Should we hire academics who are parents?

I think the dilemmas you describe are very real, but not really specific to academia. The rest of the world also hires the best candidate available at the moment, even when all candidates are in principle good enough. And regrettably, that can mean the one least likely to be a mother.

Perhaps a difference is that academic careers have a high-competition phase early on, while other careers have their highly-competitive phase a bit later, when people are trying to get into middle management etc. But the idea “I’ll have children when I am 38, because I have to make career first” is widespread outside of academia too.

Any kind of career break can be bad, but increasingly I’m finding that employers (in IT at least) accept and even respect people taking a yeah or two out to do interesting stuff with their lives. But then, my bit of IT is characterised to some extent by a fight to find and retain quality candidates as much as by winnowing the applicants to select the best from several that are good enough. This changes with the fads, of course, but there are always “in demand” skills and also employers who recognise good people and would rather train the clueful than hire the certified-but-clueless.

Academia is special mostly in that the metrics are readily accessible. In many commercial environments the metrics are know to be of low quality but that’s all anyone has. So “managed 25 people for three years” is used as a substitute for “competent, experienced manager” because how do you come up with a number for the latter… In academia at least you can say “papers in peer reviewed journal” and so on, which are pretty comparable. But managing five difficult people well beats managing 25 people poorly… metric anyone? (not to pick on managers, geek skills are just as hard to manage)

Moz, that’s nothing special (‘geek skills are just as hard to measure’). I have a cousin who is currently unemployed, as a project manager (IT, but it’d apply to any area). Does this mean that she helped get things done far better and faster than others, and more than justified her salary? Or that she was a plug-in project manager, probably worth her salary, but interchangeable with 1,000 others? Or was she a liability, and shouldn’t be touched with a 10-foot pole?

I’ve seen the same with engineers, managers, and several other fields. Once you get into fields where the technical skills are specialized, and interpersonal/organizational skills, adaptability and ‘wisdom’ matter a lot, resumes become low information.

At that point, you really want to talk with people who know the candidate, and know the work environment.

Is it true that people with children do worse on the job market? Some evidence suggests not. Men with children seem to do better and women with children do the same as single women.

Of course, this is merely an observational study, but the basic conclusion seems plausible.

Arbitrista, i think you partially answer your own question. The reason employers can place unlimited demands on time without being seen as extremely exploitative, is that there are enough people who are willing tobe used that way, if the good side of the job is good enough. That’s what ‘scarce job market’ is, in the end.

The trouble I guess is that in many important fields, the good side is status dependent, whether it is academia or management or IT geekery. If everyone worked 10 hours less, the ambitious crowd would still be the top of their field and thus happy, and everyone would have time for kids. But as it is, having kids makes it harder to be top of your field, unless you’re a man with an old-fashioned stay-at-home wife.

Two points:

1) I agree with Zamfir; while there may well be some particularities with seeking a job in academia (and in particular an academic job at a relatively prestigious institution) that make it unique–such as the fact that perhaps the most intense stage of the competition for said jobs begins immediately after (in not before!) one’s training for them comes to an end–the truth is this a widespread and longstanding issue. It isn’t all that substantively different from the issue which plagued women and enlightened men during the high-pressue high point of the “organization man” world of work during the 1950s.

2) I was having a breakfast break with a few colleagues at an APSA convention a few years back, and as the conversation turned to this issue, I mentioned to Dan Drezner the schedule I’d worked out with my wife during my graduate training and the job hunt afterward, trying to come to a more egalitarian arrangement in regards to raising our four daughters. Dan asked me what I had to give up to make that work. “Ambition,” was my answer.

arbitrista, at least at the highly-educated, relatively high status end of the job market where academia sits, you have the fundamental freedom to choose between the exploitative structure and giving up part of your ambitions. Perhaps the people in the system are slaves to it, but most of them choose to be so very deliberately.

The structure of the labor market, and the relative position of those seeking employment, is grossly exploitative. Discussing ethics in this situation reminds me of discussions about the proper treatment of slaves.

The trouble with comparing academic employment to slavery is that everything I have ever read that was written by an ex-slave indicates that the slaves wanted for the institution of slavery to be abolished and many ex-slaves actively worked towards this happening. However, academics and ex-academics are not so universally agreed that being paid to perform academic work is a bad thing. For example, I have not read a single post on this blog arguing for the abolishing of universities and all other academic institutions.
If the sufferers from those institutions still want them to continue, then they are fundamentally different from slavery, and thus while you may find it reminds you of discussions about slavery, I don’t see why you expect anyone else to feel that way.

I am prepared to bet a very large sum of money indeed that the problem here was not that his professor was spending too much time on child-raising and domestic labour.

You’d win the bet, in a hypothetical world where I was foolish enough to make the other side. What I was doing was outlining the educational responsibilities of many academics. Most university professors are not hired merely because their employers are power-mad psychopaths who love the idea of having hordes of minions to boss around, they are actually expected to perform some tasks that most people regard as useful for a society as a whole, such as helping their PhD students.

It seems to me that there’s an assumption underlying this whole conversation that what any academic, parent or no, ought to expect of herself is a job at a world-class research institution. Aren’t we being pretty comparative ourselves by defining success as the “best” job rather than as one that’s “just good.” Perhaps parenting ought to be seen as a “normal” state of affairs, but who says that achieving top status in one’s field ought likewise to be seen as “normal”? Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that a “normal” mother in academia should end up with a “normal” job at, say, a job at a middle-tier state university, or at a liberal-arts college where teaching excellence may outweigh publications (the former, arguably, is less a pure function of hours put in). If someone achieves “abnormal” success because she saves time by choosing not to have children, or chooses to let her spouse do the bulk of the work of child-rearing, or has superpowers and doesn’t require sleep, I see no moral problem with the result that she has preferred access to an “abnormally” desirable set of top jobs.

Arbitrista asks: How many hours are people to be expected to work, anyway? It seems perfectly clear to me that academic superstars are expected to work far more hours that your average liberal-arts professor. Isn’t that true of superstars in any field?

For the record, I’m not justifying the current state of affairs where institutions are willfully replacing decent jobs with abysmal ones (i.e., adjuncting). But that seems to me a separate issue; the fact that we’ve been defining the median job downward doesn’t intrude on the principle that the median job ought to be the expectation of those candidates who don’t possess extraordinary talent or extraordinary amounts of free time.

There are important issues in the post but the way it’s framed right now (“Is discrimination ok?”) is pretty shocking. How different is this from a circa-1960 post asking “Should we hire women; they’ll just quit when they get married/have kids?”

A lot of the justification for monkish celibacy was to make it possible to escape from family demands, which were even heavier in the past than they are now. The corruption of the flesh etc. was part of it too, of course, but IRL people are subject to so much temptation and are involved in so many complications and compromises and time-consuming nuisances that self-perfection and scholarship were hard to swing.

Everywhere that work is supposed to be your total self will be anti-family. An economic or free-market analysis of life almost always overvalues work, and is thus anti-family. (James Buchanan of the Chicago school wrote a fulsome tribute to an economist who literally worked himself to death and felt bad on his deathbed because he wasn’t able to work). For a lot of real-world people today, the overvaluation of work is part of their folk ethic — it’s not a theoretical problem. (Call the Sandwichman).

In some highly-competitive trades people do makework and put in unnecessary hours just to give themself an apparent advantage in the excellence race, leading to a vicious circle of excalating hours. Superiors also make excessive demands as a way of hazing their inferiors , weeding out the sane, and maintaining themselves at the top.

In the Malthusian world the main justification for monkish celibacy was to get that fertility rate down so as to get that Malthusian income up a few notches.

25: That strikes me as a post-hoc sociobiological rationalization, especially considering that the same church honored female fertility so highly for non-nuns.

Lt – how would you frame it if you wanted to discuss whatever issues you think are important?

Harry B – I think you are facing a conflict here. On the one hand you talk about the value of parenting in and of itself (“a great source of flourishing”). On the other hand, you talk about the inefficiency of losing productive (female) talent from elite parts of the workforce. In engineering, efficiency is calculated compared to the ideal of being able to convert 100% of the energy from one form to another. What is the 100% efficient state here that you are comparing losing productive labour to? Is it that everyone should devote their time 100% to the formal economy, or at least the elite should? To put it another way, if a person, male or female, values the flourishing involved in parenting at least as much as they value creating great science, what is your basis for saying that it is inefficient for them to raise kids and work less as a scientist? The fundamental basis of micro-economics is that people maximise their utility, as distinct from maximising monetary income. A standard result taught in Econ 101 classes is that if a worker’s hourly wage increases we can’t tell from first principles if the worker will work more or fewer hours, or to put it in jargon if the income effect outweights the substitution effect or not. (Of course many people object to this model on the basis that many workers can’t pick their hours, but in the context of flexible working arrangements for academic parents that objection doesn’t seem applicable).

Maybe the comparison between academics should not be made only on realizations, achieved products but also on “how to” : how to be a good teacher, how to face your academic responsabilities, how to think in an original way… A very good paper is worth more than 15 good papers, I think. So quality and “know-how” should be the first criteria, instead of number of publications, number of conferences, number of subjects dealt with…
Very Best !

Sam (@7) – the study asserts that being married is a reliable proxy for having children, given that some large fraction of the married students have children before graduation, but provides no support for that assertion. It is possible that having children reduces the benefits of being married, but not so much as to make being married with children less beneficial than being single.

For example, I have not read a single post on this blog arguing for the abolishing of universities and all other academic institutions.

Yes, well that’s because there aren’t any grad students commenting today…

I could have chosen to hire someone in to do the caring, and been more productive myself.

No, you’re an academic, you can’t afford that.

Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that a “normal” mother in academia should end up with a “normal” job at, say, a job at a middle-tier state university, or at a liberal-arts college where teaching excellence may outweigh publications (the former, arguably, is less a pure function of hours put in).

It does sound reasonable, but to take such a view would require that we not sweat it when there are fewer women professors in the nations top research universities.

Isn’t the reason we’re having this discussion that we’re not really comfortable with the way the top spots are distributed? At the end of the day, though, we have a system where those positions go largely to people who are willing and able to devote an extremely large amount of time and energy toward the endeavor. To say that “people who have chosen to devote their lives to their research should not be penalized for not being parents” is to say that the unequal distribution will persist.

I feel like we’re jumping ahead a few steps by acting as if a handicap is a plausible solution so we can conclude the problem is intractable because handicaps seem crazy. Surely the best way to increase (say) the numbers of married women with children isn’t to spot them a number of publications, but increase institutional support (family leave, daycare, etc) for families.

(And of course, one difference between TV and children/elder care is that it is generally considered permissible to turn off the TV. Children are people, which means we owe them a different set of duties. Most parents wouldn’t describe the time commitment that rearing children demands as a hobby.)

The institutional twist that the academy has is a relatively long journeyman period (graduate school) and a fairly rigid window that the determines the trajectory of much of the rest of one’s career (postPhD-through-tenure.) And there’s no way to interrupt that process and return to it, and it coincides reasonably well with female fertility.

One odd feature of this discussion is the assumption that there is a competition between the ‘productivity’ of academic employees and their having and raising children. We all seem to be assuming that universities and colleges exist for the sake of cutting-edge scholarship, alone. To my knowledge, even the vaunted ‘research’ universitites exist, in part, to educate – particularly to educate the young. Wouldn’t it be odd if – monk-like – academics chose only to educate the children of others and not to raise children of their own who might be educated (by other academics) in the future?
To be sure, the number of children that academics can contribute to the applications pool is relatively small, as academics are a relatively small segment of the population. So, what strikes me as odd is not simply the absence of a utility calculation. Rather, I think it perverse to suggest that institutions of higher learning should not want their own employess to be parents of people who will seek higher education. It is especially perverse when we recognize that the children of academics are most likely to be the [future] students who value education for its own sake rather than as a ticket to a job.
On the other hand, as I do not want to overplay the ‘education is special’ card, let me illustrate the perverse character of the assumption in broader terms. Imagine a society which persuaded its citizens that they should all work to their maximum ability in order to maximize ‘productivity’ and that having children is incompatible with this. So, everyone stops having children. In this case, both the utility problems and the perversity are readily apparent.
In other words, ‘productivity’ for what? A world with no future generations?

Speaking as an academic on the job market and a father of a two-months old, I feel like many other commenters that you are exaggerating the singularity of academia, Ingrid. My experience of the post-doc job market for instance is very well described by your “good enough” criteria: if all you want is a post-doc position, and if you are qualified enough, you get a post-doc position. If however you are after a position with a reasonable teaching load, decent pay, in a certain geographic area and/or within a team which complements well you own research interests, then you better be very good or lucky. And if you want in addition a top (or well-known) institution, we are in “sky is the limit” territory. But this seems to me to be common to all top jobs (in management, the arts, sports…) and not unheard of in seemingly less competitive job markets: my wife tried to make a living in the non-governmental humanitarian relief system, and it seemed to me much harder than in academia.

Now about the dilemma, I think a smart hiring committee will strive to evaluate the plausible overall potential of a candidate. Seeing that a high percentage of people do have children at one point in their life (an estimation is hard to find but various statistics fluctuate between 70% to 85% depending on the country), perhaps the committee could take into account the fact that maybe the non-parent candidate will soon become a parent employee.

These quibbles aside, I think your last paragraph was very well put.

I am floored that not a single person suggested that being a parent might make you a better professor. I’m more engaged with my research, more empathetic to my students, a better manager of time because of my children. And my students tell me they are desperate for work/life balance role models.

Dr. Fantastic,

I am floored that not a single person suggested that being a parent might make you a better professor.

I’m not sure that’s true; maybe no one in this thread has come out said so explicitly, but in many of the comments there’s been a clear sense that the struggle to find a liveable balance between the often time-consuming demands of academia and the very real needs of one’s children is worth doing, and not just because your life choices oblige you to, but because (or, at least, also because) the upside of that struggle is the benefits and sense of perspective and wisdom it enables you to bring into the classroom, etc.

If anything, I think the primary point here has been that some academia is, in some ways, functionally closed to, or hostile to, parents…and since that portion of academia often happens to its most influential portion, people’s perspective gets warped, especially right out of graduate school

John Emerson wrote:>/a> For a lot of real-world people today, the overvaluation of work is part of their folk ethic—it’s not a theoretical problem. (Call the Sandwichman).

A third point, which may be a bit of a curve ball, is that this isn’t “just the way things are.” It is the way public policies promoting economic growth have made things. Sure, there was “invidious comparison” and “pecuniary emulation” back in Thorsten Veblen’s day or else he wouldn’t have struck a nerve with his analysis. But the parenthood/tenure type of dilemma is representative of a much more generalized condition today. There may thus be less absolute deprivation but more relative deprivation, relative to one’s ostensible “peers” or reference group. And government policies have contributed to that relative deprivation by promoting economic growth without at the same time taking measures to ameliorate the effects of that growth on social life. One might even suspect that because economic growth enabled higher tax revenues without raising taxes, policy makers turned a blind eye to the socially-disruptive aspects of growth because these only contributed even further to growth (in the form of the ‘criminal justice’ system, ‘health’ care costs, etc.).

Surely the best way to increase (say) the numbers of married women with children isn’t to spot them a number of publications, but increase institutional support (family leave, daycare, etc) for families.

If parents take family leave they are probably not doing research (there are some exceptions, eg I understand some linguists have faithfully recorded their offspring’s language development, and I remember spending a lot of time with Mum in hospital waiting rooms for one year entertaining myself with a series of books, though I can’t remember what she was doing).

If you put kids in daycare all the time, why bother having them? I don’t object to childcare per se. Both my parents worked for most of my childhood, and we spent a chunk of time in daycare of various forms. I had a happy childhood, with the exception of school, which wasn’t anything to do with the hours my parents worked. But we still had a lot of time with both parents, when they weren’t working. If my parents had adopted the sterotypical pre-WWII upper-class British style of having their kids raised by full-time by nannies and nursemaids, I think they would have failed to obtain the full flourishing Harry B talks about (leaving aside the minor detail that it probably would have driven them bankrupt too).

To my knowledge, even the vaunted ‘research’ universitites exist, in part, to educate – particularly to educate the young.

Which requires professors in those fields to spend time keeping up with new developments in their field. Also, an argument for requiring research by professors is that’s one way of measuring academic quality – with many scientific fields no administrator could assess if the professor’s any good or has gone haywire, that’s a job for the professor’s peers, and there may not be any peers there at that university (eg my engineering school tried to cover about all the possible courses that could covered under the title of Electrical Engineering, probably because it was one of only two university engineering schools in the country, leading to a very diverse staff). If the professor is publising in good journals, they probably know what they’re talking about.

If you put kids in daycare all the time, why bother having them?

You know, many, many families have to use daycare at some point, which you realize because that was indeed your own experience growing up. So why the assumption that a professor who would find an on-site day care useful is “put[ting] kids in daycare all the time”? That doesn’t describe your experience. It doesn’t describe the experience of the parents that I know (especially given the academy’s somewhat flexible schedule…)

And again, this is a strongly gender-imbalanced issue. The stereotypical young prof with the two kids and stay-at-home wife is considered stable, and no one questions his productivity (at least not to the same extent, or at least not just by announcing his wife is pregnant; I’ve even heard it described as a positive thing, “Young John has to work hard with that new baby to feed!”) or wonders whether he’s harming his own parental flourishing by having his wife as primary caregiver, or argues that maybe if he wants a normal life, he should head for a small liberal arts college. (Not sure what the SLACs think about being considered the fallback career…)

Most of Europe subsidizes childraising, and their birth rate is lower than ours, often much lower. Chris’s argument makes sense on paper, especially if you’re an economist, but it’s not empirical. What economists say about The Family is usually mildly insane.

AC to Harry:

What you said suggests we can’t engage in ethical acts with political goals below the level of the state. I think, at every single level people are required to undermine gender and race disadvantage rather than just let the government do that for them. Academia has considerable leeway to do this and if the people within it choose to see their hand as tied in this regard then I really despair anything can be done at the higher social level.

This is an importnat point, I think, and not just in terms of race and gender (important as those are!)

Lemuel, you are absolutely right that all of those assumption are neither unchangable nor perfect models of the current situation. But they are close to the model both employer and employee have in mind at the start of a career, and thus it influences both hiring behaviour and child plans.

Well yes, this is mostly true. Mostly, tho! — I know several fairly successful female academics with kids, and while they have ertainly worried about whether this would affect their attractiveness as candidates — to the point of scrupulously avoiding mention of their family on campus visits — I don’t believe I’ve ever heard any of them suggest that having kids actually hurt their ability to do acadmic work.

The point is, tho, that every one of those six assumptions represents a margin on which the conflict — real or perceived — between family and acdemic work could be addressed. But Ingrid skips right over them and presents the situation as if the only choice we have is a strict tradeoff between merit and childraising.

It is always diverting watching well-meaning liberals tying themselves in knots trying to reconcile the two sacred cows of respectable American middle-class life, the bourgeois career and the bourgeois family.

In other words, on the one hand a model of the economic sphere which requires potentially unlimited time and effort to be committed to the competition for arbitrary prizes (publications published, hours billed, widgets sold) and the avoidance of equally arbitrary stigmas (time spent away from paid employment, breeding at the wrong time, breeding too much or too little) for the sake of projects and institutions whose social value could be optimistically described as hard to discern, all in the grand cause of securing for oneself and one’s immediate family a higher material standard of living than one’s fellow human beings, a higher place in the status hierarchy and the power to dominate their lives (albeit, in the case of academia, in notably small and unglamorous ways).

On the other hand, an ideal of the domestic in which Mom and Pop, conjoined for life if not beyond by legal deeds and the fear of social censure, safely locked away in a box in suburbia, exercise exclusive, obsessional control over the social, sexual and intellectual development of their progeny–a role which, like the other, calls for potentially unlimited time and effort–all the more effectively to mould them in their image, thus ensuring the continued operation of the whole soul-crushing machine.

Perhaps it is time to realise these two holy idols of life in bourgeois society can not in fact be reconciled to one another, are, in fact, in plain contradiction, especially when both are thought of as the natural aspiration and the birthright of every middle-class man and woman in the country; rather than vainly asking ourselves how to do so some us would prefer to ask a different and more fruitful question: how can we destroy both, and quickly?

Well, I know you think that but, as I’m sure you also know, not everyone agrees. Judging by this thread most people who comment here do though. I’m agnostic myself but I think it’s sometimes worthwhile reminding people of the different perspectives that might be out there. Anyway, that honestly wasn’t aimed at you specifically, and wasn’t meant to come across as a continuation of our previous disagreement. I am sure you do have a sensible and morally acceptable view about that too, and I am sure I don’t agree with it.

If Kafka were alive I think he’d be able to make us a fantastic story of some of the posts here.

The best of the worst has to be the idea that longer working-hours translates into more production and, to add insult to injury, that producing more automatically means that you achieve a higher productivity. The latter disregards the piles of garbage produced and the former the many hours spent at work getting up somebody’s nose or – maybe a bit more common – up somebody’s arse.

Unfortunately that’s the way in which a lot of society works – to my dismay apparently also the academic world – leading to a rat race where having children (or being lazy – or not wanting to bother after 5 PM) is mutually exclusive with having a societal impact & being useful outside of the kitchen (or couch – or bed).

As if there’s a correlation between spending lots of hours on your work & having talent for it (quite the reverse I’d say). Maybe the loss of talent by preselecting for those who are stupid enough to work long hours is the reason for the current economic mess.

This issue is much broader, luckily, than feminism. We are in dire need of rules that do not privilige the idiots that want to spend hours on networking and what have you – for instance that everybody can take 3 months paid leave for every 2 years of work (that’s the minimum I’d say) or at least 2 days per week are done from home (such that on the days like that nobody benefits from sitting around to show the boss he’s the last one to leave).

It’s urgent – one of these days somebody will write a ‘politically incorrect ‘ post that the West has too many children where the issue clearly is we have too many old people (& we should seriously start thinking Soylent Green).

On the one hand parents should not pay too high a professional price for the fact that they are parents; on the other hand people who have chosen to devote their lives to their research should not be penalised for not being parents.

Is anyone else reminded of Dinesh D’Souza’s complaints about how unfair it is to provide high-quality public schools for all kids? After all, he worked hard and made all sort of sacrifices so he could afford to send his kids to private school, precisely in order to give them an advantage over other kids.

That had me on the Google pretty quickly. It’s apparently from The Virtue of Prosperity.

http://www.slate.com/id/1006238/

The real problem is that we’re training far more qualified academics than we have jobs for, that’s why the academic institutions can be so picky about who they hire.

Back in the “good old days” when my college professors were starting their careers, you didn’t have to have such inflated CVs in order to succeed. But back then (the 1950s and 60’s) research funding was increasing, new colleges were opening, which meant that almost any reasonably competent person with a PhD (and even some with only a Masters) could have a reasonable assurance of some sort of decent academic career. And these people were perfectly good — the CV of my advisor was such that he probably wouldn’t get a job today, but he was an excellent teacher, and while his research didn’t win a Nobel Prize, he was a valuable resource to the community.

I don’t really see any evidence that these inflated CVs that seem to be a requirement for jobs these days really translate into better academics. I’m certainly not impressed with a lot of the research being published today, it’s a lot of irrelevant academic dithering and mathematical masturbation. And, I suspect that the successful “academic entrepreneurs” are to some degree, phonies, good only a PR and using the work done by their grad students and post-docs.

Any realisitc solution to this problem would involve cutting back the number of PhDs being granted so that institutions can’t be as picky about who they hire, seriously increasing research funding so that it takes less work to get funded, or some combination of both.

RB and LP — thanks! Fantastic quote. Will get a lot of use.

More domestic responsibilities doesn’t necesarily mean less academic productivity. People who assume it does are – inter alia – contributing to a climate that makes it hard to argue for family-friendly work practices (and hence fair divisions of domestic labour). They should stop doing so.

I strongly agree with this, tho. Formally, this post is identical to any anti-affirmative action screed you’d find on a conservative site.

Assumption of perfect meritocracy except for efforts to help a disadvantaged group? Check.
Assumption that efforts to help a less-privileged group must take the form of a finger on the scales of meritocracy, as opposed to, say, a more supportive environment or different recruiting practices? Check.
Assumption that members of the disadvantaged group really are less qualified? Check.
Assumption of a zero-sum game between groups, so that any effort to help some must hurt others? Check.

I’d really like to know if other CT bloggers — Michael Berube, say — think of Ingrid’s views in this post. (Or rather, social norms being what they are, I’d like to know what they would think of the post if it weren’t written by a co-blogger…)

Harry, ‘pretty much’ – that probably leaves room to exclude the ‘Soylent Green’ bit, I guess ;-)

Let’s flip the logic of only allowing non-parents to be in the academy. There would no longer be any students who could say “One of my parents (or perhaps both) are professors.” I think that would be sad, since it is often a joy to have children of academics in one’s classroom. Also, aren’t many members of the current academy the children of academics? It’s a state of affairs that perhaps has it’s downside, and if it were eliminated something would fill the vacuum. But I’m not sure if the vacuum would necessarily be filled by something better.

Lisa: thanks. I am happy to amend ‘destroy’ to ‘transform into something non-bourgeois’. No point in being doctrinaire about these things…

There would no longer be any students who could say “One of my parents (or perhaps both) are professors.”

An end to nepotism, another theoretical advantage of a monkish university!

The word “productivity” – here, passim – always makes me feel rather ill. Is there anywhere other than contemporary academia where people sincerely wish each other a “productive vacation” or a “productive Christmas”? A very lonely Stakhanovism.

Cala – as I understand it, Ingrid Robeyn’s argument was that parents suffered relative to non-parents in academia because of the time involved in raising kids. The reply was that more daycare could be provided. If parents have as much time free to spend working on academic issues as non-parents that implies that their kids are in daycare pretty much 24-7, like the stereotypical 19th century British aristocracy with a nanny and a nursemaid who slept in the kids’ nursery, and only seeing their kids once a day when nanny brought them down after dinner. This was not how I was raised, and it seems incompatible with the parents themselves getting much out of parenting, even if the kids are perfectly fine.

JoB – I don’t know who you are responding to. I talked about how an archeologist can translate more hours at work into more productivity (eg excavating more ground, providing feedback on more papers). This may mean getting up somebody’s arse, but that’s what we want in academic research – we want people to be pointing out other people’s errors, not being all fluffy and lovey-dovey and supporting each other’s self-esteem. Exactly how do you think that academia can progress if being nice takes priority over getting things right? Politeness is nice, but if attacking someone’s wrong theory means getting up their arse as they’re emotionally attached to it, I say well, get up their arse – just try to focus on the theory and the facts, not on personal attacks.

And yes, academic research does produce piles of garbage – this is necessay to uncover the good stuff. I don’t know any area of academic research that progresses without people ever producing garbage (eg failed hypotheses, irrelevant data (such as all the dirt that has to be dug away from archeological sites, the debris from lab experiments that exploded unintentionally, etc).

Or in other words, getting up people’s arses and generating piles of garbage are not necessarily bad things.

Praisegod barebones – yes, more domestic responsibilities doesn’t necessarily mean less academic productivity. People without children can spend their time doing pointless, non-productive stuff, or just have a massive run of bad luck. And sometimes people with domestic responsibilities can combine those with academic research, eg acquisition of languge studies. People who just assume that more domestic responsibilities means less academic productivity should stop doing so. This is why I have not been assuming such a thing but instead have been arguing that there is a conflict between a lot of time spent parenting and many forms of academic research. I understand Ingrid Robeyns is herself an academic, so I think you should grant the possibility that she herself is not just making assumptions but instead reporting what she has found in her own life.

Dear Ms. Robeyns,

I believe that – at least in theory – the solution to the dilemma that you introduce lies in the capability to assess the quality of the work that a person can carry out during the hours in which that person is paid to work. I am aware that performances are not always easily evaluated; nonetheless, if a fair competition among all those who aspire to a single position is sought after, then the competition should not take into consideration variables like “how many hours one is willing to work for”. The number of hours should be specified in the contract. What shold matters is what one is able to do during those hours. Same as a soccer coach is not allowed to select more than 11 players for his team, employers should not be allowed to expect people to work for more hours than they are paid for.

another anonymous — well, you could hardly have couched the criticism in a more charming way. Thanks. I agree with all that, and you and others on the thread have convinced me that on those days when I have that thought I’m wrong. Thanks for that too — I’ll remember what you, lemuel, etc, have said if I find myself tempted. And finally thanks for liking the parents’ rights paper. I hope you, lemuel, etc, find my new post interesting.

JoB –yes, I was deliberately a bit vague because I wouldn’t want to commit to the Soylent Green bit. Not on paper…

I wonder if the dilemma described in the original post is specific to certain fields. Surely an English professor or historian who has written an excellent book, and some superb essays, can compete with someone who has done nothing but work for a decade and has amassed thousands of pages of less-good stuff. You’d have to narrow the dilemma to describe some superman or -woman who had written, say, three books by age 30, all of which were excellent. Do such people exist? To make it hard on myself, I will assume that they do. Is the decision between someone who has written one brilliant book, versus someone who has written three brilliant books, so clear-cut? I’m not sure it is. Even it is, that’s a dilemma much more narrowly focused than “parents v. non-parents.” (Maybe in scientific fields, where there’s an expectation that you basically live in your lab, the scenario in the post is more relevant. I don’t know.)

I’ve havve heard this argument made by lawyers and investment bankers, by the way. (“The best jobs simply have to go to the people who work 100 hours a week. It would be unfair any other way.”) I have the same reaction to those comments that I did to this post: A discriminatory (against women, mostly, but also against men who share child-care duties) structure is assumed, rather than challenged. Maybe the dilemma would exist in a world with decent daycare and gender equality, but to leave those factors out of the initial hypothetical seems obtuse.

Sorry, that last sentence was kind of over the line. I retract it.

Well, she is hardly childless. Perhaps because I know her pretty well, and know the concerns that animate her, I am quite bemused by the antagonism toward Ingrid that some commentators have evinced. It’s quite misplaced and really is based on a misunderstanding of the intent of the post as well, in lemuel’s case (#89) as a spectacular misreading of her own situation.

JoB,

Anyway, it doesn’t matter a lot because you’ve made me extremely unhappy by construeing my comments as disapproving of your lifestyle.

I’m sorry if that’s the impression I’ve given, because it’s not true. I do not think you in any way disparaged my lifestyle; I think you want to support it. What I disagree with you on is a question of fact, not moral judgment: I think that more time and effort leads to genuinely more production in most cases, and so there is a trade-off between optimal parenting and optimal workplace productivity.

At the risk of being a smart-ass, this argument seems to cry out for a philosophical analysis. And since I was a mediocre philosophy major long ago, I remember that we weren’t supposed to smuggle messy things like “gender” and “history” and “social science” into arguments.

No indeed. They stood and fell on their own logical consistency, or lack thereof.

Thus, for this argument, an old philosophical tool: the reductio ad absurdum.

So here it goes. Yes, of course you should hire the more productive employee. Businesses (even academies) are seeking to maximize productivity per employee. All other businesses should do the same. This is a foundation of capitalism.

In fact, when it comes to snow days, kids’ sick days, class breakfasts, soccer practices, annoying quasi-holidays when schools are closed but “real” businesses aren’t, or summer holidays, the non-parent will always have the parent beat.

Thus, on a macro scale, it would evolve into a system where Workers work and Breeders breed and raise children — but don’t work themselves, because they’re not productive enough.

However, the only way to sustain such a reasonable system would be for the Workers to financially support the Breeders, since it’s not in the Workers’ best self-interest to stifle the supply of future Workers (for economic and corporate growth is the foundation of modern capitalism). Also, the only way for future Workers (i.e., children) to acquire the proper socialization to join the existing Workers is if Workers are not actively hostile to children and Breeders by refusing to provide for their material, social, and intellectual needs.

And if Workers are reasonable and proactive, they’ll have a vested interest in such a system, because when they retire, younger Workers who were once children will cook for and take care of older Workers in retirement homes, and they wouldn’t want these younger people to be incompetent, or worse, to hate them.

But the only way to support such a system is if the Workers will have to work even harder to sustain themselves, children, and Breeders.

But it will come to pass that some workers resent this — “Why should I work to support these people who are on a kind of welfare?” — just the same way many people resent paying property taxes to fund schools, even though they benefited from these same schools when they were children.

And it may also come to pass that just because a Worker is childless, it doesn’t mean they’re not an incompetent, or a bad Worker. In fact, doing-nothing-but-work May make Workers bitter and hostile, since the breeders are off going to the park and the beach and on bike rides, while they’re working 18-hour days. And what if, while working these 18-hour days, these Workers become less productive?

In that case, Workers who are incompetent, bitter, burnt out or merely less productive end up dropping out of the working pool, because, let’s face it, every time they look out the office window and see those happy kids, they’re getting evidence that there’s more to life than just work. Or, just looking outside the office window is a sign of non-productivity.

(And just to simplify, let’s just ignore the possible squeamishness that children might have about entering the Working system, or the hypothetical situation where Breeders or children stumble across the writings of someone like Karl Marx.)

And the more Workers that drop out, the harder the other Workers have to struggle, because now they have to support a whole other class of dependents: Former Workers. And pretty soon they can’t, and the whole system collapses.

QED

JoB, I think we have different preferences. If I mentally picture someone literally trying to get up my arse, I also have a tendency to mentally picture me trying to dig their eyes out of their sockets, as per that self-defence class I took. If you ever want to suck up to me, I advise trying a cosy chair and a nice cup of hot tea – I don’t do the S&M scene.

I’m in the “parenting is work, and you can’t be as good at two jobs as at one” category. is one of those obnoxious concepts related to the myth of hard-work meritocracy.

Lucky for me then that I have no problems with being obnoxious per se. I’d far rather be right and obnoxious or wrong and obnoxious than never venture an opinion for fear of saying something that someone somewhere might possibly regard as obnoxious. I find the mere concept of worms growing up in human flesh absolutely creepy, and yet it does happen and I understand the worms can cause serious health problems, so I don’t see obnoxiousness per se as a reason to stop discussing things, although sometimes it’s a reason to delay discussion until after dinner.

I’m not sure about what you mean when you say that there is no relationship between the amount of time you put on spending time with kids and its effect on anyone. Surely, if my parents had not spent time with me as a kid, I would know rather less about them? I do recall quite a few enjoyable times in their company as a child. I think I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Or to take the role of academic research – are you trying to say that there is no relationship between time spent saying reading journal articles in your area and how much you learn?

I doubt that any of you have ever actually worked in an academic institution that places primary emphasis on quality teaching. I do, and I can tell you that my work hours would go down a lot if all I had to worry about was publishing the next great book in my field (they were much lower when I was working on the two books I published with major university presses in 2006 and before I took this job).

“Lucky for me then that I have no problems with being obnoxious per se. I’d far rather be right and obnoxious or wrong and obnoxious than never venture an opinion for fear of saying something that someone somewhere might possibly regard as obnoxious.”

But note that these are rarely the only options on offer, and we’d all do well to remember that.

Ingrid,

Thanks for the replies, and sorry again for personalizing my criticism. (Which would be wrong even if weren’t so off-base factually.)

I don’t think the reason this kind of dynamic develops has anything to do with defects in your English, which is fine. I think it’s more a tendency shared by most of us (where “us” is participants in blog threads, or educated English speakers circa 2009, or human beings in general, or maybe especially the male subsets of the above) to treat discussion as a kind of combat and look for opportunities to win points rather than for mutual understanding. In face to face conversation this tendency is usually restrained by all the nonverbal cues that allow you to identify or sympathize with your interlocutor, and misapprehensions can be corrected quickly before they snowball. But online it’s much easier to reduce someone to whatever abstract position you want to argue against — especially if, as here (for totally understandable reasons!) there’s no response from the other side.

So I wouldn’t take it at all personally. With perhaps one caveat — some of these dynamics get restrained by the various cues — jokes, familair references, etc. — that establish in online settings that the speaker is “one of us”. If you seem to get attacked more than other CT bloggers, I would guess it’s because you don’t really do the cool-TV-show/old-SF-writer/fun-music-video/odd-personal-experience posts thatmany of the otehr regualrs do, which help establish the sense of CT as a community. Which isn’t to say you should do such posts, just a guess about why this difference might exist.