Assistant Professor Adrienne Pine '94 had a problem. The American University professor woke up the morning of Aug. 28 ready to teach her class, "Sex, Gender and Culture" - only to discover her infant daughter had a fever. Pine felt she had no viable childcare options as a single parent.
So she brought the child to her 75-minute lecture. A teaching assistant watched the baby and let her wander around the lecture hall. All was going well - until the baby became hungry. Pine proceeded to whip out her breast and feed her child as she lectured.
Her 40 students perhaps did not expect such an active example of the intersection between sex, gender and culture on their first day of class.
The incident made national headlines, prompting an intense debate between the "lactivists" - fierce supporters of public breast-feeding - and their more conservative critics. But neither mothers' rights nor public decency is the pertinent issue here. Why didn't Pine have a viable care alternative?
My fellow opinions columnist Maggie Tennis wrote an article about childcare at Brown last week ("Take care of day care," Sept. 25), pointing out the appalling lack of practical childcare options for Brown faculty. She pointed out major discrepancies between the childcare offered by American employers and our European counterparts - discrepancies that tend to disproportionately affect women, who are still often the primary caretakers of their children. But I want to address a more relevant question for us, the students. Frankly, why should we, as childless young adults, give a crap? How exactly does this directly affect us?
It may be hard for us to accept, but our professors will always care more about their children than about us. Consequently, it is in our best interest to alleviate our professors' concerns with childcare so they can focus on something more important: us. How many office hours have been lost due to kinks in childcare? How much better would professors' class preparation be? How much more research could they do? The easier our professors' lives are, the better our education is.
Brown has a reputation for shoddy day care. The limited offerings have left Brown faculty, in the words of former associate professor Pauline Luong, at "the mercy of the market" ("Staff hope for increased child care," April 16, 2009). Administrators have formed committees and conducted surveys to address the problem - one in 2007 and now a current survey in response to the Taft Avenue Daycare Center closing. Despite these efforts, however, Brown-affiliated childcare remains disorganized and inadequate.
As of now, three childcare services are affiliated with Brown: the East Side/Mt. Hope YMCA Child Care Center, Brown/Fox Point Early Childhood Education Center and Meeting Street Early Childhood Education. In terms of back-up emergency care, the University offers a service through Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a 24/7 care emergency service. Faculty must first register with Bright Horizons to receive the benefit.
While these are genuine efforts toward providing affordable and convenient childcare for faculty, they still do not offer adequate support to parents. The day care centers are overcrowded and offer childcare only for a specified age range. For parents with children of differing ages, it is inconvenient to have children in multiple day care centers.
The back-up service, which might have proved helpful for Professor Pine, also creates concerns among faculty. The website about the service is confusing and difficult to locate, discretely tucked away in Brown's Human Resources page. Many staff members at Brown are unaware of the service, finding it only when they need emergency care. Even in an emergency, a responsible parent will not leave a child with a strange and untried childcare service.
Brown's reputation for inferior childcare harms the quality of our teachers. The best and brightest young academics may have children or be planning to start a family. The quality of available childcare could be an important consideration for them in deciding whether to take a job at Brown, or instead go to another prestigious academic institution. Brown probably loses highly qualified, intelligent individuals to competitors that offer better childcare options. As Tennis pointed out in her article, other liberal arts colleges offer affordable day care. Cornell, for example, boasts an on-campus day care center that charges rates below the national average in larger cities.
Professor Pine and Breastfeedinggate 2012 is a perfect example of the kinds of parent-professor dilemmas faculty encounter here at Brown. We, as a student body, should be more concerned about childcare because the inadequacies of Brown's childcare options affect our education and our school's reputation as a leading academic institution.
I guess what I'm saying is: If universities want to avoid further rogue in-class lactation, they better improve childcare options.
Cara Newlon '14.5 is not just writing this column to suck up to her professors.
ADVERTISEMENT
