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What I Wish I'd Known About Faculty Life

What I Wish I’d Known about Faculty Life: Any Regrets?

This is the final post in Kevin Birth’s series, What I Wish I’d Known about Faculty Life. Previously: Departmental Politics, Teaching the Curriculum, The Tenure Track.

Any regrets?
Any regrets?

It was one of those gloomy days when even a cup of coffee had no warming effect. Edward and Gretchen were chatting in one of the college’s cafés. Fitting the melancholy tone of the day, Gretchen was morose about Edward’s impending retirement and move to a warmer climate. He had been a mentor to her – guiding her through the various minefields of being a new faculty member. Now she was tenured and becoming the mentor to a bunch of new faces in the department.

After a long silence, Gretchen asked, “Any regrets?”

Edward took a sip from his cup, looked up, and said, “You know, I’ve had my gripes–we get paid too little, and we are disrespected by the media. Besides, nobody reads what we publish. There are too many students; there are too many committees; there are too many people with MBAs trying to tell faculty what to do. But regrets? No, I have no regrets. I feel blessed that for 35 years I’ve been able to wake up each morning and want to get to work.” [Read more…] about What I Wish I’d Known about Faculty Life: Any Regrets?

What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life: The Tenure Track, Etc.

This is the final third post in Kevin Birth’s series, What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life. Previously: Departmental Politics, Teaching the Curriculum. Update: Kevin surprised us with a fourth post, which we’ll publish next week. 

Behold how good and how pleasant it is: for brethren to dwell together in unity! (Psalm 133:1, KJV)

Tip: Meals with  InterVarsity staff are (usually) more enjoyable than faculty committee meetings.

Ah springtime—the time of annual reviews of junior faculty. That time when tenured faculty give reassurance that somebody is well on their way to getting tenure. Or, more rarely, that time when the powers-that-be must be brutally honest with an untenured professor.

Cynthia was one such case. Her tenure decision was two years away—when considers that for most journals it takes a year or more from submission to publication, it is not that long a time. After her initial unbelief that she was in trouble, she asked the chair for a lighter teaching load. “If only I had more time to write, I know I could get published.”

Unfortunately, the chair to whom she made this argument already taught more and published more often than Cynthia. In addition, the chair remembered a time when senior faculty routinely robbed junior faculty of release time that they had earned. The chair knew that by giving a course off to Cynthia, she would be taking a release course from somebody else—somebody already considered a “productive scholar.” The chair fought back the desire to simply reject Cynthia’s request. In bygone days, chairs would have said, “Deal with it,” and then worked to fire the faculty member before the public scandal of a failed tenure case. Having lived through those times, the current chair was more charitable: she told Cynthia, albeit coldly, “I’ll take it to the P and B.”  [Read more…] about What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life: The Tenure Track, Etc.

What I Wish I’d Known about Faculty Life: Teaching the Curriculum, Etc.

This is the second post in Kevin Birth’s series, What I Wish I’d Known about Faculty Life. Previously: Departmental Politics.

HERR, mein Herz ist nicht hoffärtig, und meine Augen sind nicht stolz; ich wandle nicht in großen Dingen, die mir zu hoch sind. (Psalm 131, Martin Luther’s translation)

I like Luther’s translation—particularly the sound of “ich wandle nicht in großen Dingen.” Luther’s choice of “wandern” combined with the metaphor of “things too high for me” evokes an image of climbing a mountain that one is unable to climb. Sometimes, as teachers, we try to climb such mountains; sometimes, we try to get students to do so, as well.

The Introductory Course

Empty lecture hall
Not the response you want for your new course on your favorite topic

Chairs are poor, beleaguered people. This is never more apparent than when the chair shows up at lunch with a haggard look and pieces of paper in her hand.

On one particular occasion, the sheet of paper was an observation report of an adjunct professor in an introductory course. The observer had excoriated the adjunct for not teaching an introductory course, and not teaching the right subject. The adjunct, a newly minted Ph.D., had apparently decided to inflict high theory on freshmen, and the professor who observed this had not approved. [Read more…] about What I Wish I’d Known about Faculty Life: Teaching the Curriculum, Etc.

What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life: Departmental Politics, Etc.

Our recent series What I Wish I’d Known About Graduate School has been one of our most popular series to date, and it almost immediately inspired this follow-up series, What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life. I am pleased to introduce Dr. Kevin Birth, professor of anthropology at Queens College and one of our ESN mentors. I’ve enjoyed getting to know him through email, Facebook, and other online interactions, and I’m glad he offered to write these three posts. They’ll be a bit different than Hannah’s, as Kevin is applying an ethnographic, storytelling method from his field to the context of faculty life. As a result, each post deals with several, interrelated issues (hence, the “etc.” at the end of each title). Thank you, Kevin! ~ Mike

Not many of you should presume to be teachers… (James 3:1a)

Kevin Birth (Anthropology, Queens College), standing in front of an ancient mass dial at St. Gregory’s Minster in Kirkdale, Yorkshire. (One of Kevin’s specialties is cultural conceptions of time.)

During the last several weeks, Dr. Hannah Eagleson has written about what she wished she had known about graduate school. Anyone who is a junior professor would be well served to read those essays simply because the challenges of graduate school become the challenges of being a new professor—except the pressure of being a new professor is often much worse than the pressure of being a graduate student. Instead of writing a dissertation, one is expected to chug out articles or books. This means dealing with the publishing process—a process where rejection is the pro forma first response, and obsessive revision on a tight deadline is de rigueur. This must be done while developing new classes—often introductory classes that force one to teach outside of one’s specialty. And, finally, there are the service requirements. All too often, junior faculty get stuck with the committee assignments that the senior faculty don’t want to do. So all of Dr. Eagleson’s advice to graduate students applies to junior faculty.

There are some new wrinkles to one’s life when one becomes a professor, however. Often, new faculty are not fully cognizant of these new things because it can be difficult to figure out how being a professor is different from being a graduate student—other than the obvious differences of there now being more courses to teach, and the student loan people suddenly wanting money.

To capture these differences, I’m going to create a set of characters over the three blog posts I’ve been asked to write, and tell some stories. All the characters and stories are fictional, but inspired by real events. Out of respect to my colleagues and acquaintances in academia, I don’t want to simply tell the true stories, which are often more absurd than the fiction.

I think I’ll begin many years ago and before my time with a couple of strangely complementary vignettes that I’ve heard over the years.  [Read more…] about What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life: Departmental Politics, Etc.