One comment on my post about the difficulty summer break poses for faculty members with young children highlighted this can be a problem for both male and female law profs, and I wholeheartedly agree (although in general, and I repeat this is a big overgeneralization, my female colleagues seem to agonize about it more). The poster also raised the important point about legal academia being un-family friendly in general, and I certainly think that’s worth some more discussion. Brian Leiter had a very interesting discussion on his blog a few weeks back about how the practice of requiring a look-see visit before extending a lateral offer makes it very difficult for faculty members with either young children or a partner with his or her own career to move up. One other practice that leaps to my mind is the increasing use of exploding offers. One terrific school in which I was very interested extended me an offer with a 48 hour deadline for a response. It was simply impossible for me to commit my lawyer husband and 3 young children to move across the country on that short a timetable. I’d like to open this up for a discussion about other un-family friendly policies that people have encountered, either on the market or after entering teaching.
Posted by Jennifer Collins on April 24, 2005 at 05:09 PM
» Are Law Schools Family Friendly? from Conglomerate Jennifer Collins is guest blogging at PrawfsBlawg and is asking for readers’ non-family friendly experiences in academia. [Read More]
Tracked on Apr 25, 2005 9:46:05 AM
Comments
I agree with Jennifer’s posts about the difficulties of balancing academia and childcare. This year I have been teaching at Yale law school, which has a day care that is open year round on-site. My office was basically at the same building where my two baby daughters went every morning. That was terrific but so rare. Lateral moves that depend on visits are certain to have gendered patterns. Women are far more likely to have partners with career constraints and are less likely to want to move their entire family for the chance of “moving up” in the ranking. The upside of this is that as more and more couples are making decisions about their academic jobs based on a both their careers and the quality of life of the place, there are more and more terrific faculty everywhere, at all ranks. Which means that there should be more dynamic competition among law schools that the historically entrenched rankings. Another thing about the dual academic family is that this year, while I was on the market, I was struck by how little influence one school or department had over another school at the same university.
Posted by: Orly Lobel | May 10, 2005 10:03:07 PM
I’ve never heard of a law school making an exploding offer for a tenure-track professorship. That’s just bizarre. Did you ask them why they couldn’t wait a few more days? I suppose that if they felt the need to give you an exploding offer to get you, you probably didn’t want to go there.
Posted by: lawprof | Apr 25, 2005 2:05:18 PM