Roads Taken: Women in Student Affairs at Mid-Career (review)

Roads Taken: Women in Student Affairs at Mid-Career focuses on mid-career as a topic that has received little attention in the literature, and most interestingly, on the personal and professional decisions made along the way to and at mid-career. The topic of mid-career is important to those who are headed for or are at this stage of their working lives, and to those who supervise mid-career colleagues. The focus of Roads Taken on decisions is the most valuable contribution made by this book. The chapters where this succeeds are especially worthwhile.

Roads Taken is an edited book divided into five parts, each beginning with an introduction. Part I, Considering the Doctorate, includes an introduction by Mary Howard Hamilton and chapters by Susan Jones, Rebecca Gutierrez Keeton, Julie M. Wong, and Gage E. Paine. Particular strengths of this section include explicit attention to the decision making of women of color, and practical, grounded advice provided by Gage Paine. Part II, Dual Career Couples, was introduced by Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Susan B. Twombly, and Suzanne Rice, and featured chapters by Melissa McDaniels and Kristen Renn, and Martha Ruel. McDaniels' and Renn's chapter did a particularly good job of walking the reader through early career-building decisions in the context of a two-career (both in student affairs) relationship.

Part III is titled Motherhood and Student Affairs: The Skillful Art of Managing Work and Family. The highlight of this section is the introduction by Sarah Marshall. Refreshingly, this introduction was based on recent research and did a complete job of charting the broad territory that must be navigated by working mothers. Carole Hughes, Jean Joyce-Brady, and Terry Zacker also wrote chapters for Part III. Part IV, "I've Arrived": It's the Journey, Not the Destination, included an introduction by Carole Hughes, along with chapters by Gail P. Olyha, Sheilah Shaw Horton, and Anna M. Ortiz. Carole Hughes' introduction was very good and could have served as the organizing chapter for the entire book. She contextualized mid-career and mid-life nicely, and was skillful in laying out career development issues especially relevant to mid-career. Anna Ortiz's chapter, "Arriving at Tenure," was perhaps the strongest in the book. Though autobiographical like nearly every other chapter, it was reflective in a far more substantive and articulate way than most of the other chapters.

The final section of the book, Part V, Alternate Routes: Exiting the Mainstream Student Affairs Highway, was introduced by Kristen Renn, and included a chapter by Barbara Fienman and one by Marcie Schorr Hirsch and Lisa Berman-Hills.

The strength and weakness of Roads Taken is the autobiographical nature of the book. Many of the personal stories are immediate, accessible, and compelling in their candor about difficult life circumstances, as well as professional disappointments and joys. One can easily imagine how effective these accounts would be in the live conference setting that spawned the idea for the book. The weakness of this approach is that the writing is of uneven quality, making some of the personal accounts read like cover letters while others lost focus mid-way through the narrative.

The important recurrent theme throughout Roads Taken is the interplay between professional decisions and aspirations, and personal ones. Many of the authors identified this tension as positive as well as negative. A notable example of this is the number of contributors who described how their own management of this tension led to greater empathy and more effective supervision of their staff. The moments when these realizations were made constituted the high points of the book.

Roads Taken accomplishes a couple of important things. First, it opens up a topic that matters. The first-person accounts that characterize the book constitute a helpful starting place in thinking seriously and comprehensively about mid-career issues for women in student affairs. Second, it does a competent job of...