Establishing the Family-Friendly Campus: Models for Effective Practice (review)

In reviewing this book, I wore two hats. I dug into the 10 chapters and resources of this edited book as a new co-PI on an NSF Advance grant. I was interested in the experiences of other campuses that have put family-friendly policies in place to inform our own efforts at the University of Maryland.

As someone who studies changes in the academic profession and academic reward systems, I also approached the book as a researcher, interested in findings about the depth of organizational change and impact these policies and reforms may have had on individual faculty lives and academic homes. I found the book extremely useful from the first perspective. I left the book with perhaps more questions than answers from the second. However, I believe my questions reflect where the field is in assessing impact of family friendly policies rather than any limitation of the book.

The majority of chapters are written from the perspective of change agents who have put family-friendly policies in place. The kinds of reforms and policies are varied and are captured nicely by a typology of five categories presented in the first chapter by co-authors Gloria Thomas and Jean McLaughlin: tenure clock adjustment, active service modified duties, on- and off-ramps, temporary part-time appointments, and delayed entry. They add to this list dependent care and dual career appointments as evolving after this original typology was adopted by the American Council on Education (ACE).

Many of these campuses received the ACE and Alfred P. Sloan Award for Faculty Career Flexibility for outstanding models of faculty career flexibility policies and/or had NSF Advance grants to further the careers of women in science. Among the chapters are descriptions and analyses of efforts at the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins Institutions, University of Southern California, and the University of California system.

There are also chapters that focus on groups of institutions and lessons learned across them, such as a focus on medium-sized Catholic universities, the Sloan Award winner campuses as a group, the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) Program, and two grassroots faculty organizations: one at the University of Arizona and the other at the University of Nebraska.

This approach of having individual chapters focused on specific policy reforms is a real strength of the book. Readers can use each chapter independently and focus on chapters most relevant to the kinds of reform they are planning whether that is to provide automatic extensions for graduate students who adopt or give birth, or to offer tenure-clock adjustments and temporary part-time appointments. Each of the chapters discusses the history of the issue on the campus, the organizational change process used to put reform in place, some theory or rationales guiding the reform, and in most cases an assessment of success.

Lessons learned for other campuses on a journey toward similar reform are offered. Some of these lessons include getting buy-in from across the campus before implementing policy reform, creating flexibility in who is eligible to use policies and for what (e.g., women and men, for birth, adoption, elder care). Other lessons focused on having a central office to increase awareness of policies and coordinate services, establishing a sense of urgency, and organizing a coalition to implement and assess whether policies are really serving faculty.

At several points, previous research, statistics, and theories are effectively brought into the discussion to frame the problem and the interventions. Most interesting was Jeni Hart’s comparison of a change process that worked collaboratively with administration and one that utilized external pressure on administration to push for change.

Each of the lessons learned from change agents in the field seemed insightful and important—and very useful for campuses attempting to move their campuses in similar directions. The same lessons are often repeated in multiple chapters, a limitation of the presentation...