Academia's Parent Trap

Dialogues #41

“Having kids is important for how we think about human life and human flourishing, because the fact is that we have the same things these kids have. We have these emotions. We have lots of moments of irrationality. We have all these bodily functions. We have large chunks of our lives where we're completely dependent on the care of other people and not recognizing that leads to a lot of weird thinking about what human life is. ” - Dr. Megan Fritts

🚨Episode 13 of the podcast is out! 🚨

When the moving truck pulled into College Station, TX to start my PhD program at Texas A&M, my wife and I had three kids in the minivan.

A couple weeks after that first semester of taking courses and teaching formal logic, we welcomed our fourth kid two days after Christmas.

And as I was beginning my last fall semester of teaching as a graduate student, having developed my own course on metaphysics that previous summer, we welcomed our fifth kid.

My family situation was unusual not only among other PhD students, but even among the philosophy department faculty.

Other than my supervisor at the time, within the philosophy department I had never seen anyone's kids, or heard anyone talk about parenting within academia.

Philosophy prides itself on including literally everything in the scope of its subject matter.

But as you will see from the most recent episode, philosophy has a massive, family-shaped gap in its literature and priority list.

Not only that, the demands of academia often make opting in to family life, including marriage, a major obstacle to merely surviving in the discipline.

Marcus Arvan talked about his and his wife's decision to delay having kids because of the research and job market demands.

To advance your ideas and networking possibilities, almost all scholars need to travel across the country regularly to multi-day conferences.

When you're a scholar, a wife, and a mother, those challenges can become barriers to holding on to a career in the field.

I was grateful that Dr. Megan Fritts--a wife, a mother, and a professional philosopher--opened up so candidly about the challenges that parents face within the academic world.

Of course, we could think of plenty of careers that are not kid-friendly, many of them appropriately so. But for academic philosophy, it doesn't seem necessary to the discipline itself that kids and families are perceived more as hindrances than as assets.

So why is it the case?

If you have more to add, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Until next time,

Jared

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