For Jaiden Radocyz DRC’26, Douglass is the ideal place at Rutgers to develop the leadership skills necessary for advancing personal, professional, and community futures. Whether they are curating an exhibit in the Douglass library through the Faculty Fellows program or serving as a peer mentor for their fellow Douglass students, they exemplify what effective feminist leadership looks like across campus.
“It is just so important to have spaces like Douglass,” she said. “It’s a community that’s open to discussion, where being passionate is encouraged, and your lived experience is celebrated. To be a leader, you need to know and learn about yourself as well as your community. Douglass is the place to do that.”
As a student in Douglass’s feminist foundation course, Knowledge and Power: Issues in Women’s Leadership, Jaiden was introduced to feminist leadership. Formerly known as Shaping a Life, the course has been beloved by generations of Douglass students. The heart of the course is building a knowledge base for feminist ethical leadership, foregrounded by the renowned authors, thinkers, and activists on the syllabus. Readings have included a wide range of feminist texts, including Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Sharon Lee De la Cruz’s I Am a Wild Seed, and Adrienne Rich’s essay, Claiming an Education. The course situates these theories, ideas, and philosophies in the context of feminist leadership, a kind of leadership defined by the power in bringing others along, creating space for debate, respecting differing opinions and perspectives, and pushing forward together in ways that bring about a common good.
“Knowledge and Power prepared me for feminist leadership really well,” they said. “It really presents a pathway for how students can grow both personally, professionally, and as a leader while at Rutgers.”
Many, including Jaiden, feel the course gives them the framework to contextualize the gendered experiences they may have had throughout their lives and build the confidence to speak out about them. At the same time, the course aids students, who are most often in their first or second year of college, to hone integral university-level skills such as critical thinking, analytical writing, and close reading.
As a standout student in her own section of Knowledge and Power, Jaiden applied to become a Barbara Voorhees Peer mentor. They were placed with the class of Dr. Katy Gray, Assistant Dean for Douglass Discovery and Academic Programs, whom Jaiden also had as an instructor in their own Knowledge and Power course. In this role, they work with their assigned class section of Knowledge and Power as a teaching assistant and peer mentor, helping Douglass students not only with course material but with all the adjustments, challenges, and triumphs that come along with life in college. As a peer mentor, Jaiden excels at bringing the leadership skills she learned in Knowledge and Power into practice.
"I've taught a lot of students at Rutgers, and there's a lot that's really special about Jaiden as a person and a thinker," said Dr. Gray. "What made them such a great peer mentor is their openness to new ideas, their capacity for thinking about how feminist concepts can build a different kind of future for everyone, and their really strong desire to start that work at Douglass and Rutgers."
“In Douglass’ Knowledge and Power course, students get so much more confident,” Jaiden said. “As a mentor for the course, it’s so wonderful to watch. At the beginning, people may have been shy, but by the end, they are significantly more willing to say what they wanted to say and to speak up.”
Dedicated to her studies in the humanities, Jaiden is a double Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies while pursuing an Italian minor. After they graduate from Douglass and Rutgers, they hope to pursue a Master of Information Science and become a community librarian where she can continue to impart the importance of the humanities beyond the academic space, bringing the magic and power of literature to readers both young and old alike.
