Saying Yes to the Right Things: Managing Your Academic Career

1. Saying Yes to the Right Things: Managing Your Academic Career Kathleen Okruhlik, Western University Shannon Dea, University of Waterloo

2. Equity seeking groups and service “Women and racial minorities generally perform more service work (including, but not limited to, diversity work) than other faculty members: this often constitutes a dual burden.” (Hart, Grogan, Litt and Worthington 2009, 62)

3. Sponsorship “…not a male conspiracy, but rather, a surprising absence of male (and female) advocacy. Women who are qualified to lead simply don’t have the powerful backing necessary to inspire, propel, and protect them through the perilous straits of upper management. Women lack, in a word, sponsorship.” (Hewlett, Peraino, Sherbin and Sumerg, 2010)

4. Institutional housekeeping ...“institutional housekeeping”... represents the invisible and supportive labor of women to improve women's situation within the institution... Much like... unpaid domestic housekeeping..., institutional housekeeping is usually performed without resources and recognition. In the context of university life, women's work of monitoring gender equity adds to their official responsibilities of teaching, publishing, and grant seeking.” (Bird, Litt and Wang 2004, 195)

5. Institutional housekeeping “Service work, like domestic work, is commonly considered the dirty but necessary work that must get done. Indeed, many of us working on institutional change are concerned about the hazards of the extreme demands made on women faculty. The worry is appropriate: the institutionalized practices for assessing faculty progress toward tenure and promotion at Research I universities are built upon a model that relegates "service" to the margins. Unless university administrators embrace equity issues as their own high priority missions, women and members of minority groups will continue to be penalized for doing institutional housework.” (Ibid., 200)

6. Integral to the core “Diversity service work that is evidence-based and embedded in research findings can be recast as an intellectual enterprise... Clearly, instead of being seen as an add-on to the central faculty roles and responsibilities, this kind of service work should be regarded as integral to the core.” (Hart, Grogan, Litt and Worthington 2009, 62)

7. Institutional change “Search and tenure committees need to be educated about criteria for new research areas (e.g., feminist studies, race/ethnicity studies, sexuality studies, community-based and applied inquiry...) Institutional leaders... must challenge committees to reward scholarship that is emergent and to support diverse ways of working.” (Cress and Hart 2009, 483)

8. Two positive notes “…yes I said yes I will yes.” Molly Bloom, James Joyce, Ulysses The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

9. Break-out question #1 When you think of colleagues or your former professors, which ones do you most admire? Why? What do/did they say “yes” (and “no”) to that earned this admiration?

10. Break-out question #3 Think of a time in the past when you said “yes” professionally, and in so doing produced unanticipated consequences – whether positive or negative? Does that story have any obvious morals you’d like to share?

11. Break-out question #2 In years to come, when you look back on your career and your life, which things do you most want to have accomplished? Are you saying “yes” to the things that will make these accomplishments possible, or that will set up obstacles to them?