Academia and parenthood both demand significant time if one is to do either well, which explains, I think, why so many academics are single, or, if married, have few, if any, children. Indeed, over and over again among friends in academia I’ve heard the refrain, “My books are my children.”
It’s a painful refrain. Frankly, the humanities’ adoption of the model of the German research university has meant that there are ever more books being written of ever less value and truth, books with a short half-life which the author lists on a CV and which libraries dutifully purchase. It’s easier to evaluate someone based on quantity than quality, and so in the capitalist economy that contemporary academia has become, publications function as currency for jobs and tenure. Hence the pressure to “publish or perish,” perishing meaning getting a real job (as certain of my relatives would have it).
Nothing novel there, as it’s been pointed out again and again. But it’s disturbing, I think, to hear Christian academics talking about sacrificing children for the sake of publications. “Be fruitful and multiply publications on your CV” is the one instance of allegoresis I’ve seen tolerated and encouraged among those who otherwise insist on an exclusive reading of the plain, literal sense of Scripture. To me, it’s another instance of modernity capturing supposedly conservative Christianity. Many of us have surrendered our view and practice of family life to the demands of the marketplace, often preventing the miracle of procreation by means of the miracles of technology.
Will our articles help us grow in faith, hope, and love, as children will, the family being the domestic Church, the school of discipleship? Will our books bury us? Will publications mourn our passing?
We prefer the merely physical to the ensouled, extensions of our minds to extensions of our bodies. Modern materialism rears its head. More modernity: We can control what we write, pixels and toner being at the mercy of our fingertips. Children…not so much. True, parents are an authority over them, but children are persons with souls, wills, minds, and bodies all their own.
Relying on the mystery of Providence, I think we Christian academics need to sacrifice some of our publications for the sake of children, and trust that God will find us jobs wherein we can be both good mothers and fathers while using our academic gifts for the greater glory of God and the salvation of humanity.
Alice von Hildebrand had it right when she wrote, “When the time has come, nothing which is man-made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God’s image and likeness.”
And when I die, I do hope my little dissertation will have affected how believers and scholars read the Gospel of Matthew. I hope more, however, that my children are my legacy, that they become by God’s grace good people who love God and neighbor. My children are my books, and I hope to help them write their lives to eternity.
I’m a little curious how far you think it’s reasonable to take an argument of this sort. Compare someone like Martin Luther – he had a few kids, but his philosophical children seem like a much larger brood than his physical children.
You might be able to look at philosophical vs. physical descendants for a humanities degree – which in most cases probably is a extremely small bunch as far as publications are concerned but a somewhat larger clan if you examine those mentored through years spent teaching.
For me, nearing the end of a science Ph.D., my work actually has a fair number of practical applications – more so than most degrees in the area. How could you compare the legacy of something of this sort to the more-theological area you deal in?
Would speaking of philosophical descendants vs. physical descendants be stretching the meaning of a passage like Isaiah 54 too far?
I think it would be stretching Isa 54, if I take your meaning rightly.
I would also maintain that there’s a distinction between the natural family — which as a Catholic, at least, I think of as the basic unit of society and the domestic Church — and those one shapes in mentoring.
I also think I’m not necessarily saying either-or. What generated the post was the attitude I’ve found among some otherwise Christian colleagues in academia who really see children as something optional, as something perhaps incidental or ancillary to both marriage and sex, and when you talk to them — or when they write editorials in one’s evangelical college newspaper, for instance — they use the same rhetoric as planned parenthood. I’m thinking of one person in particular who basically told his wife in no uncertain terms they were done with kids (after 2) so that he could generate more scholarship.
The thing about Luther — the foundation for his voluminous work was set up well before he was married, when he was prayer, learning, and teaching as a monk, and Katie Luther was a wonderwoman running the house. In fact, they often had about fifty people — many of them orphans — staying and dining with them. (There’s a display of this set up in the recently revamped Luther museum in Wittenberg.)
Another thought: If one only had to teach, it’d be possible to work a forty-hour week as an academic and be a good mother or father as well. But the pressure to publish — at least in the humanities — has become insane. I can’t speak to the situation in the sciences, of course.
A professor once mentioned that the ‘god of academia is a god of wrath, not grace.’ The professor I worked for during my lab years told me when I came under his tutelage said “You’ll get along just fine once you realize that there are only 70-80 working hours in a week.” Silly me, I thought he was using hyperbole to make a point. No, that was the pace he drove himself; and he had the ex-wife and two kids he rarely saw to prove it.
The question I found myself thinking after a while was, “is it worth sacrificing one’s family on the altar of tenure?”