This ‘Academic Doula’ Calms the Panic of Faculty Parents

Lorena V. Márquez wasn’t used to asking for help.

Like so many junior female faculty members determined to establish themselves, Márquez, a scholar of Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of California at Davis, feared that she might be perceived as not being serious or hardworking.

Still, something had to give, Márquez realized in the spring of 2020. She’d just received revisions for her first book, which she was scrambling to incorporate into her manuscript so she could stay on track for tenure. She was also moving her classes online — among them a fall survey course with more than 500 students enrolled — amid the Covid-19 pandemic, not to mention juggling online schooling for her 6- and 8-year-old children, both of whom needed near-constant supervision.

The competing demands of her two lives, as an academic and as a mother, gave Márquez migraines. She noticed it hurt to open her mouth, and her dentist told her it was a stress reaction: She was unconsciously clenching her teeth at night.

That’s when the email arrived in Márquez’s mailbox, from a UC-Davis faculty listserv. It encouraged faculty parents in need of support to contact someone named Diane L. Wolf, a professor of sociology who was offering free advice to professors at all stages of parenthood. Márquez saw an opportunity. She reached out.

Wolf is the architect of a program — the first of its kind, she believes — to support faculty parents once their formal leave ends. Inspired by the isolation she’d felt as an academic mother, her scholarly interest in American motherhood, and her training as a postpartum doula, Wolf thought Davis and other institutions could do more to help.

“It’s really after the baby that things get crazy,” she says. “I wanted to address and help and support those who were feeling the way I did after sleep deprivation: How are they going to perform? How are they going to publish? How are they going to get back to work with a child?”

Family-leave policies that kick in immediately after a birth, adoption, or fostering — which typically offer faculty members a set amount of paid weeks off — are crucial, Wolf says. But there’s been little attention paid to what happens at the end of those weeks, when parents return to work, and how publication pressures and grant deadlines suddenly take on a different valence with an infant or toddler in the household.

So Wolf fashioned herself as an “academic doula” — she invented the term — to help faculty members through that transition.

While a host of colleges have taken steps in recent years to make their campuses more family friendly, Wolf’s one-on-one approach at Davis stands out.

It began in 2018, when she got funding for a two-year pilot program to organize in-person support groups for faculty parents. Later, given logistical obstacles and the pandemic, she started offering virtual one-on-one consultations with mothers like Márquez (Wolf said men have rarely asked for meetings). Wolf, now a professor emerita, talks women through their trials: how to deal with a senior colleague who criticized them for not publishing enough after having children, or when to tell their department chair that they were pregnant. She helps review their Covid-impact statements — in which faculty members detail the pandemic’s effects on their teaching, scholarship, and service — and their tenure files.

Sometimes, the solutions she suggests are practical ones: Could a single parent of young children arrange for a family member or friend to watch the kids for a few hours on a regular basis, so the mom could work uninterrupted? If an infant’s hectic schedule made it hard for his mother to focus on her writing, could she shift gears and work on something less mentally draining — like updating her syllabi — for a while?

On other occasions, she helps plot out logistics. On a recent Zoom call with a faculty couple at Davis who will soon welcome their first child, Wolf helped both parents review the kinds of leaves and policies they were eligible for. The soon-to-be mother would automatically be eligible for a one-year pause of the tenure clock, Wolf reminded her, while her husband could take a quarter-long sabbatical in either 2024 or 2025 to do more child care. It might be a good idea for Mom to schedule her graduate seminar to meet for one longer session once a week instead of two shorter sessions, Wolf suggested, and both parents should be sure to ask their chair not to assign them classes that met in the early morning or late afternoon.

Wolf also assuages concerns about the competing demands of parenthood and academe. The pregnant faculty member confided on the call that, between an important forthcoming conference that would require a red-eye flight and a recent journal rejection, her ambition and anxiety were nagging at her. Wolf nodded sympathetically, promising to meet with her again to map out a detailed publication plan that would accommodate both her child-care duties and her progress toward tenure.

In the meantime, Wolf advised the professor, ship off that article to a different journal, and be sure to pack a pillow for the overnight flight. “Try to nap,” she smiled. “It’s not ideal, but you’ll survive.”

Wolf has had many similar conversations in her three decades of advocacy for academic parents at Davis, which began when a junior colleague was told to take a sabbatical instead of maternity leave. (Wolf herself was initially denied parental leave after the birth of her son in 1994, but received it after protesting to the provost.)

Along with others at Davis, she helped revise family-leave policies for the campus and joined a team of faculty members who serve as “work-life advisers,” giving their colleagues confidential and personalized advice about starting families and about the resources the university offered.

That’s the crux of what Wolf does: lending an ear, making suggestions, reminding her colleagues to prioritize their time as parents and not worry so much about work. In other words, Wolf says, she’s providing the support she wishes she’d had as a new parent saddled with the stresses of teaching, publishing, and staying connected with the academic community.

For Márquez, that validation was key. “I think that academia can be very antifamily. When you have children, it’s kind of like, ‘Well, you brought it on yourself, so you have to deal with it, figure it out,’” she says. “I’ve never felt like I can be a mother and an academic. I’m an academic from 8 to 5, and then when my kids are home, then I’m a mother.” But that mind-set changed when she met Wolf, who told her: “No, we can be both.”

That message wouldn’t carry the same weight coming from a human-resources representative, says Orly Clergé, an associate professor of sociology at Davis who’s also worked with Wolf. “You can’t do it if you’re not faculty, if you haven’t gone through the hoops of merits and promotions and book writing and article writing and faculty meetings. You have to understand every aspect of this profession and its demands,” Clergé says, “and you can’t do it if you kind of have sold into the bureaucracy, because then you’re serving different masters.”

What Wolf provides is a third-party listening ear, one to whom people like Márquez and Clergé might feel more comfortable voicing concerns than they would to their department chair or an administrator.

Wolf, though, is happy to get administrators involved, with the permission of the faculty member she’s working with, if the situation calls for it. For example, she collaborated with other work-life advisers to publish a list of best practices for departmental leaders. The guide advises no 8 a.m. or 5 p.m. classes for faculty parents with care-giving responsibilities, as well as no brand-new teaching assignments for returning parents during their first semester back at work.

Notably, Wolf says, none of the suggestions on that list should cost a department any money. Rather, they point toward understanding and compassion.

While Wolf’s program does cost a bit of money, the vice provost for academic affairs, Philip H. Kass, doesn’t hesitate to add it to the budget he turns in to the provost each year. Wolf counts Kass as a stalwart supporter.

“You just have to make your priorities, and in academic affairs, our priorities are attention to the faculty who need our resources the most,” Kass, who has also served as a work-life adviser, explains. “Those are often more-junior faculty, faculty who have work-life integration challenges, faculty who, through no fault of their own, have had difficult times being faculty members.” Wolf’s services work in concert with other efforts by senior administrators to make UC Davis a family-friendly workplace, he says.

While neither Kass nor Wolf is aware of similar programs at other institutions, Wolf is working to get the word out. She’s slated to do some consulting for the University of California at Irvine, whose faculty members will be able to sit in on her Zoom support groups for Davis parents and talk with Wolf one one one. She’ll soon offer workshops to faculty members and administrators at California State University at Fresno.

And although Wolf’s history of advocacy and professional expertise make her an especially good fit for “academic doula” work, she believes senior female faculty members on any campus who are dedicated to supporting their colleagues could fill a similar role.

Meanwhile, in March 2022, Lorena Márquez had another sleepless night. This time, though, the cause wasn’t the stress that had plagued her two years earlier. Rather, it was excitement, from learning her tenure had been approved. She sent Wolf an email to let her know, crediting the tailored support with helping to shepherd her through the process.

During that crucial professional period, Márquez wrote, “I was drowning,” and Wolf “threw me a floating device.”