The arrival of professors Rosemarie Arbur, Elizabeth Fifer, Rosemary Mundhenk and Barbara Traister to Lehigh’s Department of English in 1972 and 1973 was a landmark in campus diversity and inclusion.

The women’s stories and lives are chronicled in “The First Four,” a documentary written and produced in 2013 by four Lehigh students.

At times, campus culture proved challenging as the women faculty faced outdated notions of gender roles. The women professors, however, found their interactions with students to be positive.

Traiser describes an encounter years later in New York’s Central Park when a student who had not had her in class recognized her as a Lehigh professor who had been pregnant.

“It was so unusual to see a woman faculty member, and especially a woman faculty member pregnant, that he had remembered,” she said. “He picked me out just sitting under a tree in Central Park.”