Parenting & Professing: Balancing Family Work with an Academic Career

reviewed by Silvia Foti
Drawn to this book like a hungry baby to a pillow-soft mammary, I found myself unable to latch on to its central message—that mothers teaching full-time in the college classroom are scarce, perhaps because they are disrespected, mistrusted, and unwanted. Divided into three sections—Challenges, Possibilities, and Change—comprising 24 personal reflections of women and two men pursuing professorships and parenthood, the collection attempts to answer why colleges are particularly unreceptive to mothers, and what can be done to correct this situation.
I knew first-hand the adjunct life was low-paying, provided no health benefits and never compensated for coursework preparation or paper grading, but after jumping through rows of credential-laden hoops lined up so carefully to test collegiate abilities, surely I’d find a full-time position somewhere? After reading Parenting & Professing, the answer I received to my question is that, if I want to be physically and emotionally available for my husband and our two young children, it’s possible, but daunting, to be both parent and professor.
Here are the gloomy facts presented in Andrea O’Reilly’s forward:

•  Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s research in Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (New York: Miramax 2002) found that, among professionals, female academics have the highest rate of childlessness: 43 percent. Founder of the National Parenting Organization and an economist, Hewlett’s theme in all her books is that high-powered career women are less likely to marry and have children because it’s next to impossible to be a master at both. What is surprising in the personal reflections shared in Parenting & Professing is that this includes the academic world, despite professors’ enjoyment of benefits unimagined by the average worker: flexible work schedules, the ability to work from home, and summers off.

• The American Association of University Professors confirmed in its “Statement of Principles on Family Responsibility and Academic Work” (2001) that “women remain disproportionately represented within instructor, lecturer, and unranked positions; more than 57 percent of those holding such positions are women…. In contrast, among full professors only 26 percent are women.” Likewise, “[A]mong full-time faculty women, only 48 percent are tenured whereas 68 percent of full-time men are tenured.”

• Further research on academia conducted by Alice Fothergill and Kathryn Felty (2003) shows that married women, particularly with children, are more likely to have dropped out of graduate school, interrupted or abandoned their careers, be unemployed or employed in a job unrelated to their training, or to hold lower academic rank.

Study after study cited in the introduction of Parenting & Professing demonstrates that women with children pursuing a full-time career in academia are scaling a slippery slope fraught with too few compromises, little understanding, and no accommodations for a family. Is this a message adjuncts with children need to hear? Although the news is unsettling, it’s clear and anchored in solid research of women in the academic workforce.
The Challenges section of Parenting & Professing features Janie Rieman’s essay, “Tenure-Track to Mommy-Track: In Search of My Scholarly Self,” in which the author offers a poignant self-portrait of a new mother who leaves her tenure-track position to follow her partner to a university in another state at which he has accepted a tenure-track position. After applying for a full-time position at a nearby university and advancing to the on site interview, Rieman receives the devastating news that she has been denied the job. As a result, she redefines herself as a scholar and accepts a position as an adjunct at her partner’s university. From Rieman’s experience, you might conclude that you should never leave a tenure-track job unless you want to be an adjunct again. Rieman’s essay reveals the academy’s unwillingness to bend to the complexities of family life or buttress and encourage new mothers pursuing academic careers.
In the Possibilities section, Norma Tilden’s essay, “Mary Was an Adjunct,” compares the role of the Virgin Mary with the life of an adjunct instructor. As a Catholic who has had her share of students who thought they could walk on water, I couldn’t help smiling and agreeing with Tilden:
What is unique about the teaching model of mothering, especially as embodied in the Virgin Mother, is its recognition that our students always come to us as other people, already half-formed, whom we help to become what they were meant to be rather than to become versions of us. Mary does not represent an ideal of self-reproduction, but a choice to accept and creatively transform the intrinsically other.
Identification with the biblical poor might fortify adjuncts through the lean years of no appreciation and what sometimes feels like persecution, and it’s certainly healthier than drugs or alcohol. Tilden’s essay also points to the necessity of relying on inner or spiritual resources to balance parenting with professing in lieu of solace or understanding from the academy.
In the Change section, where I expected finally to find stories with happy endings, I was instead confronted by Kathleen B. Jones’s “Boomerangst.” Jones, who appears on the cusp of having it all, shares her experience as a mother in graduate school in 1969, writing papers on nuclear arms reduction to the songs of Sesame Street in her living room. As a teaching assistant, she co-chairs a child-care coalition, but then goes through a divorce. By 1977, she is offered a tenure-track job in North Carolina as the only woman in a five-person political science department, and seems to have achieved what she always wanted. Then, however, Jones gets pregnant with her second child with her second husband and resigns her position several years later after being denied a leave before her second divorce. Her final words are matter-of-fact but tinged with bitterness: “The academy, especially as embodied by large research institutions, is like the Marines—if they wanted you to have a family and a personal life, they’d have issued you one.”
Parenting & Professing is an eye-opening collection of firsthand accounts of the nearly insurmountable struggles women face in balancing their tenure-track ambitions with raising sane children who are free of bitter resentments against mothers missing in academic action. The book clearly illustrates in personal essays that academia is rigid and unforgiving for mothers on full-time payrolls, even more so than corporate America. Adjunct faculty who are considering becoming both parents and professors should read the book to get a realistic picture of the problems they might face. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for answers or a roadmap on how to combine parenting and professing, you won’t find them in this book. All of the well-written personal essays point to the frustrations the authors encounter in academia. And although the book’s title and introduction imply the promise of finding a balance between parenting and professing, none of the authors in the essays seemed to have the answer. Until attitudes change at the top levels of administration within academia, adjunct instructors may want to put their professorial ambitions on hold until their children are older.
For anyone thinking about having it all at the university banquet, read Parenting & Professing, then push back your plate to leave half your cake uneaten.