When I got out of graduate school, I pretty much knew what I would need to do to be a successful researcher- get lots of grant money, publish a bunch of good papers, and hire functional students and staff. Getting tenure, eventually becoming a full Professor, and having an active and funded research career were clear priorities, but so were having a family and a enjoying a good quality of life with a semblance of balance. I had no idea how to make all of that happen, and I worried about when to start my family in a way that would not kill my academic career. So now that I’ve done it and lived to tell the tale, what are the most important lessons I’ve learned? Well, here are two:

Pay Attention to Politics: Like it or not, it’s essential to become and remain aware of the political winds around you as you plan to start a family and pursue an academic career. Happily, it’s no longer the case that as I was told during the first year of my faculty position, by a female administrator no less, that “Women are either Mommies of Professors, but never both,” but being sensitive to climate and making sure that you find a landing place that truly is supportive of combining family and academia is critical. I was not politically savvy, for example, when I started my postdoc, and although I had hoped to start my family in that position, it turned out that my postdoc mentor, although a mother herself, was inflexible and dictatorial. Ideally, I should have been able to negotiate with her such that I could have started my family and worked on a compromise that met her needs and mine, but it became clear that such a conversation would not be productive. Working with her, I began to learn the hard way about the impact of politics in the academic world. My advice is not to put your life on hold as I did for political reasons, but to be aware and deliberate in coordinating your activities to assure that you do not get into a damaging political situation.

Sometimes, Separation is a Good Thing. In other words, don’t try to merge your parent and professor duties. For example, do not lecture to your classes with your baby in a sling, and avoid bringing children to faculty meetings and other non-social university obligations. Attempts to combine your two worlds in this way, first, assure that you are unable to attend sufficiently to either one, and are unprofessional. On the other hand, depending on the culture in your department, it may be fine to bring your baby from time to time when you are just working in your office (not having office hours or meetings). On a related note, caution should also be exercised when deciding whether or not to bring kids and families to professional meetings; remember that as a pre-tenure faculty member, those conferences are incredibly important for making connections and getting your work known. Can you really do that well with a baby on your hip or a nagging feeling that you need to cut out of a poster session to meet your family at the pool? Sometimes mixing business and pleasure can backfire, so tread carefully.

These are just a couple of the gems of successfully starting a family while effectively navigating the academic world I’ve accumulated in my career. Parenting and being a Professor are growing, dynamic, and creative processes, and require time and discipline. My experience has taught me that keeping these two worlds separated at crucial times and points is essential to succeeding in and having the time to enjoy them both.

One of the most challenging parts of developing a career is climbing to the top of whatever heap you’re in, having proven yourself, taken your knocks, gone the extra mile, and impressed the right people and groups sufficiently to be vested with significant leadership and responsibility. It feels good, doesn’t it? Well, it should, but it’s interesting, that once that pinnacle is achieved, there’s always more to do, isn’t there? There’s that saying, “Want something done? Ask a busy person.”, and nowhere is that more true than in our jobs, especially if you’ve managed to absorb responsibilities as they’ve been handed to you, perform at a high level, and not totally lose your composure in public.

So this poses a problem, of course, when even you, with seemingly endless capacity, begin to get that “Wow- I’m overcommitted” feeling. It may have taken a long time, but once it happens, it’s a little scary. When we get overcommitted at work or at home, something has to give. The worst-case scenario is you slog along, continuing to shoulder the burdens that keep getting placed on you and smiling, taking on more and more without unloading anything, and then you drop a ball. The ball drop frequently occurs in a “perfect storm” situation, which can include any combination of variables such as increased work pressure/crisis, spousal/family illness, financial stress, personal health challenges for you or co-workers, unexpected problems that impede work progress, and problems with kids at school. Regardless of the factors contributing to the storm, however, the ball drop occurs for the same reason: there is not enough of you to go around, and the resulting lack of capacity to absorb the unexpected. Hopefully the ball you drop is a little one, but if it’s a big one, the outcome can be a mess and can not only affect you, your family, or the organization you work for, but will certainly take your self-confidence down a few notches.

The best-case scenario, however, is that you decide to deal with the overcommitted feeling before the ball drop occurs. This is a hard habit to develop, especially when you’ve “made it” by being all things to all people all the time, but it’s a critical leadership passage, and one that will prolong your career as well as your mental and physical health. There are 2 basic parts in approaching this, and basically they add up to making strategic decisions about what to give away when things get to be too much.

Part 1: Say No

If your plate is full, admit it. You wouldn’t sit at the dinner table with a plate full of food and when someone passes you the next dish, create a mountain of a meal rather than saying “no, thank you, I have enough”, would you? Hopefully not . Think of saying no to new things in the same way. The next time someone asks to serve on a Board of Directors, politely decline. The next PhD student who approaches you to be their dissertation advisor, let them know you have too many commitments already to do the job they deserve. Admittedly, sometimes you’ll be asked to do something you really want to do, and saying no is not what you want to do. In that case, something else must go to make room for the new task. Remember the plate? Either eat the roll or take it off your plate before taking another helping of something yummy…

Part 2: Give it away

So if you say no to a request or opportunity or want to say yes to something new but have a full plate, step 2 is to create opportunity for someone else. This can be called delegating, but that word suggests passing responsibility down; often, you may have the chance to pass responsibility and opportunity to your peers. When someone asks you to do something and you say no, it’s best if you can offer an alternative to that person, ideally having checked with the individual you’re recommending first. If you need to unload a task or responsibility to allow yourself to take on something new, do that as well, but discuss the possibility with potential recipients of the added task before doing so. The goal here is to spread work around by giving people with capacity additional tasks, not to overload them instead of you.

Clearly, the cynics in the audience (myself included) will say “Oh, yeah- well, we all know that s*** travels downhill, right?” The key here is to pass on opportunities and tasks with integrity and from your ethical core. Listen to your gut here. Although it would be great to unload the huge, complex, painful project you’re struggling with in favor of a new, shiny, simpler one, your gut will tell you that such a move is wrong. Listen to that, and do not pass the buck when it should stop with you. If you are working on the painful project and really want to try to take on the shiny one, let your manager or colleague know that you are interested, but cannot work on the new project until you have completed the current one. Also, when passing incoming tasks or opportunities to others when you cannot take them on, think about the people you work with and who could derive benefit from taking on the task and showing they can do a good job. This can be a developmental tool for you to use, and the projects or opportunities you offer to others can be presented in the frame of “Here is something that came to me that I think would be a great opportunity for you, and I know you’ll do a great job, so I wanted to offer it to you first.” Using respectful delegation and task sharing in this way can be a wonderful leadership tool, but be careful not to overload your reports or your colleagues!

By being strategic about taking on more, creating options for getting the work done when you say no, and using delegation as a leadership tool, you can protect your time and make sure you stay out of the “overwhelm zone.” Remember, it is better to do some things very well than a number of things poorly.

As a coach I spend a great deal of time supporting clients in finding ways to establish and maintain balance and boundaries between their work and personal lives with varying degrees of success.  For some, it’s pretty simple:  Make appointments with yourself or your family and keep them just as you would with a client or a colleague.  For others, its harder:  Appointments get overridden all the time as things come up at work, there is that “one more email” that has to be answered, or a decision to work on a presentation blots out “me” time.  What’s the difference between these people?  Well, my own experience and my work as a coach has distilled it to one word:  GUILT. 

Somehow our society had grown to value work time and professional achievement  over personal time and recreation to the point that taking time to create balance between the seemingly-endless stream of work and our families creates immense internal turmoil for many folks.  We’ve internalized society’s bias that more work=better work (a flawed premise for many reasons) such that for some people, great time relaxing, hiking, reading, or playing with our friends and families is overshadowed by a cloud of guilt that “I *should* be working.”  How sad.

Of course, as is true of most of this blog, I’m writing about this because I’ve allowed myself to fall into this trap numerous times.  I distinctly remember a while back when I’d promised my daughter that we’d play Uno (she always beats me), “as soon as Mommy is done with this email.”  Well, the emails dragged on, and finally, she asked me if I was ever going to be done.  My initial reaction was a welling-up of frustration and anger with her impatience, but as I looked up at her, I saw that she had been waiting over an hour and also, that she was still waiting patiently.  As I looked at her, I also saw how grown up she’s becoming (even though she’s only 6) and suddenly I felt guilty for a different reason.  I shut down my email, closed my laptop, and she beat me.  Twice. 

What was the guilt?  Before I know it, she and her brother will be grown and out of the house and I’ll be left with all the time in the world to do my email on the weekends.  Thankfully, I’m paying enough attention to re-focus my weekend energy into these wonderful kids and my best friend, my husband, to honor the balance that we all need between the stress of the week (work, school, homework, driving, etc.) and “us” time.  Too soon, we’ll be sending them off to college and wishing for a game of Uno.

The appointments I make with my family and myself are non-negotiable, and have to be.  I am proud of the work I do, and I enjoy it, but it’s the relationships in our lives that really matter.  It makes more sense to feel guilt for not making time to be with the people we love than for not working through the weekend; the good news is that guilt usually tells us that something needs to change, and perhaps keeping those appointments with yourself, your family, and your freinds is the solution.

Inside Higher Ed this week had a piece about Faculty grievance processes, how they work, how they fail, and the controversy that often surrounds the role of administration in such processes.  As a former Faculty governance leader and now an administrator dealing with such processes from the “Dark Side”, I found myself thinking about the points in the piece form several perspectives, but at the core of my reflection is sadness that the overarching faculty view of administrators is so negative.

I appreciate that at the core of effective faculty grievance policies is faculty review of a grievant’s case and the opportunity to discuss and deliberate the case freely.  An important aspect of faculty governance at non-unionized school however, is “shared” governance in which administration and the faculty partner to make decisions and policy for the good of the University.  Among the faculty’s most important role in this partnership is addressing personnel issues including the award of tenure, promotion, and post-tenure review.  Even in these roles, however, the faculty and administration work together to create processes that are consistent, defensible, rigorous, and that assure that tenured faculty are productive, engaged, and committed to the work of higher education.  In this partnership, of course, the faculty are the ones who set the standards, make the judgments regarding the academic and scholarly achievement of other faculty, and determine expectations for collegiality, productivity, and scholarship.  The administration provides support in the form of policy, budget, and legal and fiscal compliance to implement and uphold the standards of the faculty.  Tenure and promotion committees, for example, although populated with faculty, are run and overseen by administrators, and when those processes result in a grievance from a faculty member, who goes to court?  Not the faculty members-  it’s the administrators who carried the water on the decision of the faculty committee and had the responsibility of conveying the decision-  we are where the rubber meets the road.  Faculty get to make the decisions, but administrators have to take responsibility for those decisions and defend them.  It’s a pretty good deal for the faculty, but given this arrangement, it’s sad that faculty governance tends to view university administration with such mistrust. 

Given that faculty grievances involve unhappy people who believe they have been wronged, lawyers and litigation are common endpoints.  The folks who have to deal with that part of the “faculty grievance process” are usually not the faculty members who want to be free to “make a decision” about the grievance without the administration present, but the administrators themselves.  Many faculty would express concern that having administrators who may end up in court be part of discussions of grievances may create problems in that nobody want to go to court, and as such, administrators may try to keep the committee from reaching a negative conclusion to avoid litigation.  In fact, I recall serving on a tenure and promotion committee once as a faculty member in which the Associate Dean advised us not to turn down a very weak faculty member because it would result in the Dean’s office going to court.  That was totally inappropriate, but I know that happens (I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of weak Associate Deans out there), but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

One possible solution is to have administrators serve as ex officio on grievance committees, so that person can listen and understand the position of the committee, provide resources, and reflect policy and legal concerns to the committee from time to time.  Moreover, it’s worth noting that many administrators, especially mid-level folks who are frequently the ones who deal on a daily basis with faculty and personnel issues, especially grievances, are still people with faculty appointments who engage in “faculty” activities.  Having said that, many of us move into administration because we care deeply about the University and its faculty, and realize that we can have a positive impact as mid-level administrators (Associate Deans).  We are faculty through and through, and can provide a bridge between the “faculty” and the upper administration, many of whom are, truly and my necessity, very detached form the work of the faculty and the issues faced in the trenches.  My hope is that my faculty colleagues can appreciate that many of us who are “administrators”  are faculty first and foremost, and can add something valuable to grievance and other processes to assure that the collective decisions we make are sound, fair, defensible, and consistent with our (the faculty’s) priorities for our profession and our institutions.  

TV head

It started out as punishment.  My husband and I removed all “technology” from my 10-year-old son’s life last week (save what’s needed for school) in response to a bad attack of “spoiledsmartmouthbrattykiditis” he had been suffering recently.  The initial reaction was impressive-  moaning and gnashing of teeth ensued, accompanied by a great deal of moping and verbal self-flagellation.  The removal of access to laptop games, web surfing, Nintendo Wii and DS, and the television seemed to be an insurmountable punishment from which he would never recover.

To make matters worse,   his little sister was not punished, and was able to engage in technology activities.  This clearly added insult to injury, and he watched enviously over her shoulder as she romped through Webkinz World with Paris, her pink poodle.  Without him being able to watch, interestingly, she had not interest in the television, so it remained off.  Even the Wii was not enticing for her without him, and was dark as well.

His angst, happily, gave way quite quickly to something pretty wonderful.  My son, for whom reading has never been a preferred activity, spent yesterday actually reading books.  Our Saturday progressed quickly as we collectively hung out, played games, read, and just talked.  Mom and Dad also observed the TV-free rule, and no one really seemed to miss it. 

Sunday dawned with my kids getting up before us and heading downstairs to play “The Dinosaur Game”.  We moseyed downstairs and drank coffee and read the paper, enjoying the laughing (and of course bickering) of our kids, which is highly preferable to the blaring garbage on the TV. 

We realized that over time, our AAP-standards driven rules about computer, game, and TV time had loosened and loosened to the point that the TV was on way too much at our house.  We know what they watch, and even though the channels and content are, according to the TV rating system, age-appropriate for our kiddos, I am stunned by the portrayal of kids and the smart-mouth sassiness that’s modeled on even these shows.  The moratorium on non-academic technology continues for my son, but interestingly, as a group, we’ve all agreed that it’s nice not to have the TV on.  The degree of disconnection that television, and games (especially DS games) add to our already busy lives is unacceptable to us all-  even the grounded kid and even the little sister. 

The TV can come back on after this week, but for no more than 1-2 hours a day during the week and for an extra hour on the weekends.  We’re reinstating “technology-free time” for all of us, even Mom and Dad, after dinner every night; the emails can wait until the next morning.  Happily, the guilt I’ve been feeling about letting “the great intoxicator”- TV- get the better of my family has been replaced by a renewed sense of the value of silence and low-tech pursuits. 

Now if I can just get my Dinosaur to survive long enough to finish the Extinction game just once….

There’s a lot of discussion at my university these days about “changing the faculty reward system” to better reflect modern faculty work. Our institution, like many around the country, is developing definitions of faculty work and tenure and promotion criteria which move away from the typical “Big Three” of research, teaching, and service toward integrated models of faculty activity. We all know that faculty don’t work in the solitary way they used to- they connect with each other, the community, corporate entities, and others to apply the knowledge and training they have to both address problems and expose students to that process. Gone are the days of the solitary biologist in the lab with the bacterial cultures, working alone to determine and manipulate growth curves. Today’s biologist is in the field with the environmental scientist, the chemist, and the public health researcher figuring out how the bacterium got there, why it’s growing where and how it is, and estimating its impact on the water supply. It’s interdisciplinary research, of course, but there more to it than that. It’s the service-learning class in which students are supposed to apply what they learn in their Sociology lectures to work they do in a shelter for battered women and children. These integrated activities are hard to quantify in the traditional Big Three frame, so clearly, we need to find a way to quantify and evaluate these “new” types of faculty work. As the Associate Dean who runs my college’s tenure and promotion process, and an interdisciplinary scholar in my own rite, I’m on board with this, but I have a deep, dark secret- I’m a Stanley Fish fan.

Although I agree that we need to modernize the way we see and reward faculty work, I have a deepening concern about our approach. Finally, I’ve named my unease, and it is akin to a theme laid out in Stanley Fish’s new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time.” When I utter Dr. Fish’s name in the halls of my university, it’s almost as if I’ve made a disparaging remark about someones mother, but there are fundamental aspects of his view that must be integrated into our discussions of faculty work. 

Dr. Fish says many things in his new book, many of them provocative and controversial (BTW, I highly recommend the book to the thinking academic-  it is one of the most invigorating and sometimes maddening reads I’ve had in a long time).  The particularly germane kernel from the book is that faculty work must still be scholarly “faculty” work, not social work, political work, or personal work without clear and definite connections to real, rigorous scholarship.  Faculty work, done on behalf of the university, as innovative and interdisciplinary as it might be, must still be rigorous, scholarly, and deeply grounded in the discipline(s) in which we teach and do research, even as we cross boundaries and venture beyond the walls of our labs and classrooms.  The focus of the conversation regarding “valuing modern faculty work” has shifted from this fundamental tenet of making faculty scholarship, clearly and broadly defined in terms of rigor and quality, accessible and meaningful in the larger context of society, to essentially finding ways to accept any activity faculty decide to undertake and name as “scholarship” as a valued activity in the tenure and promotion process.  We are on the brink of becoming overly-inclusive in what we accept as valued faculty work; unless we are deliberate and careful, we will find ourselves utterly unable to objectively measure the scholarly performance of faculty members, or to meaningfully discriminate among them for tenure and promotion.  If we’re not gutsy enough to insist on rigor and objective measures of scholarship in these new definitions, we will become the stewards of institutions in which it is difficult to delineate tenured faculty members from community activists, social workers, clergy, politicians and journalists.

In our enthusiasm to value diverse and innovative faculty activities, we must not lose sight of the fact that all activities are simply not created equal.  There must be a measuring stick, a rigorous, empirical, scholarship-based measuring stick, that assesses the value and quality of the work faculty undertake. For the sake of illustration, I offer 2 examples of a “service-learning course”. The contrast here reflects the variability in implementation of approved courses that I’ve observed in the name of “diverse faculty work” in my own college:

CASE #1: Dr. Smith’s section of an approved Psychology service-learning course combines in-class work focused on generating research questions from peer-reviewed primary literature, with a service learning component in which the students volunteer in a battered women and children’s shelter while they are gathering observational data to test hypotheses generated in class. Students then examine the dataset, address the hypotheses they generated, and complete research papers and presentations based on their data and the literature.

CASE #2: Dr. Doe’s section of the same approved Psychology service-learning course takes a different approach. Students meet in class to talk about their expectations of what will happen and how they will feel when they go to the shelter to work. When they return to the classroom, they write “reaction papers” about their feelings and experiences and class discussions focus on what they think the causes of the Sociological challenges faced by the people in the shelter might be, and how they as citizens might help to solve them. They write a final paper based on these discussions and their reaction papers.

Case #1 demonstrates a scholarly approach to a service learning course, and Case #2 does not. As we expand or view of what faculty work is and should be, it’s critical that we learn the lesson illustrated by these cases; that not all “innovative, creative, and integrative” faculty activities are created equal. It’s great to find ways to value the great work faculty do that crosses and blurs the boundaries of the training I, for example, received 20 years ago, but there must still be a real, definable, scholarly anchor for valuing and evaluating these activities, and that is the part of the conversation that’s missing right now.

For tenure and promotion to retain their value, they cannot be entirely customizable, “one-size-fits-all” propositions, adaptable to the self-defined scholarship of each faculty member.  Tenure and promotion are not and cannot be a feel-good exercise.  We must tenure only active and highly competent scholars, innovative or not, and to assess their acheivements, including those that cross boundaries and mix things up a bit, using hallmarks of true scholarship that are accepted and defensible to our peers and society.  

For higher education to evolvein the way we dream it will, we must create a balance between creativity and quality in faculty work. The challenge is to be flexible enough to appreciate and value innovative and high quality work, but also to be bold enough to set a high bar for our faculty to make sure our students have the experience they deserve.

There- I’ve said it.

So we’re in full swing at my house these days: school, job pressure for both of us, failing father-in-law stress, soccer schedules, tennis lessons, plumbing problems, “oh crap, I have a dentist appointment today”, etc. Time to re-group and remind myself of all the stress-management techniques that help us get it all done and not go nuts. Every year about this time I run through this Top Ten List of Stress-Reducers and make sure I am actually doing them. It helps.

10. Identify and stick to your priorities: Make a list of tasks you must accomplish. With each item on your “must” list, include a deadline or a clear time commitment.
9. Be organized: Use the list you generated in #1 to organize your life and calendar. Treat tasks as appointments with yourself just as you’d make appointments with others- respect your own time.
8. Keep communication open: …with your family, your boss, your spouse. The motto to keep in mind here is Communicate Early, Communicate Often. Remember also that communication is a learned skill- practice it until it becomes second nature.
7. Expect the Unexpected: Some morning when you have a really important meeting at work or a deadline, you’ll wake up to a flooded basement or a vomiting child and someone has to take one for the team. This too will pass, and getting upset about it just makes it seem worse.
6. Save time by spending a little more money: In the long run, you have only two things to spend-time and money. If you want to save on one, you’ll have to spend the other.
5. Pick your battles: Decide what things are non-negotiable for you and which ones really are not that big a deal at home and at work. For example, there are so many things I used to get worked up about that I just don’t sweat anymore.
4. Learn to do two things at once: Help your son with his homework while you’re waiting for the wash to finish. Plan your errands so that everything in one neighborhood is done in the same trip. Catch up on your email while waiting for school to get out.
3. Learn to say no: Clearly, there are some things you can’t say “no” to, such as when your boss asks you to do an important task or your baby needs to go to the doctor, but there are plenty of things you can say no to.
2. Ask for help: When there’s too much to do, ask for help at home or at work. This totally goes against the “Superparent” self-concept many of us have for ourselves, but we all know, deep-down, that we cannot do it all well all the time.
1. Be kind to yourself and others: Be sure to take care of yourself and your family by making time together without kids, and without each other sometimes. Take care of your mind and body.

I got a great question from a working mom on AllExperts.com. Her question was great, and I enjoyed answering her. Thought you might enjoy the exchange:

Questioner: Claudia
Subject: Is this sexism?
Date Asked: 2008-09-16 20:02:01
Date Answered: 2008-09-20 11:51:24

Question:
Hi. My question is do you think it is sexist to question the Republican Vice Presidential Candidates decision to run, despite the fact that she has five children, some of whom are under eighteen and one of whom has special needs?

I was reading an editorial the other day in the dentists office in Macleans I believe it was, and a FEMALE columnist said she felt Sarah Palin should put the best interest of her children first, she also made some remark about how she would never want to be married to a man like her husband who was an “outwardly low achiever” taking on a “woman’s role”. I was quite shocked. Now let me tell you, I’m not fan of MS Palin(I cringe whenever they refer to her as “Mrs”) but she should be attacked for her views on the issues, NOT for her gender or for her decision to take on a demanding career. No one would be questioning it if she were a man and had a loving, doting stay at home wife. Also, to make fun of a man for being a supportive partner and loving father? Why are women considered selfish if they still want to hold onto their careers after having children? Do we have to choose between being sucessful professionally and being a good mom? What are your thoughts? THanks.

Answer:
Hi - Thank you for a great question, and I am sorry it’s taken me a few days to get back to you. I must tell you, I’ve been thinking the same thing every time I hear some discussion about Gov. Palin’s personal choices regarding her family. I think it is sexism, and I especially find it sad, as you did, that women often seem to be the ones commenting. I’m not a Palin fan either, but I am glad to see that women are playing prominent roles in the campaigns this year, and it is dismaying that folks seem to only see the fact that Palin has a complex and potentially challenging family situation. Like her or not, she IS a State Governor, and she deserves to be considered based on the issues, not on her personal choices. A man with a Downs Syndrome child, for example, would never be criticized, by men or women, for aspiring to the VP, unless, perhaps if he were married to a clearly career-oriented women, in which case, I suspect, she would be criticized, not him, for having a career despite having a special needs child.

This last point brings me to the questions you asked regarding professional choices for women and the judgment we receive for making them if we are moms. Happily, I do not believe that overall, society considers moms with careers selfish, especially when we successfully make time for our families (have balance) and are explicit with our kids about the fact that, regardless of gender, it’s important to always do your best, make a contribution outside the home if that is important to you, and to be responsible not only for your own life (including meeting your intellectual/professional goals), but also to support and contribute to the well-being of your family. My message to my kids is “work hard, take care of yourself and your family and have integrity, whether you work outside the home or not, whether you’re a man or a woman”.

Public figures like Dr. Laura, sadly, have fueled the “selfish mom” view you mention, which I think is incredibly irresponsible. I think folks like her subscribe to the belief that since women are biologically tied to babies (via nursing for example), and since our society, generally, views women as the “default” parent, that women *should* feel guilty if they seek a career. Having said that, I do have issues with parents (moms and dads) who work so much that their kids spend most of their time with nannies or au pairs, and rarely see mom and/or dad- the key is balance and responsibility.

I refuse to make a choice between career and family. I support my clients (and myself !) in unloading guilt and frankly, using time better to get more time with their families, more time for “mommy” time, and still having time to have a gratifying career. Part of the guilt I see in myself and women I work with comes from feeling “spread too thin” and as a result, the perception that we are not doing things well enough at work and home. Usually, this is a matter of making some wise choices about time and ordering of tasks and activities, setting and maintaining priorities and boundaries, and asking for help when we need it. Honestly, I think I have an obligation to model for my son and daughter that moms and dads can both be good parents and strong professionals. Thanks for a great question, and I’d love to chat with you more about this issue- I know it will keep coming up, both in the campaign and in general.

Warmly,

Mary

This morning I’m sitting in the airport preparing for a Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS) Personnel Development workshop for Deans. I’ve been really looking forward to this chance to get together with old and new colleagues to discuss, struggle with, and hopefully find some possible strategies foe dealing with several increasingly thorny faculty development, retention, and engagement issues. The folks running the workshop asked us to put forward a couple of case studies we wanted used as discussion points for the 2 day meeting, with the goal of increasing the likelihood that each of us participating could come away with more than the realization that others are facing similar problems, but rather with some action steps to try to move things forward.

Needless to say, I thought of way more than 2 case studies, but only submitted 2, that are currently near and dear to my heart from both a faculty development standpoint, but also from an organizational management and faculty engagement standpoint, especially for our non-tenure-track faculty. Curious to see what others think about these:

CASE #1: PROFESSOR DEADWOOD WAS AN ACTIVE, ENGAGED SCHOLAR WHEN SHE WAS A JUNIOR FACULTY MEMBER, BUT SINCE RECEIVING TENURE AND BEING PROMOTED TO FULL PROFESSOR SEVERAL YEARS AGO, SHE SIMPLY SAYS “NO” WHEN ASKED TO STEP UP AND SERVE HER DEPARTMENT, COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY. DISCUSSIONS WITH HER DEPARTMENT CHAIR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR GOODFRIEND, ABOUT DINGING PROFESSOR DEADWOOD IN HER MERIT REVIEWS HAVE BEEN FRUITLESS, AS CHAIR GOODFRIEND DOES “NOT WANT TO MAKE WAVES” IN THE DEPARTMENT, AND SO SHE CONTINUES TO GIVE PROFESSOR DEADWOOD VERY HIGH ANNUAL REVIEWS DESPITE HER COMPLETE DISENGAGEMENT. THE DEAN’S OFFICE IS CONSIDERING INCLUDING THE DEGREE TO WHICH CHAIRS USE THE ANNUAL MERIT PROCESS TO “MOTIVATE” SENIOR FACULTY TO TAKE ON THE SERVICE LOAD THAT IS EXPECTED OF THEM, BUT IS CONCERNED THAT SUCH A POLICY WILL BE SEEN AS MICROMANAGEMENT.

CASE #2: THE NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY ON OUR CAMPUS ARE SEEKING A SERIES OF TITLES THAT WILL BETTER REFLECT THEIR ACTIVITIES AND WILL HAVE RANK ASSOCIATED WITH THEM. FOR EXAMPLE, CURRENTLY OUR COLLEGE HAS INSTRUCTORS AND SENIOR INSTRUCTORS (ALL ONE-YEAR CONTRACTS), WHO CONTRACTUALLY DO TEACHING, AND ARE NOT REQUIRED OR ENCOURAGED TO DO RESEARCH OR SERVICE. THE REQUESTED NEW TITLES WOULD INCLUDE “ASSISTANT, ASSOCIATE, AND FULL” RANKS AND REVIEW OF RESEARCH, TEACHING AND SERVICE, BUT STILL WOULD BE ATTACHED TO ONE-YEAR CONTRACTS AND PROMOTION WOULD NOT BE ASSOCIATED WITH A PAY RAISE. THE CONCERN IS THAT IN THE PAST, OUR COLLEGE HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY SUED BY NON-TENURE-TRACK FACULTY WHO CLAIMED, THAT ALTHOUGH THEIR CONTRACTS DID NOT REQUIRE THEM TO DO RESEARCH AND SERVICE, THE FACT THAT THEY CHOSE TO DO THAT SHOULD MAKE THEM ELIGIBLE FOR TENURE. ALTHOUGH THE COLLEGE VALUES IT’S NON-TENURE TRACK FACULTY A GREAT DEAL, THE LEGAL ISSUES SURROUNDING THE CURRENT DISCUSSION ARE WORRISOME.

These struggles are major ones in academia, where title and rank are not necessarily accompanied by large monetary support, and where there is essentially no accountability for poor behavior or lack of partiticipation once a faculty member is tenured. Moreover, mid-level administration is constrained, largely, by its upper levels (here is a place where business and academia come together), and even innovative ideas that may be useful in engaging faculty and other colleagues that are not tied to money, but rather, have prestige or recognition of seniority associated with them, require extensive vetting, legal consideration, and sometimes, end up being analyzed away through committees, budget analysis, and compliance audits.

Having said all that cynical stuff, I am still excited about this conference, because for me, half the fun of my job is trying to find solutions to problems like these that *will* work and will not get us into hot water (warm water, fine, but not hot water). Flexibility in thinking and possibility-driven discussions have to happen, even if 90% of them don’t result in something workable. I hope to come home with some flesh for the bones of the ideas I have and some insight from others dealing with situations like those I describe above. Sooner or later, we have to find solutions to these problems, even if they are small steps that start to shift seemingly intractable problems.

Hope springs eternal!!

So the last few weeks have found me doing a series of TV spots and little interviews and talks on topics of stress reduction, time management, and the importance of setting aside worries to get a good night’s sleep. These are great fun, because I enjoy doing them, and also, I think they help keep me honest- if I’m going to talk about this stuff, I need to practice what I preach, which is easier said than done.

Why are these so much fun to do for me? As a scientist and professor, I spend most of my time talking to students or to colleagues who already have a foundation for understanding the details of the complex relationships between stress, sleep, health, immunology, and physiology that are part of my research. On the other hand, I love doing media spots because it gives me the chance to blend my science, teaching, and my coaching, to provide the popular press with real scientific analysis and data around things that tend to get watered down and miscommunicated in the media- I enjoy the challenge of making this stuff accessible to a lay audience, but still factual and not diluted to the point that the research basis for my comments is lost. For example, “Stress is always bad for you, so try really hard to avoid stress” is a message I’ve read in magazines and heard on the radio and TV more times than I can count. Of course, stress is not avoidable, so it could be argued that putting effort into “trying really hard to avoid stress” is, in itself, a stress-inducing mandate. The facts, of course, are that stress is defined broadly, affects different individuals to varying degrees, and can be motivating and positive, given that it is met with constructive activity that meets the demand and allows for resolution. On the flip-side, and the place where many popular press pieces fail, is the fact that animal and human research broadly show that chronic stress does not allow the body to recover from stress which can have long-term consequences for immunity, cognition, and disease susceptibility; the key seems to be active coping and developing strategies to create time and space for mental and physical recovery from stress, even if it’s just a “time-out” and then a return to the stressful situation.

These interviews are great fun, but usually, at the end of them, the reporter asks something like, “So, what do *you* do to combat stress/get enough sleep/stop worrying?”. I found myself repeatedly laughing and saying something like “Well, I’m still working on the ‘practice what you preach’ part so for now, the message is ‘do as I say and not as I do!’” Ha Ha.

I’ve decided this is really not very funny anymore, so in the last weeks, I have committed to practicing what I preach. I have made appointments with myself, that I am keeping, to exercise every day, to have 1 hour of “me” time each day (usually 30 minutes in the morning and 30 at night) to read, take a walk, or do some yoga, and to get to bed at a regular time each night so I get at least 7 hours of sleep per night. This is the stuff I tell clients to do and what I recommend to my classes and in the media spots I do, and finally, I am doing it myself over an extended period of time. The good news is that is really does work! I feel much more rested, less stressed (even though my job is getting more stressful by the day), and les cranky to my family, myself, and my colleagues. It feels good not to be a hypocrite anymore, and the best part is that I am just generally much more optimistic, even-tempered, and circumspect about the stress as it comes my way.

The take-home message is that now when people ask me “How do you do everything?” I can honestly say that I am taking care of myself and everybody else- it does take a little more discipline (I get up at 4:30 every morning now, but the benefits far outweigh the cost of this early start), and I do say “no” to things that encroach on my time for exercise and me. Again, the benefits of this far outweigh the costs- I know I am a better Mom, partner, coach, colleague, and professor for committing to taking care of myself.