Winter 2004

Volume 33
Number 2

Balancing Act

Opening the Doors to Success: Creative, Flexible Institutional Policies
The relative inflexibility of current institutional workplace and graduate school policies has a high cost not only for individual women but also for the diversity of research and teaching faculties. According to researchers at the Sloan Foundation's Program on Workplace, Workforce, and Working Families, this problem can be significantly alleviated by creative policies that allow greater flexibility so that women can both keep working and meet the extreme time demands of parenting young children.

Flexible policies can contribute significantly to academic success for many parent-scholars. "I think Simon Fraser University has some of the most progressive policies for students. It is one of the reasons I chose them, and I have grown to greatly appreciate their policies and attitudes as they contrast with institutions far less understanding of graduate students with alternate lives," says Cynthia Pollack. "Advisors and staff also truly listen to individual needs--they at least try to help, rather than merely quote policy and send you packing. Even when I run up against roadblocks, I still feel like I am being treated as a unique human being, which goes a long way toward survival."

But even at progressive institutions, standard policies can overlook the needs of students who must work on their degrees part time. "From class work through dissertation, my studies have been part-time (the other part being parenting, working, or both), but my institution only allows full-time fees for Ph.D.'s," explains Pollack. "It is true that the university is good enough to permit 'on leave' terms, but they must be applied for with the committee's support, they often require a fee, they still count towards duration to completion, and you are deprived of many services, naturally--you're not supposed to be studying! It helps that after some number of terms, the fee does drop back to halftime, but not until you've 'paid your dues.' The choices are 'charge ahead' or 'on hold,' and no 'chug-along while multi-tasking' mode. There must be some way to improve the system."

In addition, the fellowships that fund many students in the dissertation years should be designed to accommodate the needs of students with parenting responsibilities. As Laulainen-Schein explains, "A lot of fellowships require extended periods 'in residence' (three to six months). With children, you cannot just leave for that period of time and do nothing but research. I was thrilled to find one fellowship specifically for mothers of preschool-aged children. We need more of those fellowships or at least fellowships whose guidelines don't automatically rule out mothers based on their criteria. Many of the applications might just as well have been stamped 'No parents need apply.'"

On almost every institutional level, creative policies can be implemented that would significantly improve retention and graduation rates and would likely increase the number of women able to achieve tenured positions. "For instance," says Pollack, "permitting 'public' access to databases from home for a fee would be helpful; it would make it easier for someone unregistered or on-leave to still be able to conduct high-quality literature research, especially from a distance after an unexpected move. My institution now allows for only one interim term, limited service (but a fairly low fee); you're not supposed to need more!"

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a "Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work" in 2001 calling for universities to take the lead in America to create institutional policies that support both work and family responsibilities. "The goal of every institution," the statement says, "should be to create an academic community in which all members are treated equitably, families are supported, and family-care concerns are regarded as legitimate and important."

Campuses must revisit their current policies to ensure they are effective to provide fair flexibility for families. According to Sloan's Program on the Workplace, Workforce and Working Families, fair flexibility policies can take a number of forms, including "flexibility in the scheduling of full-time work hours (including flextime, compressed work week); flexibility in the amount of time working (including part time, part year); and career flexibility with multiple points for entry and re-entry over the course of a career (this includes formal leaves and sabbaticals, as well as taking time out of the paid labor market)."

AAUP recommends several policy changes for institutions to create a fairer climate for faculty with care-giving responsibilities, including allowing leaves, reducing or modifying workloads, and "stopping the tenure clock" for up to two years after the birth or adoption of a child. Clearly, similar policies could be put in place for doctoral students. Translated to doctoral programs, fair flexibility could allow students with significant care-giving responsibilities to slow down their progress without facing severe penalties. Like policies recommended by AAUP to "stop the clock" for tenure-track professors with young children, a fair doctoral program would allow students to take more time if needed to meet their program's deadlines. Institutions can greatly improve, says Laulainen-Schein, "simply by recognizing that we have children and that they are actually more important in the grand scheme of life than the dissertation. That isn't to say we won't finish, just that it won't be on the same timetable as those who have no children."

Finding a Way
Finding a way to negotiate graduate studies and parenting duties takes an incredible commitment to academia; this can actually produce better, more focused, faculty and researchers. "I took a very long time to finish," says Lyn Blanchfield, "partly due to the fact that initially I had little idea of where I was going with the info I gathered and also because I took 'time off' to have our son and teach part time to earn some much needed income. A whole year went by before I was able to get back to the dissertation and make some progress with it. Over that year, I felt exhausted and tremendously guilty for 'wasting' my time by teaching and taking care of our son. As it turns out, however, it may have been the best thing to have happened to me. After that year, I was really able to attack my project again with fresh eyes. I realized how much I loved the work and because I had so little time to write, I was forced to plan my time very well and use those couple of hours a day very wisely."

For many graduate student parents today, the solution is to personally negotiate workable terms with their programs and institutions, as well as within their families. As Berger explains, "What I really need now that I have children is more time to work on the degree. I have negotiated more time to complete the process that led me to being a doctoral candidate. At the University of Maryland-College Park, we have four years to get to that point, but I needed more time since I was pregnant, on bed rest, and then delivered twins during that time when I was finishing up that piece. Now that I am finishing my dissertation, I have enough time, hopefully."

My husband and I are also finishing our dissertations now, and each of us recently turned in chapters to our committees. But, it has taken a serious personal commitment to be active co-parents. We have developed a workable schedule to trade off evenings during the week; I take care of my son Monday and Wednesday evenings while Rich writes, and he does the same for me on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. We devote our Sundays to intensive family time. This schedule is exhausting, but we will try to find a way to maintain it until we finish.

Though we are back on track to complete our degrees, our graduate program still has no formal policies for parental flexibility. As a result, we have each had to personally negotiate with program directors and deans for extra time to complete our work. Even though we have been allowed that time, the university policies that have posed barriers for us still remain in place. Several encouraging conversations with the sympathetic graduate dean of my school have given me hope that as my husband and I successfully complete our degrees, we can also help our university create new, more flexible policies for the graduate students with families who will come after us.

And within programs across the country, practices really are changing to make room for parenting on campus. Nicole Ives, a new mother and a doctoral student in the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work, explains that "This semester, with the help of an amazing visiting professor from Hebrew University, I TA'ed a course called 'Ethnicity and the Family' with [my infant son] Luke in a Baby Bjorn. The students loved him. The professor wants to work hard in changing the old perceptions and thought having me and Luke come to class each week would contribute toward that."

References

American Association of University Professors. 2001. "Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work." www.aaup.org/statements/REPORTS/re01fam.htm

Gabriel, Cynthia. 1999. Graduates as students, graduates as employees: Labor unions in the academy. minnesota review. 50 (1):87-100.

Mason, Mary Ann and Marc Goulden. 2003. Do babies matter? The effect of family formation on the lifelong careers of academic men and women. CGS Communicator. www.cgsnet.org/pdf/aprilcomm.pdf

Program on Work life and Law, American University. www.wcl.american.edu/gender/worklifelaw/mothers.cfm

Smallwood, Scott. 2004. Doctor dropout: High attrition from Ph.D. programs is sucking away time, talent, and money and breaking some hearts, too. Chronicle of Higher Education. 50 (19):A10. chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i19/19a01001.htm

---. 2002. U. of Michigan strikes a deal with teaching assistants. Chronicle of Higher Education. 48 (29):A12. chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v48/i29/29a01202.htm

Syverson, Peter. 2002. The new American graduate student, part II: Since 1993, more diversity but more debt. CGS Communicator. www.cgsnet.org/VirtualCenterResearch/policyanalyses.htm

---. 1997. The new majority: CHS/GRE survey results trace growth of women in graduate education. Council of Graduate Schools. www.cgsnet.org/pdf/cctr706.pdf

Williams, Joan. 2004. Singing the baby blues: If having children on the tenure track is a career killer, is having them in graduate school any better? Chronicle of Higher Education. 50 (33):C2. chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i33/33c00201.htm

---. 2002. Putting the AAUP's family-friendly policies into practice. Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com/jobs/2002/01/2002012801c.htm

Workplace, workforce, and working families. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation web site. www.sloan.org/programs/stndrd_dualcareer.shtml