Many people seem to think that life as an academic is rather cushy and easy -- not having to keep a 9 to 5 schedule, having summers off, etc. But as the vast majority of academics will tell you, the reality is very different. You are expected -- explicitly and implicitly by your colleagues and university officials -- to work somewhere around 70 hours a week (precisely because you don’t have to keep a 9 to 5 schedule), devote pretty much your entire life to your career, and routinely sacrifice time with your family in order to get your work done. But as the Boston Globe reports, universities are slowly starting to implement more flexible options for faculty:

Schools have to confront bias ingrained in the academic culture against people who don’t put in grueling hours. They have to consider what to do about people who can’t afford a half-time salary because they are divorced or live in an expensive real estate market such as Boston. And they must wrestle with the delicate question of whether it’s possible to do groundbreaking work, especially in the sciences, without working long hours. . . .

A major university consortium, the American Council on Education, is pushing schools to create a more flexible academic career path, including part-time options, to address the low representation of women and members of minority groups, as well as a wave of retirements on the horizon and a decline in foreign scholars coming to the United States

The article goes on to say that although many universities have (or are implementing) flexible tenure schedules for faculty, many professors are reluctant to take advantage of them because they fear their colleagues will penalize them in their tenure review process, thinking that they are not fully devoted to their career.

This belief is of course, based on an outdated family model in which the husband works full-time while the wife stays at home to take care of the home and the kids. Unfortunately, these kinds of antiquated beliefs are what makes academics the less-than-perfect job that many people think it is. That is truly ironic considering how “liberal” and “socially progressive” academics are supposed to be.