Yes, maximum pursuit of career success means less time with the kids, and for many people, even men, less time with their kids is a negative.”

My point, lest it be misunderstood, was not to malign male academics and suggest that they don’t care about their kids, but to point out that the whole work/family balance is not just about mothers and their children but fathers too. Discussions about going part time after children is almost exclusively about women. There are obvious practical reasons for this – to do with the giving birth thing, and breastfeeding – but in the medium to longer term I continue to be surprised at the slow development in the number of men realising that family life can include time for them, too.

Also, what are all those male academics with kids doing? Not spending time with their kids? How sad.

Yes, maximum pursuit of career success means less time with the kids, and for many people, even men, less time with their kids is a negative.

Also, what are all those male academics with kids doing? Not spending time with their kids? How sad.

Apropos the discussion Tuesday, there are further thoughts on this topic from Ilya Somin (also here; I think the parallels between being a law professor and a professor in most non-professional fields are very weak, however) and Thoreau, while Dan Drez…

It may differ from person-to-person and from field-to-field. I am not an academic, but when I was doing my theses, in engineering and economics, the only way I got good ideas was by clocking up the hours studying my problem. The 40th hour was more productive than the 4th because I understood the problem much better.

Then there’s all the testing and disproving of the good idea until I eventually would come up with an idea that was not merely good but also right – a very important thing in engineering where wrong ideas are extremely obvious.

Ingrid, it’s a compromise. A way of getting time with my kids and doing what I like to do. It’s not great for me career-wise, but it is great for me sanity-wise. And, yeah, I’m being cheated – no tenure, less prestige, no guarantee of a full time position in the future, last pick of teaching time slots, and I’m certainly not paid for all the time spent doing research. Sometimes I’m bitter about it, sometimes I’m cool.

Converting these part-time positions to full-time tenure-track jobs with benefits and goodies simply means employing fewer—far fewer—people because “regular” academic jobs are expensive. The availability of poorly paid, non-benefits-eligible part-time jobs, lousy as that sounds, means that more people have the chance to stay in the profession, to teach and do research.

What’s bad about the current system is that departments usually don’t accord part-timers basic respect or the goodies that are free—e.g. participating and voting in department meetings. And they don’t get support for research even if they qualify according to the same merit-based criteria as full-time tenure-track faculty, e.g. travel money and internal funding for research.

My modest proposal is: pay them lousy and don’t provide benefits so that more of them can be employed and then treat them exactly like full-time tenure-track faculty. If people are sufficiently motivated to sacrifice to stay in the profession, and lots are, we should provide that option to as many people as possible.

Geranlly, I’m with #18. The arrival and maturation of my ideas is not necessarily closely related to time I’m ‘officially working’ (if such exists). Given the choice between one year full time and two years half time, I bet I’d come up with more in the latter. Of course, the problem is that life is finite and the real choice is two years full time or two years part time – but then the latter probably includes a much richer balance of other things…

I think this is an important point.

I’m a part-time academic, and no, its “not good” for my research. If it meant that I did bad research now, I’d see it as a problem, but it just means that I don’t do much research.

I’d already accepted that I wasn’t going to be a “star” academic when before I decided to work part time when I had a child. I think it’s true that it’s hard to be a star working as a part-time academic, and that if you have ambitions to be a star and get pushed into working part time, you’ll end up feeling exploited. But I think that’s true in any field that has stars. There are very few careers where being at the top of the filed
doesn’t require more than “full-time” dedication.

If universities feel that part-timers do lower quality work than full-timers (not just less work), then that’s a reason to decide that part time work isn’t good for the institution.

But I find I bristle at people discussing whether part time work is good for me, as an academic. That’s a choice I make, within the constraints of what the university is willing to offer me, balancing all the various interests and commitments that have a claim on my time. I’m quite capable of making it with my eyes open, even if I’m not always happy with all the available choices.

I think the time factor is interesting. It might work in part-time researchers favour. Once fixed costs are taken into consideration, if you’re a tax accountant and it takes you 2 hours to fill in a tax return then productivity is linear – if you work 20 hours you’ll do 10 tax returns, if you work 40 yours you’ll do 20.

I’m not sure academic research works like this. I suspect there are substantial diminishing returns so that your 4th hour is much more productive than your 40th. Maybe some types of research are constrained by time they way tax accountancy is – say if you’re screening anti-cancer compounds and it takes you a day per drug. But otherwise all it takes is a good idea, and you don’t only have these the hours you’re clocked in. Einstein kicked off his career as part-time researcher. I’m sure it’s not as productive as full-time research, but I’m not sure it’s that terrible either.