THE ADJUNCT TRACK

It's All in the Bag

Teaching part time sometimes makes a Ph.D. feel like a failure, but it also allows her life as a parent to work

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By CORINNE BENNET

Two summers ago, I found the perfect handbag at a garage sale. It was leather and looked professional and was just the right size for a small notebook, a conference program, and a paperback book.

Recently I realized it was also the perfect size for a couple of diapers, some wipes, a sippy cup, and a pacifier. My perfect conference bag now masquerades as a perfect diaper bag.

Too bad my own twice-weekly transformation, from parent to professor, is not so seamless. More than once while teaching in my classroom, I have looked down at my shirt to see the remains of the breakfast that I struggled to get my son to eat. I keep waiting for the day that I'll look down and notice I'm wearing mismatched shoes — something that actually happened recently to a woman I know, who later insisted, "But my kids look great today!"

In graduate school, I nurtured visions of ivy-covered brick buildings, idyllic grounds, and book-lined offices. What I didn't envision was how hard it would be to balance work and family. I knew that I wanted to teach and I wanted to have children, but I always thought I would be a parent with a tenure-track job.

Well I have the book-lined office, but it's in my home. And this past academic year, I was both a parent and a faculty member, but not on the tenure track. Instead I spent the year as an adjunct and found, to my surprise, that the position suits me well.

In graduate school, my friends and I had wondered aloud, Why would anyone want to be an adjunct?

After completing my Ph.D. in the humanities, I taught full time for two years. It was a non-tenure-track position, however, and if it had to end, it ended at the right time. Shortly after that I gave birth to my son, and I have been teaching part time ever since.

It has taken some time for me to accept the revision of my graduate-school dreams as a good thing. As young children, both my husband and I had a parent at home, and it was important to us to offer that to our own children.

In retrospect I see that my initial inability to accept the value of part-time teaching as a possible solution to balancing everything was based on the mixed signals that I absorbed in graduate school. I don't want to suggest that my department was hostile to families. On the contrary, it boasted an on-site day-care center, and when a fellow graduate student had a baby, I witnessed the rare event of a dissertation director's advising her to stop writing for a little while.

But while I saw many female professors who had children, I never saw any who were pregnant. As graduate students, my female friends and I were carefully coached by our advisers on how to avoid questions about our personal lives during job interviews.

I remember one discussion group in which female graduate students and professors debated whether a female job candidate should remove her wedding ring during an interview. The idea was rejected as extreme, but the fact that it was considered at all has remained with me as illustrative of the perceived disconnect between professional and personal lives in academe.

Around that same time in graduate school, I overheard a male professor offer gloomy condolences when a graduate student announced that she was expecting a baby at the start of the next semester.

And early in my career, I had a conversation at a conference with a male professor about balancing work and family. He advocated taking your children to work once in a while, so colleagues could see that family was important. As soon as he walked away, a female professor who had overheard our conversation came rushing toward me to say that his advice might work for men, but that women had to protect their professional image at all costs.

As academic professionals, we are encouraged to learn about our rights regarding maternity leave, but we are also sent the message not to exercise those rights. Rather, it is understood that the ideal is to carefully plan your pregnancy around academic breaks so that you don't have to take a leave at all.

All of which underscores the message you hear repeatedly as a female graduate student: Any children you have should be neither seen nor heard in academe.

The other message that all graduate students hear repeatedly is that success means securing a tenure-track job. So it's no surprise that becoming an adjunct, however willingly, has occasionally made me feel like an academic failure — even though the growing list of publications on my CV suggests otherwise.

Choosing to pursue part-time work was also difficult for me because I do see women who seem to be able to balance full-time teaching with family life. I have close friends who rely heavily on child care and seem to thrive on the pressures of publishing, committee work, and the race for tenure. Their successes make me wonder if I am giving up too easily.

But I also have graduate-school friends who have decided not to teach at all, and they have even more freedom than I do to nurture their children. On my busiest days — especially when I have papers to grade — their freedom seems like a dream.

Part-time teaching can feel like an academic no-woman's-land. I have research ideas but sometimes not the time or resources to put them into effect. An adjunct's salary and an absence of conference-travel support has made it harder to turn those ideas into realities.

I feel sure that raising my son is the most important work I can do right now, but I share the lament of a stay-at-home mom I know who longs to do work that "means something." Certainly parenting is work that "means something." But some days it doesn't feel like it.

Public recognition of your work matters, and the truth is that when you're an adjunct, such recognition is hard to achieve. Grant money, office space, and the choice of which classes to teach usually go to the full-timers first.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman about the important role that mothers have in shaping children as future leaders. I am the first to agree with that point, but I envy the fact that people are still reading and discussing her ideas, while my ideas get interrupted by the end of my son's nap or his insistence that I read the same board book for the 10th time that day.

And, of course, my adjunct salary is significantly lower than my former full-time salary. My husband and I now look at my financial contribution as a nice bonus, but we would never be able to survive on it, even if I were teaching the same number of credits taught by full-time instructors. With my decision to teach part time come the decisions to forgo paying for my own health insurance, to stop going out to eat, and to put off various home-improvement projects. My son has only once had a paid babysitter — and that's not because I'm overprotective.

However, part-time teaching allows me to be a full-time mom while keeping my foot in the door for the future. What I used to view as a failure in the profession now seems to be a way to have the best of both worlds. I've been lucky enough to see my son's first smile, to hear his first laugh, and to catch him when he falls (sometimes).

While the time I have for research is severely limited, knowing that his naptime must be productive writing time has forced me to be more focused than ever before. I'm learning to take advantage of the time I have. And now that I am expecting our second child in the fall, I am even more appreciative of my flexible schedule.

I still look forward to the day when academic success for parents — both mothers and fathers — doesn't require the types of compromises and sacrifices that it does now, not only for people who must rely on expensive child-care services, but also for people like me, who are satisfied teaching part time but desire a proportionate share of the benefits that come with teaching full time.

For now, being an academic mom means splitting my days between play groups and discussion groups, between reading board books and blue books, and between studying Dr. Seuss and Dr. Johnson.

At least I'm carrying those diapers in style.

Corinne Bennet is the pseudonym of an instructor in the humanities at a university in the Midwest.