What’s wrong with this, the first sentence of Robert Drago’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Harvard and the Academic Glass Ceiling“?

Drew Gilpin Faust’s appointment as president of Harvard University has seriously dented the academic glass ceiling.

Well, the assumption that there is an academic glass ceiling, of course—the existence of which, given the number of female university presidents in office before Drew Faust came along, seems questionable.

And that’s just the start of Drago’s problematic argument, in which he alleges that the real sexism at universities pertains to adjunct faculty members.

Recall the 2005 event that triggered Faust’s appointment. The university’s president at the time, Larry Summers, suggested, among other claims, that relatively few young women were prepared to make the “near total commitments to their work” required of successful academics. He also suggested that men may hold a biological advantage in the pursuit of science and engineering careers. The anger generated by those comments almost certainly contributed to his resignation.

About the biological comment, yes. But Summers’ remarks on the challenges of juggling work and family manifested, by his standards, Oprah-like sensitivity, and I don’t recall anyone being particularly upset by them.

Drago, a professor of women’s and labor studies at Penn State, has a new book coming out, Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life, which is certainly an important topic. But he loses me when he writes,

…Norms surrounding our ideas about motherhood…[lead] us to expect women to bear and rear children, to take care of the ill, elderly, and those with disabilities, and to do so for low or no pay, and without public recognition.

Without public recognition? Really? Has there ever been a time in history when mothers were more fussed over, talked about, and self-congratulatory than they are now?

What Summers missed are [women’s] sacrifices. Indeed, the way he broached the subject of family commitments represented a significant threat to the careers of female faculty members everywhere — an accusation that women are really “just moms.“

In fact, that’s just not true. As I recall, Summers detailed the challenges facing women in academia, and suggested that the greatest challenge was balancing work and family. He may not have waxed empathic about the difficulties of being a mom, but that wasn’t Summers’ topic.

Drago’s heart is in the right place, but his solution—a part-time tenure track—doesn’t really address the question of how you can maintain Harvard’s standards of excellence and make a balanced life viable for women (and men) who have children.