Alumna founds girls' school

By Sarah Marie Pittman
The Collegian

When asked how many children she has, Fresno State alumna Diana Meehan answered, “Biological children — two. Non-biological — 502.”

Meehan, 63, is not coming to Fresno State to discuss a plethora of adopted children but rather the girls who attend the school she helped found, the Archer School for Girls. Meehan graduated from Fresno State in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She will speak Wednesday as the College of Arts and Humanities’ Distinguished Alumnus. Her lecture is titled, “Founding a School, Learning My Lesson.”

Meehan’s father was a space pioneer and as a child, Meehan never stayed in one place more than two years, growing up for the most part in Texas, New Mexico, California and Colorado.

At Fresno State she joined a sorority and soon found her niche.

“It was the time that I was trying to grow up,” Meehan said in a phone interview with The Collegian. “I didn’t know how to drink or how to do the twist. I didn’t know very much. I was in exactly the right place. It was a really good community.”

After becoming the first in her family to graduate college, Meehan went on to earn her master’s degree in mass communication from San Diego State University and her Ph.D. in communication from the University of Southern California.

“I think that it’s absolutely vital that you’re always growing and always learning. Even if it’s not a degree, people should always be learning. It’s a way of staying alive,” Meehan said.

She decided to continue her education because she “wanted to do something in the women’s movement and [she] felt like [she] didn’t know enough.”

Among many accomplishments, Meehan has served as a founding member of the International Women’s Center in Moscow, Russia; an adviser to the National Commission on Children; the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Women and Men at the University of California and an invited participant at two presidential economic conferences.

Meehan is the founding partner of VU Productions, the non-fiction division of UBU Productions, which her husband, TV creator-writer-producer Gary David Goldberg, (“Family Ties,” “Spin City,” “Must Love Dogs”) formed and served as the chairman.

VU Productions produced award-winning documentaries that include A & E Network’s “Women in War,” Lifetime Network’s expose of child labor violations, “Danger: Kids at Work,” an ABS special, “Revolution at Work,” and Lifetime Network’s “Shattered Lullabies,” an investigation about infant mortality.

In 1994 Meehan founded The Archer School for Girls, a sixth through 12th-grade private girls’ school in Brentwood, Calif. which is centered on the way girls learn.

“The first and primary advantage is that girls play all the roles. They’re the class clowns, the class presidents, they’re the editors, the chemists and the varsity,” Meehan said.

Another benefit is that there is more of a focus on academics.

“The best female math and science students are girls in single sex schools,” Meehan said. “You eliminate a lot of the distraction from having 16-year-olds of different sexes in the same room at the same time. It’s hard to concentrate on algorithms and algebra and English when there’s someone in the room, to your eye, that’s sexy as all get up.”

Meehan attended two different girls’ schools in high school and her two daughters both attended the Archer School for Girls.

Meehan said the school offers a lot of scholarships and she said she would go around to friends she knew in Hollywood and ask for donations to sponsor a girl’s tuition.

“They thought I was going to sell them a documentary and I’d sell them a kid,” Meehan said.

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