Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Thinking Stiffs: An Introduction

A Marxist literary critic at Disney World, a biologist swimming with sharks in the Amazon, a political-scientist-turned-administrator in a prop-filled death-and-dying classroom—each is a contributor to this volume. Working sti¤s, or perhaps we should say thinking sti¤s, they, along with their fellow contributors, map out the terrain of academic dads. What di¤erence does contemplative fatherhood make? How might the setting of academia facilitate more vigorous involvement with one’s children? What kinds of vigorous involvement might it facilitate? Are Papa, PhDs at the vanguard of alternative family-making? Do they have something to tell us about reformulated masculinity? About ambition? About egalitarian politics in the home? These are just some of the questions this collection addresses. In an era when Promise Keepers on the Right and President Barack Obama on the Left exhort men to meet their parental responsibilities, when memoirs like Big Russ and self-help manuals like Better Dads: How Fathers Can Guide Boys to Become Men of Character capture the popular imagination , when shifting cultural attitudes about women and the hard facts of divorce and economic exigency (i.e., the need for two incomes and, thus, the less than perfect availability of Mom) compel men to be more active in raising their children, fatherhood is at once commanding attention and provoking debate. Academic fatherhood is no exception. In some ways, it is just catching up to academic motherhood. In 2007 Rutgers University Press published a collection of essays entitled Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life. Coedited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans, the collection gave voice to the enormous frustration of women in the academy as they try to balance, and in part reconcile , the two roles that the book’s title wittily conjoins. Not every contributor was frustrated, of course, but many felt that the academic workplace ix Thinking Sti¤s: An Introduction 00front_Manu 7/1/2010 5:29 PM Page ix was hostile to the parental obligations of women. A good number wrote of soldiering on, while some wrote of opting out of academia altogether. This volume di¤ers considerably, even provocatively, from its companion volume. Although male academics can be seen increasingly at the library during story time, at the doctor’s midday with a sick child, and at the grocery store picking up food for dinner—“They’re like reintroduced wildlife !” a well-known scholar once quipped—Papa, PhD doesn’t register the same sort of guilt or anxiety as Mama, PhD. Indeed, many of the essays in this collection register no guilt or anxiety whatsoever. One even pointedly laments that the birth of the author’s child might harm the author’s vocation as a philosopher. Other essays recount, as previously mentioned, adventures at Disney World and in the Amazon, but also in Moscow and Lima. To be sure, there are pressing concerns here, including divorce, economic distress, professional disappointment, cultural prejudice, and disability, to name just a few. There is also lots of thoughtful reflection. But why the lack of intense frustration? An appeal to the professional literature o¤ers possible explanations. In her book Redefining Fatherhood, Nancy Dowd says simply that though “fathers are more engaged in the care of children than ever before . . . father care remains rooted in the assumption that the mother will be the primary caregiver.”1 Such an assumption enables not only perceptions of women as less valuable in the workplace, she argues, but also notions of masculinity that privilege the father’s role as provider over that of nurturer. Hence, while the condition of a working woman’s motherhood is subjected to intense scrutiny—by herself, her colleagues , her family, and the culture in general—a working man’s fatherhood is, in contrast, almost entirely ignored. James A. Levine and Todd L. Pittinsky, authors of Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family, believe the very phrase “working mother” connotes an insoluble bind. They write, “For many people, working mother has come to symbolize conflict. When a woman works outside the home, our society assumes she must feel a constant tug-of-war between her ‘job self’ and her ‘parent self.’ But working father is a redundancy, isn’t it? . . . The prevailing assumption is that men do not feel that tug-ofwar between their ‘job selves’ and their ‘parent selves.’”2 Men, in other words, might feel just as torn as women, but they are encouraged to keep...