Linda Kerber: The Larger Questions Posed by the Controversy Over Lawrence Summers

Linda Kerber, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (3-18-05):

[Linda K. Kerber is chair of the department of history and a lecturer in law at the University of Iowa. She is president-elect of the American Historical Association.]

In the recent furor over remarks by Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard University, about why so few women go into math and science, one key issue seems to be getting lost. Among other points, Mr. Summers suggested that women don't want to work the 80-hour weeks required for an academic career. Eighty hours?

Is that really good for women? For anyone?

What has happened to our academic workplace?...

The outpouring of anger and frustration we are hearing today is invigorating: It is a sign that a shift in thinking is taking place. As more and more women join men in earning a Ph.D., the inequities of the tenure-track academic profession are becoming more apparent.

It is long past time to frame a new agenda. Once again we must re-envision how the professoriate is embodied. Once again we must redefine the boundaries of a professional career. Once again we must challenge fixed definitions of an equitable workplace. And once again, those who speak out will risk accusations of disruption, even irresponsibility. This will be the work of a generation.

But feminists -- men and women -- are better situated to solve the challenges than we once were. In the 1970s, we were demanding admission -- to degree programs, to fellowships, to tenure-track positions. In the 21st century, we have won the fellowships, we have the Ph.D.'s, many of us have tenure, some of us have distinguished chairs, some of us are deans and provosts and university presidents. What will we do with the place in the academy that we have earned?

How will we now use our optimism and our bitterness to reinvent the academy? What risks will we take?

There was a time when academic life was largely reserved for the Brahmin class: men born to wealth or at least comfortable family resources. Not until after World War II was the academy a site of social mobility, where a lower-middle-class striver might seek advancement, job security, and a good income. It is now clear that while white women's representation has skyrocketed, women of color have rarely found upward mobility in academic life. At one Ivy League university last year, 30 percent of the faculty members in the arts and sciences -- 210 individuals -- were women, but only 9 people were African-American women, and only 3 (in a total faculty of nearly 700) were tenured.

It is also clear that, while we can take pride in opening many opportunities -- and the fellowships necessary to sustain them -- to people of equal merit, the form of those fellowships shapes their impact. When graduate aid comes in the form of teaching assistantships, as it does in my university, there is far less flexibility for taking time off. That especially affects women. The implicit message is sent: Don't get pregnant in grad school. But other people are also put at a disadvantage. When the work of parenting is shared, having financial aid only or primarily in the form of teaching burdens both men and women. All those who have few other financial resources are apt to find themselves taking extra time on their dissertation as they struggle to earn enough to support themselves or their family.

The drift toward the use of adjunct and temporary faculty members, passing on fewer benefits and making it impossible to maintain a research agenda, also has a disproportionate impact on women (who often hold such jobs), but it too affects both men and women. The visiting job that once provided a breather while one looked for a permanent position now enables a minimal kind of survival at the cost of decreasing opportunities for stable tenure-track jobs.

Moreover, "married" is an insufficient marker of duties of care: Many mothers -- and some caregiving fathers -- are not married. And all of us, men and women, parents or not, are likely to find ourselves at some moment with close relations -- elderly parents, adult siblings, or same-sex partners stricken with cancer or suicidal depression -- who need our care. As the recent renovations in internship hospital schedules have demonstrated, 80-hour professional weeks are an old-fashioned way of displaying machismo, and they are not a healthy way for a society to organize its most subtle and significant work.

In the year and a half that I have chaired my department, I have learned a lot about human frailty. At one point last winter, there were at least seven members of a 30-person department who were heroic when they met their classes at all, and only one was coping with her own illness. The others were struggling with tragedies that afflicted spouses, children, parents, siblings. Half involved men as caregivers, one for a dying wife. The University of Iowa has prided itself on longstanding generous health care and other benefits for faculty members. But we have not begun to think collectively about how family care might be taken out of the crisis mode.

For institutions that pride themselves on their intellectual power, that neglect of a major challenge is remarkable. Should we not be amazed at how many of us desperately improvise when one of our members faces a personal crisis, as though such a thing never happened before, as though people in need of care -- infants, the aged, people temporarily sidelined by a broken leg -- are not a substantial portion of our population?...

Many years ago the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote an essay, "Women and the Alphabet," in which he made the point that if you didn't like uppity women the place to start was at the beginning. Once you teach girls the alphabet they'll want to read, once they read they'll get ideas, once they get ideas they'll make claims. Once Harvard decided to educate female students, it should not have been surprised that the institution would face questions about the social arrangements in which scholarship takes place. Women have been earning Ph.D.'s in the academy in equal numbers to men for more than a decade. Why be surprised that we now demand that workplaces be user-friendly to us -- and to all?

Why not think about how all of us, men and women, tenured and untenured, staff or faculty members, whatever social and financial resources we have or have not inherited, stand to gain from more-equitable workplaces?