Epilogue

As I have personally experienced and through my years of interviewing women and faculty of color about their experiences in the higher education work place, women faculty typically described difficulties inherent in being someone who tries to balance her work roles and her personal life roles outside of the professoriate. Here are a couple of their quotes from Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success (Turner & Myers, Jr., 2000) that describe being torn between family and career:

Abriendo Puertas, Cerrando Heridas (Opening Doors, Closing Wounds): Latinas/os Finding Work–Life Balance in Academia makes a critical contribution to the literature by highlighting the experiences of men and women as they strive to fulfill their various roles. These testimonios are extremely inspirational to all who work in academe, providing insights on how one can remain grounded in his or her person as a whole while pursuing his or her goals. These situations reflect a fine balance that must be achieved to persist in academe. Chesler and Crowfoot (1997) view such situations as being related to power. They ask “to what extent new members of the elite will operate, or be permitted to operate, any differently than their … predecessors” (pp. 25–26). As my colleague Barbara Townsend and I (2000) have stated, the increasing diversity of the academy means that more faculty face conflicts of commitment between their work and their family and/or community responsibilities.