chat with chair

Chat With The Chair

The very nice chair of my department came to talk to me today about

why my husband and I are not both going to participate in the next

department weekend function (my husband is still at a conference, so

the chair couldn't talk directly to both of us). I should say that I

am using the word 'nice' very sincerely -- the chair of my department

is truly one of the nicest people I have met in academia, and this is

all the more remarkable because he is a research superstar and an

excellent teacher.

In any case, he was troubled about the situation because, although he

understands the challenges posed by weekend commitments, he and his

wife always managed to work things out when their kids were young.

Sigh. His wife is also a professor, although they are in different

fields. There probably were times when they both had to be somewhere,

and I'm sure they managed just fine by hiring babysitters or whatever.

I told him that we had not been able to find a babysitter who could

take care of our child for 10 hours that weekend, that the concept of

paying to attend a long meeting on a weekend irked me, but, more

importantly, I thought that our department could take this opportunity

to be a bit more progressive than just the same-old way of doing

things. Why should we do things the same way as 20-30 years ago? Every

other science and engineering department at our university does things

the same-old way, and I guess we can too, but why? Wouldn't it be

great if our department did something to make participating in these

functions possible for faculty with young children?

I also pointed out that it wasn't particularly stressful for me to

attend or not attend, except in feeling left out of important

discussions, but had he considered how difficult it was for the

tenure-track faculty with kids? They feel they have to attend or

jeopardize their position in the department, so they are not going to

complain like I will.

In previous discussions with him, I'd mentioned my disgust at the lack

of women speakers in our departmental seminar series, and he had

agreed that there should have been some women invited. We talked about

this more today. For example, he has a very talented female graduate

student who is worried about her ability to get a faculty position, in

part because there are so few women in their research specialty. I

said "How do you think she and the other women grad students feel when

week after week, every seminar is by a prominent man and there are no

women at all?" He knows these things -- I really don't need to tell

him -- but I think he needs to feel them a bit more viscerally than he

does. I wonder if, because he is so nice and so respectful and so

supportive of women, that perhaps he can't see that not everyone feels

that way (?). I don't mean that he is unaware of discrimination, as

that is clearly not the case either, but somehow he doesn't *see* some

very obvious things. He let the male domination of the department

happen (both actively and passively), perhaps because he doesn't

notice these things?

I didn't really feel any better after talking to him, but I didn't

feel worse either. I feel thwarted -- I want to take action and change

things -- not just talk about them. I felt better after talking to my

favorite colleague, who always listens to my rants and who laughs at

my jokes and cheers me up, and who fortunately is here this week.