A Push to Help New Parents Prepare for Tenure Reviews

AAUP wants colleges to grant them extra time -- even if they don't take leaves

By ROBIN WILSON

Leaders of the American Association of University Professors believe that professors who care for newborn children

ALSO SEE: The AAUP Plan For Women With Tenure and Families, Moving Up the Ranks Is Challenging Colloquy: Join an online discussion about a plan by the American Association of University Professors to give new parents more time before tenure reviews.

deserve more time to achieve tenure. A statement that the association's governing board is expected to vote on this week recommends that universities lighten the teaching load for men and women who are caring for newborns, and give such professors up to two years longer to prepare for tenure.

The proposed policy is the broadest statement the association has made on balancing family responsibilities and academic work in 25 years. It marks a shift in thinking at the association about whether it is wise for academic mothers to ask for special consideration to ease the impact of children on their work. If it is approved, the statement would become part of the AAUP's book on recommended practices and procedures, known as the Redbook.

According to the association's statement, many women in academe are stuck in low-level positions. Among those working in instructor and lecturer positions off the tenure track, 57 percent are women.

"Although increasing numbers of women have entered academia, their status has been slow to improve," says the association's statement. The primary reason, it says, is "the lack of a clear boundary in academic lives between work and family," which has meant that "work has been all pervasive."

The centerpiece of the association's statement is its recommendation that female -- and male -- professors be granted an extra year on the tenure clock after the birth or adoption of a child. A key component of the proposal is that professors be given the extra time regardless of whether they take a leave from work.

The last time the association visited the issue of stopping the tenure clock was in 1974, when it issued a statement on leaves of absence for childbearing and child-rearing. That statement, which is now part of the Redbook, only obliquely makes reference to "stopping the clock." Female professors, it says, should only get time off the clock if they take an extended leave. That means women would have to be off the payroll and away from campus in order to stop the clock. But under the new policy, professors caring for babies would get an extra year regardless of whether they went on leave, coming up for tenure after eight years if the normal time at their institution was seven years.

Mary W. Gray, who headed the AAUP's Committee on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession from 1973 to 1978 and again from 1986 to 1992, helped write the 1974 statement. She insisted that the rest of academe would resent women for getting special treatment if universities allowed them to stop the tenure clock without going on leave. If women who stopped the clock did not take a leave, Ms. Gray worried, they would be expected to have made professional accomplishments during the year off the clock.

Ms. Gray, who is chair of the mathematics and statistics department at American University, still believes that's a danger. "Women don't need another reason to be resented on top of everything else," she says.

But women seem reluctant to take unpaid leaves. Universities have realized this, and starting in the late 1980s, some began instituting policies that allowed women to stop the clock regardless of whether they took a leave. Some members of the AAUP's Committee on the Status of Women believed the association should change its policy as well. But Ms. Gray fought it. "There was a theoretical debate on the committee," says Mary Burgan, who became general secretary of the association in July 1994. "Some of us thought it was time to do this before now, and we're a little bit late."

Martha S. West says was "shocked" to learn about the association's stance when she took over in 1999 as head of the association's new Subcommittee on Academic Work and Family. She says requiring women to take a leave in order to stop the clock is impractical and harmful. "There are a lot of reasons why women don't want to go on leave," says Ms. West, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis. "They don't want to interrupt service, lose salary increases, and women who run labs can't just stop."

The scant data on the subject show that women may be reluctant to stop the clock, no matter what their circumstances. At institutions that already allow professors to stop the clock without taking a leave, few women take advantage of the policy. Many fear it would stigmatize them, landing them on a "mommy track." Women also worry, as Ms. Gray warned, that they will be expected to accomplish more work if they get an extra year before tenure.

It is not clear how many institutions allow academics to stop the clock, with or without taking a leave; there is no up-to-date data on the subject. Of those campuses that allow for stopping the clock, though, most are research universities or elite liberal arts colleges, including Wellesley College and the Universities of Georgia and Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1996, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources conducted a study of 94 campuses that it said had the most family-friendly work policies. It found that 80 percent of them had formal or informal policies allowing professors to stop the tenure clock. Most did not require faculty members to take a leave.

Of those campuses that said faculty members had the option of stopping the clock, 80 percent reported that the option was "rarely used." A primary reason, according to a report on the study, was that professors "fear career penalties if they were to stop the tenure clock."

Belinda Davis, an associate professor of modern German history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, says stopping the clock worked against her. A senior professor in her field advised her to take the extra year and put off her tenure bid until the fall of 1999, she says. Ms. Davis wasn't even sure she needed the extra time because her first book was already about to be published. But she followed her colleague's advice.

When it came time for her department to vote on her case, however, the very professor who suggested she take extra time complained that it had taken her too long to come up for tenure. The university denied Ms. Davis's tenure bid in the spring of 2000.

But Ms. Davis objected, complaining that "the year off the tenure clock was being held against me." Ultimately, the colleague who opposed her tenure bid left and the administration agreed to reconsider her file. Last spring, the university granted her tenure.

The new policy the AAUP has proposed does ask universities to monitor tenure decisions to ensure that "faculty members are not penalized in any way for requesting and receiving extensions of the probationary period." It also extends the option of stopping the clock to male professors. "Although many men take substantial responsibility for the care of children," the statement says, "the reality is that women still assume more responsibility for child rearing than do men." Those who drew up the policy say they want to encourage men to become more involved, so they want to extend the option to them.

Some faculty members question whether parenthood is the only thing that should qualify professors for extra time. Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says he would be happier if the AAUP policy "looked more broadly at major interruptions and crises in people's lives and found a way of accounting for all of them."

Professors who care for an ill or elderly family member should also get extra time, he says. "This policy has an odd echo of Republican family values, that nothing matters more than the raising of your family," says Mr. Nelson, who has no children. "I'm not amongst those who idealize children."

While experts on work-family issues in academe believe that stopping the tenure clock should be an option, they say a better idea is allowing faculty members who are caring for new babies to do less teaching and committee work. That would allow them to focus on their research and writing. "I believe reducing the workload is much more promising than stopping the clock," says Robert Drago, a professor of labor studies and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University. "I've never seen anyone turned down for tenure because they've done less teaching. But less research will get you turned down every time."

The AAUP's policy statement endorses that concept. It calls on colleges to allow new parents to receive regular pay and keep up their research, while shelving or reducing their teaching and service obligations for a while.

Such an option would help Susan W. Hinze, an assistant professor of sociology at Case Western Reserve University. She stopped the tenure clock for a year after her son was born in August 2000. But within weeks, Ms. Hinze was back in the classroom, advising undergraduates, and attending faculty meetings. Meanwhile, she says, "my research really slowed down."

Before giving birth, Ms. Hinze had finished collecting data for an article. "But I still have not sat down and written a paper from that," she says, adding that she is "exhausted" by family and teaching responsibilities. She worries that when her tenure file is reviewed next year, colleagues will expect her to have written during her time off the clock.

She attended a discussion sponsored by the Women's Faculty Association at the university last year where she says senior women confirmed her fears. "The message was, 'If you can do your career not only like the guys, but better, then you will succeed in academe,' " Ms. Hinze recalls. "It was very discouraging."

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article