In my email inbox last week was a notification of a fellowship opportunity. Since I have a sabbatical coming up shortly—okay, in a couple of years, but time flies, right?—I eagerly skimmed the details. It’s a fellowship squarely in my field. The funding is pretty generous, probably enough to help me buy out some extra time at my institution, and finish the damn book that is core to my next promotion. But at the end of the description, there sat the deal-breaker: “visiting scholars are expected to be in residence for the entire year.”
I understand the advantages of residential fellowships. For the institution sponsoring a fellowship, it is a good (and relatively inexpensive) way to introduce “fresh blood” into a program. And I cannot even begin to explain how much I have benefited from residential fellowships. On fellowship as a graduate student, I formed networks with some incredible scholars, gained some invaluable mentors, and met some of my best friends in the field. But therein lies a critical detail. As a graduate student, I had few things that tied me down to a certain location. I could fairly easily upend my single self—or perhaps my single self plus graduate student boyfriend—and journey around the country in search of fellowship spoils. Now, with two very young children and a husband with his own professional commitments, this flexibility is gone.
I bring this up because, unless you have been living in a cave (or frantically finishing your dissertation), you are probably aware of the ongoing discussion about women and families in academia. We have Barbara Walter and her colleagues writing that female authors in international relations are cited far less often than men. Other studies suggest that women with a family are far less likely to get tenure, and that women are also promoted to full professor less quickly than their male counterparts. Some of this has been attributed to practices of self-citation, the continued prevalence of all-male scholarly networks, and the unique service burdens placed on women.
It is worth asking, I think, what structural factors in academia might inhibit the promotion of women and, in particular, if there are certain opportunities less accessible to women (and, to be clear, men with inflexible family obligations) that might have a significant impact on their ability to be promoted. After all, fellowship funding allows women to put aside the burdens of service and teaching to focus on their research. Such fellowships also build networks that can lead to an increased recognition of one’s research in the field. Might it thus be worth thinking about how things like “residential fellowships” might be restructured to attract a different pool of applicants? Is a full-year presence at an institution really necessary, or more a relic of a time when communication and transportation was a serious obstacle to intellectual exchange? What would these fellowships lose from having seminars throughout the year, without requiring an in-house presence? I’m certainly not claiming that this is a panacea, but certainly it seems time to think about the ramifications of our institutions for ongoing issues of gender and family in academia.
Agree 100% that year-long fellowships are antiquated, making it harder to participate in them (and, as a result, likely reducing the quality of the applicant pool at the margin). I’d like to see them go the way of the Palm Pilot. But I disagree that there’s any important gender angle here. None of the married/child-rearing males I know are any more willing or able to take a year away from their families (or move them) than are the females, and none of the single/childless females I know are any less able to take advantage of such fellowships than are males.
The big point here is the anachronistic year-in-residence requirements, and how they serve to undermine the goals that these fellowships are trying to achieve. I think everyone would agree that more flexibility on that front would be better for everyone.
As the father of a child with special needs, I have never felt able to apply to residential fellowship programs: I can’t disrupt my family by either being away for such a period or by moving them. A periodic seminar structure with online interactions in-between strikes me as a very workable substitute.
I believe I received a similar notice from a certain institution on the East Coast. My reaction was similar, and I’m sure there is a gendered aspect to it, but I’d be in the same boat. There is no way I could do an in-residence fellowship, unless my wife and son were able to come. In that instance, we would face the two-body problem all over again since my wife is an academic. I’ve seen it done where both spouses get a fellowship at the same institution for a year, but it’s not easy to line such fellowships up for one person, let alone two. I’m not convinced that there is an alternative since the in-residence program is intended to build a community, though maybe it matters less for faculty on sabbatical than it does for pre- and post-doc cohorts. As someone who had a post-doc where there were faculty on sabbatical in just such a situation, I found their mentorship and friendship especially worthwhile.
Nice to hear I’m not alone in thinking about residential fellowships. I absolutely agree that men face this problem as well. My (academic) husband has withdrawn from fellowship opportunities that would require living apart from the family. That being said, I think there are still two reasons to think about this as a gender problem. The first is the whole “gender, not sex” issue: residential fellowships are based on a set of (outdated) assumptions about gender relationships, where men have relative freedom to move their family. Moreover, it suggests that we value certain ends (“building intellectual community”) over others (helping academics maintain a work-life balance) for reasons that are not self-evident (what do we mean when we say that these institutions “build intellectual community?” At what cost are we building community, if that “community” is now restricted to a particular group?)
Second, while I know–again, from firsthand experience–that this affects men with families as well, I’m not convinced the sexes are equally burdened. That’s mostly a hunch, plus some anecdata. Maybe something to be taken up by the TRIP folks if we think it’s significant enough.
Hey everybody, take a look at the new Fulbright short-term fellowships program. I had a three month Fulbright to Durham University last year, and had a long conversation with the head of the US-UK Fulbright commission. She is really committed to working on this problem — not only of women with small children who find it impossible to leave their homes for a year at a time, but also of men in two-career marriages who don’t really have the option of just dragging everyone along either.
Interestingly, during my 12 week tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study in Durham, I was indeed the only woman scholar in residence, but none of the men brought their families either. When I asked them why not, I was told that their wives and husbands were lawyers and academics and other types of professionals, and that they too couldn’t simply pick up and leave.
Our family’s situation was a bit unique because my husband is retired from the Army, and so I had the pleasure of holding down the fort for months on end while he was deployed. Thus, he was very committed to reciprocating so that I could go on my own ‘educational deployment’.
My point is that Fulbright began to listen when they noticed they were only getting applications from retired old men, they began asking people why they weren’t applying and then they went about adjusting the program to make it workable for our generation. My sense is that if we keep speaking up (maybe dropping the nice people who sent you an application a note saying: THis is why I’m not applying and this is what make it feasible for me to do so), then this might be an area where we could see real change.