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Previous "Balancing Act" Columns
How to find a balance between work and family
Balancing Act
Is there any advantage to an academic's professional career from having children?
Balancing Act
Here's a primer on how to approach your department with a request to work part-time.
Balancing Act
Surrounded by faculty moms, a new assistant professor wonders if she would have more friends if she got pregnant.
Balancing Act
Here are some pitfalls to watch out for if you are in a "mixed marriage" of professor and nonprofessor.
Balancing Act
Here's how one academic couple managed to find two tenure-track jobs on the same campus and both win tenure.
Balancing Act
An associate professor had timed her first two pregnancies to coincide with scheduled breaks in the academic calendar. How hard could it be to do that again?
Balancing Act
Women are taking faculty positions in record numbers but most are not the sort of jobs that lead to success in higher education.
Balancing Act
A look at how a small group of professors set up a child-care program to serve participants at their discipline's annual meeting.
Balancing Act
A semester off means a break from the many mundane aspects of academic life that can keep you up at night.
Balancing Act
A case can be made that caregiving leaves and flexible work arrangements benefit institutions as well as individuals. Academic parents just need to make that case.
Balancing Act
When it comes to offering alternative work arrangements to working parents, academic and nonacademic employers have one thing in common -- inconsistency.
Balancing Act
Knowing there would be little room for them at the top, an academic couple finds fulfilling work at the sort of campus most Ph.D. advisers would view as a big step down.
Balancing Act
For a middle-aged academic couple, the "right" career choice has often been in conflict with a desire to stay married.
Balancing Act
In the midst of writing her dissertation, a doctoral student wonders how to tell her committee that she's expecting.
Balancing Act
If male academics don't have to choose between their personal and professional goals, an assistant professor wonders, why should she?
Balancing Act
A Ph.D. thought her transition from graduate student to faculty member would be a good time to lose weight. Somehow, things got out of hand.
Balancing Act
The story of how a tenured professor in the social sciences became a victim of domestic abuse.
Balancing Act
You negotiated a job for your partner as part of your hiring package. Then he dumped you. Can't you negotiate his firing?
Balancing Act
The last thing she wanted to do was negotiate like a girl and accept a low-ball offer.
Balancing Act
A Ph.D. in sociology who left academe to raise a family finds few departments welcoming her return.
Balancing Act
When faculty members ask that question, what they really mean is "What's in it for my family?"
Balancing Act
An untenured academic mother decides that she can't do it all, so she's just trying to look like she can.
Balancing Act
A biologist wonders why, after five years, her small-town college still doesn't feel like home.
Balancing Act
Many institutions' aren't, says a law professor, but a best-practices model is now available that is worth adopting.
Balancing Act
A Ph.D. in history finds that a rural, small-town campus is no place to be single.
Balancing Act
When you love your family and your job, sometimes you've got to put pressure on one to enhance the other.
Balancing Act
For a pregnant professor, diagnosed with cancer, suddenly earning tenure was no longer her life's biggest challenge.
Balancing Act
More women are persuading their institutions to let them work a reduced schedule on the tenure track.
Balancing Act
A postdoc gets the chance to see a living, breathing example of a successful female scientist.
Balancing Act
In the weeks after a miscarriage, a young scholar finds writing about her professional development to be too daunting.
Balancing Act
Faculty members who are not teaching during the summer have all the time in the world to do research. That's the problem.
Balancing Act
What steps should universities take to help graduate students balance their doctoral work with their family obligations?
Balancing Act
A Ph.D. sacrifices her career to follow her academic spouse and finds herself accused of sexual harassment.
Balancing Act
Can a trailing spouse ever make it to the tenure track? A Ph.D. who landed a job through her husband's appointment has her doubts.
Balancing Act
For a would-be law professor, going on the job market means weighing every career move against the happiness of her family.
Balancing Act
An insider's information about a job opening can be as off-base as an outsider's ignorance.
Balancing Act
What happens when an academic couple breaks up and the spousal hire with a half-time appointment needs a full-time job?
Balancing Act
Two academics opt to share a faculty position and a half to make time for their children.
Balancing Act
A multiracial faculty member mulls the costs of fitting people into pre-established ethnic categories.
Balancing Act
When an assistant professor of English goes out on the academic job market, it's not just his future at stake.
Balancing Act
Overworked and unhappy, a tenured professor decides she wants out.
Balancing Act
A tenured professor goes out on a professional limb to get a life.
Balancing Act
A Ph.D. in chemistry finds that his training in academic science helps him as a father.
Balancing Act
Harmony derives from a sense of personal control over our work and our lives.
Balancing Act
Is it better to have children in graduate school than on the tenure track? A young scholar finds out.
Balancing Act
An A.B.D. in French adjusts her career plans after her father suffers a debilitating stroke.
Balancing Act
A trailing spouse, tired of low-paying adjunct work, arranges a sabbatical for herself.
Balancing Act
Linking merit raises to outside offers is one of several practices in academe that discriminate against female professors with families.
Balancing Act
A Dad-to-be describes how he used technology to fulfill his teaching duties and plan for a family leave.
Balancing Act
The logistics of an academic couple's search for two tenure-track jobs are tough enough, but how do you cope with the emotional fallout?
Balancing Act
Excessive attention to who deserves the credit in collaborative ventures defeats the whole point.
Balancing Act
Elizabeth Gilbey didn't particularly enjoy being spurned by her husband's department, but the experience did solidify her career goals.
Balancing Act
Academic employers need to learn that many professors, given the choice, would take time off over more money any day.
Balancing Act
For an academic couple, the worst question you can ask is about their future together.
Balancing Act
The one thing female and minority scholars should most avoid in order to succeed in academe: isolation.
Balancing Act
Naomi J. Miller experiments with ways to integrate her work with her family life.
Balancing Act
The chilly climate for women in academe reflects stereotypes not only about women in general, but about mothers in particular.
Balancing Act
Achieving a perfect balance in work and life is an exercise in futility. But is it so futile you shouldn't even try?
Balancing Act
That's the motto Lisa Krissoff Boehm lives by when it comes to balancing work and family.
Balancing Act
If you follow scholarly trends rather than pursuing your research passions, you may win recognition but you'll lose yourself.
Balancing Act
Outdated assumptions about the ideal worker undermine people's efforts to integrate their work life with their personal life.
Balancing Act
Joan Williams applauds the AAUP's new policy recommending special benefits for new parents, but wonders, Will anyone follow it?
Balancing Act
Lessons drawn from work and family life can be applied from one realm to the other, says Naomi J. Miller.
Resources:
Library:
Landing your first job
On the tenure track
Mid-career and on
Administrative careers
Nonacademic careers for
Ph.D.'s
Talk about your career
Elsewhere Online:
Perspectives
Wall Street Journal