The Family Track

How do the necessities of caring for others deter, benefit, or redefine

        research and teaching in higher education? What have universities done

        to recognize the difficulties facing academic parents, single mothers

        and fathers, graduate students, lesbian and gay couples? What pro-family

        policies can be enacted during institutional budget crises?

      At a time when the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaper

        of the lives of those it employs, The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties

        While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve discusses the challenges

        and benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competing

        needs to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in other

        personal relationships. Here academic women and men explore issues that

        include biological and tenure clocks, childcare and eldercare, surrogate

        parenting of students, and increasing job demands. In telling stories

        about the quality of their lives, they express their hopes, anxieties,

        difficulties, and personal strategies for maintaining a delicate but achievable

        balance.

      "Lively, well-written, useful, and persuasive … The Family

        Track reveals much on family roles within the academy and suggests

        many specific projects and guidelines for Institutional change."

        -- Judith Kegan Gardiner, editor of Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency

        in Theory and Practice