The Onion once ran an article entitled “T.A. spotted at bar.” The joke was a group of undergraduates shocked to see their teaching assistant hanging out, and that in the eyes of students, teaching assistants and professors are generally two-dimensional academics who do nothing but research, teach and study.
Surprising though it may be, professors and graduate students do more than read scholarly journals all day. They balance their academic work with outside lives, and some have families to raise. And although they might not frequent Cornerstone Grill and Loft or come out in force to football games, they’re an instrumental part of the university.
But getting them to stay in College Park has become a problem. No one doubts the quality of the university’s academic work, but the university needs to provide more than just quality academics to attract and retain truly top-notch faculty. It needs to provide quality of life.
When administrators ask faculty members why they choose not to take a job or decide to leave the university, location is often cited as a factor. College Park is surrounded by federal research agencies who are ready and willing to provide funding, but the city itself pales in comparison to the opportunities around peer institutions in Chapel Hill, N.C., Ann Arbor, Mich., and Berkeley, Calif.
And when graduate students are asked why they dropped out of programs, the desire to be at an institution that enables them to have a family comes up again and again. Faculty and graduate students share a fear of losing a research grant or a promotion if they take time off after having a baby. The university’s teachers and researchers want a family-friendly environment. While the university has the Center for Young Children, the program is not nearly big enough to care for every professor’s child. And female faculty and graduate students still face an unfair fear that having a child could cost them a job, scholarship or fellowship.
Fortunately, the university has started taking steps to provide professors with a better quality of life. However , many of the new initiatives have been neutered by a lack of funding and the plans should only be considered a first step.
In the fall, the University Senate approved a revamping of the university’s paternal leave policy for tenure-track faculty. The new policy now allows such faculty to request reduced workloads and a delay in their tenure review date in order to allot more time to raising a family.
This semester, the senate voted to create a family care resource and referral service that will point faculty toward available child care resources. But the program will only be free for 240 people, with the remaining help-seekers having to pay. The senate hoped to create a more extensive child care plan, but with the university budget as tight as ever, opted to go for a scaled-down version.
University administrators also announced a plan for next year that would create a Childbirth Accommodation Fund that would grant paid parental leave to graduate assistants. In order to attract a wide range of graduate students — not just those who are single and without children — the university must be able to compete with its peer institutions, three of which already provide six weeks of unpaid parental leave.
All three of these initiatives would make the university a more attractive place to work, but all three are new, and implementation needs to be carefully watched. In addition, once the economy turns — if it ever does — child care resources should be near the top on the list of programs that warrant expansion.
Still, more can be done to improve the quality of life for university employees. College Park is not a prime place to raise a family. With the congested and dingy Route 1 corridor and the city’s fair share of crime, few would point to College Park on a map and declare they wouldn’t live anywhere else. Revamping a city isn’t easy, especially when its current state is much the result of the surrounding area. But that is exactly why administrators should work further to implement policies that make the university, if not the surrounding area, more attractive. The development of East Campus should help, but ultimately the city needs to rival upscale Montgomery County in its attractiveness to families.
The university’s academic reputation has skyrocketed in the past 20 years. Let’s hope that in the next 20, its reputation as a place to live and work can keep improving.
