Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach and Serve edited by Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George, 1998, University of Illinois Press.

Surviving the Academy: Feminist Perspectives edited by Danusia Malina and Sian Maslin Prothero, 1998, Falmer Press.

Reviewed by Maryanne Dever

While substantially different in orientation and audience, together these two edited collections remind us that while the western academy has often been viewed as a site of radicalism or liberalism, its institutional culture seldom lives up to its reputation for enlightened and progressive politics. Indeed, many contributors to these volumes would contend that such a reputation has been built upon silences and is maintained not only by adherence to an increasingly outmoded notion of the dominant academic subject as white, middle class and male, but also by strict regulation of what may be spoken about by faculty (and to whom).

In its choice of title The Family Track marks a deliberate and conscious shift from the frequently derogatory or dismissive notion of the "mommy track" and highlights the fact that, despite lingering perceptions that the majority of male academics are functional bachelors and it is only women who must "juggle" professional and personal commitments, both male and female academics have family and relationship responsibilities, the vast majority of which are poorly accounted for in academic workplaces in the United States. Principally a collection of well-crafted and reflective personal accounts of building academic careers while maintaining personal lives, the volume derives its particular impact from the (often painful) honesty of these narratives. Given that many essays involve intimate and compelling revelations of the type seldom viewed as "appropriate" in the context of the academic profession (pregnancies, sexual orientation, relationship failures, childcare and eldercare traumas), it is hardly surprising that they should be marked by a sense of relief at dropping what Alicia Ostriker calls their "professional camouflage" (5).

Some of those writing are now well-advanced in their academic careers and reflect on their early graduate school and professional lives in the 1960s and early 1970s when, as Ellen Cantarow notes, female graduate students were expected to pour the tea at departmental functions and were punished for "having the nerve" to become pregnant (16). Accounts by younger contributors would suggest, however, that despite decades of feminist activism and equal opportunity rhetoric, substantial changes have yet to take place in practice. A recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, noted that even where specific maternity leave provisions are available or can be negotiated, significant numbers of women faculty in the United States still endeavour where possible to give birth over the summer so as to minimise impact on their colleagues and departments (and consequently on their own careers). This is not surprising if we accept Brian Rosenberg's picture here of male colleagues "who regularly and with great conviction teach feminist readings of David Copperfield [yet] are quite capable of stepping out of the classroom and acting like better educated, more benign versions of Mr Murdstone" (223).

As several contributors point out, it is rather ironic that universities and colleges, typically represented as think tanks for the future, remain so resolutely behind the times in their fierce separation of the personal from the professional and in their ready recourse to familiar gender stereotypes. But while The Family Track makes great efforts to stress that the prevailing workplace climate is less than ideal for anyone with personal and family responsibilities, there is no escaping the fact that the social meanings that attach to parenting and caring tasks are highly gendered and that it is women's careers primarily that are made or marred by "good" and "bad" reproductive choices. Rosenberg himself admits that although when he brings his sons to work and they tear around the hallways "this is widely (maybe not universally) seen as endearing", a women doing the same "would be viewed with raised eyebrows" (224). Moreover, women remain particularly vulnerable in a system where the early career years with their attendant pressures to complete graduate degrees, publish, and compete for tenure frequently overlap with childbearing and child-rearing years. Carolyn Forche in her interview with the volume's editors provides some of the most incisive analysis in the collection. She argues, with reason, that she is not "interested in advising women about how to adjust to a situation that is fundamentally unjust and inequitable ... We're constricted in our thinking when we begin with the supposition that the task is adaptation rather than resistance and refutation ... I can't begin by advising women that there are artful ways of 'having it all', or artful ways of adapting to a situation that is fundamentally unhealthy" (53-4).

Throughout the collection, and most particularly in the final section entitled, "How it Could Be: Strategies and Models for Change", there are recommendations for institutional change and detailed strategies for making universities and colleges more humane and equitable working environments. These include the recognition of non-traditional family units, the extension of domestic partner benefits to lesbian and gay partners, basic provisions such as adequate paid maternity and paternal leave, access to suitable childcare facilities, and the enshrining of a "family-friendly campus" as a legitimate institutional goal. It is true that these issues will be all too familiar to many readers, but keeping them on the agenda in times of rapid institutional restructuring is doubtless part of this volume's strategy. To quote from Annette Kolodny's concluding contribution, it is vital that the current "paucity of financial resources" not become an excuse for a "long-term failure of commitment and imagination" (304).

In Surviving the Academy: Feminist Perspectives individual contributors from time to time make recourse to the personal and to the anecdotal, but the overall focus of this volume is upon the gendered dimensions of recent structural change in higher education in Britain, rather than upon individual career development issues. Arising out of a Women in Higher Education Network (WHEN) conference, the collection inevitably charts some of the same terrain as The Family Track by "drawing out the public/private divide" (1), but its real target is the raft of changes that have swept through the British academy (and elsewhere) since 1992 leaving a new corporate entity "characterized by greater managerial power, tighter hierarchical structures and limited involvement in the decision-making process for those below senior management level" (9). The differential impact of these changes on all groups of women in academe - students, academic staff, administrative and support staff - is analysed in detail in Pamela Cotterill and Ruth Waterhouse's impressive opening chapter where they examine "the gap between the corporate rhetoric and the reality of experience". They touch on one of the volume's recurring themes when they point to the insidious ways in which the new aggressively corporate or managerial masculinity has the capacity to marginalise so-called "feminine" elements within higher education even more effectively than the male chauvinism of the earlier collegial system. (Anyone who has had the dubious privilege of sitting around a boardroom table with a group of deputy vice-chancellors and attempting to insert concepts such as "women", "access" and "equity" into strategic plans and mission statements rich in the terminology of "quality", "clients" and "targeted outcomes" will already know this).

Echoing Carolyn Forche's analysis in The Family Track, individual contributors here identify how the increasing push to reduce academic labour to a series of FTE (full time equivalent) equations, for example, presents specific inequities for those whose traditional academic roles have involved significant elements of "care", those important and labour-intensive tasks of advising, counselling, pastoral work, and "community building" that stand to be further devalued through their FTE invisibility. The full weight of these particular labours is brilliantly analysed by Tina Barnes-Powell and Gayle Letherby in their chapter "All in a Day's Work", where they highlight, among other issues, how in the new educational marketplace where "customers" are licensed to define and demand "satisfaction" for their fee money, younger and less powerful women staff become vulnerable to student expectations that they be endlessly "on tap" or available: "This notion that we were always available was not confined to the space of our office. We discovered that students would present us with their problems in a variety of locations: walking between lectures; in the library; in the car park; in a cafe; while at lunch; even in the toilet! ... On several occasions students told both Gayle and I that they were 'customers', and they had 'rights'" (72).

This chapter is the highlight of a section dealing with "Maternalism in the Academy" where contributors tease out the painful irony that dictates women staff should efface their actual maternal status in order to be viewed as fully "professional" at the same time as they are routinely expected to offer the institutional equivalent of nurturing to all around them. Other contributors like Robyn Thomas and Sonia Thompson analyse the on-going sex, class, and race-based discrimination that continues to be fostered through the shift from a notion of the university as essentially "a gentleman's club" to an enterprise privileging "ruthless" and "tough" management, through the trend towards fulfilling quality assurance requirements with increasingly competitive, individualistic and quantitative measures such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and through the reduction of equal opportunity initiatives to empty marketing gestures. Gabrielle Griffin's excellent chapter "Uneven Developments" uses the current precarious state of the field of Women's Studies in England as a way of exploring the increasingly vexed connections between gender, education and institutional change on the one hand and academic hierarchies, feminism, and power on the other: "This new managerialism has led to the creation and/or renaming of posts in academe which bear titles familiar from industry such as chief executive etc. The question of the extent to which women do and/or should participate in this managerialist culture is one that poses dilemmas for feminists, particularly when writing on women and management" (138).

Griffin's chapter appears in the third and final section of the book entitled, "Collective Action: Standing Still or Moving Forward", and while the editors clearly intended this concluding section to offer a more positive perspective than the preceding ones, the effect is compromised by the lingering impact of those earlier chapters. Like The Family Track, Surviving the Academy is ultimately an instructive rather than uplifting read.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach and Serve edited by Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George, 1998, University of Illinois Press. Surviving the Academy: Feminist Perspectives edited by Danusia Malina and Sian Maslin Prothero, 1998, Falmer Press. Reviewed by Maryanne Dever While substantially different in orientation and audience, together these two edited collections remind us that while the western academy has often been viewed as a site of radicalism or liberalism, its institutional culture seldom lives up to its reputation for enlightened and progressive politics. Indeed, many contributors to these volumes would contend that such a reputation has been built upon silences and is maintained not only by adherence to an increasingly outmoded notion of the dominant academic subject as white, middle class and male, but also by strict regulation of what may be spoken about by faculty (and to whom). In its choice of title The Family Track marks a deliberate and conscious shift from the frequently derogatory or dismissive notion of the "mommy track" and highlights the fact that, despite lingering perceptions that the majority of male academics are functional bachelors and it is only women who must "juggle" professional and personal commitments, both male and female academics have family and relationship responsibilities, the vast majority of which are poorly accounted for in academic workplaces in the United States. Principally a collection of well-crafted and reflective personal accounts of building academic careers while maintaining personal lives, the volume derives its particular impact from the (often painful) honesty of these narratives. Given that many essays involve intimate and compelling revelations of the type seldom viewed as "appropriate" in the context of the academic profession (pregnancies, sexual orientation, relationship failures, childcare and eldercare traumas), it is hardly surprising that they should be marked by a sense of relief at dropping what Alicia Ostriker calls their "professional camouflage" (5). Some of those writing are now well-advanced in their academic careers and reflect on their early graduate school and professional lives in the 1960s and early 1970s when, as Ellen Cantarow notes, female graduate students were expected to pour the tea at departmental functions and were punished for "having the nerve" to become pregnant (16). Accounts by younger contributors would suggest, however, that despite decades of feminist activism and equal opportunity rhetoric, substantial changes have yet to take place in practice. A recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, noted that even where specific maternity leave provisions are available or can be negotiated, significant numbers of women faculty in the United States still endeavour where possible to give birth over the summer so as to minimise impact on their colleagues and departments (and consequently on their own careers). This is not surprising if we accept Brian Rosenberg's picture here of male colleagues "who regularly and with great conviction teach feminist readings of David Copperfield [yet] are quite capable of stepping out of the classroom and acting like better educated, more benign versions of Mr Murdstone" (223). As several contributors point out, it is rather ironic that universities and colleges, typically represented as think tanks for the future, remain so resolutely behind the times in their fierce separation of the personal from the professional and in their ready recourse to familiar gender stereotypes. But while The Family Track makes great efforts to stress that the prevailing workplace climate is less than ideal for anyone with personal and family responsibilities, there is no escaping the fact that the social meanings that attach to parenting and caring tasks are highly gendered and that it is women's careers primarily that are made or marred by "good" and "bad" reproductive choices. Rosenberg himself admits that although when he brings his sons to work and they tear around the hallways "this is widely (maybe not universally) seen as endearing", a women doing the same "would be viewed with raised eyebrows" (224). Moreover, women remain particularly vulnerable in a system where the early career years with their attendant pressures to complete graduate degrees, publish, and compete for tenure frequently overlap with childbearing and child-rearing years. Carolyn Forche in her interview with the volume's editors provides some of the most incisive analysis in the collection. She argues, with reason, that she is not "interested in advising women about how to adjust to a situation that is fundamentally unjust and inequitable ... We're constricted in our thinking when we begin with the supposition that the task is adaptation rather than resistance and refutation ... I can't begin by advising women that there are artful ways of 'having it all', or artful ways of adapting to a situation that is fundamentally unhealthy" (53-4). Throughout the collection, and most particularly in the final section entitled, "How it Could Be: Strategies and Models for Change", there are recommendations for institutional change and detailed strategies for making universities and colleges more humane and equitable working environments. These include the recognition of non-traditional family units, the extension of domestic partner benefits to lesbian and gay partners, basic provisions such as adequate paid maternity and paternal leave, access to suitable childcare facilities, and the enshrining of a "family-friendly campus" as a legitimate institutional goal. It is true that these issues will be all too familiar to many readers, but keeping them on the agenda in times of rapid institutional restructuring is doubtless part of this volume's strategy. To quote from Annette Kolodny's concluding contribution, it is vital that the current "paucity of financial resources" not become an excuse for a "long-term failure of commitment and imagination" (304). In Surviving the Academy: Feminist Perspectives individual contributors from time to time make recourse to the personal and to the anecdotal, but the overall focus of this volume is upon the gendered dimensions of recent structural change in higher education in Britain, rather than upon individual career development issues. Arising out of a Women in Higher Education Network (WHEN) conference, the collection inevitably charts some of the same terrain as The Family Track by "drawing out the public/private divide" (1), but its real target is the raft of changes that have swept through the British academy (and elsewhere) since 1992 leaving a new corporate entity "characterized by greater managerial power, tighter hierarchical structures and limited involvement in the decision-making process for those below senior management level" (9). The differential impact of these changes on all groups of women in academe - students, academic staff, administrative and support staff - is analysed in detail in Pamela Cotterill and Ruth Waterhouse's impressive opening chapter where they examine "the gap between the corporate rhetoric and the reality of experience". They touch on one of the volume's recurring themes when they point to the insidious ways in which the new aggressively corporate or managerial masculinity has the capacity to marginalise so-called "feminine" elements within higher education even more effectively than the male chauvinism of the earlier collegial system. (Anyone who has had the dubious privilege of sitting around a boardroom table with a group of deputy vice-chancellors and attempting to insert concepts such as "women", "access" and "equity" into strategic plans and mission statements rich in the terminology of "quality", "clients" and "targeted outcomes" will already know this). Echoing Carolyn Forche's analysis in The Family Track, individual contributors here identify how the increasing push to reduce academic labour to a series of FTE (full time equivalent) equations, for example, presents specific inequities for those whose traditional academic roles have involved significant elements of "care", those important and labour-intensive tasks of advising, counselling, pastoral work, and "community building" that stand to be further devalued through their FTE invisibility. The full weight of these particular labours is brilliantly analysed by Tina Barnes-Powell and Gayle Letherby in their chapter "All in a Day's Work", where they highlight, among other issues, how in the new educational marketplace where "customers" are licensed to define and demand "satisfaction" for their fee money, younger and less powerful women staff become vulnerable to student expectations that they be endlessly "on tap" or available: "This notion that we were always available was not confined to the space of our office. We discovered that students would present us with their problems in a variety of locations: walking between lectures; in the library; in the car park; in a cafe; while at lunch; even in the toilet! ... On several occasions students told both Gayle and I that they were 'customers', and they had 'rights'" (72). This chapter is the highlight of a section dealing with "Maternalism in the Academy" where contributors tease out the painful irony that dictates women staff should efface their actual maternal status in order to be viewed as fully "professional" at the same time as they are routinely expected to offer the institutional equivalent of nurturing to all around them. Other contributors like Robyn Thomas and Sonia Thompson analyse the on-going sex, class, and race-based discrimination that continues to be fostered through the shift from a notion of the university as essentially "a gentleman's club" to an enterprise privileging "ruthless" and "tough" management, through the trend towards fulfilling quality assurance requirements with increasingly competitive, individualistic and quantitative measures such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and through the reduction of equal opportunity initiatives to empty marketing gestures. Gabrielle Griffin's excellent chapter "Uneven Developments" uses the current precarious state of the field of Women's Studies in England as a way of exploring the increasingly vexed connections between gender, education and institutional change on the one hand and academic hierarchies, feminism, and power on the other: "This new managerialism has led to the creation and/or renaming of posts in academe which bear titles familiar from industry such as chief executive etc. The question of the extent to which women do and/or should participate in this managerialist culture is one that poses dilemmas for feminists, particularly when writing on women and management" (138). Griffin's chapter appears in the third and final section of the book entitled, "Collective Action: Standing Still or Moving Forward", and while the editors clearly intended this concluding section to offer a more positive perspective than the preceding ones, the effect is compromised by the lingering impact of those earlier chapters. Like The Family Track, Surviving the Academy is ultimately an instructive rather than uplifting read.