The first thing I saw was the unmade bed. A stranger had lain in it recently, and the crumpled duvet still held a human shape. A divot the size of an adult head folded the pillow into the shape of an open book. An oily lip print remained on a glass.
I was in Toronto for the annual Modernist Studies Association conference. It was my first academic event since my 1-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a chronic illness, and, with no child-care alternatives in sight, I left my administrative position directing a humanities center. I was now unemployed, a stay-at-home mom, and paying for this hotel room out of my own pocket. It was money I could have saved for medications and supplies or, better yet, a real vacation. The conference fees and travel were covered by a travel grant from the conference organizers, earmarked for contingent faculty. I had arranged for my parents to help with child care, written a paper, gotten my passport in order, and spent money that was not coming in on this dirty hotel room so that I could go downstairs and sit under fluorescent lights and talk about Samuel Beckett’s radio plays for the BBC; so that I could hang on to the idea that my career would resume at some point and that I could pick up right where I left off.
I called the front desk to tell them the room hadn’t been made up. Then, I sat on the crumbled bed, cheeks burning with a hot sense of shame. Somehow the soft lighting of this grimy room managed to illuminate all the delusions that I was harboring. I suddenly felt like I shouldn’t be here, like I was prioritizing the wrong things. Who was I to think that I could be a caregiver for a medically complex child and a scholar at the same time?
This conference took place in October 2019, just a few months before the first case of Covid-19 was reported. The pandemic, for all its horrors, did open up the conversation about caretaking in academe, if only due to the extremity of the moment. For this article, I spoke with eight academics about their experiences as caretakers since 2020. They pointed out that things were bad before, but that the pandemic shone a spotlight on the challenges of balancing career and caretaking. The difficulty of working without reliable care support became impossible to ignore. Some were optimistic enough, at the time, to hope that this attention might lead to improvements.
Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, not nearly enough progress has been made. My interviewees describe broken promises to create a better social safety net at the university and national level. President Biden’s failed Build Back Better plan included funding for universal free preschool, expansions to Medicare and Medicaid, and support for home-health aides and family members caring for seniors and people with disabilities. The failure of this plan and the sense of business as usual that has returned to university campuses has left many caretakers feeling abandoned in a time of ongoing crisis. As Alexa Price-Whelan, a microbiologist at Columbia University, tells me: “We’ve gone right back to where we were before Covid with more demands on people’s time. We’re more burned out than ever before.”
The pandemic opened up the conversation about caretaking in academe. But four and a half years later, not nearly enough progress has been made.
There are many strains on academic caretakers today, some of which are shared by other professions, and some that exert their own distinctive pressures — especially in a time when two-thirds of the professoriate are employed in contingent positions. Day care is more expensive than ever. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, child-care costs are untenable for most families. The highest average child-care costs are in Washington, D.C., at $24,243 per year. (As a point of comparison, an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown is paid a minimum rate of $7,000 per course.) Many day cares closed during the pandemic and never reopened. Elder care is in an even worse state. Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates have failed to keep up with the cost of medications and staffing. Nursing homes, assisted-living homes, and home-health aides have become increasingly expensive.
For faculty of the “sandwich generation” — tasked with caring for both children and aging parents at the same time — the financial costs are astronomical. After paying for two children in a family day care until school age, Sara Brady, a communications professor at Bronx Community College, found herself faced with the cost of assisted living for her father. The bill was so high that she had to take out a home-equity loan. While she felt prepared for the expense of child care, she was blindsided by the cost of elder care. College savings became out of the question. And, she is quick to point out, things are even harder for new parents. The day care where she sent her children has now doubled in cost.
Academic careers often take people away from their hometowns and communities, leaving faculty caregivers lacking the support networks that help to raise a child, care for an aging parent, or weather a medical emergency. Sending kids to a grandparent or sharing a parent’s care with a sibling is more difficult for faculty who have moved across state or international borders. Before quarantine began in New York City, Sumeyye Yar had a new baby and was about to start a new alternative-academic job. She’d waited two years for a work permit after coming to the United States for her husband’s tenure-track job. With a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular genetics and a Turkish passport, Sumeyye found herself caring full-time for an infant during a pandemic without any family support. Her position was terminated due to Covid closures; without a second household income, she could not afford a nanny and did not feel comfortable sending her child to a child-care center during the pandemic. “Now there is a big blank on my CV, and it’s just getting harder,” Sumeyye tells me. “Even if I wanted to return to academia, I couldn’t. Biotech is so picky — they want someone fresh out of Ph.D. or postdoc or with years of industry experience.” Researchers who work in alt-ac or non-tenure-track positions also saw the Covid emergency creating difficult resume gaps when their positions were terminated and they became full-time caregivers.
Academic careers often take people away from the support networks that help to raise a child, care for an aging parent, or weather a medical emergency.
For others, the pandemic and the attendant changes in university life brought a shift in priorities. Ellen Stockstill, newly tenured in English at Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg, recently took a buyout offered by her administration. Her husband, after playing the role of a trailing spouse through Ellen’s tenure process, had recently started a new career as a military chaplain, a job that would involve unpredictable deployments. This meant that if she stayed in her current position, Ellen would be a single parent in Pennsylvania while teaching a full load of classes, serving on promotion and tenure committees, and keeping active as a scholar of Victorian literature. Before taking the severance package, Ellen tried to brainstorm alternatives, like cobbling together sabbaticals and online teaching so that her family could live together. But the online-teaching appointments were never guaranteed, and she would need to apply every year. She weighed the pros and cons of staying in her position and found that looking ahead to the next stage of her career, with the greater administrative load of a newly tenured faculty member, was not as inspiring as it might once have been. She realized how lucky she was to have a rare tenured position, but the work was not fulfilling her the way it used to. Like many of us in fields where hiring is dwindling, she was taught to think of a tenure-track job in quasi-mythical terms, as a “unicorn.” As the aura around academic labor diminished, Ellen began to recognize that she had transferable skills in writing, research, and administration, and she’s now looking beyond traditional academic career paths.
Ellen is not the only person I interviewed who, like myself, chose to leave an academic job. Although much time has passed since my initial choice to leave, and I’m now back in a tenure-track job, I still find it difficult to talk about my decision to other academics in ways that don’t come across as a form of “family first” conservatism. But the tide may be turning. I’m hearing more stories of people leaving academic positions for personal reasons, whether to care for others or for their own mental health, especially as state-level politics make leaving states with anti-LGBTQ legislation, for instance, an act of self-care.
Half of my interviewees stepped away from academic jobs at some point in their career to provide care for another or prioritize the needs of a family member. All of those who stepped away were women, and each one acknowledged the difficulty of talking about such deeply personal decisions. Women with children are far less likely than men to occupy tenured positions. Seventy percent of tenured men have children, while only 44% of women do. The costs of caretaking are unequally distributed across gender and racial lines, and this discrepancy leaves a mark on the professoriate.
“I think what’s happened after Covid is that childcare has become visible,” Pragya Agarwal tells me. A behavioral scientist and the author of (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman, Pragya is the mother of three children. She started graduate school as a single mother and became the first woman and first person of color to earn a professorship in her engineering department. Later, struggling with infertility and IVF treatments as a senior faculty member, she felt she needed to hide these parts of herself from her colleagues in order to avoid being seen as too “momsie.” By the time the pandemic hit, she had stepped down from a tenure-track job after the birth of her twins. She didn’t sleep during her first six months with the babies, and the late nights took a toll. One day, a baby pressed a key on her computer, and a carefully worded email disappeared into the ether. It was a final sign that she could not juggle these two roles and do either to her satisfaction. After some time away, Pragya was able to return to academic work with new vigor, but this time around, she chose to only apply for fellowships and visiting positions that gave her the flexibility she needed.
It has not always been easy. At a recent event where Pragya was invited to speak in London, she asked the organizers if her children could stay in the green room as she gave her talk. She was told they could not. The lack of accommodations for parents with children and the timing of conferences and events like these, often in the evening or on weekends, mean that parents engaged in active child care miss out on opportunities to present their work and engage with their peers. Zoom events offer some potential for inclusivity, but here, too, caregivers might find themselves struggling to cordon off the time and space to attend virtual events, especially those that take place around school pickup times or mealtimes. For those who have child-care or elder-care support, going away for a conference can offer a reprieve and a chance to engage fully with academic life in a way that is often impossible at home.
Even more difficult than conferences are long-term professional opportunities like writing residencies and residential fellowships, which often bar participants from bringing children. Moreover, many grants and stipends will not allow researchers to apply money towards child care. Another parent I spoke with, Alisa Roost, tells me her university offered a research stipend for her work as chair of the humanities department; she could spend the money on a computer or other equipment that she doesn’t need or for travel, but could not spend it on the caregiving support that would allow her to conduct research over the summer when her son’s school is out.
Another challenge for academic caretakers is the double-edged sword of having a “flexible” job. Academic careers are often less restrictive than 9-to-5 jobs, whether those are hourly-wage positions or corporate jobs. This means that academics often become the default caregiver after the birth of a new child or a medical emergency. Chris Robinson’s youngest child was born with a rare genetic condition. During the pandemic, the City University of New York anthropology professor and his wife, who has a less flexible 9-to-5 job, had to regularly put off work to care for their child. Going back to work before schools were back in person, Chris was balancing teaching classes with managing online occupational and physical therapy for his then-4-year-old daughter. Chris describes what he experienced as “very little understanding of the needs of faculty with children.” As a parent of a child with complex needs, Chris felt this acutely. At the same time, he experienced increased solidarity with his students, who were often parents themselves, navigating the same difficult balancing act.
Another challenge is the double-edged sword of having a “flexible” job, which means that academics often become the default caregiver.
Chris describes himself as “extraordinarily lucky” to live in New York, where there is better funding for disability services, including money for care support and, as his daughter gets older, funds for a full-time aide to help her transition to independent living. However, there are other challenges. Chris is co-director of a field site in Romania, which he is often unable to visit. Paleontological field seasons last around two months. “Some colleagues take children to the field,” he tells me, “but they don’t have special-needs kids.”
Unexpected events like the birth of a child with disabilities or the illness of a parent can significantly alter the course of careers, especially for graduate students and precariously employed faculty. Soon after Kate Schnur finished her graduate coursework in English and moved from Ann Arbor to New York, her brother-in-law and sister were both diagnosed with cancer. What began as short-term care support soon became much more permanent when her mother suffered a stroke. Kate recalled visiting her mother at the hospital after her stroke and trying to grade papers. She was teaching three courses in English composition. She had the “flexible job,” and so she was there most days. After a full day at the hospital, she would go home, eat dinner with her husband, and set to work on her dissertation.
I ask Kate if there’s anything she wishes her employer or her graduate committee had done differently to support her during that difficult time. “I can’t answer that question because it didn’t occur to me to ask,” she responds. If there had been emergency funding or medical leave available, she might very well have passed on it. The work was both a burden and a lifeline, keeping her sane through the days after her mother’s stroke. She read Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation in the pleather hospital armchair and was able to be present and escape at the same time. And yet Kate also expresses a sense of regret that she felt the need to power through: “You get wrapped up in the narrative that you can keep up with everything.”
Years later, Kate’s mom is living back home with support from aides, and Kate is continuing to publish and present her research while adjuncting full time. Her life remains closely tethered to her family, and her job prospects are limited to the New York area, where there are many universities — but also a glut of newly minted Ph.D.s competing for the same positions. Kate tells me that Covid was “actually kind of great for me,” because it meant that other family members were home and could take up more of the caregiving. There was a brief moment when all jobs were flexible in a new way, and Zoom office hours and meetings meant that a caretaker could be two places at once. It’s a sign of how bad things had gotten that this felt like a relief.
If colleges are going to “build back better” after the pandemic in a way that allows all faculty members to thrive, they must take serious steps toward improving the care crisis that is driving faculty — especially women, those caring for disabled family members, and international scholars — out of the profession.
Here are some recommendations from my interviewees. As individual faculty members, we can educate ourselves about institutional policies regarding paid parental and medical leaves and tenure-clock stoppages and ask for what is available. If they do not already exist, departments and universities should establish policies that ensure faculty are not penalized for taking any leave available to them, and transparent documentation should ensure this protection. At the administrative level, chairs and deans should review how they allocate online teaching and include caretaking as a necessary factor for consideration. Stipends and research funds ought to be applicable toward child care if they are not already. Conferences and professional events can be made more inclusive and planned at times that are least likely to conflict with caregiving. And finally, hiring committees considering candidates must recognize the way that care needs create gaps in a CV and protect applicants from discriminatory assumptions.
There is more recognition now than ever that scholars have transferable skills and that they will walk away from jobs that prove incompatible with the business of living. We know they will leave because they are already leaving.
Four years after my messy hotel room in Toronto, I returned to the Modernist Studies Association conference, now held in Brooklyn, not too far from where I had started working at Sarah Lawrence College. Luckily for me, my new position did not include any restrictions on how much time had passed since my dissertation was defended, as many do, and the search committee did not look askance at my years as a stay-at-home mom. I was now on the association’s board, having been appointed to serve as the organization’s first representative for contingent faculty. Through this position, I got to know more members in situations like mine: people who were unsure about whether to come to the conference, who felt sidelined as scholars by their professional status and life circumstances. It became clear to me, talking to these members, how entwined the story of contingency was with the story of caregiving.
Walking away from the conference toward the uptown subway that would take me home, I felt a sense of relief in movement. The subway would take me back as quickly as I had arrived. I settled into an open seat, and the train accelerated with a great squeaking of wheels. Between the conference and home, I was between worlds. And this, too, could be a generative space — but only if I had enough support to make it so.