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References

Stockdell-Giesler, A., & Ingalls, R. (2007, July). Faculty Mothers.

/Academe/, /93/(4), 38-40. Retrieved October 13, 2007, from Academic
Search Premier database.

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*Faculty Mothers *

It's time to rewrite the rhetoric of motherhood in higher education, and

we can use AAUP recommendations to help

Although more women than men now enroll in and graduate from U.S.
colleges and universities, the ethos of the scholar in the modern
university, remains that of a solitary male thinker who, upon producing
enough intellectual work on a strict schedule, is rewarded with a
lifetime position. This conception is based on classical ideals of
philosophical inquiry: the Socratic method, dialectical reasoning, and
an appreciation for the life of the mind.

Unfortunately, the standard for motherhood clashes with this model.

Women faculty members routinely have difficulty with the "up-or-out"
tenure clock. Because the childbearing years coincide with the pretenure
years, many women find that they must choose between producing children
and earning tenure. Others feel they must hide the fact that they are
mothers while simultaneously maintaining an ethos of feminine nurturance
within the classroom. This essay is an effort to rewrite the rhetoric of
what it means to be a scholar and a mother.

As teachers and scholars, we nurture ideas and minds in our classrooms

and scholarship. The metaphors of birthing find parenting are ever
present in both of these areas of faculty work. Indeed, at the private
liberal arts institution where we teach--the University of Tampa--we
often find ourselves mothering in loco parentis. One of us
(Stockdell-Giesler), a mother of young children, is still untenured ten
years and two jobs after graduating. The other (Ingalls) is trying to
navigate a probationary, period while planning to start a family. Yet
the only acknowledgment of our identities as mothers on campus is a
quotation in the faculty handbook of legal language from the Family and
Medical Leave Act. The failure of our administration to recognize this
aspect of our identity is a real problem regardless of the individual
and departmental support we receive in other areas.

This issue extends well beyond our institution. Although the AAUP and
other groups have urged colleges and universities to strike a work-life
balance, academic culture is slow to change. As Remembering the "Life"
in Academic Life: Finding a Balance between Work and Personal
Responsibilities in the Academy, a 2004 report of the American Political
Science Association, reminds us: "What is particularly
disturbing--though not, perhaps, surprising--is that many programs
designed to address these tensions [of work and family balance] fire
significantly underutilized by faculty, members, even when they exist."
Similarly, in "Bias against Caregiving," published in the
September--October 2005 issue of Academe, Penn State researchers Robert
Drago and Carol Colbeck, writing with several graduate student
colleagues, report that "faculty members suffer career penalties for
using policies designed to help them balance work and family
commitments." In a system that nurtures young minds, deeply embedded
beliefs persist that mothering detracts from excellence as a faculty member.

The research by Drago and his colleagues shows that "bias avoidance"
affects men far less than women, who often sacrifice personal
fulfillment to succeed in academia. The statistics certainly do not bode
well for women faculty members who spend years carefully planning lives
and academic careers, trying to "have it all." They may watch their male
peers succeed beyond graduate school, while they find themselves
radically changing their life plans in order to manage their careers.
Even when an institution offers flexibility, its price often seems much
too high. Workplaces that honor family life and respect a diversity of
schedules, family structures, and personal commitments outside work can
go far to reduce gender inequities.

Our Proposal

The southeastern United States has many small- to medium-size liberal

arts colleges and universities. Although numerous elite universities and
large state institutions (such as Yale University, the University of
Michigan, and the entire state university system in California) have
proactively established family-friendly policies, many schools in the
Southeast lag behind in policy formation. It is not enough to claim a
family-friendly atmosphere; an institution's formal written and legal
documents should support all such claims. And it is unfair to grant
"leave" on a case-by-case basis behind closed doors. When policies are
not formally extended as entitlements, faculty mothers may refuse them,
fearing that they will be perceived as less hardworking than their
colleagues for having "indulged" in "time off."

When we set out to prepare a proposal on family-friendly policies, we

considered the financial and cultural limitations of our institution and
the pace at which change on campus typically evolves. We also surveyed
institutions comparable to ours (in terms of size and region) as well as
different types of universities (such as the University of California
system). We found that many institutions offer short-term disability
insurance, which, under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978,
provides at least partial pay for maternity, leave. As the AAUP's 2001
Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work
notes, "if professors are entitled to paid disability leaves under
institutional benefit programs, then women professors are entitled to
paid pregnancy leaves." Some schools not only offer paid maternity leave
but also have policies clearly written into their faculty handbooks
specifying other forms of assistance: on-site day care or assistance in
locating it, discounts on private-school tuition, the option to stop the
tenure clock, and domestic partner benefits. Unfortunately, however, our
institution offers none of those benefits.

As professors of composition and rhetoric, we are trained to envision a

piece of writing in stages, to imagine what it will become, but also to
honor its present state. The notion of the "draft," the nebulous middle
space of a text that links approaches to a product over time, is the
grounding principle for us in our endeavor to rewrite the rhetoric of
family life at our institution. Such rhetoric is, after all, codified in
the school's cultural history; to revise it means to attend to audience
and purpose as we shape the language we use to make our arguments in the
presence of others and in our writing. It also means having the patience
to understand that a "draft" may be far from the intended product; it
may not even be what we really want. Thus we imagine a series of
"drafts," steps toward what we hope will become a significantly larger
rhetorical shift.

Ours is a story of understanding the invaluable process involved in

rewriting a cultural text and in negotiating our audiences. Our
task--which continues--demands special rhetorical skill. As untenured
faculty members who are taking on the role of activists, we must
communicate the need for change and, once it occurs, ensure that it is
written into the permanent texts that define our institution's ethos.

First Steps

The AAUP suggests that faculty groups interested in reforming their

institutional family leave policies review AAUP recommendations and
other literature on work-family balance, compare their university or
college to others, understand relevant institutional documents and
committees, and conduct a campus workshop. We've accomplished almost all
of these recommendations. When we presented our proposal to our local
AAUP chapter and our Faculty Committee, we saw heads nodding vigorously
and received praise for our initiative. In fact, in fall 2006, the
faculty voted unanimously to support our proposal for paid family leave
and domestic partner benefits. But we've also discovered a contested
space between what the AAUP recommends and what we accomplish for
faculty parents on our campus. This space is complex and somewhat
volatile. Piggybacking on the good name of the AAUP is not enough.
Intentions are not always malign; sometimes, a school can do only so
much for its employees.

The loudest argument on campus against our agenda is a financial one.

Still, as the institution's funding, student population, physical size,
and reputation grow, its pockets deepen. Committed to improving the
university's regional, state, and national reputation, our
administrators promise to hire new faculty, develop new programs,
continue to expand the campus, and maintain a high-quality Web site.
Although we take pride in these goals as markers of our growth, we want
to see the connection between work and family on the list of our
university's priorities.

Fear of the Teacher-Scholar-Parent

In "Hiding the Baby," published in 2005 in Parenting and Professing:

Balancing Family Work with an Academic Career, English professor Gale
Walden narrates the visceral discomforts of being on the job market with
a partner and a child and trying to reveal "absolutely nothing about
[her] personal life." Walden describes one campus visit, during which a
"private talk" with the search committee chair exposed the insecurities
of the committee about hiring a new mother: "We are worried you won't be
as productive as before," the chair said, adding that "I'd be more
comfortable if the baby was three." Despite the obvious legal
implications of such "private" concerns being publicly communicated, the
comments uncover one of the driving forces behind the unfortunate lack
of paid parental leave in the academy: fear.

Some institutions demonstrate fear of the teacher-scholar-parent by

making policy on a case-by-case basis or by not having any policies at
all. When we consider the financial and cultural consequences of
offering paid parental leave to mothers and fathers, we can understand
administrative fears: if we offer paid maternity leave to one mother,
won't all of the women want it? If we offer it to mothers, won't they
ultimately decide to cut back on their workloads or leave the
profession, as some women have done in the past?

And even more complex questions follow: for example, what happens when
women who have children take advantage of paid leave and then return to
their professional academic duties? In "Choosing Motherhood as a Female
Chemist," also published in Parenting and Professing, chemistry
professor Donna J. Nelson describes her meticulous plans for childbirth
and continued postdoctoral research. Against the advice of her research
adviser, who suggested that she review the benefits offered to mothers
to be, she "didn't want to take off very long because [she] enjoyed
[her] research so much." Day care began when Nelson's child was two
weeks old. Her commitment to work, however, invited criticism from
colleagues and her tenure committee. Nelson describes how one colleague
told her she was "a bad mother." Such prescriptive stereotyping seems
ironic, especially given the stereotypical assumptions that women will
abandon professional life for parenting.

The Pregnant Body

The very physicality of maternity--perhaps its most fundamental aspect

--affects the construction of perceptions about teacher-scholars who are
mothers. In Teaching to Transgress, activist and professor bell hooks
explains, "We are invited to teach information as though it does not
emerge from bodies." Indeed, the parental body is almost invisible in
our faculty handbook and in its discourse about benefits. The
"profession" at our institution takes pains to make space for bodies in
offices and for students in desks and dorms, but it honors the ethereal
nature of mind over the earthen nature of parenthood.

Many mothers who are also academics understand intuitively what hooks
means: what we do professionally is produced by our bodies, and there is
no separating mind from body. They understand the larger sociocultural
impact of what they do both in and outside the classroom, and they
recognize that their intellectual work product is corporeal.

We can imagine this manifestation of the physical in the minds of those

who create policy: the super-present body of the pregnant professor
distracts her from her rigorous scholarly duties, takes away from her
position of authority, represents a threat that this multiplication will
continue. Will there be no end to her needs as a faculty member with a
child? Yet her situation could just as easily be seen as a joyous
manifestation of her body's grounding in life, the present, her work,
and her place in the world.

Furthermore, when we put pregnancy and childbirth into the context of

the typical faculty career, a semester-long maternity leave is a mere
blip on the screen of a commitment to an institution that often spans
decades. If the tenure clock is extended by a year, it's an opportunity
for both the faculty member and the institution. But the rhetoric of the
probationary process creates positions of patron and supplicant--the
hiring institution extends a generous offer of employment with specific,
strict expectations for performance. And, all too often, a pregnancy is
perceived as a threat to a supplicant's ability, to meet those
expectations. In years when jobs are few, the institution is in a
position to construct such an ethos.

But our research into the policies of other institutions and the
personal stories of faculty nationwide bring us more hope than
pessimism. It's true that the culture of our institution breeds fear
about paid leave and the staying of the tenure clock for faculty
parents. The language of our minimal family leave policy suggests that
we are not child friendly, which may leave us a bit stuck in terms of
hiring younger faculty who hope for institutional support when they
become parents. Further, the financial constraints of our budget--and
the priorities we've established for the near future --do not leave much
room to accommodate faculty who have or want children. However, we have
taken on the task of this activism because we are dually invested in two
labors: that of caring for our children and that of our professional
work. Our goal is to stay entangled in the delicate balance between our
work as teachers and scholars and our work as parents. We believe that
the success of such a negotiation is possible.

We want to bring revision to the way faculty" mothers are "read" so that
hiding and resentment among faculty parents can be replaced by the
institution's honestly abiding by the creed that it communicates to
students' parents: we are a family here at this institution, and we are
going to take care of yours as we would our own.

~~~~~~~~

By Anne Stockdell-Giesler and Rebecca Ingalls

------------------------------------------------------------------------
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