There is a connection between two recent postings that might not be obvious.
- In their essay on women in math, engineering and science, the presidents of Stanford, MIT, and Princeton issue this call:
“Colleges and universities must develop a culture, as well as specific policies, that enable women with children to strike a sustainable balance between workplace and home. Of course, achieving such a balance is a challenge in many highly demanding careers. As a society we must develop methods for assessing productivity and potential that take into account the long-term potential of an individual and encourage greater harmony between the cycle of work and the cycle of life so that both women and men may better excel in the careers of their choice.”
- In the article on academic free agents, a university administrator is quoted as saying that “getting an outside offer is the best way to increase your salary”. This certainly is what one gets told by Deans and department heads in my experience.
I would like to point out that there is a fundamental unfriendliness to families in a system of salary determination that depends largely on outside offers to gauge the level at which a faculty member should be paid. It seems obvious that faculty members with families, and especially those where the spouse is working as well [Fn. 1], are much more rooted in their community. Kids go to schools, have friends, parents have support networks all factors that make moving a very difficult proposition.
Such faculty members (who “come with a family”) are naturally seen as “unmovable” by their peers and thus may never be seen as on the market for a possible senior offer.
Why not play the game and solicit outside offers that one does not have any intention of accepting, purely for the purpose to have an argument for a higher salary? Well, to me it seems morally dubious. Especially in small fields where everybody knows everybody, one would be manipulating friends for personal gain.
I recognize that universities need criteria by which to judge the standing of their faculty members so as to determine an appropriate salary level. But the existing system appears fundamentally unfair to faculty members with families and should be revisited if universities really want to “develop a culture, as well as specific policies, that enable women with children to strike a sustainable balance between workplace and home.”
I wonder what could replace the current system? One would hope that something short of a Gourmet Report-like ranking of individual faculty at research universities could be found.
Update: There is a post on “Bitch Ph.D.” about the problem of uprootedness at earlier stages of academic careers.