Get a Life and a Career. What a Concept!

Nobody tells Naomi Miller to get a life. Not after her feat of "bearing," as Victorians put it, four children on the way to tenure. And certainly not after her recent performance here.

As people munched on their club sandwiches and oriental chicken salad earlier this month at the sixth annual meeting of CUWFA -- the College and University Work/Family Association -- Miller, an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona, shared some "origin stories."

Such as what happened when she alerted her dissertation adviser at Harvard (during a national conference, no less) that she was pregnant with her third child.

"Naomi," the otherwise "very supportive" adviser asked, "when is this going to stop?"

"I thought," Miller recalled to laughs from the 80-odd sympathetic souls lunching in the University Marriott's Madeira Room, "You taught me everything I know. You never taught me anything about that."

Similar comments, Miller confided, often drifted back to her as her brood grew. One observer wondered, "Is she a member of a cult or something?" Another remarked, "Well, I don't understand. Naomi has always been so organized!" It had to be explained that Miller, shockingly, had planned things that way.

The Marriott crowd sighed and shook their heads, these idealistic campus professionals who think "academic life" shouldn't be oxymoronic. The conference's theme -- "Balancing Professional and Personal Lives in Higher Education: a Focus on Women Faculty" -- made it sound easy, like balancing a checkbook, but the travails discussed in multiple sessions suggested the uphill battles that professionals in CUWFA have been fighting since the organization's 1994 founding.

Overwork and the decline of leisure. Gender discrimination and prehistoric attitudes about spousal hiring. Tenure clocks invented for pre-enlightened men. Older guys who like the old ways best (and younger guys who mimic their every step). The challenges to parents doing research abroad. The peculiar burdens experienced by African-American women in academia. The intricacies of child care and parent care.

And in the sessions and on the display tables outside the hotel meeting rooms, one saw the amazing resources developed and operated in recent decades by CUWFA sorts to make 80-hour-a-week academic lives more humane.

The Work/Life Programs at Pennsylvania State University that counsel employees on alternate work arrangements or medical leave. The University of Michigan's Family Care Resources Program, which helps university employees, faculty, and even students care for elderly or disabled parents. New York University's Office of Work-Life Services, which advises on everything from adoption and "finding time for fathering" to transportation options and home safety checks. The University of Washington's Nanny-Share Network and Lactation Stations, at which "most women find it takes less than 15 minutes to express their milk." The outside commercial sources like the Boston area's Parents in a Pinch, or conference-cosponsor Caregivers on Call, in Lynbrook, N.Y., for emergency backup child care.

To the middle-aged male outsider still burdened by an older, anti-Newmanesque image of the university -- atomized books, classes, teachers, students, research -- this 21st-century merger of campus bureaucracy and intimate personal life amazed, delighted, yet raised questions as well. If these issues matter to all campus types, where were the men? (The conference's theme aside, CUWFA's membership of nearly 100 is more than 90 percent female, and only a handful of men came to Tucson.) Is it such a good thing for the university or college to pay attention to our personal lives? Shouldn't the higher-ed institution be like the minimal state, establishing just enough order for people to proceed about their scholarly, scientific, and professional business? Why should it emulate the welfare state/city on a hill, with every community member's fortunes the concern of all?

The CUWFA display tables offered some ammunition for dogged cynics. The University of Texas at Houston's Work-Life Program organizes "Coffee Talk Consultations" that promise to "reduce stress and absenteeism." Ah, one might think -- the embedded bottom-line rationale. The University of Toronto's Family Care Office provides a workshop on "Cooking On a Budget." Does one want to take food tips from establishments that regard leftovers as haute cuisine? Harvard's Office of Work and Family advertises a quirky program on "Taking Back Control of the Holiday Season," divided into "Skills for Taking Control" (darting left in Macy's before your kid sees Santa?) and "Creating Meaning, Celebration and Connection" (interrogating the Foucauldian presumptions of gift-giving?). Would that offering inevitably become a staple of every other American institution, like the case method?

Skepticism faded, though, through immersion in the realities of the CUWFA world. While M.I.T. is building a three-story, 12,000-square-foot child-care center for kids up to age 6, designed by Frank Gehry (M.I.T. faculty parents will presumably give them John Stuart Mill-like toddler training in architectural appreciation), many "benchmark" American colleges and universities, in the phrase of one attendee, still offer little more than essentials, and what the law mandates. "Often we're somewhat isolated, and we come in providing services, little programs," says the University of Arizona's Mimi Gray, CUWFA's current president. "The second level of work/life is to change the fabric of the institution that makes it untenable to have a personal life."

Naomi Miller, whose anecdotes came on a panel about the University of Arizona's "Millennium Project," a well-funded administration-backed study that is assessing the state of satisfaction at her increasingly progressive "work/life" institution, joked of how one dean in the bad old days bragged to her colleague, professor of education Myra Dinnerstein, that he had given maternity leave to one of his people. "He was actually doing something that was already required by university policy," Miller explained, but didn't know it.

In fact, after two days steeped in work/life discussions and material, it becomes clear that what CUWFA-thinking on campus has replaced is the aristocratic "ethics of goodwill." Before state and federal laws imposed institutional policies on family matters, and stirred growing awareness on the part of presidents and provosts that work/life services make smart business investments (fewer departures require fewer searches, and so on), the human needs of faculty -- and sometimes staff -- depended on local warlords, otherwise known as department chairmen and deans.

Chairmen -- almost always men -- who too often wondered why young women assistant professors with babies couldn't do it, à la Sinatra, "my way." Chairmen inclined to look in the mirror and see ideal job candidates. Deans adamant -- even rightly so -- that they had enough to worry about without taking on in loco parentis obligations toward professors.

Compared to such Dark Age morality, the evolving "cohesive approach" to work/life presented by the University of Arizona's "Life & Work Connections" office, the hometown team that offered several smoothly designed presentations about how to involve all parts of the university in such matters, looked like a Renaissance.

Beyond changing policies, a happy consequence of dissipating Dark Age thinking, many at CUWFA agreed, is that the chairmen, chairwomen, and deans are getting better too, displaying fresh bounties of "goodwill" that would have shocked their predecessors. That's especially true, it appears, if they work under a president like Arizona's Peter Likins, whose supportiveness and personal rainbow coalition of six adopted children of different ethnicities has won over even naysayers inclined to deny any male university president the benefit of the doubt, and M.I.T.'s Charles M. Vest, whose endorsement of M.I.T. professor Nancy Hopkins's admired study on gender discrimination in science at her institution is seen by many CUWFA folks as a model of enlightened leadership.

The more one transcends old standards of every assistant professor for himself or herself, the more CUWFA's cutting-edge activities seem positively irresistible. It's fun to imagine a whole internecine English department marching up to the University of Iowa's human-resources department to take advantage of its "Workgroup conflict management." (Hey, Columbia, get with the program!) Headed to Virginia Tech? You'll appreciate the links to the "Blacksburg Newcomers Club" for meeting new people, and read for pure edification its remarkably comprehensive draft guide on "Breastfeeding at Virginia Tech." ("It is very helpful to think of your baby when pumping. Look at his/her picture. Some women bring a clothing item from the baby to work. The touch and smell encourages the milk ejection reflex.")

Just as political states remained benighted about slavery in the 18th century, and stay befuddled in the 21st about animal rights, the university and college as communities look to be in their first moral trimester, with leaps and bounds (and kicks) still to come. The day may arrive when presidents and provosts run mixers for their single faculty and staff, order free medical treatment in campus health centers for all community members, pay adjuncts what they deserve, even distribute a part of endowment interest to everyone on campus.

Or so we can dream.

"Making Life Work at Boston University" declares a brochure at that institution. Before you sniff at the CUWFA revolution, contemplate a life that doesn't, and the kind of scholarship and personality it produces. "Mommy Track"? How about "Human Track"?

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Temple University.