Dr. Allison Pugh, a sociology professor and chair of the women, gender and sexuality department at the University of Virginia, says women’s studies programs are giving campus communities the tools they need to understand what’s going on “outside my window right now. … We drag the university into the 21st century,” she says. “Administrations point to us when they want to highlight their commitments to equity or justice or inclusion. But it’s not just as a symbol. We provide the intellectual decoder rings for the enormous cohorts of students who are driven to understand current events.”