I like academia. I love college campuses, chem labs, and the smell of libraries with old books. Places and institutions dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, to study, investigation, and discussion. In an odd way, I feel more at home on a college campus than in most places. They feel exciting, challenging, and yet as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes. That my own college experience differed significantly from my theoretical ideal did not do much to diminish my belief that a college professor had a near-perfect job in a near-perfect setting.
Pausing to let my professor friends recover from their choking fits....Thirty plus years away from the university experience—if you don't count paying tuition bills—along with a fair amount of reading, and discussions with friends who are college professors themselves, have revealed not only that an academic job is not the halcyon experience I had imagined, but that my view of academia as the ideal of intellectual inquiry is also seriously flawed. A recent article at Inside Higher Ed, entitled Does Academe Hinder Parenthood?, confirms both illusion-shattering discoveries. (Thanks to GroshLink for alerting me to this.)
The comments following the article are as revealing as the article itself, which notes that an academic career significantly reduces one's (statistical) chances of having children.
Controlling for such factors as age, weekly hours worked, and race or ethnicity, male faculty members are 21 percent less likely than male physicians to have recently had a birth in their households. Controlling the same factors for women, those who are academics are 41 percent less likely than physicians to have recently had children.
I was pleased to note that the comments were for the most part several steps more civilized than the usual playground taunts I see in comments to online news articles. However, I also noted a disturbing tendency—which may in itself reveal something about academia's view of children. "I was 36 when I felt free to start procreating," "Not once in non-academic circles have I ever heard mothers referred to as 'breeders'—but I hear it from academics all the time," "fulfilling a biological function," "women have family caretaking pressures IN ADDITION TO reproduction," "the male/female binary couple"—perhaps the writers are merely being academic and precise, but terms like "procreating," "breeders," "biological function," "reproduction," and the redundant "binary couple" all sound cold in this context, and distant from the reality of children and families. When doctors talk about an unborn baby at a certain stage of development as a "fetus," they are being technically correct, but an abortion-rights advocate uses the same term to put distance between that being and the idea of a living, human child. I find it quite likely that the very language with which those in academia are speaking about having children would have a negative effect on their own childbearing decisions.
So too, would the attitude of the commenter who calls himself "ScienceProf."
Of course academia hinders parenthood — it’s hard to be a parent when you work 80-100 hours a week. The question, however, is not whether it hinders parenthood, but whether anything should be done about it.
My answer is a flat out No! We cannot and should not coddle to those who make the decision to have children. When a woman has a child it is her problem, and no one else’s. Why should her colleagues pay the cost of her decision with their time? Why should the department be dragged down by having a member is not producing research? Why should a university be expected lower its standards of excellence?
When I serve on a hiring committee or select graduate students to work in my lab, I don’t want any with children. I know that they will be unable to commit the 80-100 hour weeks that is the standard workload of my department. As a supervisor for tenure-track faculty and graduate students, I refuse to accept lesser productivity due to someone’s choice to have a child. Anyone who has a child must accept the responsibility for their actions.
For those who do choose to have children, it is wholly unfair to expect your colleagues and department to share the burden of your personal decision. Their child is their problem, not mine, nor the department’s.
Even with my less-idealized view of the academy, I trust that attitude is not widespread—though I fear it might be. If it is, the problem goes far beyond whether or not college professors must jeopardize their careers to have families. Such a system would require them to jeopardize their careers to have a life. Even the medical establishment is beginning to learn that one cannot require that kind of work load for any more than a short time period and expect decent, let alone creative, work.
I still love libraries, old books, research, and college campuses, and know that there are schools that come much closer to my ideal than most. I'd love to hear about them!
