UC considers family-friendly
policies for faculty
BY ANNE BURKE
UCLA Today Staff
She’s tenure-track at UCLA and the mother of a newborn. She
loves teaching but knows that the time it takes away from her baby
is lost forever. Every day, she wonders how much longer she can
keep it up.
“When you’re pre-tenure, you’re learning how
to teach, so that takes an enormous amount of time, and then you’ve
got to be writing,” said the instructor, who asked that her
name not be used. “The time that you have to engage with your
child is just a few hours a day because they sleep so much.”
The question she asks herself is, “Should I be in academia?”If
she leaves UCLA, she’ll join a disturbingly large number of
UC faculty women who have decided they can’t keep all the
balls in the air. At nearly every stage of their academic career
— from securing a tenure-track position to achieving associate
and full professor status — married women, both with and without
children, leak out of the academic pipeline at a disproportionately
high rate, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.
The difficulty of attracting and keeping women faculty is one of
many work-family issues addressed in a proposed systemwide initiative
aimed at giving UC a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining
the best and brightest faculty.
The initiative comes at a critical time as UC embarks on its biggest
hiring spree ever. Over the next 10 years, UC estimates it will
hire on average more than 500 new tenure-track faculty a year to
replace retiring faculty and to keep up with a demographic surge
of new students.
The proposed initiative, called the UC Faculty Family Friendly
Edge, aims to increase the use of existing family-friendly policies
and programs — many of which faculty are not aware of —
as well as establish new policies, such as a flexible, part-time
option for tenure-track faculty with caregiving responsibilities.
Elements of the initiative that would require changes to the Academic
Personnel Manual are currently under formal review by the UCOP.
Also under consideration are benefits for adoptive parents; tuition
reimbursement for faculty and their immediate families at any UC
campus or medical center; relocation counselors to help spouses
and partners find employment; more university-sponsored child care;
and emergency backup child care.
“We’re very enthusiastic about it,” said Susan
French, chair of the UCLA Academic Senate Faculty Welfare Committee.
“We think doing everything we can to make the UC system a
good place for people who want to raise children and achieve a good
balance of family-work life is really a good idea.”
“We want to make everyone aware that there can be a balance
between work and family life,” said Rosina Becerra, associate
vice chancellor for faculty diversity and member of the systemwide
committee that helped create the initiative.
The initiative suggests various strategies to encourage faculty
to make better use of existing family-friendly policies, many of
which have existed for 15 years. A systemwide survey in 2002-03
found that only half of faculty were aware of an option by which
ladder-rank faculty caring for a newborn or newly placed child under
5 may get temporary relief from teaching duties, generally for one
semester or quarter, or stop the tenure clock for a year.
Some faculty know about family-friendly policies but choose not
to use them out of fear that “it might have hurt my chances
for tenure or promotion,” according to the survey.
Some recommendations are likely to be controversial. One would
allow faculty to go part-time as family and personal needs arise.
Three-fifths of female faculty respondents and nearly a third of
male respondents said they would be interested in either a flexible
or permanent part-time option.
For details on the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge, visit http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/ucfamilyfriendlyedge.html.
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