The college presidents, provosts, and other senior administrators who gathered here on Thursday to talk about work-life balance on their campuses agreed: Higher education has made remarkable progress in making it easier for employees to work and manage their family responsibilities. But it also has a long way to go.
“Other sectors took on this issue ahead of higher education,” said William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, who was one of about 70 leaders who attended a daylong meeting on the subject, held by the American Council on Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
What’s standing in the way of more progress? Often the culture at institutions doesn’t match up with the family-friendly policies on paper.
Sometimes the climate is marred by a department chair who isn’t up on all the details of how to help a professor stop the tenure clock or take a leave to have or adopt a child. Or maybe the chair—who hasn’t always been trained on how various workplace-flexibility policies operate—has a hard time recognizing his or her options for modifying the duties of professors who need to adjust their workload to care for children or elderly parents.
Sometimes senior faculty members hint to their junior colleagues that it’s a bad idea to take a break while seeking tenure. Some longtime professors make sure that junior faculty members know that they managed back when the help new professors have at their disposal didn’t even exist. So the women—and men—who really need policies to help them balance their work and personal responsibilities tend to decide it’s better to just grin and bear it. Those who don’t sometimes suffer the consequences.
“It’s not just the department chairs—the whole faculty climate has to change,” Steven Marcus, director of faculty leadership at the University of Maryland at College Park, said during one of the discussions on Thursday.
‘A Competitive Issue’
Because of the stigma often still attached to those who use work-life policies, an increasing number of faculty members on the job market make it a point to ferret out which institutions are family-friendly in name only, panelists agreed. New professors often rule out places that don’t appear to embrace workplace flexibility in practice.
“There is an expectation that there will be flexibility,” Mr. Kirwan said. “It’s become not just a value we should espouse but a competitive issue.”
For institutions looking to hire top-notch faculty members, the stakes are high. Colleges that don’t meet the mark will find that attracting and, most important, retaining the next generation of faculty members will be tough, especially when recruiting globally, said Steven G. Poskanzer, president of Carleton College.
“They come to us with different norms” about workplace flexibility, he said.
The face of work-life balance in higher education has, for the most part, been that of a woman grappling with how to mesh her life as a mother with her life as a professor. But meeting attendees expect the changing demographics of the professoriate will soon give administrators a related issue on which to focus. The same faculty members who needed flexibility to have and raise their children now are taking care of elderly parents.
“This is the next issue we need to take on,” said Linda P.B. Katehi, chancellor of the University of California at Davis.
Getting On With the Task
Thursday’s meeting, dubbed the National Challenge for Higher Education Conference, also featured roundtable discussions on issues that included recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty, meeting the professional needs of midcareer faculty members, and phased retirement. And there were sessions on the legal issues that can crop up from the use of work-life policies and how liberal-arts colleges can provide their faculty members with more career flexibility, among other things.
Some of the attendees came from colleges that have been awarded Sloan Foundation grants for their efforts to foster work-life balance and faculty retirement transitions. The hope is that some of their ideas will catch on.
“People are not ill willed … but there’s a poverty of imagination of what can be done,” said Kathleen E. Christensen, a program director at the Sloan Foundation.
Ms. Christensen led a discussion during the meeting with Joan Ferrini-Mundy, assistant director of education and human resources at the National Science Foundation, about trends in work-life balance, particularly among academic scientists. After much spirited discussion, Deneese Jones, provost of Drake University, called for attendees to “create an urgency” about promoting flexibility in the workplace so that the change they had talked about could take place.
“We can’t continue to admire the challenge—we have to move on it,” she said. “Let’s get busy.”
