According to Girgus, the university has a child care working group that is exploring ways to double that number, but she expects the process to take three to five years.
Dobkin agrees that Princeton needs to improve its daycare capacity, which he believes will help the university recruit and retain younger faculty.
“The difficulty with child care is that you end up hurting the most vulnerable people, the post-docs and junior faculty,” he says. “So we are looking into that with the expectation of making changes here.”
In the meantime, the automatic tenure extension policy reflects Princeton’s current focus on improving policies for faculty, especially women. Increasing the number of female department chairs, hiring more female faculty in the natural sciences and engineering and eliminating any gender gaps in faculty salaries were all recommendations by the task force.
“This is the way the world ought to be in the 21st century, and universities ought to lead,” Dobkin says. “Princeton is acknowledging that childbirth and adoption have an impact on careers. Our goal really is not to give people extra time by going from six years to seven, but to have them realize on their own that taking a year out of their seven years to spend time with their family was ultimately a good thing all around.”
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