Family Track

How do the necessities of caring for others deter, benefit, or redefineresearch and teaching in higher education? What have universities doneto recognize the difficulties facing academic parents, single mothersand fathers, graduate students, lesbian and gay couples? What pro-familypolicies can be enacted during institutional budget crises?At a time when the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaperof the lives of those it employs, The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve discusses the challengesand benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competingneeds to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in otherpersonal relationships. Here academic women and men explore issues thatinclude biological and tenure clocks, childcare and eldercare, surrogateparenting of students, and increasing job demands. In telling storiesabout the quality of their lives, they express their hopes, anxieties,difficulties, and personal strategies for maintaining a delicate but achievablebalance."Lively, well-written, useful, and persuasive … The Family Track reveals much on family roles within the academy and suggestsmany specific projects and guidelines for Institutional change."-- Judith Kegan Gardiner, editor of Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice