On becoming a mamascholar

his is the essay I wrote right when we were deciding whether to start a family.  Essentially, it is the beginning of mamascholarhood.  I read it now and it seems a bit naive.  In the end, Johannes was conceived shortly after this piece was written.  I decided to stay in a job that I did not like very much because starting a professorship in another state 3 days after my due date seemed unrealistic.  I remember the day I made that decision, and it felt like being a mamascholar was not really a possibility.  Feel free to share your own decision making stories...

I think I finally grew up last week. After six years of study, exams, field work and one too many student loans, I discovered the first job posting for which I am really qualified. It’s official: I’m on the job market. This didn’t come unexpectedly – I’m nearly done with my dissertation. But still, seeing the announcement in the proverbial black and white made me realize how difficult this whole job search thing might actually be.

I opened the attachment, half expecting yet another announcement for math or special education, and saw instead a posting for a tenure-track position in my subfield of education research at a doctoral-granting institution with an international focus. Perfect. So why was I, all of the sudden, so uncertain? I have wanted to be a professor since before I knew what a professor was. As the daughter of a professor and community college lecturer, some of my earliest memories are of my mom’s laboratory in the nursing wing of a large community college in Ohio. My mom was clearly the hippest biologist on staff, with her tie-dyed lab coat and her classroom skeleton that wore a fez-style hat. Later, after we moved to Upstate New York, I learned how to use the library on my dad’s campus before I finished middle school. By the time I was a freshman there, I knew most of my professors by their first names.

My interest in higher education grew from this very personal beginning into a professional calling. Although I could have continued in communication or perhaps even political science, my undergraduate fields, I chose to pursue my Ph.D. in education policy partly because I had come to recognize that the field craves experts of its own and not those just borrowed from other disciplines. In my heart, I think I have always seen myself as an educator. Academia is not just a second home; it is the place where I have always felt most at home.

So now I am finally “old enough” to have an office in the ivory tower. Yet, the posting, the first, I hope, of several, somehow summed up all my hopes and fears with one click of the mouse. Little things like the job market seem so far away when you receive the acceptance letter into the Ph.D. program. Now I realize that especially with my subfields – comparative education and research methodology – there may be only four to five academic openings in North America during the next year. So how picky do I actually get to be?  Is the perfect job, like this one, still perfect if it is below the Mason-Dixon line?

My parents still live in Upstate New York, my sister in San Francisco, my husband is from Minnesota and we met in Berlin. I guess a job in Alabama or Texas would round us out, but for some reason, the South sometimes feels more foreign than Europe (where I would gladly accept a position, should anyone be offering). So what is it about southern universities that has me on edge?  Maybe I’m just used to snow and lots of it – it’s hard to imagine having great weather the whole year.

But when I am really honest with myself, I realize my geographical dilemma has a decidedly biological dimension.  If at some point my family of two becomes a family of three or four, it would be nice to be close to some relative—any relative—and that leaves the South a little bit cold.

If you look back over the several years of job search diaries published in the Chronicle, it is not uncommon for a fresh Ph.D. or ABD like me to confess that she’s worried about balancing family and career. The undeniable overlap between my biological clock’s ever-louder ringing and the commencement of my job search is not unique. In education it is particularly common because our average age of graduation is amongst the highest in the Academy. Fact is that despite the many strides my mother’s generation made for us, women of my generation, in and out of the university, still have to confront this issue. I have to confront this issue; it may be that the year I start looking for my dream job is the same year that my husband and I decide start a family.

In my dissertation support group – which is filled with other recent Ph.D.s and Ph.D. hopefuls, both women and men – we talk about various ways of family planning on the tenure track. Our expression for this is “beating the clock.” Most days, this expression empowers me and makes me realize, as any good social scientist would, that we have agency and that means we have choices. We can choose to delay going on the job market and we can choose to stop the tenure clock or seek non-tenure track positions and we can choose to adopt or choose not to have children. But on other days, these don’t really feel like reasonable choices for me. On those days I don’t want to beat the clock. I want to throttle it, throw it out the window and then run downstairs to stomp on it some more.

I hate the fact that conversations about starting a family with my husband, who is also an academic hopeful in a similar field, are mostly about hoping to squeeze in a birth between dissertation defense and the tenure track. Of course the reality might look quite different; our yet unconceived little one might be on an entirely different calendar than the academic one. Yet I sit here with my Palm Pilot in hand and calculate—would I be showing by January? Or what about April, when our largest national conference takes place? How pregnant is too pregnant? Will they take me seriously if I look like a bowling ball? Or worse, will they have those quasi-illegal thoughts that I know many people, even my female colleagues have – thoughts like “She’s going to be too busy with the kid to publish enough, to be a good colleague, to be a good professor.” In education, we distinguish ourselves by our commitment to social justice. Over and over again, I meet colleagues from throughout the world and I’m astounded by their commitment to using research to make the world better and more just, as trite as it might sound. Many of us, myself included, chose Schools of Education exactly for this reason. Yet, I still sit here with my calendar, trying to figure out whether achieving one dream means giving up or postponing another.

There is no real way of knowing if you are good enough until you are out there on the market. We spend upwards (for some way upwards) of five years trying to add lines to our CVs. Research, teaching and service must all be accounted for plus those few extras which make you stand out to the committee amongst the 100 or 200 or 300 (God, I hope its not more) applications they may receive. But in the end we just try to have enough lines to cover ourselves because that is what it feels like out there one the market—like you are standing in the cold with nothing more than the pages of your CV to keep you warm. But this is when I remind myself again that we do have choices. So I choose to take the plunge, both into the job market and motherhood. Maybe one or both won’t work out, maybe that CV won’t have enough lines to hide a big pregnant belly, but then again maybe it won’t matter. Maybe I will be lucky enough to be 9 months pregnant at a job interview where they look at me and not at my belly and then say “welcome aboard, here is information on our tenure process and the university daycare.”