lewin

As should be clear from my previous posts, I think that we should all pitch in to help each other -- not just the childless helping those with children. You don't, apparently. At some point, everyone has to leave Galt's Gulch, though.

Not a strawman. You've been pretty clear that you want to help only explicitly on your terms and that you think the institutional response should be to privilege seniority. I feel, as I've been clear, that the institution should be humane and receptive to the requests of students who have needs. At my M.A. institution, I was once a TA along with another student. We both had to teach two sections for the class. Two sections were at 8am and two were at 2pm. The professor's initial plan was to assign each of us one of the early morning sections and one of the afternoon sections. In the end, the professor ended up giving me both 8am sections and the other individual the plum 2pm sections. Why? For an excellent reason:

1. Said other TA could not afford to live in University town (prohibitively expensive place to live -- few of us could afford to live there) and lived 20+ miles away.
2. Said other TA's bicycle (and all bicycles) were repeatedly stolen from storage facilities at the apartment complex where he lived. Commuting by bicycle had become impossible because the lease also forbade keeping bicycles in one's apartment(!) -- ironically, while the landlord apparently could not prevent theft of said bicycles, they could indeed tell who had bicycles stored in their apartments.
3. TA had to take the bus to the university -- and the earliest bus route within walking distance did not come by until 7:30am -- meaning that student couldn't physically get to campus before 8:20 or so with all of the stops along the route.

As another student who couldn't afford to live in university town, I ended up having a 30 mile commute to get to my sections smack in the middle of rush hour making my average commute time anywhere between 50-80 minutes, meaning that I had to be up out and of the house at 6:30am twice a week so that I could sit in traffic to make what would, by 9am, have been literally only a 30 minute drive.

Inconvenient? Absolutely -- it was inconvenient as hell. What was inconvenient for me, however, was literally this student's only way of holding onto his funding, receiving his tuition remission, and thus being able to stay in graduate school and fulfill his dream. He is now a first-year student in a Ph.D. program at a great university that, thankfully, has better funding and lower costs of living in his area. If the professor hadn't been flexible in the scheduling or had this option, this person would have lost his funding entirely since there were no other opportunities for said person to TA elsewhere in the department that semester that didn't involve the same 8am trap.

So was I inconvenienced? Yeah. I'm not going to pretend that it didn't suck. But *it didn't suck as much as having to literally abandon my dreams because of an inflexible system*.

I'm glad that my professor was looking out for students that way (by the way, the professor was my advisor, but not of the other student), and I am grateful that in a scenario where I wanted to TA for a certain professor because it gave them a chance to evaluate me as a teacher and say more about me when they wrote me a LOR, my department was willing to consider it and ultimately approve my request.

Like I said before, there is a difference between people pitching in in an atomized and contingent fashion -- "sure I'll cover your section on Thursday" -- and being willing to bite the bullet without complaint one semester because someone advocated for -- and got -- a better assignment because of childcare issues, or a sick parent, or an upcoming surgery, etc. I don't have a problem with the latter. I've been both a "winner" and a "loser" because the institution *didn't* stick to a mode of "fairness" that solely considered seniority, but a mode of "fairness" that considered a myriad of factors, some professional and others personal. I prefer the latter -- it is more humane.

In an unrelated but very important point*, the questioner who preceded you misused the word 'confound', which should only be used to describe variables that co-vary with both the independent and dependent variables. It's possible that "date since last menstruation" might have introduced random error variance into the cortisol data (as you said correctly, "added noise") but that isn't a confound unless the questioner is suggesting that "time since menstruation" is also related to perceived discrimination in some complicated way that suppressed the relationship between variables.

...and if the questioner was suggesting that women experience more discrimination depending on their menstrual cycle, the audience probably should have had a problem with that





* by "important" I mean "pedantic".

Obviously I didn't make it clear enough from the context that "drinking wine" was a little rhetorical flourish meant to illustrate the broader point that my non-work time, however I choose to use it, is just as important as a parent's time.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot so to sum up my opinion...

a.) Individuals covering for each other is great; my department's quite communal and we do this for each other a lot.

b.) Everybody has things outside of school that are important to them. Here's an example that you might be more sympathetic to: My spouse works night shifts and long hours. If I were assigned a TA that required driving 90 minutes 2-3 times per week I might go five days without seeing her. You're saying "kids" is a good reason for accommodation, but why not "working spouse"? By saying, "I have kids and need permanent accommodation," it's implying, "You non-parents, your priorities are less important." Arbitrary top-down judgments about whose personal life is more important is a recipe for unfairness and discontent.

c.) There's a difference between extenuating circumstances and permanent life situations. "My daughter is ill, can you cover my class?" is worlds away from, "For the rest of my PhD, can I be exempted from undesirable TA assignments?" The former is great, the latter is unreasonable.

^^Agree with all of the above.


I feel a bit like you're picking an extreme example to make a point. What if parent is watching Storage Wars with kids, but non-parent is taking care of spouse with cancer? What if parent's kid and non-parent's spouse are in the same choir!? I'm being facetious to make the point that it's dangerous for organizations to play the "this is more important than that" game.

I wouldn't hesitate to cover for a colleague who has a choir concert event if I had something less important going on. But never would I think that their "average" spare time as a parent (or whatever they happen to be doing on a random day) is more worthy than my childless time.

Any of you have experience being close with professors of the opposite sex?

Did I miss the memo about the meaning of "troll"? Or is any discussion topic that's not about the font size of your writing sample suddenly trolling?

To add more anecdotal evidence, in my time as a PhD student I've known three women who had their first kids in the last year of PhD and one who did during postdoc. Of those, three have tenure-track jobs and one has a good government research job. A fifth woman had a kid in the first year of a tenure-track job after doing a one-year post doc. So all would have been 30 years old, +/- 2 years.

Now that i think about it, of the female PhD grads I've known, the women who had kids have been more successful than the ones who didn't. They were all pretty awesome.

To add more anecdotal evidence, in my time as a PhD student I've known three women who had their first kids in the last year of PhD and one who did during postdoc. Of those, three have tenure-track jobs and one has a good government research job. A fifth woman had a kid in the first year of a tenure-track job after doing a one-year post doc. So all would have been 30 years old, +/- 2 years.

Now that i think about it, of the female PhD grads I've known, the women who had kids have been more successful than the ones who didn't. They were all pretty awesome.

I had my kids when I was 26 and 28. I was married to my college sweetheart, we both had stable and well-paying jobs, and my in-laws lived with us and helped with childcare. Graduate school wasn't even on my radar then--I thought I would be a high school science teacher forever.

Then we separated, and I moved back to the west coast to be with my family. With the support of my mom and dad, I earned my MS in Science Education at the local state university and decided that I wanted to pursue a PhD. It wasn't an easy decision to go back to school as a single mom of two. It's been a tough couple of months, but I love it here, and I think we'll be okay.

Would I love to be childless in grad school? YES! There's no doubt that my childless colleagues can do things that I can't easily do. Am I envious at times? Yes.

My responsibilities as a parent and student are no less or more than others--just different. I wrote my original post when I was still emotional, and I can see how my wording suggested entitlement. While the discussion has become heated at times, I appreciate everyone sharing their viewpoints. This issue is just very visible in my department because of the older student population.

Maybe being a good, responsible parent would mean waiting until one's life circumstances can support raising a child independently, without forcing one's colleagues to cover for them.

Maybe being a good, responsible parent would mean waiting until one's life circumstances can support raising a child independently, without forcing one's colleagues to cover for them.

^^Agree with all of the above.


I feel a bit like you're picking an extreme example to make a point. What if parent is watching Storage Wars with kids, but non-parent is taking care of spouse with cancer? What if parent's kid and non-parent's spouse are in the same choir!? I'm being facetious to make the point that it's dangerous for organizations to play the "this is more important than that" game.

I wouldn't hesitate to cover for a colleague who has a choir concert event if I had something less important going on. But never would I think that their "average" spare time as a parent (or whatever they happen to be doing on a random day) is more worthy than my childless time.

Obviously I didn't make it clear enough from the context that "drinking wine" was a little rhetorical flourish meant to illustrate the broader point that my non-work time, however I choose to use it, is just as important as a parent's time.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot so to sum up my opinion...

a.) Individuals covering for each other is great; my department's quite communal and we do this for each other a lot.

b.) Everybody has things outside of school that are important to them. Here's an example that you might be more sympathetic to: My spouse works night shifts and long hours. If I were assigned a TA that required driving 90 minutes 2-3 times per week I might go five days without seeing her. You're saying "kids" is a good reason for accommodation, but why not "working spouse"? By saying, "I have kids and need permanent accommodation," it's implying, "You non-parents, your priorities are less important." Arbitrary top-down judgments about whose personal life is more important is a recipe for unfairness and discontent.

c.) There's a difference between extenuating circumstances and permanent life situations. "My daughter is ill, can you cover my class?" is worlds away from, "For the rest of my PhD, can I be exempted from undesirable TA assignments?" The former is great, the latter is unreasonable.

Obviously I didn't make it clear enough from the context that "drinking wine" was a little rhetorical flourish meant to illustrate the broader point that my non-work time, however I choose to use it, is just as important as a parent's time.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot so to sum up my opinion...

a.) Individuals covering for each other is great; my department's quite communal and we do this for each other a lot.

b.) Everybody has things outside of school that are important to them. Here's an example that you might be more sympathetic to: My spouse works night shifts and long hours. If I were assigned a TA that required driving 90 minutes 2-3 times per week I might go five days without seeing her. You're saying "kids" is a good reason for accommodation, but why not "working spouse"? By saying, "I have kids and need permanent accommodation," it's implying, "You non-parents, your priorities are less important." Arbitrary top-down judgments about whose personal life is more important is a recipe for unfairness and discontent.

c.) There's a difference between extenuating circumstances and permanent life situations. "My daughter is ill, can you cover my class?" is worlds away from, "For the rest of my PhD, can I be exempted from undesirable TA assignments?" The former is great, the latter is unreasonable.

Maybe being a good, responsible parent would mean waiting until one's life circumstances can support raising a child independently, without forcing one's colleagues to cover for them.

The assignment is just as inconvenient. The effect on the rest of the lives isn't.

What this comes down to is a difference in fundamental opinion- you seem to feel that, so to speak, we, as a culture, should all pitch in to help out those who have kids, because it benefits society as a whole (referring back to some of your earlier points here). That's just not an opinion I share.

I think that all to often, it leads to taking a lot of the personal choice out of having kids or not. If I choose not to have children because I feel like I'm too busy at this point in my life to adequately take care of them, and/or to financially stretched to adequately support them, but then I end up subsidizing someone else's time with their children (and, of course, through taxes their care costs) by taking evening/remote TA positions so they don't have to.... Then that takes away a lot of the freedom in my decisions.

I think we've hit the "agree to disagree" point in this discussion, personally. You think that those with children as an external responsibility should be put in a special category, and catered to. I don't. I think most of us in grad school are stretched thin enough as it is with our own responsibilities and holding our lives and relationships together without the addition of extra stressors, whether we're single, married and childless or with children.

And since you seem to be getting increasingly patronizing with your treatment of childless people (we're apparently sitting on the couch drinking wine watching TV and playing World of Warcraft) relative to those with children (who are apparently doing the thankless and highly regarded task of raising tomorrow's students for us), I don't think this is going to get anymore productive.

Maybe being a good, responsible parent would mean waiting until one's life circumstances can support raising a child independently, without forcing one's colleagues to cover for them.

Mike D - you're over-thinking this one. Get over it, first.

Now, pretend you're an expert - what would your areas of expertise be? Write that down. "Philosophy of Law" for example, would work, as would something more specific. In my discipline, for example, I might list: new media histories, contemporary art and globalization, curating new media. Imagine a 3rd or 4th year course you might be teaching in 5 years time - what would it be called? That's your expertise.

Imagine you're writing keywords for an article abstract (for example, for the proposal you are submitting). What would those be?

It's not a trick question.

Hopefully this helps.

Maybe being a good, responsible parent would mean waiting until one's life circumstances can support raising a child independently, without forcing one's colleagues to cover for them.

I do not think that your irritation trumps someone else's efforts to be good parents who are present for their kids -- sorry. And it is precisely the TA-assigner's job to make those kinds of judgments. And they do. All the time. You don't have to like it, but there it is.

Fixed that for you. If other people prefer the other TA because of its location then it should be easy to switch without using children as the reason. But now you're equivocating. Your original post said: "...because I am a single mom of two elementary-school aged kids, I preferred to stay close to the university." It's unreasonable to expect someone else to travel if the sole reason is that you have kids and don't want to travel yourself.

And nobody was suggesting you shouldn't decline the TA if that choice works better for you. (I'm glad you're getting the RA's instead!) The option to decline a TA should be open to anyone regardless of reason. But if you're arguing that you deserve a local TA (which unarguably means that somebody else needs to take the far one) because of children, I don't accept that reason.

Because I disagree that some aspect of one person's personal life (i.e., kids) should take priority over some aspect of another's (i.e., anything else). Favouring parents is not a neutral decision; it creates real costs for non-parents (e.g., the people now burdened with a 90 minute commute to their TA) who are, essentially, subsidizing someone else's decision to have children. Less applicable for academics, but I recently read an article arguing that parents should get priority for having holidays off. But wouldn't non-parents like to spend holidays with relatives too?

Mostly, I just want organizations with these policies to be aware of the consequences and make decisions in an informed way, not just make the assumption that "because I have kids" is an excuse that should be accepted without question. And I want parents to acknowledge that their kids don't necessarily have the same priority for me as they do for you, and that's not selfish or wrong somehow.

"[Evening] classes are taught by grad students, adjuncts, or the childless faculty." I totally support the first two groups from that list teaching all the evening classes. And there are ways to accomplish the same goal without explicitly favouring one group, such as paying mileage or a shift premium. If evening classes pay more, some people will choose that of their own accord.


(As an aside, on this issue, I do find myself sympathetic to arguments that by not favoring parents we're unintentionally harming women and contributing to gender imbalances.)


ETA: tldr: Parents spending time with their kids isn't more important than me spending time with my dog, or anything else I want to do.

1. Sorry, if I wasn't clear: I didn't mean to say your advisor shouldn't get involved, just that at my institution they typically don't.

2. "I think I should be treated differently because I have kids." We can agree to disagree

Two minor points:

1. My supervisor has no interest in or influence over my TA assignments. It's all done by administrators. Norms at other places might differ but I wouldn't get him involved in a TA dispute.

2. I'd be irritated if having kids trumped other concerns (e.g., seniority). It gets dicey when some people's personal lives (e.g., kids) are given priority over others (e.g., seeing my partner, watching TV with wine). It's not the TA-assigners job to make those kinds of judgments.