The Family Track

About the Book

How do the necessities of caring for others deter, benefit, or redefine research and teaching in higher education? What have universities done to recognize the difficulties facing academic parents, single mothers and fathers, graduate students, lesbian and gay couples? What pro-family policies can be enacted during institutional budget crises?

At a time when the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaper of the lives of those it employs, The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve discusses the challenges and benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competing needs to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in other personal relationships. Here academic women and men explore issues that include biological and tenure clocks, childcare and eldercare, surrogate parenting of students, and increasing job demands. In telling stories about the quality of their lives, they express their hopes, anxieties, difficulties, and personal strategies for maintaining a delicate but achievable balance.

"Lively, well-written, useful, and persuasive … The Family Track reveals much on family roles within the academy and suggests many specific projects and guidelines for Institutional change."
-- Judith Kegan Gardiner, editor of Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice