I won’t bore you with the details of my recent move except to say… worst move ever! It involved movers who were 10 hours late, a child who had to sleep on the floor, a welcome-to-home-ownership visit from a plumber, and multiple floods (from TWO separate sources!). Remember when moving was a half day affair that involved only a large CD collection and a lamp?
Which leads me to my question of the week… I was talking to various friends, colleagues, and acquaintances about the move and mentioned the difficulty of doing it with a toddler. Our regular babysitter is in Sri Lanka so we were on our own for much of it. Though a few unbelievably supportive colleagues offered to babysit, the idea of Junior running wild in their homes made me worry for my tenure chances so I politely turned them down. A number of people suggested I recruit a grad student.
I know many grad students who babysat/housesat/etc while in grad school. It never bothered them and they typically appreciated the extra money or the opportunity to spend a week in a swank house sans roommates. No judgement of the faculty I know who do this, but I can’t quite make myself do it. One of my undergrad RAs offered, unprompted, to take Junior to the park for a few hours and I couldn’t take her up on it.
We spend a lot of time talking about how to professionalize our students, how to get them to understand the discipline and how it works — the idea being that the sooner they ‘behave as if’ they are a professor, the better off they are once they actually become one. It strikes me that there is an inherent conflict then in asking them to babysit for $10 an hour at the same time we are trying to get them to think of grad school as the beginning of their career (as opposed to an extension of undergraduate school). Am I wrong? I’d like to be since it would expand my babysitting options…
If you do this, howdo you do this? What’s the negotiation like? Has it changed your working relationship? More importantly, do your students judge you when they discover that you Tivo Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rarely clean your window screens, and regularly feed your child EasyMac for dinner?
UPDATE: As usual, Jay sums it up much more succintly… If this is a distinct possibility, we probably shouldn’t be reinforcing it.
I didn’t do any such work in grad school, nor do I currently use grad students for cheap labor (though I might, if I found one I could trust with our dogs). But my sense, from friends who’ve been on both sides of the transaction, is that the conflict isn’t that great as long as the prof is transparent about what is going on.
I’ve seen a few cases that seemed exploitative to me, but for the most part, both parties seem to acknowledge it as one of the many absurdities of grad school.
I would greatly respect a professor who I saw Tivo’d Buffy, unless it appeared that they were a big fan of the last two seasons. Blech. (A guilty fan I could still respect; after all, I watched those seasons too!)
Ouch! I TIVO all of them but I actually purchased the last two seasons on DVD because they are my favorites… It’s the first season I can’t really tolerate.
Yeah, well, I find the first season rough going too, with a couple exceptions (The Puppet Show! And the parts of Prophesy Girl that deal with Willow’s horror at the vampires and Buffy’s will to live). It doesn’t have a lot of depth.
By the last two seasons, though, I didn’t like most of the characters, and season 7 had so many dropped plot threads it made my head spin.
The two I own are seasons two and three, which I think have both the best plot arcs (certainly the best villains!) and also the best characterization. I think David Greenwalt gets a lot of credit for the former, and maybe Joss not yet being distracted with Angel helps explain the latter?
All that said, if I were at someone’s house and any damn ep were on, I can’t say I’d turn it off…
p.s. Are you watching Joss’s web musical that began last night?
is this the Dr. Horrible thing? I hadn’t heard of it until a bunch of other bloggers started talking about it…
on the one hand, i’m a little nervous for self-identity reasons about following it on the web. on the other, the musical episode of Buffy was clearly the best ever so…
In my experience the babysitting “option” is typically one imposed upon/made available to women, not men. I don’t know a single man who was asked to babysit for a professor during graduate school. For this reason alone, I find the dynamic potentially problematic. I had women friends who regularly babysat for professors (both male and female ones) throughout graduate school. These relationships were not exploitative in most cases, but did cause a certain change in the way that these faculty viewed my friends (e.g., the spouse of one professor “jokingly” announced that she wished so-and-so would “not be such a great scholar” because she didn’t want to lose her babysitter to graduation). I only did it once myself, but felt yucky about it and made sure I was unavailable when asked again. Eventually people got the message. As a young woman in a largely male subfield, I did not want people to think “babysitter” when they thought of me, but “student,” or, better yet, “scholar.”
I think CF has a point. As a grad student a zillion years ago, I did watch an assistant professor’s child occasionally, but she was someone I had known when she was a grad student and I was an undergrad who hung out with grad students. When my own children were little I did not go around asking students if they would babysit for me, for all the reasons you worry about. I do remember that one person (now a professor) did watch my children a time or two, but I think she sort of assertively told me that she liked being with children and urged me to ask her. I also don’t ask specific people whether they would help me manage my disorganization for money even though I know from sort of floating the idea that some people would never do it and others would be happy to get the chance to earn extra cash. But my tummy tells me that I might feel less uneasy talking to women about such things than men, even though I work with a lot of male students, so that is a good reason not to do it.
I feel less loathe to ask around if someone wants to house sit. The opportunity to stay in a place with air conditioning and other upper middle class amenities is sometimes seen as a good thing.
I think CF raises a good point about gender as well, although my guess is that it would always be a female professor asking the grad student, regardless of the students’ gender. How many male professors are as concerned about childcare? I’m not saying they aren’t, but this does go back to olderwoman’s post on scatterplot about work/home conflicts and the way men aren’t expected to have them in the same way women are. Either way, it would depend on who was asking. If it was an actual friend-faculty-member of mine with whom I might be swapping childcare or something like that, I would almost feel like it was a compliment. The situation changes when you have your own kids because the line between grad student and professor gets even more blurry.
I know this spins the question a bit, but as a grad student who actually pays another student (in a different program) to watch my own kids while I am in class, it is a more affordable option than paying for childcare where I live. I can’t say I feel really bad about exploiting student labor, since I feel like most of the students here (grad and undergrad) are from affluent families.
Ten years after grad school and I still resent the fuck out of being asked to babysit my advisors’ kids. Professors ask grad students (as opposed to deans) to babysit because grad students have less relative power. I didn’t ask my professor to mow my lawn, for instance, when I knew she had a weekend off.
Since anon has reactivated this thread, I’ll update by saying that I talked to the now-professor I mentioned above, and she confirmed that she asked me if she could babysit my children. She said she would never babysit for her advisor, because that was too close a relation, and would be troubled if professors asked her and offended if they expected free labor, but liked the opportunity to earn money and get to know more about people’s personal lives. I certainly think a professor asking any student to do anything for free would be out of line. Probably the only non-offensive way to find out if people want this kind of work is to say to students you know, “I’d be interested in hiring a babysitter [gardener etc.] and wonder if any grad students would want the work. Would you mind putting the word out and tell anyone who is interested to get in touch with me?”