This structure is worth describing, for it also represents or embodies the reasons why, in general, York as an institution is relatively receptive to a program like Women's Studies. I should add at this point that the basic supportiveness of the structure was enhanced immeasurably by the attitudes and actions of the people running it. During the period when we were working to get the program in place, York's President, H. Ian Macdonald, helped us at every necessary point, and so did a whole range of deans and department heads (of whom there were two on the organizing committee). So too did innumerable secretaries and administrative assistants - the invisible army of strong and competent women who really run universities as they do all other complex bureaucracies. They were often a sort of fifth column, keeping us informed far more than strict duty required about crucial details of deadlines, personnel of committees, outcomes of meetings and so on.

But back to the structure. York is an interdisciplinary university, which started out with a strong commitment to general education. Only in the most recent years has it even been possible for students to take departmental courses in the first year of study. Beside the normal departments, therefore, we have something called "divisions", which offer only interdisciplinary courses in either (respectively) the humanities or the social sciences. Students are required to take a certain number of such courses as well as their normal majors in departments. We also had by 1981 twelve "interdisciplinary" programs. These each combine some choice of departmental majors with some specified assortment of divisional courses. Thus, we have: African Studies, Mass Communications, Urban Studies, Canadian Studies, Religious Studies and so on. We obviously also have a procedure for getting such an interdisciplinary program approved. All of which suited the preferences of the Women's studies Committee, who were convinced that there were good intellectual reasons for making the program a combination of disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary approaches.

So, for two years, we worked our way through the approval process. The problem was that, normally, such programs "link" with only a handful of departments. Thus, Canadian Studies would need to link with Geography, Political Science, French Studies, History, possibly English, and only those departments would have a say in the approval of the program. It would not need to have any formal connection with, say, Psychology or German. Initially, we hoped to be allowed a sort of carte-blanche for linking, on the grounds that Women's Studies, although perhaps analogous to other area studies programs, was nevertheless different, and could be linked with all classifications of human knowledge. This argument was not accepted. So we started out with the most obvious disciplines, the ones we expected the most majors in English, History, Sociology, Psychology. Then we gradually expanded, until now we can formally do what we wanted originally, allow linkage with each degree-granting unit in the Faulty of Arts. But to do this we had to work through fourteen department structures and get their agreement that Women's Studies really exists, is intellectually valid. and is not political (or at least not more political than everything else in the curriculum). Note that some departments have as many as three level of decision making on curriculum matters!

It was an exhausting process "trial by committee", one dean called it. But it had an extremely valuable side-effect. When we went first to Arts Faculty committees and then on to the full Council, and to Senate committee and full Senate, everyone involved had already encountered and criticized our proposal in their own departments. And we, of course, had already made the most necessary modifications. So that, in spite of somewhat paranoiac expectations, we had very little difficulty getting approved. All it took was time and, yes, a great deal of patience.

We are now a legitimate program. Our students combine a conventional (six- course) Honours major with six courses in Women's Studies. The latter includes a core course required of all majors, team-taught by a humanist and a social scientist show the different (interdisciplinary) ways of doing womens studies (and I will spare readers the negotiations necessary for approval of that cross-divisional course). Majors also write a senior honours thesis in the major department with which they are linked, on a Women's Studies topic. We expect to have two graduates this June-but we may have only one, since the second is expecting a baby in July and this slowing down her thesis.

So this is Women's studies at York, It was a compatible environment, we worked very hard-and after one year, can't yet say much about our one formal program. We can, if encouraged, wax very enthusiastic indeed about our more of facilities and faculty and services and students

Now we look forward, to when we can get going on graduate studies, on the same model.

1. The categories of women's studies courses have now been collapsed into two: courses which maybe taken for program credit (designated each year including specification of instructor and section) and "related" courses in which research on women may be done (similarly identified each year in agreement with the instructors). The "related" courses extremely useful device for "mainstreaming" research women