to campus for the women’s Center’s 40th anniversary? Holy crap. Like I was like this, there’s no way this is going to happen. I found out how much she cost. It was not a small amount of money, because she’s worth it. And as the as the planning progressed and and we finally figured out, like we could ask this person, we could ask this department, we could ask this we created this whole like sponsorship structure. We made it possible to bring this icon to campus so 2012 Gloria Steinem. Came to speak at the University of Idaho. We sold tickets, and we actually filled an entire side of the football stadium in Idaho to listen to Gloria Steinem speak. And so I share all that story. I got to spend time with her that day, I was like the Uber driver taking her around to all of the different locations. She is delightful. She’s just just absolutely it’s an incredible human but as I reflect back on this time and earlier this year, I learned from my colleagues at Idaho that that women’s center was one of many places across the country that unfortunately has been closed due to anti dei legislation the state of Idaho, the legislature in Idaho, even though we thought it had a permanent establishment. It is a conciliation agreement. Legislative action could still undo that. And 50 years it was 2022, they celebrated their 50th it was 52 year old. Women’s Center closed its doors. I’ve written about this. I’m not going to cry. I’ve written about this, the the meaning that that place held for not just those of us who were there in the late, you know, 2008 to 2013 which is my span, but the decades of women who were a part of that space, um, and how much we’ve lost in closing spaces like this. I ended up writing my dissertation about student engagement in the Women’s Center, and it has been such a formative part of my identity and being a part of a planning committee that involved not just some of the founders of the Women’s Center, but also students who are currently there, and some alumni to bring Gloria Steinem to campus, truly one of the the best experiences of my professional career. But I I cannot help but wonder what we how we are going to take stock at the end of who knows when this era will end? What that means for higher education, what this means for our for our future and and I think at the heart of it, it is identity work. And working in identity centers is personal, because who I am, it is political. Is inherently a political space. We are disrupting. We are creating and claiming space for people who this campus was never built for, right and it is also professional. Right is my job to challenge equity issues on campus. It was my job to support students and to address issues that were arising, and that alignment of personal, political and professional. Those five years, five and a half years were were incredible. So that’s my story.

Helena Gardner
Wow, Heather, just that was a journey that that was a journey we’re going to pause. We’re going to pause. Thank our sponsors and come come back.Well, we’re going to go ahead and give a shout out to today’s sponsors one more time Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspective, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, please visit. Neil, what you thinking about over there?

Neil E. Golemo
I mean, I kind of hate that. I felt like I knew where the story was going to go about halfway through. I think there’s a lot that certainly resonates with me, especially, you know, growing up in the country where, you know, you got work that needs to be done, and you don’t really have time to think about much beyond whether it’s getting done or not, you know. And I was raised by women, you know. I. All the smartest people I knew were women. All the most accomplished people I knew were women. And you know, I had to go out into the world to hear a different story in a lot of ways. And so I don’t know these zoom was just a ton of confusion, but I don’t know what it could be like to have such a big part of yourself and validated so clearly and so, yeah, sharing.

Helena Gardner
Such a huge part of others and albeit 10 years ago, ish kind of it sounds like when you’re celebrating a 40 year. Yeah. And you think about, though, where it started, where there was nothing to have a stadium of interest, right? So that means there’s half a stadium of interest for a long time, silenced or looking for voice, and definitely looking to be in community like, you know, a leader, a thought leader, who’s doing the work. And, you know, and so I, you know, Neil, I didn’t know where we were going. And that’s, as Heather said it, I realized I was aware that there, that that center had been closed, and it hit in a way of I um, I wish I’d written it down. Personal, professional, there was one more

Heather Shea
political, political, personal, yep, yep, all

Helena Gardner
of them, as you said it for me, yeah, in a way of where, you know, I think about, and I’m curious to where you see it going. Heather, yeah.

Heather Shea
I mean, I will say, hopefully. No, what are you hopeful for? I’m I’m curious. I’m

Helena Gardner
just hopeful, yeah, that we we come through this season. That’s what I kind of wanted to just know, hopefully we come through. But I’m curious to how you see it, holding on, pulling back like, yeah, what are your thoughts in that space? Right?

Heather Shea
Well, so one thing I do want to say is that the phrase personal is political, or political is personal said both ways. It’s actually like early feminist, like women’s liberation feminist belief, which the idea behind that is that there is no individual story, right? Every person story. And when we do the collective consciousness raising work and we start comparing stories, we realize that we have political power if we pull together. And so think, imagine the 1970s you know, women, housewives like this, like Feminine Mystique era, right? So, like all these women, red Betty for Dan, and they’re like, wait a minute, my life is the same way. Wait, wait a minute, you don’t have a credit card. I can’t get a credit card, right? Wait a minute. Like, you know, my your husband’s beating you, my husband, right? So, like, a whole lot of stuff was happening in that era that then prompted this political movement. So we have been here before. I say that to say we have been here before we have done organizing, and often it was underground. It was not in the public space. And you know, as as an administrator, I’m watching students engage with the current political climate and feel just my heart breaking, but also like we need to, we need to continually circle back to the fact that we we have people on our campus, we have ancestors on our campus who have been a part of building and retaining joy in their lives, even though that it feels Like the whole world is against them. So the the kind of reminder of that, and you know, I spent some time with some colleagues at at ACPA last month, and we were talking about this like we need to remember that. And it wasn’t necessarily, you know, white women who’ve experienced that in the past, but you know, black women, folks of color, who you know they were, we were always kind of working towards an end that wasn’t in the cards, right? So personal is political and professional. That’s the little phrase, thank you.

Neil E. Golemo
I keep, I keep coming back to this idea of like trails have been blazed, and having to go back and the things that we might be taking for granted. You know, second wing feminism was revolutionary, but we take it for granted now, because it was about ideas. Like, maybe you shouldn’t have to stay in a relationship where you were beaten because you don’t have the all. You can’t get a loan. You know, you aren’t allowed to have credit. But you know, as a man like I can tell you, when we got married, we bought our first house on my wife’s credit, not mine. You know, I lost nothing by that, and I just worry so much about the things that we take for granted. But I can also say, you know, anybody who haven’t grown up in the country, you know, if you spend time in the forest, going on a trail, you know that once a trail is like, grown over, it’s still easier, still there. It’s easier. You don’t have to replace it. You just have to clean it up. No, no. Maybe I’m being hopeful, but.

Helena Gardner
I love it. That’s because you’re pretty much like, once a trail has been blazed, it’s Blaze. It it’s blazed. Like it’s, it’s almost like, I think, like the double edgeness of it, of the conception that there are no longer concerns, because the trail has been blazed. Work has been done, mixed with kind of what you’re saying, how they’re like, there’s no end in sight. So that the work’s never done. If we want to maintain any we can wake up one day humans. We’re human differently, and I’m looking forward to that day. But I love that you say that though you know. Because, as we said, we’ve been here before, and we know where we are going, you know. So now the other Oh, go ahead. I saved my question, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Heather Shea
no, I want to say one more thing about kind of that second wave feminist movement, because, and, and, you know, we know, if you’ve studied feminist history and all the the ways In which white feminists, cisgender feminists, straight feminists, have have prioritized themselves over widening the circle. And the second wave feminist movement was, was definitely perpetrators of that exclusionary feminism. And so I also want to, want to say that, and I think the, you know, if we’re going back to that, oh, right, like, that’s, that’s not solidarity, that’s not intersectionality, yeah, that’s not showing the ways in which our multiple identities and experiences overlap and create. And so one of the things that I learned in the Women’s Center, and have learned since then, even being here at Michigan State and working in a women’s center here was, you know, we got to take that and use it, but we also need to expand and think again and and figure out who was not at those tables. You know, what sacrifices were made under, under, about identities that ended up hurting our our colleagues who could have been a part of the beneficiaries of that work. So second wave feminism, I mean, Gloria Steinem has said some transphobic things as a as a mother of a trans kid, like I can’t hold I can’t help but not hold her responsible for that. But I am deeply, you know, grateful for the the the many voices of wisdom, both inside Women’s Center work and beyond that is kind of shaped, shaped that for me.

Neil E. Golemo
Well, I mean, that’s why we stand on the shoulders of giants, right? Like to grow, to improve, to get better. And I am a firm believer that, you know, knowledge is is weird in that, like, it’s toothpaste you can’t put back in the tube like it is transformative, you know? And I think there’s a lot of effort out there to roll things back that are just a giant waste of time, yeah, and one way or the other, you know? What was the saying? The the arc of of justice, yeah, it bends towards is long, but it bends towards justice. Eventually, we just gotta keep doing the work our heads down and keep going, yeah.

Helena Gardner
And I feel like, you know, ladies and Brooklyn is wanting to take the professional out of it. I think, like, that’s the way to say it is. We wanted, like, you know, remove it from those spaces. But you can never take it from the person, and as long as it’s in the personal, it’s going to remain in the political like it doesn’t. It doesn’t go away as a as a human right, as human space. I’m curious, Heather, if you you know you’re not, you’re no longer at Idaho, you’re not in that institution any longer. But I’m wondering if you have any. Insight on what the work maybe looks like now there and if, and if you’re not able to speak to that, I understand, but what you imagine it may need to look like anywhere that might be facing similar,

Heather Shea
yeah, well, I do know that not just the Women’s Center, but also the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the LGBT office, they all closed, and those staff members have been reassigned. I know the person who succeeded me as director is now working in like the central Student Affairs office, and I can’t imagine that there is still not organizing happening, right? And I, you know, I know that they, they did, they did the closing out of the Women’s Center justice. I’m in close contact with a woman who was in there in the beginning, right, who sent me videos and all of this. Because, you know, it happened on a Friday afternoon in January. So I gosh, you know, I think it’s a really good question, though, because when you take away the physical work space, does that mean that the psychological work, or the emotional work doesn’t continue and and does it have to be within the walls of the institution, right? Like there’s organizing spaces all over that don’t have to live within higher ed. So what I think the thing I would hold on to, if I were in a center that had just been closed, is, where else, beyond the university or college that I work with, can I engage in spaces of activism? And there’s some of that, you know, and everywhere

Neil E. Golemo
You know, my struggle with that. I live in Texas, and this is coming up, and you know my struggle is, it’s not just that we’re having these, these yokes placed on us, but also, like we teach our students that there’s a right way to do things, there’s a right way to affect change. And I struggle because I know what’s right, and we’re being told to ignore and we know it’s right and so, but also, like, I want to follow the law, because I believe there’s something good in that, and I struggle. I struggle with that, like I feel betrayed a little bit by law and the pretzels that we have to put ourselves into, you know, because we have so much spare time as it is, right? So much mental space to be doing more and so.

Helena Gardner
You are so consistent with very good and very direct on minors, and you’re right, like it’s, the constant forever growth.

Neil E. Golemo
When you have a face limit, you define silver lining from time to time. So neighbor podcast

Helena Gardner
and this, this particular podcast episode has just been it’s been enlightening. It’s been great, and it has it’s been awesome to spend this time on this side of Heather to learn about your journey, your impact. And thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you,

Heather Shea
of course, thank you. Thank you both, and thank you to the producer behind the scenes. GT, thank you.

Helena Gardner
Yes, and you want to learn more about Heather. If you didn’t know, you can catch Heather on multiple student affairs now episodes today, though, she’s here with us on here’s the story, a part of that same student affairs now, family, we’re so glad you’ve joined us. We definitely took a journey in our feelings. But we do this. We do this all the time. But here’s the story. We give you an opportunity to laugh, to cry, to learn, sometimes commiserate and always celebrate being part of the Student Affairs experience. Listen, if you. Have a story. We all have a story. Please consider sharing with us by leaving a two minute pitch via voice file at Student Affairs now com slash. Here’s the story. Every story is welcome, and every story is an is an earnest perspective. And even if you don’t feel like sharing yours, you can go back and still find ours. You could find Heathers. You can find several others at Student Affairs now.com you can check us out on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Um, I’m still Helena, and this is my great host. Pass it over to you.

Neil E. Golemo
I’m still Doctor Neil . Golemo, and I just want to say that I hope this story has fed your flame a little bit, because we all need a little bit of light. So please go out there and do the work, because we need it.

Helena Gardner
Thank you both this. This episode is edited by the great Nat Ambrosey, and I tell you what Nat does a great job making us look good, feel good and sound good. So thank you, Nat, for all you do all the time. This is Here’s the Story, and until next time. Thank you. Heather Shea.