When Robert Drago, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, first asked me to co-write an article proposing a half-time tenure track, I agreed only reluctantly. At the time, I was already on a book tour and teaching a full courseload; I didn't need any more pressure. And, after all, what would come of the idea?
Evidently, something has. I'm hearing from more and more academics who have persuaded their institutions to let them work on the tenure track on a part-time schedule. Just recently, in the space of a week, I received two e-mail messages from faculty members -- one at Ryerson University, in Toronto, and the other at Stanford University -- who had negotiated such appointments.
The first writer, Rachel Berman, is an assistant professor of early-childhood education at Ryerson. As she tells it, she was hired in April 2000 and got pregnant immediately with her second child. With her first, she had hired a babysitter, but this time she felt she couldn't because her new son was born with life-threatening allergies.
Under Canadian law, she was entitled to 50 weeks paid leave (no kidding, 50 weeks) but she elected to come back to work at Ryerson early because she was a new faculty member and the principal investigator for a major grant. Day after day, she found herself stumbling to her desk at 9 p.m. after putting her kids to sleep, and working until well after midnight. "Meeting some children's needs is just more challenging than others," she said. "It was too much."
So she took a year off and then the following year got involved in a research project one day a week. During both years, she was paid, not by the university but by the research grant. Her future remained a question mark.
Then, after reading about our idea for a half-time tenure-track, Berman decided to approach her university. She won the support of her department head, the dean of faculty, and the head of the faculty association. She now has a three-year, renewable contract that cuts her teaching, research, and service duties in half. As a Canadian she has national health insurance; her pension and long-term disability benefits will be calculated based on her new salary. Each year that she works will be counted as a half-year on her tenure clock, although she can speed up that clock if she wishes.
The second e-mail message came from Kathryn A. Moler, an associate professor of applied physics at Stanford. Newly separated from her husband and the mother of 2-year-old twins, Moler knew she was going to have difficulties meeting the demands of a full-time schedule. She now holds a part-time appointment, which she negotiated with her chairman when they went jogging together one day.
At Stanford, which is on a quarter system, professors in her department typically teach one class every quarter; she negotiated a quarter free of teaching with a proportional decrease in salary. She still manages several grants which together total roughly $600,000 annually. Last summer, with the permission of one of her grant agencies, she decided to take some time off and used money that she had set aside as part of her summer salary to hire a postdoc. "I used to average 70 to 90 hours a week," she said. "Now it's closer to 40."
Both women found support for their reduced load within their institutions. Moler, the only woman in her department, said, "My colleagues are incredibly supportive. ... I might be benefiting from the fact that it is an all-male department. Everyone is impressed that someone who doesn't have a wife can do what [the male professors] are doing."
Part-time, tenure-track arrangements have been on the books at a substantial number of institutions for years, according to Kathleen Christensen of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Yet most such policies were unusable, she said, "because a culture of long work hours and [a focus on] speed to tenure meant that the part-timer was seen as working in a deviant fashion."
For example, at the University of California at Berkeley, "we found that a part-time option already existed on the books," said Marc Goulden, principal research analyst of a Sloan-financed project on family-friendly policies led by Mary Ann Mason, dean of the university's graduate division, and Angelica Stacy, a professor of chemistry there. But few knew about the policy, he said, and even fewer used it, because a faculty member who opted to work part time was not guaranteed the right to return to full-time work. "That was a serious barrier to a lot of people," he said.
Survey data at Berkeley found that more than 60 percent of female faculty members and a third of their male counterparts were interested in a flexible, pro-rated tenure track that would allow them to return to work full time at some point.
The trouble is, a policy of the University of California System requires that tenure must be granted within a maximum of 10 years.
Goulden, Mason, and Stacy are together working on a project called the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge, supported by the Sloan Foundation. The trio is advising the system president's office, which is reworking the university's policies for part-timers on the tenure track.
In developing a proposal for the president's office, the Berkeley group had to choose between two options: preserving the traditional six-year span of the tenure track but adjusting the tenure standards for part-timers, or maintaining the standards and lengthening the time allowed, within the 10-year limit.
When the Berkeley group floated its idea of modifying the productivity requirements for part-timers on the tenure track, some critics feared a dilution of standards. Yet the group found almost no opposition to allowing faculty members to work part time for a limited period. It is now working on the details of a proposal to allow tenure-track professors to work part time for three to five years on a pro-rated basis, so that, for example, two years at half time would equal a full year for tenure purposes.
Berkeley is a large, urban research university where departments would have the flexibility to offer a mix of tenure-track arrangements. A department could, for example, recover half of the salary of a part-timer on the tenure track, and use that money to hire an adjunct to teach a course.
Small liberal-arts colleges in rural locations have less of a Ph.D. labor pool. So, does that mean that a half-time tenure track is not feasible there?
Not necessarily. Saranna Thornton, an associate professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College, helped me think about a solution. The portion of the tenure-track professor's salary that reverts to the department could be used to hire a postdoc, who would teach a course or two while completing a dissertation or writing for publication.
It is less attractive to think about the possibility of departments hiring adjuncts to fill in for part-timers on the tenure track, then paying those adjuncts less than the tenure-track professors and pocketing the difference. A department can, of course, pay the adjunct a higher salary, but that does not solve the ever-growing boom in low-paid, dead-end adjunct positions peopled disproportionately by women. The Sloan Foundation's new Dual-Ladder Program is designed to support projects that create far-reaching solutions for flexible and fair career paths in academe, such as setting up a policy that would automatically move an adjunct to the tenure track after a certain number of years.
A number of institutions, including the University of Michigan, are working hard to develop more options for half-time positions on the tenure track with modified duties.
The question is, Will such choices ultimately help women or hurt them? Won't the overwhelming majority of those on a half-time tenure track be women? Is this just another recipe for a mommy track?
Such questions reflect the assumption that if women aren't given the option of a part-time tenure track they will "tough it out" on the traditional track. But even if they do, there's no guarantee of tenure at the end.
I asked Rachel Berman what she would have done if she hadn't been offered the half-time position on the tenure track. "It would have been such a devastating choice," she said. "In all honesty, I might have gone back full time and ended up collapsing."
That's a high price to pay for tenure, and indeed a collapse might well have led to her being denied tenure. "I'm just so grateful," Berman said, "I didn't have to face that."
