El Chronicle of Higher Education Review titula así su interesante reportaje sobre la actividad de los profesores universitarios —24 horas al día / 7 días a la semana— ahora que a sus tradicionales responsabilidades se unen las variadas demandas que vienen con las comunicaciones instantáneas, la Red y las TICs.
Este artículo muestra experiencias de profesores universitarios de los Estados Unidos, mujeres y hombres, bajo las nuevas condiciones en que se desenvuelven las labores académicas: organización del día, vida en pareja, multitasking, clases, viajes, colaboración a distancia, tele-trabajo, vida en el campus…
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The 24/7 Professor
What to do when home is just another word for the office
By PIPER FOGG
Technology has revolutionized the way professors work. With just a few keystrokes, they can gain access to vast library collections online. They can collaborate with peers halfway around the globe. They can read e-mail at home in their pajamas or at a research site thousands of miles away. The convenience of being able to work virtually anywhere and anytime, though, has a price. Students accustomed to instant messaging want immediate replies. Department heads know that faculty members can still check in online despite attending a conference three states away.
Skeptics argue that academics have it easy. Summers off, the option of working at home at times, and a handful of classes a week — how taxing is that? Other professions can be much more demanding. But those who believe that academics live an unhurried life of the mind have only to look at the typical professor’s to-do list for a reality check. Besides teaching, attending department meetings, handling administrative duties, and spending face time with students, most faculty members also have to grade piles of papers and respond to constant e-mail messages. Most are expected to do research as well. That usually means taking work home.
In his forthcoming book, The Elsewhere Society, Dalton Conley, a sociologist at New York University, warns that telecommuting is “a recipe for work, work, and more work.” He calls the college campus a “total institution,” which he defines as a “social environment where participants experience all aspects of their lives — meals, sleeping, socializing, recreation and so on.” While professors may not live on their campuses, many spend most of their waking hours there. That leaves them open to demands from all corners.
So how do scholars find time to think, write, or just recharge their cluttered brains? How do they maintain a personal life when work is so consuming? What can they do to set priorities?
On these pages, several professors discuss their strategies for finding that balance. One popular approach is to block out time for specific tasks while leaving room for the unexpected crisis. Another approach is to bring along work wherever they go. One professor gets so many e-mail messages that he has set up an automatic reply that tells senders not to expect responses unless they are current students or colleagues. Self-imposed deadlines and long to-do lists work for others. Conley, who has studied the shifting of work-life boundaries, says he is happiest with a BlackBerry in hand and his kids by his side. “My strategy,” he says, “is to accept the new reality.”
Sometimes Even a Master Planner Has No Plan
In the month of december, Amelia A. Baldwin moved her fiancé into her house, packed up her office at the University of Alabama at Huntsville so the room could be recarpeted, got married, learned that her father was diagnosed with cancer, and had to give and grade final exams. The associate professor of accounting, who is not tenured, had been juggling wedding plans, moving plans, and course plans all semester.
“It’s all about time management,” says Baldwin. She chose to teach her courses on a Tuesday/ Thursday schedule and to save the other days for research. “I do much better if I can have a big block of time,” she says. Before her fiancé moved in, she’d work eight to 15 hours some days — partly because she could. Her office is just a two-mile bike ride from her house, a ride she enjoys, so staying late is easy. “You don’t come in and punch a clock,” she says. “It’s very hard to turn it off.”
To keep fit, Baldwin schedules rides with other cyclists on Monday and Wednesday nights. She also allots time for choir practice and church. She writes all her commitments on a master list. During her free time last semester, she’d squeeze in preparations for her December 22 wedding. Because she was married once before, she felt no pressure to stage a big, fancy affair. But she still had to arrange for catering, choose centerpieces, find a dress, and order a cake.
Of course, life cannot be totally mapped out. When her father was diagnosed with lymphoma, in early December, she dropped everything and flew to Florida to visit him. She has taken it all in stride, despite coming down with a raging sinus infection right before exams. “Part of it is just age and learning over the years that you just can’t control everything,” says Baldwin, who is in her 40s. The professor says her department has really come through for her: While she cared for her father, a colleague covered one class and her department head covered the others, she says, including listening to three hours of student presentations — “above and beyond the call of duty.”
5 Kids, 2 Careers, and Multiple Backup Plans
For Robin Feldman, a professor of law and mother of five, multitasking is a way of life. While pregnant and on bed rest with her youngest child, she wrote part of a scholarly book using voice-recognition software. She also did a live interview for National Public Radio. “No one had any idea I was doing it lying on the couch,” says the professor, who earned tenure last spring at the University of California Hastings College of Law.
The 46-year-old has children who are 17, 15, 13, and 8 years, and a 22-month-old. With such a large brood, she has to be ruthlessly efficient in order to be productive. Technology helps. To prepare for class, she turns on her Sony Reader, a hand-held device that displays the texts of books and documents. While reading, she walks for exercise. She is also testing a device that reads documents out loud. That would transform her hourlong commute to the San Francisco campus into constructive work time. Technology is there to manage her schedule, not to overwhelm it, she says.
“I don’t say, ‘I can’t do this,'” Feldman declares. “I say, ‘How do I do this?'”
On occasion, subterfuge is involved. When her 8-year-old was a toddler, the professor, then at Stanford University, couldn’t get anything done if he knew she was working at home. So each day she would get in her car, wave bye-bye to him, park at her neighbor’s, then slip back into a home office she had created in the garage. “My toddler never had any idea,” she says.
Feldman has also taken time off from work. For four years, when her oldest children were little, she stayed home. Then she went back to work as an adjunct. When she got back on the tenure track, in 2002, she says, the challenge was less about getting her work done and more about convincing others that she was serious about being an academic. It helped that she had a great record before she opted out, she says, and kept her contacts up while an adjunct. It also helped that she has always had a full-time nanny at home.
At Hastings, Feldman directs the law-and-bioscience project, an intellectual exchange for bioscience companies, law firms, and academics. To balance that with her teaching, she blocks out days for teaching and for research, as well as time for family, and tries hard to protect each one. Her family eats dinner together most nights and attends synagogue on Saturday mornings. She and her husband, a corporate lawyer, rely on friends in their tight knit Jewish community to help with the children.
“I always have, in my mind, five different backup layers,” says the professor, who says things rarely go as planned despite her best intentions. “You have to get used to having a plan B, plan C, and plan D.”
Caring for a New Baby and a Scientific Career
When his wife’s three-month maternity leave was nearing its end last March, Alexander R. Horner-Devine prepared for a change in his own schedule. The engineering professor at the University of Washington had worked out a deal to stay home two days a week with their son, Jasper, while his wife went back to work as a full-time professor.
The move was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Advance program, which “bought out” his teaching load for a semester, meaning that the grant money could be used to pay someone to teach in his stead. The program is designed to help increase the number and leadership of women in math and science, but it recognizes that a family works as a unit, and that different arrangements help different women succeed.
Horner-Devine’s wife, Claire, teaches in the university’s College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences. While pregnant, she switched from a research position to the tenure track. Her husband’s Advance grant enabled her to work toward tenure while starting a family.
For him, that arrangement meant balancing a crying child on his lap while trying to check e-mail, and working on his laptop whenever his son dozed off, even if they were parked in the car. Horner-Devine, who is also on the tenure track, admits that it has been a challenge. Jasper is a fussy eater and poor sleeper. During the summer, while other babies his age were starting to sleep through the night, his parents were up with him six to eight times a night.
“I drink a fair amount of coffee,” says Horner-Devine, who jokes that he’s lucky he lives in Seattle, the coffee capital of the country. But his caffeine high didn’t always mean finishing all his work. “It slipped a lot,” he says — particularly grant-proposal deadlines. “You dig a bit of a hole.” The situation taught him to set priorities differently, to say no more often, and to delegate work. But both he and his wife were still up every night working late after Jasper fell asleep at 9 or 10 p.m.
Was it worth it? The response from his son makes it worthwhile, he says. And he has become a more confident and more involved father: “I did see him walk for the first time.”
Strapped for Time and Money, a Single Parent Relies on Efficiency
In an ideal world, Susan Montez would write poetry, teach a few classes, and have enough money to hire a maid. But this English professor often finds herself running home between the classes she teaches at Norwalk Community College to throw in a load of laundry or straighten up the house. The single mother of an 18-year-old, Montez hasn’t published any of her poetry in years.
She has so much on her plate, she says, that she avoids her mailbox, checking it only every two weeks to avoid dealing with yet more paper. She forces herself to check e-mail for work once a day.
To discourage procrastination, she started an online forum a few years ago to get support from like-minded colleagues. Now, whenever she posts her elaborate to-do lists, she knows that peer pressure will push her to cross off the tasks.
But the notion of balance, for her, is more about the trade-off between work and money. Since she lives in Darien, a pricey Connecticut town close to her campus, Montez has had to consider new ways to increase her income. To keep afloat, she has engaged in day trading — rapidly buying and selling stocks online — but recently took a big hit. Already she teaches extra courses for extra pay. She picked them with efficiency in mind. “I found that teaching ‘development,’ you have less work outside the classroom,” she says. Developmental courses, which are more introductory, have fewer students and more computer-lab time, and therefore fewer papers to grade. Montez is also taking an accounting course so she can apply to be a certified public accountant. She hopes to earn extra money by preparing tax returns.
“I love the academic schedule and the freedom of it, but it just means I have more time to worry about money,” she says. She’s also checking into M.B.A. programs and might consider doing some college administration. It’s not unheard of for scholars to take on other jobs, she notes. After all, “Wallace Stevens sold insurance. T.S. Eliot worked for a bank, and William Carlos Williams was a doctor.”
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education