Academic Adultery: Surreptitious Performances of the Professor/Mother

Abstract

I'll admit it; I've been seduced. Just over ten years ago as a newly anointed PhD fervently seeking a relationship with an institution that would allow a balanced quality of life featuring career and family, I bought the line that small liberal arts colleges were more family-friendly than hardcore research institutions. Knowing from my experiences in graduate school and from reading The Chronicle of Higher Education that life in the academy is not particularly conducive to raising children, I sought to establish a relationship with an institution that advanced the philosophy of wholeness of person as part of the educative process. Such places, I believed, would be sites that disavowed dichotomies of mind/body and professional/personal, featuring instead a philosophy of integration consistent with my feminist principles. I took the plunge and made a commitment with a liberal arts college, embarking on the path toward tenure, and seeking to prove myself fit for the long-term professional relationship in the midst of having two children. Much of what has followed that day of declaring my commitment has been positive. I in an institution in which a familial metaphor is ubiquitous; ours is not a school, but a that provides students with opportunities to grow in ways beyond intellectual development, helping them also nurture an aesthetic sense, attend to their physical well-being, cultivate a spiritual identity, and engage in social relationships. Faculty members are to serve as not only teachers, but role models, engaged mentors, and compassionate disciplinarians, practicing skills commensurate with intensive parenting: listening empathically, providing individual instruction, attending to a student's personal problems after class, and multitasking scholarship with administrative minutia. Discursively, this is a stark contrast to the legendary business-only environment of research institutions--and a seemingly perfect site for a professor/mother. Understanding the potency of discursive formations in enacting everyday relations of power (Foucault, Discipline), I interpreted my institution's adoption of the familial metaphor as a promising indication of a family-friendly environment. A redefinition of teaching as parenting should allow me to integrate seamlessly my mother work with my academic work. At last, I should be able to balance my personal life with my professional one, proving the cynics to be wrong. But my experience has not been so unambiguous. Instead, I have experienced what Mumby explains as a struggle for meaning shaped by discourse and characterized by the management of tensions that constitute daily organizational life. My awareness of this interpretive struggle shaped by a particular discursive framework was sharpened in 2005, when I participated in a critical autoethnographic study for a National Communication Association panel with three other professor/mother colleagues working in small-college environments. We read the evocative Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety and analyzed our subsequent conversations over the course of a year, hoping to discover understandings about our performances as professor/mothers. As we discussed our experiences in enacting the simultaneous roles of faculty member, administrator, mother, partner, and colleague, two broad themes became apparent. First, we acknowledged that in this era of the new millennial student (Holtz), we are encouraged to meet students' needs in increasingly more communication-intensive, personalized ways--redolent not only of good parenting, but of overprotective mothering--in a familiar, but not principally sound, rendition of the family metaphor as complement to the student's own helicopter parents. Teaching bleeds into caretaking, as liberal arts schools rush to demonstrate their student-centeredness in competition for the diminishing pool of prospective students willing and able to pay high-priced private tuitions. …