I really think there’s something going on with punishing women who dare to reproduce in academia. Our efforts to draw attention to the problem are met with stonewalling and eyerolls, as if to say, “hey, we heard all of this back in the 1970s/80s/90s when we hired you–haven’t YOU figured it out yet?”

It is worth repeating what has been noted before in these comments: the university as a whole has no parental leave policy other than FMLA. What people need to understand is that colleges and universities and even departments often rely on informal or extra-formal procedures for dealing with such leaves, which makes them by definition undefinable and ad hoc. My college does not consider what I am taking to be maternity leave or parental leave – it is not classified as such, even though this is what they offer faculty in place of FMLA. FMLA is unpaid of course but it also causes many logistical problems for those of us on a semester-based system – since FMLA would require the university to reinstate me full time and full pay near the end of a semester, when it would simply not be possible for a professor to begin teaching.

Honestly, if I had understood clearly what the outcome of all these months of negotiating would be, I probably would have insisted instead on taking FMLA leave and sucked up the financial loss. I was recently informed that the amount of work that I would be expected to perform while on “leave” would have to “adequately compensate” the university for such leave – to wit, that I would be expected to perform as close to a full work load as they could give me without teaching. I’m not sure therefore why offer this “benefit” of course releases if their main concern is extracting an equivalent or near-equivalent amount of work. I won’t enumerate the expectations for my work load while on leave, but they are onerous indeed. I’m feeling certain that the whole concept of parental leave (ie leave during which a parent acts as a primary caregiver for a brand new human being) does not exist at my university.

I would also like to add that the idea that an untenured faculty member at a new university with a byzantine and unclear set of policies should somehow be in a position of power or authority over her chair and her dean and the administration as a whole is absolutely absurd. We need to be realistic about the power dynamics functioning at universities and how those affect the untenured.

I’m still waiting for other ideas about how to staff courses for faculty leaves and sabbaticals. Any ideas?

I agree that adjuncting can be exploitative. OTOH, when courses on the schedule needed covering at sometimes the last minute (or even in some cases urgently, in the middle of the term), my adjunct/lecturer friends have stepped up to take on the extra teaching because they needed the dough. It would have been unfair to expect anyone to volunteer, so I think hiring adjuncts is a more just and realistic solution. I just don’t see any other way of solving this problem right now. (But I’m open to all serious suggestions.)

I in fact never said or even implied that there weren’t ever times when adjunct or emergency instructors may be important and necessary. And I agree that to the extent that there is a semi-permanent academic underclass, they should be eligible for benefits (what I actually said was that, due to their work situations, they’ll generally have less access to the social time needed to ever take advantage of said benefits; I ask this partly tongue-in-cheek and partly seriously: who has time to date, marry, and think about having kids with the commuting and grading load of the average adjunct?). What I disagree with is the idea that the complicated problem of maternity leave has the simple solution of extending the already bloated use of adjuncts. And what I really disagree with is the pay scale, the “small (very small!) pots of money” that you recommend storing away to pay adjuncts. $4000 to teach an entire college level class is really a disgraceful amount to be paying adjuncts with many years of college-level teaching experience (which is the typical level of experience at least in my field of English); and what’s especially disgraceful is that this pay is considered generous is some quarters. And quite frankly, this issue affects more people for much longer periods of time than maternity leave does. I’m all for sane and fair handling of maternity leave (and agree that the service requirements of the university in question basically make it no longer any kind of “leave” policy), but my point is that the primary means of solving the issue cannot be to simply extend an already supremely unjust system.

Instead, I think all lectures should be recorded (it is really so cheap to do that these days), and when the professor is gone, lectures from past semesters should be played. Students or TAs or other profs can step in with grading. Or the prof. on leave can get to it when he/she gets back.

I do agree also with KP that it’s a serious problem that so many academic laborers only WISH they had the social life to have a family and children.