The Balancing Act: Gendered Perspectives in Faculty Roles and Work Lives (review)

In the Foreword to this edited volume, Ann Austin explains that the central purpose of this collection is to contribute to the growing scholarship on "the nature of the academic workplace" and, most importantly, that such attention will better position institutions of higher education to attend to the "quality of the workplace" (p. xi). The effect of this improvement, she argues, will enable the "diverse array of faculty members to manage the demands of their lives" (p. xi), making faculty more productive professionals.

Though the book's contributors don't take on Austin's central concern about the academic profession (i.e., its "nature") very decisively, the chapters absolutely make important contributions to our knowledge of present-day faculty life, especially for women.

The implicit and overriding premise of the commendable research here is that the academic profession can be transformed through action such as consciousness raising, strategic policy implementation, and generational demographic change. Like much of the scholarly research on the impact of women (and non-Anglos) on the academic profession, the entries here endeavor to identify and critique the ways in which the profession's historic character and function are incompatible with and unsuited for new generations of scholars.

These new generations have brought to the academic profession challenges that are without doubt contradictions to the profession's normative composition. Many women faculty have unsettled the academic profession's time-honored orthodoxy of vocational dedication by privileging or, at a minimum, incorporating family life into the vocational equation. According to the book's contributors, parenting, a role conventionally and ideologically separate from the labor of the academic professional, is now an indisputable concern of many members of the faculty and, thus, is a critical issue in their recruitment and promotion, in the construction of institutional policy, and in the tangible and intangible reward structures of the profession.

How and when faculty—especially women—become parents and engage in parenting are particularly key conditions in assessing productivity, promotion, institutional and professional status, and, not so insignificantly, personal fulfillment. In sum, the book's chapters underscore the contention that the "academic career" must contend with the intrusion of "family" and must do so (or so the authors contend), through structural adjustment, and not ideological, social reconstitution.

And this is perhaps my only worthwhile critique of the reputable and necessary research found in The Balancing Act, Ironically, the research presented here does little to destabilize the normative values of the academic profession, the very ideals and principles that make the profession so inhospitable to many women (and lots of men) and many faculty of color.

The authors present us with indisputable data on the incompatibility of the profession's ideals with the reality of many women's lives but do little to reconstitute or suggest permutations of our professional standards that would change the "nature" of the academic life. Why should we "juggle" the professional and the personal? Why should women's biology—that they have babies—be the salient condition to prompt professional change? Why should we think about structural change like on-campus day care as a strategy to improve faculty productivity? Why should family life be fashioned to effect productivity? Why should family boundaries "accommodate" work? And when did multi-tasking in our 50-plus-hour work week become a praiseworthy life strategy?

In Chapter 4, Colbeck's participants integrate their academic work with their home responsibilities in terms of time and location, a finding that is a disconcerting fact of professional life today. Why should individual, independent research production be privileged and not the collaborative scholarship depicted in Creamer's examination (Chapter 4)? Though very tactical, pragmatic, and true-to-life (certainly so in my own life), the propositions and proposals to affect the quality of faculty life accounted for and highlighted in this text only modestly...