Invisible Adjunct

"Laura at Apt 11D promises "a long winded, rambling rant" as soon as her toddler goes down for his afternoon nap."

... and here is every at-home-academic parent's dilemma: use precious nap time for selfish ends? (i.e. getting some writing done) or use it to contribute to interesting public discussions?

me, I'm typing this one-handed as a little man on my knee grows increasingly restless ...

I'll start the rant...Nowadays, if women have babies in their 30's, that's considered "early babies." It's getting to the point where no one can afford to have a kid until they hit their 40's! If I were going to have kids, I would have loved to do so in my early 20's, when I still had energy. Unfortunately, the stupid economy makes it impossible for women to have "early" births, so they have to put off having kids until later. I know all the recent Oprah-esque rhetoric about how fourty and fifty feels oh-so-energizing, but after chasing after a toddler, I don't care how wonderful being 30, 40, or 50 feels, you WILL feel close to the century mark, I guarantee it. I think we need to stop trusting the advice celebrity moms who are having kids after 35 and then handing them over to nannies to raise. To hear them talk, kids require no extra energy at all. How 'bout that!

IA writes:

These babies are "early" only in relation to the demands of the tenure clock, and in the world beyond academe would generally be considered rather on the "late" or "delayed" side (ie, born to women in their late twenties to mid-thirties).

In this town (100,000 people, university of 10k students - a significant influence, but not nearly a "university town") that's not at all an accurate description. No mother in my wife's similar-education or similar-income or similar-politics circles is under 30, and most are in their mid-thirties. The only group we know where parents are her age (27) is the totally-non-overlapping cluster of our solidly blue-collar friends: carpenters, dockworkers, bail bondsmen, ...

(As an aside, I didn't have any blue-collar acquaintances throughout undergrad or grad school; it's very odd to now be an academic and be hanging out with people from the "other side".)

ABD Instructor,

In some circles, having a first child after 30 is now considered the norm, but these circles are most decidedly not representative of the population at large. No time to search for detailed information, but here's a brief summary from the National Center for Health Statistics. While "pregnancy rates for women in their 30s and over have been increasing modestly since the mid-1990s," the majority of babies are still born to women under 30: "Women aged 20-24 had the highest pregnancy rate, followed by women aged 25-29."

I believe that ABD's point is not that highly educated women are representative of the U.S. population, but that highly educated/successful professional women in general are having children later. This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to workers on tenure clocks.

My own lawyer/lobbyist/doctor-filled neighborhood displays a similar pattern, lots of first-time mothers in their early thirties.

IA,

Obviously this data is not a refutation, and this is not information about pregnancy rates but about births. However, the median age of new mothers in Australia has just reached 30: Sydney Morning Herald: Baby talk - but not until 30

Whenever this topic comes up I broaden the topic to point out that childraising is a big money-loser for everyone. Usually the mother is impacted worse for reasons we all know about, but fathers lose too. Raising children is, in short, a communitarian activity rather than a rational self-interest activity. (Chicago school economists have concocted amazing systems according to which childraising is a three-way contract in which all three parties agree to provide certain goods and services, with the two parents contracting with themselves on behalf of their minor and incompetent infant who is to provide "child-services". It was by Gary Becker, I think, and Onion-hilarious, but in our system kids are really a loser.)

A second point is that granted the nuclear family (very little extended-family help) and some degree of democratization (no one can afford servants) everything falls on one of two people. Usually the wife. In Brazil or India we wouldn't have these discussions -- we'd have grandmothers, nieces, poor cousins, or servants doing the work.

Third, you could add that in our bourgeois meritocracy, very few attain wealth without enormous committments of time. If we were all heirs to millions we could have careers or not and families or not pretty much on our own schedules. But these days almost everyone has to spend 10-20 years working very hard to make it into even the upper-middle class.

This doesn't contribute anything to solving the problem being discussed here, but it does show why the problem has proven so intractable.

Two families I know of solved the problem by deciding that the man was the wife. In one case it was explicit and in the other case it was obvious to outsiders. But for there to be a two-career family, seemingly one would have to be well-established and prosperous while the other was just getting started. For same-age ambitious two-career couples, childraising is almost impossible.

My decision to quit adjuncting and move to high school teaching was motivated, in part, by the mutual desire of my wife and I to start a family. In that sense, my tenure clock never started. Now I have a house in a city with bad public schools and a daughter with the opportunity to attend a great school at a hefty discount. Go back on the job market? I think not. I know at least one other guy from my cohort who abandoned his academic dreams because he had to support his growing family. The academic people who make it these days are largely single and mobile. I was a bit surprised to see that the tenure clock for fathers is faster, but when I thought about how much paid paternity leave I got (0 days) and how much female teachers get (six weeks "medical leave" not maternity leave) I realized at least part of the reason for the difference. Many female teachers take the six weeks and then the unpaid six weeks required to be offered by law. Essentially, they take half pay for one term. I now realize that part of the discrepency is caused by the fact that men cannot stop working when a child comes. They are simply in better shape than a woman who has gone through 9 month of pregnency and who knows how long a labor which may have involved major surgery. It takes a toll on a body. If Mom had an income and stays home for any length of time, Dad may have to double up (hello Princeton Review!). How many female academics are the major breadwinners in their families? My plans to revise an article this summer went out the window when I took paying work. As my wife returns to work, I have even less time for research and writing than before, as I now am on after school child-care on most days. (My wife has a job with "flexible hours," which means she mostly works afternoon, evenings and weekends). Now I get to see my kid, but not her. The system as practiced now favors those with the most resources (Double income academic families at institutions that pay lip service to families) and shafts those who most need the help (single parents, those without extensive financial resources to pay for childcare, working moms whose families are dependent on their incomes to get by.)

This raises in my mind another question related to "Should I retire?" Should married couples in academia have to share a line if they are recruited as a team?

I've been struck (and confused) at the degree to which my sense of being personally careerist in the conventional academic sense more or less evaporated about the 7th month of my wife's pregnancy in late 2000, and especially after my daughter was born in early 2001. It's hard for me to disaggregate a whole set of things--being tenured in spring 2000, my father dying in mid-2001, being on leave in the 00-01 academic year, and the maturation of my own beliefs about what the academy and my field of specialization ought to be like and aren't--but they added up to getting off a particular kind of fast track.

From my perspective, that seems like a good thing, but it's also clear that this is a kind of luxuriating in the fact of tenure: I can afford to redefine myself as a generalist, iconoclast, eclecticist, and so on, and have that incidentally suit a shift of my resources and time towards being a parent. If I were pre-tenure, it would be another thing; if I were single or my wife was on a fast-track career path herself (she's also shifted into a more part-time work role) it would also be another thing.

I was struck, however, that when I presented something in a faculty lecture on the preliminary stages of a new research project that I started while caring for my infant daughter, and began the PowerPoint presentation with a picture of her as an explanation of why my project was in such a preliminary, underdeveloped state even after a leave, I had a female colleague come up to me afterwards and complain very strongly that it was unfair for me to do that. No woman, she said, could do that and get away with it; it's only cute and acceptable if a man does it.

I think this is both true and untrue, fair and unfair. I think it overlooks the degree to which a certain kind of careerist impulse in academia is often all the more ferociously obsessional for women and that women, especially senior women of the first "breakthrough" generation, are far more ferociously unforgiving to other women who step away from that impulse than men are. That's a strictly anecdotal observation on my part, and it may not hold as a valid generalization in the experience of others. But I've been privy to the details of several tenure decisions outside of Swarthmore where women with small children were being hammered for relative lack of scholarly achievement not by male colleagues, but by tenured female colleagues.

So for one, I guess that if my colleague is right that women are not permitted to use childraising as an explanation for their scholarly output, and men are, that it may not be men who are doing the primary work of enforcing that disparity.

In fact, I feel rather as if my colleague was herself doing the work of reifying that disparity. As I said in my blog when writing about this question, I'd rather that we all be able to put our scholarship in relation to our other responsiblities, and that we all be able to put aside the ridiculous ideal that a scholar is producing 24/7 in some garrett somewhere, than none of us be able to do that. I'd rather that my female colleagues be able to preface a PowerPoint presentation with a picture of their newborn than I be asked *not* to do so in the interests of fairness. And I'd like to see it explicitly understood that someone who formally sections out time for a parental life is not somehow slacking off on the professional job they're employed to do by a college or university.

The vastly more complex issue in the context of academic institutional life is really not between men with children and women with children (though lord knows, I'm still a horrible, guilty free rider when it comes to the domestic chore I most loathe, laundry) but between people of approximately the same generational cohort and promotional rank who have children and those who do not. If the ones who do not vastly outproduce the ones who do, and we continue to value scholars by the volume of their scholarship rather than the quality of it, then there's a very difficult problem to try and arbitrate. I would suggest that the first thing that might help would be to formally, aggressively, explicitly forbid the kinds of evaluations of relative merit that do rest, explicitly or implicitly, on the amount of scholarship that someone produces, and work mightily to appraise instead the qualitative contribution that different people make.

"I think it overlooks the degree to which a certain kind of careerist impulse in academia is often all the more ferociously obsessional for women and that women, especially senior women of the first "breakthrough" generation, are far more ferociously unforgiving to other women who step away from that impulse than men are. That's a strictly anecdotal observation on my part, and it may not hold as a valid generalization in the experience of others."

Anecdotally, I can confirm this observation. Still, I would add that these women are enforcing a set of norms that made it very difficult if not impossible for them to have children: ie, the unforgiving demands of the tenure clock, which was designed by and for a certain kind of academic. That academic was male, and he was either monkishly free of familial obligations, or else possessed of a wife who managed the material side of life so that he could devote himself to the life of the mind. Some of these women didn't want children. Some of them did, but sacrificed family in order to have a career -- a sacrifice that the men of their generation did not have to make. Hence the ferocity.

"The vastly more complex issue in the context of academic institutional life is really not between men with children and women with children (though lord knows, I'm still a horrible, guilty free rider when it comes to the domestic chore I most loathe, laundry) but between people of approximately the same generational cohort and promotional rank who have children and those who do not."

As the "baby gap" indicates, the burden still falls disproportionately on women. But I think you are right that things are moving in this direction.

Thanks to Matilde in #5 for making explicit the point I was trying to make in #3.

Very, very timely discussion. We spent the Thanksgiving holiday talking about issues brought up above and decided:

1) I'm ready to schedule my defense (yay!) and even well-positioned for early tenure.

2) I'm not going to wait around for the tenure decision. After I get the sheepskin I'm going to drop off the track, move back to my wife's hometown, and build a house next to her parents so we can do the extended-family child raising thing.

I'll either adjunct there (5 colleges/community colleges in the county, another 7+ in the two most populous adjacent counties), do a startup, or take an industry job. Probably a mix of all three.