What Would a Pro-Family Academia Look Like?

My most recent Martin Center column highlighted the irony, considering higher education’s formative influence on America’s prevailing anti-natalist culture, of the industry’s anxiety over declining birthrates. “Where,” I asked, “are large families less welcome, or where do they seem more culturally transgressive, than on American campuses?” I quoted briefly from Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk, who describes the book as “motivated by a single intuition: that if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must also be consequential.” Current birth rates and their own responses to surveys suggest that one-in-three Gen Z women—those presently in their most fertile years—will never have children. Pakaluk hopes that the exceptions to such trends may reveal underlying causes and suggest means of reversal.

Nowhere, perhaps, are demographic trends less susceptible to redress than the world of higher ed. Adjusting for the trope that large families are a product of poverty and ignorance, Pakaluk confined her study to college-educated women with at least five children. A tenured professor herself and also the wife of an academic, the campus is her native environment. Pakaluk knows from experience that, while her female peers in academia are 40 percent less likely than their male colleagues to be married with children a decade after completing their doctorates, tenured faculty members are not outliers. At all levels and every stage of life, higher education tends to discourage childbirth.

In her study’s participants, her own students, and elsewhere, Pakaluk has encountered women who wanted to start families but felt pressure to delay marriage. Such pressure might be implicit but pervasive social messaging, or explicit admonitions from parents concerned for their daughters’ material best interest. Both point to one of Pakaluk’s main conclusions, that “falling birth rates are not a cost problem” per se. Overwhelmingly, her interviewees reported that “the main obstacle to choosing a child” is all those other potential uses of their time and financial resources—opportunity costs, in economist-speak. And for what more than economic opportunity do students attend college?

One participant, Danielle, put the matter most pointedly in describing how “professional education and work crowd out time for having children in myriad ways—even when women want [them].” The root problem is a system of “formal schooling undifferentiated from a male timeline, [continuing] through college, graduate training, residencies, and assistantships.” Danielle asserts that college-educated women thinking of starting a family often feel a “sense of betrayal of people who’ve invested in their careers.” “There’s no option,” she laments, “for a part-time, six-year medical residency, because I have young children and I want to be around them.”

Well, why not? I suspect that falling birth rates are not an unintended result of our society’s education and labor systems. But supposing they are unintended, how might we remedy them? For the world of higher ed, two of Pakaluk’s study participants are particularly suggestive. Miki, a mother of five, met her husband at an elite graduate school. After completing their respective doctorates and securing their first jobs, they had two children. Miki felt an openness to further children after a move to their second institution. Miki continued to teach but “left the tenure track.” Importantly, the couple felt they “finally had an employer that was really supportive of [their] having a family.” A tenure-track professor and a spouse with lecturer status must seldom feel there are enough hours in a day, but they at least have greater time-management autonomy and flexibility than most American workers. 

Pakaluk describes another interviewee, Angela, as “almost a unicorn in the academy”: “female, African American, and tenured, she has more than double the children [five] of the average American mom.” More remarkably, Angela “had her first baby at thirty-four after starting her first job.” Children altered the trajectory of Angela’s career. “I don’t have a published book,” she confesses. “That’s not happening. I don’t care… I’m not that person. Would I be a better scholar if I didn’t have children? [Yes]. I used to work all the time…” Angela is too humble. She must still work all the time, published monograph or no. Five children are a full-time job in themselves, but her institution must highly value her teaching to have granted tenure. 

So, what would a more pro-family academia look like? Let’s start with the point of entry.  Application materials for graduate programs routinely include a phrase like, “[State U] is an equal opportunity employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.” Here are just a few examples. Such statements are unobjectionable, but they are legally redundant. Graduate programs are no more permitted to discourage or reject applicants for reasons of race or sex than restaurants with “all are welcome” stickers on their door could elect out of racial animus to not seat customers. These are not legal disclosures; they are signals to prospective applicants. So why not add: “Those who have spent significant time out of education or employment as primary caregivers for children are encouraged to apply”? How many mothers with copious intellectual gifts and unrealized scholarly potential have considered graduate school at mid-life only to never try for want of encouragement? 

I say “mothers,” but I intentionally used gender-neutral language in my model statement. In Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and elsewhere, federal law forbids employers from offering unequal benefits on the basis of sex. There are many families where a father is the primary caregiver, and some male academics must be struggling to balance the demands of teaching and scholarship with heavy domestic responsibilities. But in nearly all instances, such policies will most immediately benefit women. (In truth, they would benefit everybody. As the Biblical proverb says: “In a multitude of people is a king’s honor, but in the lack of people is the downfall of a prince.” Republics, too—beware!)

Robustly pro-family healthcare policies would encompass the widest possible variety of options for ante- and postnatal care. But what of matters unique to higher education? Why not extend the timetable for completion of graduate programs for those serving as primary caregivers at home, expressly offering part-time options? On the same terms, why not offer an additional year for each newborn on the “tenure clocks” of assistant professors?

Taking Angela’s case as instructive, why not go one better and award tenure in such cases on the basis of teaching excellence, institutional and community service, rather than scholarship? This would be inappropriate for graduate-level faculty at R1 institutions, of course. But many liberal arts colleges and similar “teaching institutions” do grant tenure without a monograph. Why shouldn’t all such colleges approve an option to award tenure either primarily for an applicant’s scholarship or their other work? This would not constitute a lowering of standards or grant equal rewards for unequal work—the celebrated scholar but inept teacher is a campus stereotype for good reason. Instructional and service work aren’t easier than scholarship, but the regular, scheduled, and periodic nature of those duties tends to more naturally accommodate the similarly regular needs of children. And, really, how many books and articles frantically produced by overwrought assistant professors for the sake of gaining tenure meaningfully advance human knowledge? 

In her wonderfully provocative book Feminism Against Progress, British social commentator Mary Harrington critiques “mainstream culture” as “founded on assumptions that foreclose motherhood,” which it sees “as an obstacle to market participation.” For women “childless, well-educated and ambitious, or wealthy enough to outsource all of the ‘care’ to underlings, current doctrine may indeed appear ‘feminist’” and salubrious. But, she writes, those who have “viewed the women’s movement as aimed at seeking a fair settlement between the sexes – including for those women who are mothers,” should be experiencing grave misgivings. Such a pro-family “fair settlement” in American higher education might include some of the features I have suggested. But do even putative conservatives on the boards of private religious institutions or in red-state legislatures possess the courage of their convictions enough to try?

Samuel Negus is director of program review and accreditation at Hillsdale College.