POOLING AND SEPARATING EQUILIBRIA.

The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates work-life balance.

In my cohort (and the younger one), I see a much stronger impulse to separate work from home, and that strikes me as healthy. Let people lead their home lives as they see fit, and let them have time to do it. Work hard when at work, but live your life as you see fit when you go home. Let work decisions and evaluations reflect only what happens on the job.

In my faculty (and grad student) days, I was constantly frustrated that work was never really 'over.' I could always be reading more, or prepping, or grading, or trying to publish. That "sword of Damocles" feeling made for some pretty stressful times, since it seemed inescapable.

In administration, I spend waaayyyyy more time on campus than I ever did as faculty. But when I go home, for the most part, I go home. I don't make a habit of checking my work email at night, or of hanging out socially with coworkers. The sword of Damocles hangs in the office. I don't mind leaving it there. At home, I can be fully 'present' as a father. Call that 'patriarchal' if you want -- it's certainly paternal -- but being a 'present' father to my kids matters to me. If others choose to live their lives very differently, let them. As long as we can work together well, the rest strikes me as properly private.

True enough.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that educated women (and men, I want to extend the argument) might be able to force those changes more quickly by opting out.

Where opting out is opting off the 24/7 treadmill (more on that here). The kicker, however, is in that "work together well." A nest of high achievers, such as the economics department at the University of Chicago, is unlikely to be a place where work is 'over' will catch on as the norm, at least in the immediate future. And wherever the rewards go to the person who is willing to outwork the other person (whether that's reading the journals late into the night or catching the red-eye to recruit the blue-chip player or working the phones until the polls close) on-the-job is likely to continue to expand into personal time.