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This volume discusses why faculty and administrators of academe should care about implementing family-friendly policies and practices, as well as how they can advocate for policy changes. In section one, the book's focus is on empirical studies that demonstrate the need for innovative programs and policies for faculty at colleges and universities. These pieces explore issues such as the value of work/life programs for employee retention, the need for a variety of family support policies including elder care, and the influence of workplace culture on the use of existing policies. Section two includes case studies of the process of formulating family-friendly policies and their adoption at a variety of universities. The subjects of these chapters include use of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the enactment of a parental leave policy, the development of a unique \"life cycle professorship program,\" and strategies used to implement new policies. The case study chapters provide descriptions of the identification of faculty and staff needs and the process of policy development as well as advice to faculty and administrators who seek to develop similar policies at their institutions.

For the past two decades, colleges and universities have focused significant attention on helping female faculty balance work and family by implementing a series of family-friendly policies. Although most policies were targeted at men and women alike, women were intended as the primary targets and recipients. This groundbreaking book makes clear that including faculty fathers in institutional efforts is necessary for campuses to attain gender equity. Based on interviews with seventy faculty fathers at four research universities around the United States, this book explores the challenges faculty fathers--from assistant professors to endowed chairs--face in finding a work/life balance. Margaret W. Sallee shows how universities frequently punish men who want to be involved fathers and suggests that cultural change is necessary--not only to help men who wish to take a greater role with their children, but also to help women and spouses who are expected to do the same. (An Index is included.)

The impact of changing demographics in higher education, and the importance of family-friendly policies, is well documented. There is an urgent need to keep PhDs in the higher education sector, to recruit talented scholars into academia, and retain them over the course of their academic careers. The key is instituting policies to enable all constituencies to balance work and personal responsibilities.This book covers the range of issues faced by all generations in academe, from PhD students, to the “sandwich generation” (those caring for children and aging parents simultaneously) through to older faculty and administrators. It addresses the causes for women faculty with children leaving the academy at a disproportionately higher rate than men, the conflicts women face between academic work and motherhood, and the difficulties they encounter in reentering the academy after having left the professoriate. In examining the need for family-friendly policies, this book documents the “best practices” currently in use at institutions across the United States. Each chapter highlights practices and programs from a variety of institutions and institutional types that address the needs of a more inclusive family-friendly campus and offers suggestions to others who are implementing similar change on their campuses. These examples provide context so that readers no longer have to develop practices in isolation, and without evidence of their effectiveness.The editors suggest that the most successful campuses are those that utilize a work-life systems framework to meet the needs of its employees. They also point to future growth trends, including expanding the focus from faculty and staff to incorporate all in the campus communityThis book offers guidance to department chairs, deans, faculty, administrators, and graduate students on setting a family-friendly agenda, and models for implementation.Contributors include: Emily Arms -- Kathleen Beauchesne -- Jill Bickett -- Sharon A. Dannels -- Mariko Dawson Zare -- Karie Frasch -- Marc Goulden -- Jeni Hart -- Caryn Jung -- Jaime Lester -- Sharon A. McDade -- Jean McLaughlin -- Mary Ann Mason -- Sharon Page-Medrich -- Kate Quinn -- Margaret Sallee -- Randi Shapiro -- Angelica Stacy -- David L. Swihart -- Gloria D. Thomas -- Darci Thompson

Using Schein's (1992) framework of cultural change, this study examined two institutions of higher education that have achieved or attempted a cultural change to understand if and how to develop a culture of work-life balance for faculty and staff. The results identified a narrative of eligibility that arose from the discourse of faculty recruitment/retention, defining work-life for tenured and tenure-track faculty only. Moreover, situating work-life in campus traditions and histories revealed the espoused beliefs of work-life as a gender issue and perpetuated the socio-historical connection of women, pregnancy, and work-life.

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 professors to phase into retirement and take extra unpaid time off to care for a family member. The center conducted surveys of family-friendly policies in higher education in 2002 and in 2007. This spring it posted a research brief on its Web site called \"Family Friendly Policies in Higher Education: A Five-Year Report.\" The brief looks at how many colleges and universities have the most common family-friendly benefits and how that has changed over the last five years. In all, 65 percent of the 189 institutions the university surveyed in 2007 said they have a formal policy that allows new parents to stop the tenure clock, typically for a year, to give them extra time to complete work they need to make a tenure bid. Professors--both men and women, in some cases--can stop the clock after the birth or adoption of a child or to care for an ill family member. Only 48 percent of institutions reported having such a policy in 2002. The center used the Carnegie classification system to group the universities it surveyed.

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 faculty maternity-leave policy is much more of a challenge. Its interdependence with so many other policies, and the need for an institution-specific solution, requires substantial effort to properly draft. In this article, the author offers a guide to creating a sound maternity-leave policy for faculty members.

According to Mr. Rhoads, 26 percent of all colleges and universities offer paid parental leave beyond the six weeks of maternity leave. [...]writes Mr. Rhoads, extending leave to both men and women may be unwise -- particularly if male faculty members use their leaves to do something other than child care. (Female professors in the survey complained that some men used leave time to catch up on their research and writing.) \"If men should begin to take leave in much larger numbers,\" but fail to take on a larger share of child care, writes Mr. Rhoads, \"far from leveling the playing field, gender-neutral postbirth leaves will tilt the field further in favor of men.\" *** At least two colleges in Massachusetts have stopped offering benefits to their employees' same-sex domestic partners since a law went into effect this year that permits gay and lesbian couples in the state to marry.

Eric Reeves, an English professor at Smith College, has become an expert on the current situation in Sudan and has devoted his sabbatical year to calling attention to this \"invisible war.\" Reeves became involved in speaking out on Sudan through Doctors Without Borders. The humanitarian group is the sole beneficiary of the profits of Reeves' second job as a master woodturner.