What Would a Pro-Family Academia Look Like?

My most recent Martin Center column highlighted the irony, considering higher education’s formative influence on America’s prevailing anti-natalist culture, of the industry’s anxiety over declining birthrates. “Where,” I asked, “are large families less welcome, or where do they seem more culturally transgressive, than on American campuses?” I quoted briefly from Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk, who describes the book as “motivated by a single intuition: that if a phenomenon is sufficiently consequential, then its absence must also be consequential.” Current birth rates and their own responses to surveys suggest that one-in-three Gen Z women—those presently in their most fertile years—will never have children. Pakaluk hopes that the exceptions to such trends may reveal underlying causes and suggest means of reversal.

Nowhere, perhaps, are demographic trends less susceptible to redress than the world of higher ed. Adjusting for the trope that large families are a product of poverty and ignorance, Pakaluk confined her study to college-educated women with at least five children. A tenured professor herself and also the wife of an academic, the campus is her native environment. Pakaluk knows from experience that, while her female peers in academia are 40 percent less likely than their male colleagues to be married with children a decade after completing their doctorates, tenured faculty members are not outliers. At all levels and every stage of life, higher education tends to discourage childbirth.

In her study’s participants, her own students, and elsewhere, Pakaluk has encountered women who wanted to start families but felt pressure to delay marriage. Such pressure might be implicit but pervasive social messaging, or explicit admonitions from parents concerned for their daughters’ material best interest.

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