Work and Family

Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work

Statement addressing some of the current issues facing faculty members as they seek to integrate family obligations and academic work.  It recommends principles and guidelines for formulating appropriate policies and practices regarding family leaves, modified teaching schedules, "stopping the tenure clock," and institutional assistance for family responsibilities.

 

Notes From the Delivery Room

Success secrets of the stars for fitting into your research again after the baby.

Housework Is an Academic Issue

How to keep talented women scientists in the lab, where they belong.

Who Took the Sabbath Out of Sabbatical?

Worshipping real academic productivity means giving it a rest now and then.

Partner-Accommodation Recommendations

The AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession recently released Recommendations on Partner Accommodation and Dual-Career Appointments, continuing its decades-long work promoting gender equity and work-family balance in the academy. The recommendations provide assistance to professors and administrators in view of the increasing likelihood that faculty members, particularly women faculty members, will have domestic partners or spouses who are also academics and that they will seek appointments at the same institution.

Labor Pains in the Academy

Inside each of us, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips noted, are many lives competing to be lived.

The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work

Service work continues to pull women associate professors away from research. What can be done?

Motherhood in the US Academy

Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family by Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower by Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Mothers in Academia by Mari Castañeda and Kirsten Isgro, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Rethinking Academic Traditions for Twenty-First-Century Faculty

The American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, defined the essential features of the academic profession in the early twentieth century: academic freedom, shared governance, and job security. Now, seventy years later, the number of faculty members in the United States has grown from approximately 147,000 in 1940 to approximately 1,140,000 today, and colleges and universities now number 4,168—more than double the 1,708 in the 1940s (Gappa, Austin, and Trice, 2007, p.60.) While important traditions of the academic profession have been retained, faculty members themselves, their work, and their institutions have changed dramatically. Today’s faculty members are diverse; they occupy different types of appointments; and their expectations about their work environments include new concerns, such as sufficient flexibility to manage both their work and life responsibilities. Their colleges and universities also face difficult challenges. They must create environments that attract highly diverse students, find new sources of revenue as traditional sources decline, maintain and enhance their technological infrastructures within budgetary constraints, and respond to numerous demands for accountability imposed by the public.

Missing the Big Picture

Faculty Fathers: Toward a New Ideal in the Research University by Margaret W. Sallee. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. 

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