If a person managed to finish his work--whether it was research, teaching, or service--on time and in the correct format, he would have a huge competitive advantage over many of his peers. Procrastination is not always bad: Sometimes the work one puts off doing is better left undone. And sometimes the best ideas just come late. But perennially…

By academic standards, Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum has it made. She is a full professor of bioengineering at Rice University, runs a thriving cancer-research laboratory, and is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering. But with four children at home, she sometimes feels like an academic outcast. In fact, Ms. Richards-Kortum says…

Like most university presidents, Irvin D. Reid is used to having his wife at his side during important events at Wayne State University. She has been here to help greet donors during celebrations of the capital campaign and has attended every football homecoming game during his decade-long presidency. But since last month, Mr. Reid has been…

While the demands of promotion and tenure should not be minimized, career obsessiveness is both a psychological and a practical mistake. Citing management scholar David Heenan, who argues the intellectual case for having multiple lives: career, personal, communal, spiritual, artistic, the writer advocates that a major demographic and psychographic…

According to new research, aspiring professors' negative view of faculty life at top research institutions is common: the large study of the University of California's graduate students revealed that less than half perceive major research institutions to be family-friendly workplaces for tenure-track professors. About 8,400 Ph.D. students from…

In this article, the author talks about the need for sound policies to help faculty members balance family life with career issues. Many human-resource policies--for example, those governing conflicts of interest--can be developed almost independently of other policies and have a high degree of transferability from one campus to the next. A…

Results of a new survey of family-friendly benefits by the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor show that stopping the tenure clock has become the most common family-friendly benefit in higher education, following paid maternity leave. Other family-friendly policies that top the list in academe allow…

The University of California campuses are among a small but growing number of research universities adopting new policies--or reinvigorating old ones--that allow tenure-track and tenured professors to work part time. Typically, professors interested in scaling back their work want more time to care for young children, a sick relative, or an aging…

It is always a big problem and a loss of professional opportunities for an academic if he or she cannot attend an annual conference because he or she cannot find a place to leave his or her kids. One solution to this problem is for organizers to offer subsidized care care. In this article, the author describes how the Association for Jewish…

The politics of dual-career academic couples, and the policies directed toward them, have been dissected and debated at length. Rarely mentioned, however, is how an academic career can be affected by a husband, wife, or significant other who is not on the professorial track. Most pairings of professor and nonprofessor work just fine. The partners…

Drew Gilpin Faust was recently appointed president of Harvard University, and is the first female to hold the position. Women now lead half of the eight institutions that make up the Ivy League. But focusing on highly accomplished women such as Faust misses a larger point. Women may be taking faculty positions in record numbers, but most of those…

Increasingly women in nearly all sports are either leaving intercollegiate coaching or never entering in the first place. While most concern over women's sports has focused on the opportunities that federal equity laws have offered to female players--whose numbers have grown steadily--the ranks of female coaches have quietly dwindled. Last year…

In this article, the author shares the difficulties she faced as she tried to reach a balance between her career as a scientist and her role as a mother. She speaks of how she often found problems in putting her children into day care centers. She also relates that the confidence mothers have in their academic careers is correlated to the quality…

Explores why, although academe may seem like a perfect environment for raising children, some women leave their coveted faculty slots when babies arrive. (EV)

Discusses how the American Association of University Professors wants colleges to give scholars who have newborns extra time before tenure reviews. There appears to be a reluctance of the part of faculty to take advantage of such policies, however, because of fear of being stigmatized. (EV)