If you hurry, you still might have time to send a Mother’s Day card back home to mom by Sunday.
While you’re at it, pick up an extra card for your female professors who have kids. Feel free to do the same thing for your male professors around Father’s Day. They deserve some credit for balancing a family life with academia’s publish-or-perish pressure and students’ classroom demands.
More than 86 percent of tenured or tenure-eligible Northwestern faculty who responded to last year’s Committee on Women in the Academic Community survey said they spend more than 45 hours a week on job-related tasks.
A majority — more than 56 percent — said they spend 55 hours or more a week on university-related work. That doesn’t leave much time for packing your children’s lunches or reading bedtime stories.
Renee Redd, director of NU’s Women’s Center, said she has heard worries from some female faculty that showing too much interest in family concerns could jeopardize their tenure trajectories.
“Quite frankly I think women feel the pinch more than men do,” she said.
But many professors, both male and female, manage to juggle domestic and academic struggles. Not that NU makes it easy.
In the same COWAC survey, more than 70 percent of female faculty and more than 50 percent of their male counterparts said they were somewhat or very dissatisfied with finding child care for preschool-age children. Only slightly fewer professors expressed dissatisfaction with finding child care for older children.
Despite recommendations from several faculty committees for on-site child care, professors who work on the Evanston Campus still must go to the McGaw-YMCA program more than a mile away for the university-affiliated (and subsidized) program — or find their own babysitters.
Through a partnership with KinderCare, faculty on the Chicago Campus now can take advantage of child care services just across the street from the Feinberg School of Medicine. If only a similar option existed on the Evanston Campus.
The availability of child care poses a problem for NU when most two-parent families need both parents’ income. Shelling out cash for high-quality child care may be an option for some professors near the top of the pay scale, but not for other low-level lecturers or those trying to earn tenure. That’s even more true for graduate students, the university’s professors-in-training.
And for married female faculty, the choice of having hubby play Mr. Mom may not even exist, thanks to our society’s reticence to accept unconventional gender roles.
Mother’s Day provides the perfect opportunity for students to recognize what professors do for their families in their other life as parents. It also gives the university a chance to make good on the promise of on-campus child care. Sure beats a greeting card.
Elaine Helm is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].
