Good Monday morning, you lazy parental types.
While looking around Inside Higher Ed, I came across an old article about Princeton’s new policy of automatically granting a one-year leave from tenure track when a faculty member becomes a parent. I’d been delighted to read this back in August: one thing I don’t like at all about academe in the U.S. is the default assumption that people who make teaching and research their life’s work aren’t entitled to a life outside of the university.
Many more comments have been posted since I last read the article, and I boggle. Some of the people who choose to be “child-free” actually dare to imply that having children makes for lazy academics. That having children means you aren’t dedicated to education and research. I’d like to see them be responsible for a baby and hold down an exhausting full-time job at the same time, for just a month or so. I wonder if they’d change their mind then.
And spare me the “we have too many people on this planet” argument. Fertility is well below replacement rate (2.1 is said to keep a population stable) in a large portion of the world, including most of Europe and North America. The places with particularly high fertility rate (Niger tops the CIA World Factbook chart, with 7.55 children born per woman on the average) also have a huge infant mortality rate.