Professor Mommy by Rachel Connelly & Kristen Ghodsee

Author:Rachel Connelly & Kristen Ghodsee [Connelly, Rachel & Ghodsee, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Textbox 5.1. The Part-Time Route

In the best of all worlds, parents could all have the option at any college or university of working part-time in a tenure-track position (and then later in a part-time tenured capacity) while their children were young, returning to full-time when and if they chose. Given that most of us teach more than one course at a time and are expected to produce research projects that take substantial amounts of time from conception to completion, there is really no reason why colleges and universities cannot figure out ways to quantitatively divide up the work to create three-quarter-time positions, two-thirds-time positions, or half-time positions. Yet very few universities have done this. Karen Conway, a tenured professor at the University of New Hampshire, was able to broker a reduced teaching load (along with a reduced salary). Her school uses a “pieces of eight” system, where each of one’s five classes counts for one eighth of one’s duties. The remaining three eighths are research and service. Karen teaches only three classes a year and receives 75 percent of her salary. This allows her to have semesters when she doesn’t teach, and these she uses to get her research done. In her article, “One Approach to Balancing Work and Life,” she makes a plea for women faculty to bring proposals of this type to the floor for discussion.1 A few university leaders in this area, such as Berkeley and MIT, are now talking the talk, but whether they are successful at making fundamental changes in the structure of employment remains to be seen. Instead, many academic mothers looking to reduce their work-time commitments have ended up in non-tenure-track part-time positions, the so-called second tier that Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden have identified.

As with everything else in life, there are advantages and disadvantages to going down the second-tier path. The advantages are that this might be the only way for you to get enough time to devote to child raising. In addition, if you have strong geographic preferences to stay put, the adjunct track may allow you to stay at the same university where you received your PhD. Staying in the world of academics even as an adjunct has been shown to be a more successful strategy for ultimately landing a tenure-track job than taking a part-time non-academic position. Wolfinger, Mason, and Goulden, in an article called “Staying in the Game: Gender, Family Formation and Alternative Trajectories in the Academic Life Course,” found that among recent PhDs whose first postdoctoral position was not tenure track, those taking adjunct or non-teaching academic positions were far more likely to eventually land a tenure-track position than either those who took non-academic positions or those who reported being out of the labor force post-doctorate.2 The same study showed that married women with children were significantly over-represented in the ranks of the adjunct faculty. A woman with a child under six was found to be 26 percent more likely to be employed as an adjunct

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