The challenges of balancing academic work with parenting often go unrecognized by university management and policy makers.[1] Despite paid parental leaves and a shared compassionate culture on the part of chairs, supervisors, and administrators, CUNY and higher education, more broadly, have done a very poor job so far in supporting faculty and staff who are parents. Even at Hostos, fondly known as “la familia,” there is little in the way of established college-wide policies to help parents (ie: no childcare support mechanisms) and still less of an academic culture that could be described as truly pro-parenting (ie: late afternoon meetings being the norm). With the outbreak of COVID-19, the life of academic parents has become even more nightmarish as they shifted work from in-person to virtual platforms, while school closures and the loss of after-school programs and daycares simultaneously increased dramatically their responsibilities at home. Short-term solutions transitioned to long-term obstacles, as parents faced limited or no childcare. Even now, under the emergence of some normalcy, parents continue to cope with unprecedented unpredictability, anxiety, and stress.
College administrators need to carefully recalibrate academic expectations to meet this new urgency; they need to start creating more equitable, inclusive, and flexible practices, showing they care not only with words, but with actions. Sadly, CUNY’s recent mandate for 70% in-person teaching for Spring 2022 points to the complete opposite, intensifying, rather than mitigating, challenges for faculty with caregiving responsibilities. Professors with unvaccinated children, especially mothers, may have the hardest time surviving the Spring semester if the current requirement to teach at least one in-person course is followed through in its current form, without more generous allowances to be able to teach online. Currently, there isn’t yet a clear timeframe for when the vaccine will be available for children under age 5. That puts parents of these kids in a very uncertain and difficult position.
Our aim, in sharing these concerns, is to make the challenges of in-person teaching for faculty with unvaccinated children more visible, and to launch, hopefully, in the process, a larger national conversation about how we can nurture and implement a true “culture of care” that meaningfully supports the needs of faculty, staff and student parents. The circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, which are beyond anyone’s control, have further amplified “the need for academic and societal culture change:” parents should not be forced to face agonizing choices between their kids and their jobs. [2] We just hope it does not get to that point and that CUNY will do the right thing by supporting parents with young kids by at least allowing them to plan class schedules and modalities that are compatible with their family needs. As the selected stories below make clear, these needs are real, complex, and urgent.
As a mother of a 11-year boy, who spent a large part of his last two academic school years at home, I can personally attest to the intensified challenges of balancing work and family under the pandemic. Luckily, my child was old enough to study independently and self-entertain himself. Despite the cost of social isolation (a significant price for all children like him, who don’t have siblings) we managed the best we could, in no small way thanks to my ability to work remotely, while my husband resumed his in-person work as soon as the city’s lockdown was lifted. Now we are anxiously counting down the days to our son’s vaccination: His biggest birthday gift this coming year, we tell him, will be a COVID shot. But so many of my colleagues are not as fortunate. Their kids are still too young to be vaccinated and require way more attention than mine. When I heard of CUNY’s decision to implement a universal mandate to return to at least 70% in-person teaching for the Spring, I could not help but thinking: How will this affect parents with unvaccinated kids at CUNY? Why are college presidents turning a blind eye to the needs of academic mothers and fathers? How would I feel if my child was still a baby or a toddler? Would I quit my job?
The following testimonies put a human face to these questions, reminding us that addressing the barriers experienced by academic parents, especially mothers, is essential to CUNY’s mission to foster equitable opportunities and to recruit and to retain a diverse professoriate. I want to thank every faculty who shared their, in some cases deeply personal and moving, stories. Their names have been omitted to protect their careers from potential negative repercussions.
Marcella Bencivenni
Professor of History, Hostos Community College
[1] These shortcomings have been well documented. See among the most recent studies: Eva Lantsoght et all, “Challenges and Opportunities for Academic Parents During COVID-19,” Frontiers in Psychology 12:645734. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645734. Published online August 18, 2021.
[2] Mary A. Herman and Cheryl Neale-McFall, “COVID-19, Academic Mothers and Opportunities for the Academy,” Academe (Fall 2020).
