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
