Tomorrow, I’m leaving for our Midwest Faculty Conference, featuring John Sommerville as our plenary speaker. (Check out my quick review of his book, The Decline of the Secular University, as well as his latest essay in the Chronicle, “Universities Are Corporatized Because They Are Secularized”.) Since starting these summer faculty conferences a few years ago, we’ve tried to make them times of refreshment – for both faculty and their entire family. Our planning team even coined a new word for these events – confamication:
This event encompasses much more than the word conference can possibly contain, so a new word has been added to the lexicon. “Confamication†captures the fact of it being a stimulating conference, a restful vacation, which can both include and be a delight to the whole family. And it is a welcoming place for singles, couples and children as well.
Unfortunately, not all of academia shares this attitude that the “good life” includes rest, spiritual refreshment, and time with families and children. Lisa Belkin, who writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times, recently published a heart-breaking letter from a young graduate student who, faced with an unexpected, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, has decided to have an abortion so that she can complete her degree. The decision was far from easy – you can hear her agony in her letter to Belkin. Explicit and implicit pressures from her graduate program were a major factor in her decision. Here’s how she described her sitaution: [Read more…] about Children, universities, and hard decisions