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Life as a singleton in academia | 5 comments (2 topical, 0 hidden)

[new] Mixed feelings (none / 0) (#4)
by halewis on Wed Apr 28, 2004 at 09:06:59 AM PDT

I think that the article makes some valid points. Single people (as well as married people) may have outside interests -- music, reading -- that deserve just as much respect and working around. The departments I'm familiar with let people prioritize teaching times and meeting times and try to schedule around each person's outside priorities, whether it's family related or working out or sleeping in. I've also heard of a company that wanted to provide a room for women to pump breastmilk, and what they did was to provide a "privacy room" for everyone. It met the needs of breastfeeding mothers, but everyone was able to use it for private phone calls, private meetings, or anything else. This wasn't academia, but it still had the benefit of meeting a family-related need in a way that didn't exclude anyone. It certainly is unfair to expect a single colleague to shoulder the burden of evening or weekend activities -- if those are expected of people, then it needs to be equitable, either by everyone taking turns or by dividing up "undesirable" activities so that one person does weekend activities but gets preference in choosing courses.

But I also have some disagreements with the article. At times it equates "single" with "childless" and "married" with "having children". Single people do have tuition benefits for their children, just like married people, at schools that offer that benefit. It's whether or not you have children that is the issue, not whether or not you are married. A bigger issue might be whether schools that offer benefits to married couples offer those same benefits to gay couples (domestic partners, for example), but the article doesn't address that much.

Aside from equal opportunity for benefits regardless of sexual orientation, I don't, in truth, see a need to give everyone equal dollar amounts of benefits. To me that's the wrong focus (my health insurance would be more valuable if I had 10 kids -- should I get a bonus because I only have 2? And paid maternity leave is not really the same thing as paid vacation.) Stressing this seems to detract from the part of the article that I do sympathize with: recognizing that everyone has outside lives and working around them respectfully.

Life as a singleton in academia | 5 comments (2 topical, 0 hidden)

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