Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family

Chapter 7. Institutional Type Differences

110 Generally speaking, research related to academic life, work, and family has failed to consider organizational perspectives. The vast majority of research on academics and motherhood is based on the experiences of faculty at research universities. But the experience of women faculty who combine work and family is likely to vary according to their work context. The design of this study was thus based on the premise that the type of institutions where faculty members work shapes the experience of academics who are also mothers (cf. Wolf-Wendel & Ward 2006). Accordingly, we included women from different types of institutions, including research universities, comprehensive/regional campuses, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges as a means to explore how work norms and expectations shape faculty life from the perspective of women with children. In examining academic mothers in the different types of academic institution, we call upon Burton Clark’s (1987) foundational research on the intersection between institutional diversity and academic life. His work describes the diversity of institutional types within the U.S. system of higher education and offers a glimpse of faculty life in different types of colleges and universities. According to Clark, “American academics are distributed in widely varied institutions as well as in different disciplines, in many kinds of universities, four-and two-year colleges as well as in numerous subjects. The structures and cultures of those diverse settings cry out for our attention; they heavily shape academic life” (Clark 1987, xxii, emphasis added). Clark’s research influenced our approach to this study in terms of methodology, analysis, and presentation of the findings. From him we chapter 7 O Institutional Type Differences institutional type differences 111 understand that the complexities of reconciling faculty life and motherhood cannot be decontextualized from the institutions in which faculty work. Not all institutions are the same, and factors like mission, location, and prestige may make the balance between work and family either more manageable or more precarious. Robert Birnbaum’s signature work, How Colleges Work (1988), also highlights the fact that the function and organizational approach of an institution shapes how different campus actors interact with and within particular contexts, and also how people expend their energy in the workplace . The organizational milieu also shapes how people make decisions about their work. For faculty women, this means deciding how to spend time on a daily basis (Research? Teaching? Service?) and, for academic mothers in particular, the organizational and institutional setting can shape decisions about families as well (When is a good time to have a baby? Should I take a leave? How many children should I have?). Organizational perspectives that emanate from the research of Clark and Birnbaum aid our understanding of the complexity of the faculty experience for women faculty as mothers in different types of institutions and help us to analyze what we found. We were struck by the commonality of experience within each type of institutional context and, therefore, present the findings from the different types of institutions in two ways. One, we continue our use of vignettes as a means to introduce the reader to what it was like for the early and mid-career women within particular types of institutions. And, two, we use fewer, but longer, quotations in an attempt to capture the “typical” faculty experience, first at the early-career stage and then at mid-career. Research Universities: Early-Career Faculty Perspectives Jennifer’s graduate school experience can be seen as fairly typical. She worked closely with her advisor, was a full-time student, presented papers, worked on grants, and pretty much spent the bulk of her time socializing herself to be a successful faculty member. Jennifer knew she wanted to have children at some point in her life, but as a graduate student she learned not to talk about it with faculty or 112 academic motherhood others associated with her graduate program. She knew of one woman who had a baby while in the doctoral program, and everyone talked about her as if she was not serious about her studies. The word on the street was “Don’t do it.” Jennifer was hired in what was considered one of the “best openings in the field.” She noted, “I got the job and I love it, I really do.” Jennifer thought her students were great and her work environment was very stimulating. She appreciated how nice it was to graduate from a top...