When Colleges Frown on Kids on Campus — or Even Ban Them

Steve Jax

Lauren J. Myers recently set up a second desk in her office at Lafayette College.

The new one is square and red, and on it sit not a laptop and printer, but colored pencils, construction paper, an Etch-A-Sketch, and a bag of Goldfish.

The desk is for Myers’s 4-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who comes to work with her mother on occasion and typically colors or plays quietly while Myers, an assistant professor of psychology, works with students.

Bringing Charlotte along is more than just a practical step. Myers described it as an effort at “making my identity as a parent visible in a limited, appropriate way to my students and making my work life visible to my children.” She wrote last weekend in a Twitter thread responding to a call for academics to share their experiences of bringing their children to campus.

The discussion was prompted by a tweet from Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University and founder of the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice. “Children, teens, they belong on campus,” Goldrick-Rab wrote, arguing that policies banning children in academic settings mark “a major employment issue.”

Hundreds chimed in, using Goldrick-Rab’s hashtag #KidsOnCampus to air their frustrations with what they saw as boilerplate administrative policies, and evoking questions of workplace rights, professional identity, health and safety, and productivity.

I’m truly pissed to see all of these folx working in #highered being told they can’t bring their kids to campus.

We are educators. Children, teens, they belong on campus. Always have.

This *isn’t* actually about insurance.

Share your stories with me, please. #RealCollege

— Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) January 4, 2020

The ability to bring one’s children to the office — or, in many cases, the lecture hall — is widely considered a unique perk of working in academe. Myers said she hopes the afternoons her daughter spends on campus benefit young Charlotte as well as her mother’s students.

“I never know when that little moment might have an impact on that student later,” Myers said. “Maybe that student later is deciding what kind of work-life combination they want to have, and maybe they remember that time when they had that professor who had their daughter in their office for a couple of minutes.”

Practical Matters

Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, does not have a specific policy on children in the workplace, but Goldrick-Rab solicited and posted on Twitter policies from a handful of institutions that limit their presence.

Northern Kentucky University’s policy, adopted in 2003, “requests that employees not be accompanied by minor children during the employee’s normal working hours,” citing institutional liability and “the risk of harm to the children.” (In a statement to The Chronicle, a university official wrote that Northern Kentucky regularly reviews its own policy and other institutions’ “to advance the mission of the university, protect the integrity of its operations, ensure compliance with state and federal law, and convey expectations to the campus community.”)

Tennessee State University uses stronger language, declaring in bold type that “university employees are prohibited from bringing minor children on campus during working hours.”

Several institutions’ policies suggest time limits for campus visits by children (two hours at the University of Connecticut; one at the University of Florida). Others exempt “brief visits,” as the University of Colorado at Boulder does when “an employee brings his/her child, grandchild, or other minor relative in to introduce that child to co-workers.”

Many contain provisions that sick children are not to be brought to campus, and some, as at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, allow an employee’s manager to determine whether the child’s presence poses a risk to safety, confidentiality, or productivity.

That’s just common sense, said Allison M. Vaillancourt, a former vice president for business affairs and human resources at the University of Arizona and a regular columnist for The Chronicle. She described an incident in which a child passed measles to the parent’s co-worker, resulting in a monthslong hospital stay and a worker-compensation case for the institution.

Flexible policies are key, Vaillancourt said. “We would have many faculty members who wanted a definitive policy, like ‘Are kids allowed in the classroom or [are] kids allowed at work, or are they not?’” Vaillancourt said. Her office “sort of fell in the place of not having a hard-and-fast rule, but encouraging people to be sort of practical.”

Vaillancourt encourages university officials to draft “community standards” concerning children on campus. “I understand both sides of the argument,” she said. “I think people want to not have disruption in their classrooms. And yet people also want to be flexible, understanding of people who have family concerns. If you’re practical about it, you can usually navigate it.”

Andy Brantley, president and chief executive officer of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, concurred in an emailed statement, saying institutions are “typically very flexible and accommodating” of individual circumstances. “As is the case for all employers in the private sector and in higher education, it is important to have policies that clarify the circumstances under which an employee’s child visits campus,” he wrote.

Family Comes First

For Jason A. Smith, an associate professor of forest pathology at the University of Florida, that perk is essential, given the toll a faculty member’s work life can take on his or her entire family. If an institution has a prohibitive policy on bringing children to campus, Smith said, it will “basically cause faculty to have to choose between either raising a family or having a career.”

That calculus is easy for Smith: Family comes first. Such a position, he added, is easier for him to take because he has tenure and because he is male. He tweeted that “I bring my kids in when I want, how I want, and where I want on campus … They will always be welcome in dad’s office and lab. The day they aren’t is the day I say UF has to look for my replacement.”

For Smith, that day hasn’t come — he says his department is accommodating and family-friendly. But The Texas Tribune reported last year that one assistant professor had left her post at Stephen F. Austin State University over a new policy restricting workplace visits by minors.

Smith said he worried “that other universities and institutions were taking such a hard line on it.”

“It ends up,” he said, “putting an unnecessary filter on who is able to pursue these types of careers.”

‘Learning Something About Life’

In the Twitter thread, Goldrick-Rab wrote that she “grew up crawling around the hallways” of George Washington University, where her mother taught. After her thread took off, she found she wasn’t alone. Several scholars tweeted about their own experiences on their parents’ campuses, and many nonacademics — including the author N.K. Jemisin — chimed in with testimonials about being raised by parents in academe.

Like Goldrick-Rab, Colleen Sullivan grew up around higher education — her mother was a behavioral psychologist, while Sullivan herself would go into developmental psychology — and she relished the chance to give her own children a similar experience.

But Sullivan, an associate professor at Worcester State University, said she was reported for bringing her nursing infant daughter to the Massachusetts campus. Though Sullivan doesn’t know who filed the report, which she said was quickly dismissed, the incident left her uneasy about bringing her children to work.

Sullivan acknowledged the need for academe to maintain a professional working environment, but wrote that “there is a freedom within academia that supports faculty members in teaching future generations, and part of teaching future generations who are going to be employees, who are going to be the employer, is to show the importance of working parents.”

She said she had observed a trend toward more-restrictive policies in the past decade, and worries about the impact on students.

“When I have brought my kids on campus, it’s been limited, but I would argue that [students] are learning something,” Sullivan said. “Maybe it’s not something that they are reading in a textbook, but they’re learning something about life, and that’s important to me.”

‘Backwards’ Priorities

Julien Emile-Geay, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California, tweeted about the utility of bringing children to campus. “My work would not be possible without the option of bringing my daughter to my undergraduate or graduate lectures when circumstances demand it,” he wrote.

Yet Emile-Geay said he’d observed a troubling dissonance with other institutional priorities, such as football games, as he wrote on Twitter.

Contrast that to football game days, where thousands of inebriated fans descend upon campus, sometimes entering our building and triggering emergency showers that create untold flooding damage. Ah, but we can’t do anything about THAT, because, you know, football.

— Julien Emile-Geay (@el_nino_waves) January 6, 2020

“It seems like universities are willing to bend over backwards to accommodate what I would characterize as extremely disruptive events,” he said. “It’s like life has to stop for a football game, but somehow, we can’t have our family life in a normal course of things. It seems to me like the priorities are completely backwards.”

Emile-Geay said Goldrick-Rab’s tweet had started an important conversation. This is “a very common occurrence in academics,” he said, “and it’s something that’s not very talked about, partially because we know that it’s not actively encouraged by institutions, even if it’s not actively banned.”

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.