July-August 2007

In 2005-06, the recruitment of a “superstar” faculty member who had won more than $2.5 million in grants almost failed at a flagship university due to a lack of available childcare. The research facilities, students, salary, and prestige of the university were all competitive, but with no childcare available for the recruit’s small children, the hiring package was nearly refused. 

A few years earlier, a faculty couple at that same institution had faced a family emergency. Both secured teaching releases through a flexible option available there, freeing them to focus on the crisis. Within a year of the traumatic event, one underwent a successful tenure review. Another prestigious institution has since tried to recruit the couple, who cite the support they received during the family crisis as a major reason for not considering the outside offer.

Elsewhere, a promising young female faculty member received no support in finding a position locally for her husband, a highly skilled professional. Frustrated, he found employment out of state. Within two years, they had divorced. She left the institution and went on to a successful, productive research career outside of the academy.

As we all know, student demographics are shifting, which is beginning to change the face of future faculty. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in 2002-3 women earned 57.5 percent of the bachelor’s degrees, 58.8 percent of the master’s degrees, and 47.1 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded in the U.S. Moreover, the men as well as the women of the generations called “X” and “Y” want to combine fulfilling home lives with their academic careers. The traditional faculty model is not likely to satisfy this new generation of faculty members, which increasingly poses challenges for those trying to recruit and retain them. 

Strategies to address the problem of work and family balance have begun emerging in recent years. The November/December 2000 issue of Change described a half-time tenure model proposed by Robert Drago, a professor of labor studies at Penn State, and Joan Williams, a professor of law at American University, designed to benefit faculty with substantial care-giving responsibilities—still typically women. Many American college and universities have begun to adopt this and other “family-friendly policies,” such as tenure-clock extensions. In 2006, the American Council on Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced that five institutions had won $250,000 awards from the foundation’s Flexible Faculty Careers program for the most promising policies and programs.

Each of the policies to enable work and family balance, however, is situated within the broader academic culture. Departmental culture is particularly important, since faculty lives are generally most directly affected by their immediate environment. So what happens when the climate of a department is not conducive to a faculty member’s actually taking advantage of the available policies, as the education journalist Jon Marcus discussed in the March/April 2007 issue of Change?

Faculty who become department chairs typically have been trained to be scholars, not administrators. Most come to the position with little leadership experience beyond chairing departmental committees. So how can institutions achieve cultural transformation when policy implementation is carried out within departments headed by novice leaders? Our recommendation is that colleges and universities offer leadership-development workshops for department chairs, with the following three goals:
•  To expose them to critiques of the academic norms related to gender, race/ethnicity, age, care-giver status, disability, and privilege;
•  To prepare them to be agents of change within their departments;
•   To create a collegial network that will enable cross-departmental peer mentoring and dual-career hiring, as well as encourage new faculty to take advantage of important but infrequently used policies such as tenure-clock extensions.

Leadership-Development Workshops
Nationally, a number of organizations offer professional-development workshops for department chairs. The American Council on Education does so through its Center for Institutional and International Initiatives; the Council of Independent Colleges offers a series of workshops for department or division chairs; the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences also sponsors annual seminars for department chairs; and the Department Executive Officer Program is run by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (an academic consortium of the Big 10 universities and the University of Chicago).

But the first national leadership-development workshop that targeted cultural change, and in particular work-life issues and policies for faculty, was a two-day pilot workshop in 2005 for more than 50 department chairs, offered by the University of Washington’s Center for Institutional Change. With Sloan Foundation support, the primary focus of the pilot was on the tension between flexible career options and the aspects of academic culture that discourage the use of these policies. To ground the workshop, Robert Drago and Marc Goulden, a data analyst at the University of California at Berkeley, presented data and facilitated a panel discussion on the merits and availability of family-friendly policies.

In the evaluations at the conclusion of the workshop and in phone interviews a month later, more than 90 percent of the respondents said that they would recommend the workshop to others. Several participants indicated that they took work-family materials back to their dean or provost to attempt to stimulate cultural change on their campus. Benchmarking data on institutional policies turned out to be a particularly compelling catalyst for developing and implementing new family-friendly policies on individual campuses. 

But aside from this event, national leadership-development programs typically focus on the broad range of administrative duties that new chairs will assume. We believe that those should be supplemented by local workshops for department chairs that emphasize how to create a supportive environment on individual campuses for women, faculty of color, and
caregivers. 

There exists a model for workshops of this sort. The National Science Foundation (NSF) instituted the ADVANCE Institutional Transformational Awards in acknowledgment of the need in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines “to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers, thereby contributing to the development of a more diverse science and engineering workforce.” In three rounds of awards (see sidebar), a total of 32  institutions have received ADVANCE Awards. As the inaugural institutions reach the end of their five-year cooperative agreements with NSF, it is clear that engaging department chairs and other campus leaders has been critical to the success of each ADVANCE school’s transformational efforts.

In 2001, the University of Washington (UW) was among nine institutions awarded grants in the first round. Administered through the Center for Institutional Change, quarterly workshops have been offered for chairs and emerging campus leaders.

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