Week 5_SS1_LamKam CHAN ____ GREAT Mother VS GREAT Scholar

Week 5_GREAT Mother VS GREAT Scholar

In this week’s reading, the two readings that left strong impressions in my mind include Allyson Cubales’s “Mothering Is Liberation” and Wei Ming Dariotis’s “Academic Symbiosis”. These two readings tie together to some extent and gave me a better understanding of how the hierarchy in academia can affect professors’ family lives. Cubales’s chapter fully explained the struggles in her everyday life hoping to seek the equilibrium point to be a responsible mother, while being able to keep her job as a faculty by spending lots of time on preparing course materials while doing research too. The chapter pointed out microaggressions, which include the misconception that a full time professor is unable to be a responsible mother. Although it is true that raising a child requires lots of time and effort, but what about the many other mothers who also have work? The idea of a faculty either being a parent or working in academia is embedded so deeply in the society to the extent that other faculty do not see the faculty who are mothers as conscientious as a professor or as a mother. I have heard students calling their professors out for being unprofessional and claiming that the faculty do not teach well because they only care about their own child and research, while disregarding their job as a professor. In “Academic Symbiosis,” I could see the connection with “Mothering Is Liberation” in the sense that the problem of not having a support system and opportunity for faculty to express their views to university administrations really makes faculty who experience challenges in academia very helpless. The desire to get the tenure position really made lots of faculty work very hard and try to prove themselves to the administration as well as peers. However, I could see how this can add stress to faculty and not only reduce the efficiency of professors designing or teaching their courses, but also as a parent. Academic symbiosis being the “antithesis of academic competition, hierarchy, and parasitism” and lack of an easy and useful support system pulls professors behind from what they want to and capable delivering their knowledge to students.

Ward, K., & Wolf-Wendel, L. (2004). Academic motherhood: Managing complex roles in research universities. The Review of Higher Education, 27(2), 233-257.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mother-professor-professor-mother_b_3479034