If you're a college president and a parent, chances are you have plenty of hired help -- people to pick up your kids, clean your house, and manage the day-to-day annoyances of life that pose the biggest challenges for faculty parents. What you don't have is much time at home with your family.
The flexible schedule that makes academic life manageable for faculty parents is not a facet of presidential careers.
Learning to parent around presidential duties is one of the job's great challenges, as Michael Rao discovered after taking the helm of Central Michigan University in August of 2000. At the time, his son, Miguel was just six months old. As a new president, Mr. Rao was invited to many events but wasn't experienced enough on the job to know which to skip. "As you become more seasoned," he says, "you make better decisions about how to spend your time. But in my first year I went to many events that I didn't need to because I didn't know whether or not they were important. I went to two or three events a night, seven days a week. It was insane."
Before long not only was he exhausted, but he felt like a stranger to his son: "We had just taken some time off as a family because the university was closed for the holidays, which was probably the only reason I had the good sense to take time off. I spent some time with Miguel, and I realized then that I just didn't have the kind of connection with him that I wanted."
Now Mr. Rao reserves Sunday nights for family time (though occasionally there's a Sunday-night appointment, like a recent accreditation meeting he couldn't miss) and tries to be home three nights a week. He also drives his son to school most mornings, and when Miguel, who's now six, has a day off from school, Mr. Rao often takes a vacation day to spend time with him. The evenings he is home, Mr. Rao tries not to work until after his son has gone to bed at nine, though he admits to spending entirely too much time on his BlackBerry -- so much time, in fact, that "Miguel has a running joke about it. Whenever he sees me pull out the BlackBerry, he says, 'Click, click, click, click. OK, Daddy, no e-mail now.'"
Reliance on Help
While there's been much discussion about how professors struggle to balance work and family -- and about policies to make universities more family-friendly and the tenure track more flexible -- little has been said about the challenges facing presidential parents. We interviewed presidents about how they manage to run an institution and raise children and how they feel about the choices they have made.
Many presidential parents hesitated to complain because their families, unlike most faculty ones, have a lot of paid help and a large disposable income.
The president of a women's college in the Northeast who is a single mother of two and who asked not to be named says she often freed up time to be with her children by hiring someone to clean her house and do the grocery shopping.
"When people ask, 'How do you do it?', I think they assume that you're not only working, but doing all the ordinary stuff other people do, but you're not," she says. "You outsource the ordinary stuff, and focus on your job and your family. You use your money, as much of it as you have to, to keep your career going while you have children, to just make your life a little saner."
The Time Squeeze
None of the presidents we interviewed had stay-at-home partners. Many admitted that they found the day-to-day hassles of modern life far less stressful to deal with as presidents than they did when they held faculty or lower-level administrative jobs that paid less and had fewer perks. But the downside of being a president and a parent is the reality that you just can't spend the amount of time with your children that you can in most faculty or administrative jobs.
"I think it is difficult to be a good parent in a presidency," says a former president who recently stepped down as head of a college in the West. He and his wife have two young children and spoke on condition of anonymity.
"You're juggling a bunch of stuff, and the idea that everything is in the air is unrealistic," says his wife, a tenure-track professor at a Western university. "Something is always on the ground. I think that's how I felt about our life. There was always at least one more thing going than we could possibly manage."
Part of the problem is overscheduling; most presidents work a lot of nights and weekends. Then there's the constant travel, she says, adding: "I remember the bad weeks where I'd count how many nights he'd been home in the last month, and it was like 25 percent."
That was sometimes hard on their son and daughter -- who are now 4 and 7. Being older, their daughter noticed her father's absence more. "She played soccer for two years while he was president, and he made it to maybe two of her soccer games in a season. He also missed the first three Halloweens," his wife recalls. And "our daughter knew how to make him feel bad. She'd say, 'Dad, why don't you get a new job where you don't have to travel so much?'"
Recently, he did. Now he is home on weekends and attends every soccer game. Looking back, he has moments of regret, like missing his son's first steps because he was in Tokyo on an alumni trip. There were times he envied empty-nest presidents who had no overhanging guilt about trips that took them away from home for days at a time. "I never got close to my aspiration of being an equal partner in raising our kids," the former president says. "The demands of the presidency really put the vast majority of the burden on my wife, despite both our intentions to divide the work more equitably."
Bringing Baby to Work
And what if the president is female and a mother?
The president of an East Coast college, who is the mother of four daughters, recalls that she had her third child during her first year in office more than a decade ago. Anxious to show her dedication to the job, she worked right up to the delivery and didn't ask for much maternity leave. Ten days after she had her daughter by Caesarean section, she was already working at home, and before a month was up, she was back in the office part time. Soon after that, she was traveling three or four days a week to promote a capital campaign.
In hindsight, she wishes she'd taken more time off. "It was crazy, you know? I was back to work too soon," she says. "But at the time, I was the only woman president in my region, and then, oh my gosh, I got pregnant! Can you imagine?"
It was a struggle -- there were times when "I'd kiss my children in the morning and say, 'Mommy will come home,' and then I would go to my office and cry," she recalls.
On the other hand, being in charge gave her a certain amount of freedom to call her own shots. She came back to work part time, at first, and brought her baby with her. While she worked, her daughter slept in a Moses basket in her office. When her daughter got hungry, she closed her office door so she could nurse; when she had to leave a meeting to pump, she didn't hesitate to say so.
"I don't believe in superwoman heroics," she says, "but given the nature of my work as a new president and the campaign going on, I needed to be in the office some days. But I was not going to leave my newborn baby with somebody else, and it was important to me to breast-feed all my children."
Needless to say, "I leaked through a lot of outfits," she adds.
Staying Connected Through Technology
Having a short commute helps a lot, says F. King Alexander, a widower with two girls (ages 6 and 9) who recently became president of California State University at Long Beach after five years in the top job at Murray State University, in Kentucky.
Working parents know better than anyone how much time is lost traveling between home and day care or school and office, but presidents usually live on or within walking distance of their campus, so commuting is a nonissue. During his stint at Murray State, for example, he and his two daughters lived in the middle of campus. "It was great because my office was right next to my house, and the school was across the street from the campus," he recalls. Now, as president of Long Beach, they live two blocks from the campus.
When his work takes him on the road -- which it often does -- he relies on technology to bridge the distance with his children.
One year around the holidays, when Mr. Alexander was president at Murray State, he had a meeting in the Kentucky State Capitol on the same day that one of his daughters was Christmas carolling on the campus. While seeing her sing in person was out of the question, at least he was able to hear her. "I had my executive assistant call me in the State Capitol and put her on the speaker phone. It really made all the difference in the world to my daughter that I was able to hear her and talk with her on the phone before and after," he recalls.
Even little things like a family outing to a local restaurant can prove challenging for presidential parents. As public figures, they are used to the spotlight and the resulting loss of privacy. But it can be difficult for presidents to focus on their kids when they are on campus or in town, where the president is well known. That's one reason why, whenever Mr. Alexander had a free weekend at Murray State, he and his daughters would get out of Dodge. They would often travel to Nashville, Tenn., or Evansville, Ind., just to get away because "if we went to get something to eat in Murray, I would spend most of the time talking to people who would come up to me wanting to talk about the university. They were very well-intentioned people, but that would take time away from my children."
Putting Children Ahead of Others
Many presidents said that in order to spend more time with their children, they brought them to cultural and sporting events on campus. Some said that, more often than not, they found themselves sacrificing time with their partners or friends to be with their kids.
Laura Skandera Trombley, president of Pitzer College, in Claremont, Calif., has a 9-year-old son. She spends her free time with him. "I don't have the kind of time that I would like to spend keeping in touch with friends and socializing with them," she says. "And I don't go to movies. Unless it's on a plane, I'm not going to see it. One of my faculty members had an Oscars party a couple of years ago and invited me, and I realized that the only film that I had seen was Finding Nemo."
One college president who asked to remain anonymous says her marriage ended in divorce, partly because she found it hard to prioritize her relationship with her husband in quite the way she should have: "The problem is you've got a job whose pressures never let up, you've got a responsibility to your children, and you've got a spouse, who also has needs. It's very hard to give all of those things equal attention, and so you tend to take your spouse more for granted than you do your children. You can balance two things, but balancing three things is hard."
In spite of the challenges, many presidents said they thought that having children had made them better presidents. Kids are a great reality check, says a president and single mom of one: "It's easy to get heady about things because a lot of our job is showing up taking credit for what other people do, but then you go home, and there's a little boy there who says, 'OK, mom, what's for dinner?' So there's a built-in check and balance that keeps you grounded."
"It's such an all-consuming job that you'd never think about or do anything else if you didn't have children," says a long-time college president whose two boys are now grown. These days she has to force herself to leave the office. When her boys were younger, though, she says she wasn't able to obsess as much about her work.
"You really have to turn your mind off when you've got kids at the dinner table," she says. "You're not going to be able to continue to fret about the difficult decisions you're making, so they really anchor you in reality in a way that I think every college president needs."
