Carpools, Casseroles and... Classes?

Fourteen years ago, Ruth Grant sat in her hospital bed in the Duke University Medical Center maternity ward, waiting for a teaching assistant to bring her class' grades to her. While Grant's three-year-old twins stayed at home with their father and her less-than-three-day-old daughter, Anna, slept in the neonatal unit down the hall, she evaluated essays, tests and homework performance, compiling final semester grades for the dozens of students in Contemporary Political Ideologies.

At the end of the 1980s, a time when people thought they could have it all, Grant never had reservations about embarking upon a career as a professor while expanding her family. Now a full professor of political science, she smiles as she tells the story of Anna's birth, a little embarrassed at the trip she asked her teaching assistant to make. About her choice to have children, however, she is confident. "My kids are more important than anything else in my life," she says. "Why would their effect on my career ever be a consideration?"

For many people pursuing a career in academia, however, decisions about whether to have a family--and how to find enough time to sustain a substantial personal life--are intrinsically linked to their progress as faculty at a university. Admittedly, every professional career requires more than a standard, 40-hour work week. Resident physicians on the path to becoming doctors regularly spend more than 36 hours straight at work. Lawyers often spend several years working up to 80 hours a week as they attempt to make partner in a large law firm. Yet, the time and intellectual energy required of a tenure-track professor seem to many to be at least as demanding as required by other professions, perhaps more so.

In part, it is because professors are expected to play three full-time roles: Teacher, researcher and administrator. Each alone could absorb the entire work week. With such demands on time, trade-offs are unquestionably necessary. Work consumes hours that would be spent with family, and some career opportunities remain unrealized because of personal commitments. Because academic work is also hard to leave at the office, the high intensity of university teaching is not limited to hours spent on campus. Research interests and structured intellectual inquiry permeate even pleasure reading.

"You're constantly clipping out articles and reading with a pen in hand--even on matters unrelated to your field," says Michael Morton, a divorced German literature scholar from California. With his sleeves rolled up and his button-down shirt tucked into his jeans, he has a slightly unpolished yet distinguished look about him.

Morton, an associate professor, pulls out three index-card sized sheets of paper from his left breast pocket and glances at the impeccable notes--bibliographic information about the divorce rate in the United States. His current research focus is critical realism in German thought--his expertise on divorce merely an indication of his hyper-active depth of inquiry. "In the pre-tenure years especially, if you are at an institution like Duke with very high expectations for research and scholarship, a very, very significant portion of your working hours will be devoted to research, writing and publication," he says. "The rest of your time will be devoted to class prep."

Throughout the typical eight-year process of working up the faculty ranks to a tenured position as an associate or full professor, many assistant professors put in over 100 hours a week. Light regularly seeps through the cracks under doors on the third floor of the Social Science building until two in the morning, as junior faculty find uninterrupted time to devote to research. To a certain extent, administrators expect this kind of commitment. "You have to put in long hours," says Berndt Mueller, dean of the natural sciences. "You owe that to your students and to your scholarship." He adds that the pressure is particularly acute in the early years of academia when professors are still trying to prove themselves through published research.

Because the beginning of the process requires such an intense schedule of teaching, networking and research, many academics choose to wait until their careers are on track before starting a family. "The decision not to be married now and not to have children now was conscious," says Matt Cohen, an assistant professor of English in his first year at the University. He and his fiancee, who works as a research assistant in the Duke University Medical Center, have decided to wait until their careers are more stable before fully committing to one another.

Mueller, who participates in tenure decisions, stressed that huge time commitments are not necessary to achieve status as a full, tenured professor. "You can get tenure with a reasonable investment of time," he says. "Now, it is true that there's a certain amount of talent and focus required and sometimes you can make up for talent with time, but I don't think we want to fill the ranks of this university with people who work unreasonably long periods of time to achieve a record that merits tenure." Mueller, himself a husband, adds that family is an important component of his life.

But, of course, with only a finite number of hours in a day, everyone will make sacrifices somewhere. Papers go unwritten and some conferences are forgone to be in town for school plays and track meets. Lewis Blake, an associate professor of the practice of mathematics, toyed with co-writing an introductory math textbook with math professor Michael Reed. The two men discussed the possibility for a year before finally deciding against it. "I've got little kids," Blake says as he looks up at the chalkboards in his office, covered with tri-color drawings of upside-down possums and cats dressed like Santa Claus. "I just don't want to take time while they're still young."

Grant admits unabashedly that she has missed conferences she would have attended if she were not a mother. "Passing up certain professional opportunities in order to spend time with your kids is okay in the long run," she says. As a political scientist, Grant has been able to spend time at home researching and writing. She has become influential in her field and won teaching awards while still raising three children. But in the laboratory sciences, where research requires more on-site hours, people may have to give up more to succeed.

Experiments in physics or chemistry often require machinery, which takes time to keep at a functional level. Some equipment requires as many as 30 hours of active maintenance a week, and all experimentation has to be done in the lab. This on-site time is in addition to writing for publication and teaching. There is far less flexibility of location and hours than there is in the humanities or social sciences. Researchers in the natural sciences often have more University pressure to produce as well. Their laboratories are expensive for the University to keep running, and only through useful research and grants do schools recoup their investments.

Mary Eubanks, an adjunct professor in biology--a non-tenure-track position unpaid by the University that allows her lab space and teaching privileges--has a master's degree in a natural science discipline and a doctorate in the humanities. In her 30 years as an academic, she has switched her research focus from anthropology to biology and understands first-hand the difficulty of finding time for a family while being focused on scholarship. Her choices have led her away from the university world and back again as she has struggled to care for her children. "As an anthropologist, I probably could have made it as a professor because you don't have the same demands on your time," she says, getting momentarily lost in a vision of what her career might have looked like in a different field or without children. "But in retrospect, I wouldn't make the choices differently."

Eubanks, dressed comfortably in a flowing skirt with a loose-fitting, button-down shirt, tells how she had her first child as a junior in college, her second just weeks before finishing her doctorate in anthropology and her third shortly after that. Instead of taking one of several job offers when she finished her schooling, Eubanks waited for her husband to finish medical school and establish himself as a physician. She taught classes for fun, but focused primarily on her family.

When her husband left her, she tried to return to academia but as a woman in her mid-30s with children three, eight and twelve years old, she could only find a job as a research assistant. That job took her from anthropology to biology and led her to pursue her biology master's degree. Her eyes glaze over as she thinks about her past. "I had some child support coming in or I couldn't have done it," she says. She also had understanding supervisors. "There were not kids around universities at that time, but my professor didn't mind my daughter being at the lab." She moved to North Carolina to pursue her biology research, but the time commitment proved to be impossible.

"They really did expect you to be at the lab 60 to 80 hours a week--and I had to be home with my kids." Eubanks throws her hands up as she talks about the time demands. She explains how she left the university world for a decade to raise her children. All the while, she kept her research--a study of genetic crosses of corn--active by herself, growing plants in her backyard and turning the dining room table into a mini laboratory. "I was truly an academic at heart," she concedes.

Now that her children are out of the house, Eubanks has returned to full-time research and teaching, but she is too old to move up through the ranks to achieve tenure. She admits that it disappoints her, but she stands by her choices. "My family is more important to me than my career and my work and the ego gratification of science," she says.

In order to make the balance of work and family plausible, academics learn the secrets of efficiency early on in their careers. "I didn't know how hard I could work until I became a graduate student. And then, I didn't know how hard I could work until I became a professor," says Arcidiacono.

Multitasking and organization become the crucial skills of a successful homemaker. "It does not matter if I can make a tuna casserole, but I have to be able to organize the carpool," says Grant, remembering the challenges of having three active middle-school children.

Cohen, an English scholar with square glasses and a buzz-cut that has been allowed to grow two weeks too long, has nearly perfected the art of combining activities. As he talks about how he balances his personal life with work, he eats a McDonald's cheeseburger, at 2 p.m., taking advantage of the first chance he has had to eat lunch.

Finding a balance also means doing less non-required work. Some professors, like Arcidiacono, choose to teach introductory classes in which little preparatory work is required. "They might not be that much fun, but they're more do-able from a work standpoint," he says somewhat sheepishly. To spend time with their families, most limit traveling for work and present less often than they might otherwise. Time spent with students out of class or office hours decreases.

"I used to spend more time interacting with undergrads. I tell myself when the kids are grown, I'll do it again," Blake says. But even as he forms the words, he recognizes that it is not likely to happen. Alice, his youngest, is only nine and won't be out of the house for another decade. By then, Blake will be approaching retirement.

In the meantime, he fits work in between his three children's schedules--grading papers in the early morning before Alice and his two boys wake up and sneaking in a few extra hours after they go to sleep--and spends much of his nine-to-five day with his door open to students.

The balance between work and family varies as expected with field, gender and person, but few seem unhappy with the choices they have made. "Maybe I would be better connected or better known without my children, but that's not substantial," says Grant, quick to attest to the primary role her children play in her life. "If I have any regrets, it's that I wish I had been better able to put my work out of my mind when I was with my children."