faculty well-being

This collection of essays by seventeen Generation X faculty members serving in various types of institutions and representing a range of disciplines, ranks, and roles aims to “demonstrate the personal issues, conflicts, and triumphs that are definitive of this generation” as they pertain to their academic careers. While some contributions are  stronger than others, as a whole the book achieves its purpose through the insightful and honest author self-reflections.

The first sentences of the opening chapter offer, “The truth is unbelieveable, not because it is untrue, but because no one wants to believe it. I am living proof.” The readers’ fear the whole book may sound like the all-too-familiar voice of a Gen Xer is quickly affirmed. The self-analysis of the first story flows into the next three installments and the reader may begin to wonder if the whole book is going to simply be a series of texts from a group of faculty who managed to gain a formal education but think life as a teacher ought to be different somehow.

However, Andria J. Woodell’s recollection from a female white southern social psychologist’s perspective changes the tone of the book and is followed by primarily thoughtful reflections and analysis of personal choices and responsibility, within the realities of various institutional contexts. Most authors adeptly identify key factors in their personal journey, including educational background and aspirations, family dynamics, sexual orientation, or race, which impacted their experiences in academia. Following these observations they share information about specific institutional obstacles and supports they encountered along their respective journeys and how each responded to the interplay of these factors.

David Prescott-Steed’s chapter, explaining how his PhD research project on “the abyss” metaphor became an intentional factor in his post-doctoral decisions personally and professionally, was entertaining, well-written, and an appropriate summary of a Gen Xer’s values encountering the challenges and triumphs of everyday life. Likewise, Kathleen and George Mollock’s perceptive essay on an academic couples’ journey in the higher education milieu, first as students and then as faculty, describes the choices they made and consequences of those choices, some anticipated, others unexpected.

For most Gen X academics, this would be a beneficial read, even if they cannot identify with every individual story or institutional context. Likewise, for the late baby-boomer or early-Gen X administrator, it may provide helpful examples of understanding how the realities of academia are seen from different points of view. For either a faculty member or administrator in a faith-related institution, the narratives of individuals in these contexts also describe the unique challenges and approaches to these extra dimensions of academic life. As a whole, the book presents an appropriate and necessary diversity of experiences (race, gender, sexual orientation, discipline). While some chapters were stronger than others, it was a worthwhile book to read and would be a valuable addition to a post-secondary library.

A powerful account of the experience of discrimination against married women and mothers in academia, this book documents many realities I have lamented alongside female colleagues and graduate students during my years in the profession. As a married woman with three children and tenure, I am on the other side of many of the acute struggles, but reading about the experience of other women academics made me put down the book more times than I can count feeling a sort of survivor’s guilt and anger. Some of the common experiences of women that the book identifies are things I have experienced firsthand, from the suspicion that letting my doctoral advisor know I was pregnant would signal that I was not really a serious academic, to trying to schedule on-campus interviews while nursing an infant, to disdain from other faculty when pushing to create a tenure-clock stoppage policy for new faculty parents at my own institution. Other accounts in the book had personal resonance for me because of experiences of colleagues who were not able to secure positions in the academy. This book documents critical justice issues that demand our attention and creative response.

The book is divided into sections corresponding to the timetable of an academic career: graduate school, getting into the game, tenure-track positions, and life after tenure, including retirement. Each section explores data regarding the discriminatory structures and practices in that stage of an academic career, and offers policy and practices that will improve conditions. The book uses two primary data sources: the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and a series of surveys about quality of life for students from nine of the ten schools within the University of California system. The first study includes data from over 160,000 recipients of doctorates in the social sciences, sciences, and humanities, and provides much of the quantitative data for the book (which draws on data from 1981-2003). Because this study follows both those who enter the professorate and those who enter other jobs, it provides comparative data for the population with a doctorate not working in the academy. The series of surveys in the University of California schools include both quantitative and qualitative data and were designed to explore work/family issues among the professorate, administered between 2003 and 2009. The resulting book is rich with data and analysis, any section of which is worth further exploration for those involved in training doctoral students, participating in faculty hiring processes, and designing human resource policies for faculty. Although much of the data and conversation focuses specifically on the status of women in STEM fields, there is much to ponder for those of us in the humanities as well, especially as the humanities job market continues to shrink and more positions are term-contract or contingent in nature.

One of the key observations of the text is that, although women continue to face general sexist discrimination in the academic labor force, the greatest level of structural sexism is exhibited against married women and mothers. For instance: “Compared with her childless female counterpart, a woman with a child under six is 21 percent less likely to land a tenure-track position” (28). The study uncovers interesting trends, such as the global gender penalty causing women to be 7 percent less likely to get tenure-track positions than their male counterparts disappears when researchers account for the effects of marriage and children. The additional marriage and child penalty makes women, whose childbearing years often coincide with graduate school and hiring processes, especially vulnerable in navigating an academic career and establishing a personal life. In the disciplines of religion and theology, the many schools that do not hire women faculty due to religious understandings of their limited gender roles likely make these numbers even starker.

As with women in other careers, years spent caring for small children leave difficult gaps in a curriculum vitae, which creates a double bind. If a mother of young children volunteers information about what she was doing during the gap, she may be seen as less committed, but if she fails to offer an explanation, she may be perceived as covering up more concerning reasons for the gap in employment. Because interviews for academic positions often include socializing over meals, casual (though illegal) questions about marriage and family status often come up, creating problems for women who know that having young children is often not considered desirable for faculty colleagues. Additionally, the research documents that spouses who need employment are often considered more problematic for women academics than for men, whose wives are often assumed to be more moveable than the husbands of women faculty (whether or not this is true). Although the report shows more favorable conditions for women with older children and those who make it through the tenure process, the book still demonstrates that women disproportionately spend time in service to the institution through midlevel administrative roles and student advising hours, which often delays their promotion to full professor and causes lower salaries upon retirement.
 
The book also offers suggestions for practices to create a more family-friendly professorate, including subsidized childcare (including amazing but necessary services such as access to emergency care for sick children and grants for child care to allow for travel to academic conferences), tenure-clock stoppage for new parents, and job placement for spouses of new hires. The book also notes that merely creating such policies and services are not enough, citing a study in the University of California system that found that less than half of women and only ten percent of men were using their family-friendly policies, and many of them did not know they existed, despite having been added in 1988. This study points to the need for a shift in cultures around these policies, so that using them does not create discrimination and negative attitudes from supervisors and colleagues. The book also explores the need for re-entry tracks for those who have left the field for childrearing or other family-care responsibilities, and vigilance about age discrimination in hiring processes upon re-entry.

Recent organizing among graduate TA’s and adjunct faculty have raised awareness that economic conditions and benefits are even bleaker among these populations. The text only begins to touch on the world of contingent faculty, except to note that women are over-represented in both their ranks and the ranks of lower-status positions (in terms of pay and benefits) at community colleges: “Compared with her childless counterpart, a woman with a child under six is 26 percent more likely to be employed as contingent faculty rather than a tenure-track position. Compared with a man with a young child, she is 132 percent more likely to be working in a contingent position” (38). These accounts demand that even in a period when tenure-track jobs are considered a luxury good because of their rarity, we must pay attention to the forces at work that create such gaps between the hiring and work experience of men and unmarried women and women who have spouses or children in our profession. Some issues might be better addressed at a societal level, such as the availability of affordable child and health care and adequate family leave policies, but many of the cultural shifts required in graduate programs and hiring processes can be addressed through increased awareness, attitudinal changes, and strategic policy changes. While the book does not trace the data after the 2008 economic downturn, such struggles in work/life ecology are increasingly a problem for both men and women as more families require two wage earners, and as even many tenure-track faculty positions do not pay enough or have adequate benefits to support families with small children on one salary, whether that of the male or female parent.

Today the question of how to manage the three dimensions of a professor’s work – teaching, writing, and institutional citizenship – in ways that are satisfying, sustainable, have integrity, and allow for other dimensions of “having a life,” is increasingly fraught. Multiple contextual factors contribute to this state of affairs, from economic conditions that result in fewer tenure-stream positions to demands for greater accountability and the questioning of the value of a baccalaureate degree. The contemporary situation creates uncertainty for faculty, most of whom have made significant investments to become professors. Uncertainty feeds anxiety that grows into distraction that saps energy and enjoyment in the work. This is bad for professors and for their universities. Enter Susan Robison, psychologist, former full professor, and faculty development expert. Hardly naïve about larger contextual factors impinging on the professorate, Robison offers a way forward: teaching faculty practices of self-regulation that “increase their own productivity and satisfaction in areas over which they have control” – their own lives and work (xv).

Robison presumes that faculty become professors motivated by deep purposes to which they are committed. Purpose grounds aspirations and commitments. It anchors internal coherence to satisfying lives in which professors accomplish good work as teachers, scholars, and university citizens. From this basic assumption flows Robison’s framework: (1) capture the energy or “power” of one’s deep purpose and articulate that purpose and the mission, vision, and goals that flow from it; (2) establish priorities, organize projects, and cultivate work habits that align with purpose; (3) develop interpersonal skills and cultivate mutually supportive relationships; and, (4) engage in the self-care essential to long-term health. After explaining and providing both reflective exercises and concrete strategies for each element in the first four parts of the book, Robison applies her framework very explicitly to the roles that professors occupy – professor, teacher, scholar, servant leader, and human being – in part five. Her claim: when individual faculty “define productivity and happiness for themselves with a view to their own long-range success,” the results will benefit both faculty and institutions (11).

Composed in a workbook format, readers can turn to the sections of the volume that most interest them, or read from beginning to end. The volume employs theories and strategies from a range of fields, selected, conceptualized and presented specifically for faculty. This is one of its strengths. It also has an extensive bibliography for those wishing to pursue a particular topic.

Robison’s positive tone and direct, uncomplicated approach likely will lead some readers to dismiss The Peak Performing Professor as too simple, too normal. And the workbook format leads to some repetition. But for those trying to compose lives and careers, those looking to find a way to retrieve the lost pleasure of being a professor, and those charged with supporting others to do good work, this is a book worth reading