Let me preface this with a clear statement — in no way do I wish to deny that sexist, racist, and classist (to say nothing of the big, ugly open secret in academe, ageism) people and policies are plentiful in academe — but if my department, hardly a historical bastion of enlightened personnel interactions, can have women in nine of seventeen tenure lines, and if my college can have pre-tenure leave programs devoted exclusively to women and underrepresented minorities, and if my college can have a family leave policy that not only gives a full semester of leave but also a subsequent semester of teaching reassignment, then it strikes me that the real problem is not with “academe” but perhaps with elite academic institutions, such as the University of Michigan. Let’s face it, almost everybody under the rank of endowed chair full prof is getting the shaft at those places, including some individuals with privilege aplenty. For all the rhetoric of egalitarianism and empowerment issuing forth from scholars at the most elite universities in the U.S., the personal politics of the departments to which these scholars belong is not that different from the 1950s in terms of gatekeeping. I’ve always been dismayed at the ways in which many salon Marxists of research-university English departments can behave like the very targets they savage in their writing when it comes time to, say, fund adjunct pay at subsistence wages.

One answer that springs immediately to mind for me is that if you go visit a department at a graduate program that only has 10% female faculty and you find that this is a problem for you, don’t go there and make sure that the admissions people know that this is why you chose not to attend said school, but I recognize that this is also overly reductive. Don’t fall prey, however, to the Chronicle of Higher Ed worldview when discussing academia. There are other schools than Brown, Berkeley, and Michigan (or Wellesley, Denison, and Sewanee, for that matter…).

The biological clock ticking (along with the WTF sexuality was I) was a major stress factor in my life that had me panicking for the past few years over What To Do, before I decide to ‘See What Happens Now’. I realise I have more CHOICES in this GLBT marriage legal world. It’s like on Queer As Folk, a baby can have two mommies AND two daddies, therefore the financial and time cost of childrearing shall be shared more! I wouldn’t have to worry about Old Eggs if another mother is the one who contributes the egg while I carry. (I remember a surrogate story about a mother who carried her grandson because her daughter couldn’t)

Also if you have any ideas on how to change these same institutions so that the percentage of male graduates vs female graduates comes closer to parity at the undergraduate or graduate levels I’m all ears as well.