This study of academic feminism uses cultural and critical theory, feminist poststructuralism, and oral history to examine the transformative role of feminist scholarship in higher education. Nine feminist scholars were selected as participants using four sampling criteria: primary discipline (predominatly from the humanities and social sciences); generational cohort; professional age; and personal characteristics (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender). All interviewees provided curriculum vitae and were interviewed by the researcher. Generational analysis of the development of these feminist scholars reveals how discursive resources available at different moments within the evolution of feminism shaped their identities as scholars and feminists. Those who were adults in the early 1970s used their experience to institutionalize feminism in the academy; those who were in graduate school during this period assimilated the newly emerging feminist values into the academic culture in which they were immersed; adolescents experienced the women's movement as a challenge to their forming sense of identity; and children of second-wave feminists, who are now young professors, take feminism for granted as an institutional norm. Running through their career/life stories is a common thread that forms a feminist cultural core: individuals' intellectual pursuits derived from a deeply felt personal desire for social justice. (Contains 27 references.) (CH)