Timing Is Everything: Academe's Annual Baby Boom Female professors say they feel pressure to plan childbirth for the summer By ROBIN WILSON The summer break is when most academics schedule time for research, writing, and a few weeks of vacation. But for female professors, this is the time of year to schedule childbirth. It's become an unwritten rule in academe that female professors who can manage it give birth between May and August. Women with the luck of good timing say that a late spring or summer delivery is the least disruptive to the academic calendar and guarantees them the most time at home with their infants. Those whose biological clocks run on a different schedule risk annoying their colleagues, who may be forced to fill in when a baby arrives mid-semester. With ovulation kits and fertility books in hand, a remarkable number of academics manage to give birth when classes let out. There are no nationwide or campuswide statistics on the matter, but academics say they routinely try to schedule the arrival of their children during the summer break, whether they are giving birth or adopting. "The ideal time to have a baby arrive is May or June," says Mary C. Waters, a professor of sociology at Harvard University. "In the summer, people expect not to be able to find you, students aren't around asking for letters of recommendation, and graduate students are trained not to hand in chapters." Ms. Waters was fortunate enough to time the adoption of her Vietnamese son for this month. Three summers ago, she and her husband traveled to China to adopt their infant daughter. Interviews on the subject of childbirth involved a lexicon that isn't heard in the halls of academe, with references to menstrual cycles, breast-feeding, birth-control methods, and uterine infections. Many academic women were eager to talk about issues surrounding childbirth because, they say, they are crucial to the advancement of female professors. The pressure on women to avoid pregnancies that will inconvenience a department is unreasonable, they argue, and puts women at a distinct disadvantage in tenure reviews. And while some colleges are generous with paid leave compared to other employers, many academic women find college-leave policies inadequate -- at least if colleges are as committed as they say to recruiting more female faculty members. To those outside the academy, a professor's options for maternity leave might seem pretty good. Faculty members get a break from teaching during the summer, while women in other professions work around the calendar. Even during the academic year, a professor's work is flexible. That can come in handy when children are sick, or if a faculty member needs to slip home for an hour to breast-feed her baby. But the time-consuming care that an infant requires over several months is hard to make room for if you are an assistant professor. Even though many institutions allow a professor to stop the tenure clock for six months to a year, the benefit can cause resentment and taking advantage of it can doom your career, academic women say. Because of those pressures, having a baby during the summer is important -- so important that some academic women give up trying to conceive if they aren't successful in timing the infant's arrival, and wait until the next year to try again. Elizabeth McCain, an assistant professor of biology at Muhlenberg College, gave herself a three-month window. She is 37 years old, and if she hadn't conceived a baby to be born between the end of May and the end of July this year, she would have stopped trying for good, she says. Luckily for her and her husband, it worked. "I felt like this was the last shot at it," she says. Ms. McCain will be considered for tenure this fall, and she didn't want to interrupt her course schedule during the coming academic year to have a baby. At first, it looked as though she would have perfect timing -- her baby was due on the 14th of this month. But as is often the case, babies don't cooperate with schedules, and Ms. McCain's academic duties managed to collide with her role as a mother. Her daughter was born a month early, on precisely the day that Ms. McCain was finishing her grading for the academic year. When her water broke last month, she called the registrar's office at Muhlenberg to ask whether she could hand in her grades a few days late. (Graduation at that point was still a week away.) The answer: Absolutely not. So, leaking fluid, Ms. McCain sat in her home office and finished up her grading before going to the hospital to deliver. Brad Barron, Muhlenberg's registrar, said the college needed final grades to plan for graduation, but he also said the college could have found a way around the problem if Ms. McCain had decided that finishing the grading was impossible. It is their institution's inflexibility that leads many women to plan a baby's arrival for later in the summer, when classes are out. Oftentimes, a particular professor may be the only one in a department who has the expertise to teach a certain course. If the professor must leave halfway through the semester, students are left hanging or colleagues must try to fill in. "Having babies is an imposition on the rhythms of the academy," observes Robin Nagle, director of the master's program in humanities and social thought at New York University. She is due to give birth to her first child next month. It doesn't take long for academic women to figure out the unspoken rules about childbirth. Faculty members receive subtle -- and sometimes not-so-subtle -- advice about pregnancy planning. Marjorie S. Hardy, an assistant professor of psychology at Muhlenberg, was shooting for the end of spring quarter this year for the delivery of her son. But she missed the conclusion of classes by five weeks, and the college had to pay an adjunct to finish up her teaching. "People jokingly made comments like, 'Why would you have a baby during the semester when these things can be planned?'" she says. The problem is, they usually can't. If an academic woman is unsuccessful in planning a summer baby, she might find herself in a bind: trying to recuperate from a delivery, nurse an infant, and finish up a semester's teaching, all at the same time. Diane Harris-Cline, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, knows what it is like to have bad timing. Her first baby arrived in April four years ago, in the middle of a 10-week quarter. Ms. Harris-Cline doubled up on class meetings just before the baby was due so that she could take three weeks off after the birth. She returned to class in May and finished out the rest of the quarter. "I expressed milk and left it for my husband to feed the baby," she explains. "I was just sitting in class, listening to student reports, and waiting for the three hours to be over." She and her husband have been more successful this time around: Ms. Harris-Cline's second baby is due next month. The timing issue can even affect male professors. Rebecca Linafelt is not an academic, but her husband, Tod Linafelt, is an assistant professor of theology at Georgetown University. The couple timed conception so that their baby would be born in May 1998. Mr. Linafelt spent last summer at home, writing and helping to care for his daughter, Eleanor. "My wife never changed a diaper until I went back to work in September," he comments. Scheduling a summer delivery is important, say academic women, because maternity policies at many colleges leave a lot to be desired. Although all institutions must abide by the Family and Medical Leave Act and offer employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, institutional policies regarding paid leave vary enormously. At some institutions, women must rely on the few weeks of sick leave they have accumulated if they want paid time off after childbirth. At other colleges and universities, new mothers get six to eight weeks of medical or disability leave and are then expected to be back in the classroom. Faculty members complain that the policies are stingy, but many small colleges simply cannot afford to offer female professors lots of paid leave. A college's biggest concern, administrators say, is not to insure that professors can afford to take several months off, but to make sure that students get the education they paid for. Large research universities with more money at their disposal are typically more generous with paid leave. Institutions like Harvard University, the University of California, and the University of North Carolina allow faculty women to take paid time off from teaching for an entire semester. But in many cases, exactly how much teaching relief a professor gets is up to the department chairman, who is responsible for finding someone to fill in while the new mother is away. Negotiating with department heads can be a difficult process for women who are untenured and may be reluctant to push too hard. "Because the decision making is so decentralized, you are at the mercy of your chair," says an associate professor at a research university, who asked not to be named. "I don't think as a junior woman you can go in and start raising the roof." Some women find themselves pressured to use fellowships and sabbaticals as maternity leave. One junior faculty member in sociology, who timed the birth of her baby for April, just as the quarter was ending, thought she would have this summer off and then have relief from teaching one course in the fall. But when she secured a fellowship that would give her relief from teaching a second course in order to do research, her dean pressured her to give back the teaching relief that the university had already awarded her. Only after the woman balked did the university agree not to renege on its original offer. "The university has a policy that is written down, but it is bare bones and can be interpreted in different ways," says the female professor, who asked to remain anonymous. She says she plans to use her fellowship to do research, and that is why she complained when the university wanted to call it a maternity leave. Some institutions do have policies that make new parents happy. Wesleyan University, for example, gives new mothers and fathers a choice: They can take a semester off from teaching at two-thirds pay, or they can teach a reduced course load for a semester at full pay. The policy is applied universally, with little negotiating, and lots of new parents take advantage of it -- 14 have done so during the past five academic years. "We are trying to insure that professional life is not a tradeoff to a family life, or minimize the degree to which it is," says Richard W. Boyd, vice-president for academic affairs and provost at Wesleyan. New parents can also stop the tenure clock if they take a leave. Still, many faculty members at Wesleyan plan their children's births for the late spring or summer. Stephen C. Angle and his wife managed to have two daughters within that window. Mr. Angle, an assistant professor of philosophy at Wesleyan, says the couple tried not to feel the pressure of planning the births, even though they knew that success would mean more time at home for Mr. Angle. "We knew if we tried to fine-tune too much, it would stress us out," he says. For Renee C. Romano, the planning was intricate. She wanted to time her pregnancy three years ago to coincide with when she would be on the academic job market. Her hope was that she would be doing initial interviews during the early months of pregnancy and then deliver her baby in May, a few months before she would have to start teaching if she landed a job. So she and her husband used a book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control and Pregnancy Achievement (HarperCollins, 1995). It worked. Given the few jobs in history, though, Ms. Romano didn't take any chances. When she was six months pregnant, she flew to Wesleyan University for an interview, wearing clothing two sizes too large -- rather than maternity wear -- in the hope that no one would realize she was pregnant. Only after she was hired as an assistant professor of history did she tell people in her department the news. She had three months at home with her new daughter until the fall semester began in 1996, and she taught only one course at Wesleyan at full pay that semester under the parental-leave plan. Not all junior faculty members feel as comfortable taking advantage of Wesleyan's leave policy. Lisa C. Dierker, an assistant professor of psychology at Wesleyan, had her son, Noah, last August after she had finished her first year of teaching at the university. She had hoped to conceive a baby to arrive earlier in the summer, because she did not think it would help her career to accept a leave at Wesleyan so soon after joining the university. As a result, Ms. Dierker had only five weeks at home with Noah before she had to begin teaching. When he was just five days old, she began preparing lectures for her fall course, "Foundations of Contemporary Psychology." She says: "This had nothing to do with any pressure from my department. It is more a universal fear I had of being in a junior-faculty position. I don't care where you are, you can't just say, 'Okay, see you later.'" Stacey R. Kole says women at the junior-faculty rank have reason to worry that their careers will be affected by children. Ms. Kole is an associate professor of economics and management at the University of Rochester's business school and associate dean of the school's M.B.A. program. She gave birth last month to a girl, and her two older children were born in the summertime. Although she timed her babies right and took little time off after their births, Ms. Kole doesn't think she'll get tenure when she comes up for it in four years. She chose the mommy track, and she isn't bitter about it. "I've been able to carve out this very unique position here that lets me be the parent, wife, and professional I want to be," she says, "without feeling like I've failed myself." Tenure, she says, will have to wait until her children are older. Diane Harris-Cline, the University of Cincinnati professor, is hoping that having children won't derail her shot at tenure. She has accumulated enough sick leave to cover the entire fall quarter after the birth of her baby next month, but she won't use it. She will start teaching again in September. Achieving tenure, she figures, is worth the tradeoff of spending less time at home. "This is a political decision," she says. "I am going up for tenure, and I want to be around, visible, active, and productive. I don't want to be perceived as not doing my job to the best of my ability." http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A14