125 (Spring 2000): 37-39
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The Transition from Graduate School at a Research University to Teaching at a Small College
CAROL HOWARD
LAST year, I finished my doctoral studies in Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature. At the same time, I became one of seven full-time faculty members in the English department at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, a private, four-year liberal arts school whose planned student population growth is expected to lead us soon from approximately seven hundred to an enrollment of eight hundred. I was delighted to arrive at Warren Wilson last August. The faculty, staff, and administration are collegial; the students are bright and creative; and, insofar as this community holds values collectively, those values tend to accord with my own: we share a commitment to the liberal arts, environmentalism, social justice, and cross-cultural learning. Our beautiful campus is nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, and the city of Asheville is a vibrant cultural center.
For the most part, the transition from my life as a graduate student at a northeastern research university to my life at this very pleasant, small southern college whose faculty members are expected, first, to be good teachers has been fairly smooth. It helped that when I applied for jobs, I decided that I would accept a position only at a school where I thought I might really like to be. If that meant choosing unemployment over an offer I felt uncomfortable about, so be it. I thought it would be better to cobble together a living for a couple of years and, if necessary, ultimately switch professions than to take a job that seemed unsuitable. Because of the climate of desperation over academic jobs in the 1990s, some of my comrades accepted offers they dreaded receiving, and they consoled themselves with the thought that they would, as the phrase goes, "write their way out" in a couple of years. I watched one such friend experience his recent successful tenure bid with profoundly mixed emotions.
Because some readers from small colleges may be thinking of hiring a new colleague, I intersperse my personal narrative with a few words about the hiring process in general. I believe that hiring should be a good faith effort for all parties. First, it is the responsibility of job seekers to be honest with themselves and to be fair to their prospective colleagues. Second, it is the responsibility of graduate school advisers to tell their students to be realistic about their job prospects but also to help students assess their priorities and values. There are advantages to teaching at a small college, to teaching composition, to living in the South or Midwest, and to living in a rural area. Such circumstances may not appeal to everyone, but they do to some of us. I am frankly disappointed by the monolithic opinions held by some academics in urban centers. The same people who pride themselves on their sensitivity to issues of race, class, and gender can be extraordinarily obtuse when it comes to regional prejudices. Third, I feel it is the responsibility of hiring committees at small colleges to ask the questions that will help them find a good match and that will help candidates understand the reality of the school. If a committee asks candidates five questions about how they teach composition and one question about their dissertation, the candidates should get the message.
But if one is chairing a hiring committee in a small English department at a nonelite college, one should consider that an applicant who holds a PhD from an Ivy League university or its equivalent and who already has several publications might well be thrilled to receive an offer from that small department, and not merely because it means employment. Because of increased competition for academic jobs in the 1990s, graduate students were advised to become professionals early on. Thanks to market exigencies, many of us started our careers backwards by giving conference papers, publishing articles, and securing book contracts before our dissertations were finished. Our résumés might make us look as though we would only be interested in joining a research university or an elite college, but our cover letters and subsequent interviews should give a better indication of whether we're really interested in other schools as well. Having said this, I admit that I do sometimes face the existential bewilderment that comes from leaving a world that primarily values research and scholarship and entering one that primarily values teaching. I console myself with my genuine love of teaching and with the expectation that I will continue to motivate my scholarship by attending conferences and by staying in touch with colleagues in my field by e-mail and whatever other cyber options the future holds.
The good news about the dire state of the marketplace in recent years and the unpleasant business of PhD students putting the cart before the horse is that it may actually be easier for some of us to move from graduate school to a faculty appointment than it was for those who came of age during the rare years of prosperity in the 1960s and, again, in the late 1980s. In a paper published in a 1994 ADE Bulletin [Show Article], Marshall Gregory remembers the shock he experienced in the 1960s, moving from his library carrel at the University of Chicago to his first faculty appointment at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. One difference about making this transition in the last decade is that as we were hoping for a change of weather and padding our résumés, many of us also accrued several years of teaching experience. With eight years of college teaching behind me, I suspect I experienced less trauma than those recent PhDs who may have spent only a couple of years as a teaching assistant in someone else's classes before landing a job. Most of the people I knew in graduate school had been teaching for at least four or five years before moving on to full-time appointments.
I don't think one should rule out inexperienced teachers when putting together a list of candidates, although given the state of the job market, a hiring committee may well be in a position to set any criteria it chooses. But depending on whom one hires, one's role as a mentor will differ. Brand new teachers tend to have problems with authority in the classroom. Someone who has never taught composition before will not know what a comma splice is or how to grade a paper. One might gauge the appropriate level of intervention in the teaching life of new colleagues by reviewing their experience. Have they taught for two years? five? ten? How many different kinds of classes have they taught? Composition? Chaucer to Yeats? Classes with fewer than fifteen students? more than forty? How does the student population compare with those they've encountered before? How many pedagogy seminars have they been through? A mentor might offer to sit in on one class but probably shouldn't insist on it. Even though the mentor is trying to be helpful, new faculty members may need time to settle into teaching and may experience this kind offer as an added pressure. An alternative might be for the mentor to invite a new colleague to coteach one or more sessions of his or her own class.
Even though I had been teaching for eight years before I came to Warren Wilson, I found that I still needed pedagogical advice and emotional support from my new colleagues. My dean, my chair, and the other members of the English department have had a good sense of how to be supportive without being overbearing. The orientation for new faculty members before the first week of classes was essential. It was especially helpful that my dean invited well-adjusted second-year professors who were able to speak honestly about the joys of teaching here and about the difficulties they had faced during the previous year. My dean also established informal weekly lunch-time conversations about teaching. It is important for younger faculty members to talk to one another and to hear twenty- and thirty-year teaching veterans explain their pedagogical techniques and their solutions to classroom problems. It is also important to hear that veterans continue to have difficulties with students and that they continue to modify their teaching techniques. Another issue in the adjustment to a new job is that junior faculty members sometimes fear the real and imagined differences in values and entitlements that separate them from their senior colleagues. That fear is minimized or becomes virtually nonexistent in a department where everyone is asked to teach the same course load, as we are at Warren Wilson, and where junior colleagues are encouraged to participate fully in departmental decisions, as I am. It has also helped that senior colleagues speak candidly about the faculty evaluation process and that my school issues a document that explains in detail the review procedure.
Still, I have had some difficulties adjusting, and I have sometimes felt overwhelmed. It is hard to prepare several new courses at once, and one's first semester teaching five days a week and teaching twelve credit hours is bound to have its vicissitudes. I also had never experienced faculty meetings and committee work. And it is tough when new hires haven't finished their dissertation, which I hadn't. Although I had assured myself that I would be finished before moving to North Carolina two summers ago, I did not, as it happened, defend and deposit until the following May.
The biggest problem aside from the dissertation was that I somehow made the mistake of assigning too many novels. I had recently emerged from teaching Literature Humanities, the great books class at Columbia, where first-year students read The Iliad one week, The Odyssey the next, and where these two weeks of Homer are followed by a semester's brisk parade of lengthy classics. I knew well in advance that I needed to limit the number of books for my course History of the Novel. I even had copies of everyone's old syllabi, which were indispensable for planning my courses. The problem was that I also assigned novels in my course Introduction to Fiction and, I am ashamed to admit, in my composition class. My students in each class kept up with the reading well enough. I, however, nearly collapsed under the collective weight of those hefty Penguins and Nortons. Somehow, I managed to miss the overall picture and failed to recognize that if I were teaching six or seven novels in one class, I might want to teach only short stories in another, especially since I had three new class preparations and more in-class contact hours with students than I had experienced before. A related problem is that when I did reduce the number of pages I was accustomed to assigning in the great books class at Columbia, I suddenly found myself now and again running out of material to discuss before class ended. This had never happened to me before; I am accustomed to running out of time well before running out of things to say. The unexpected change made me anxious. I suspect that as I build up a store of ideas and background information on the new texts that I teach and as I gauge how students react to these texts, I'll be able to fine-tune the pace in class. In the meantime, at least until I have the first round or two of class preparations under my belt, a balance of short and long works seems to be a good solution--and this is what I assigned for the following semester.
It might be a good idea to tell new colleagues about the virtues of teaching from anthologies. At Columbia, I had no experience whatsoever of anthologies or readers. And besides, I don't like the idea of abridgments; I want to be able to choose my own material, and I remember the one or two anthologies from college as being inapplicable to the materials and methodologies of graduate school. But now I am beginning to appreciate that the new generation of anthologies is quite wonderful. I am grateful that my colleagues have introduced me to these entirely up-to-date books. Bedford-St. Martin's Stages of Drama, edited by Carl H. Klaus, Miriam Gilbert, and Bradford S. Field, Jr., saved my life in last year's course Introduction to Modern Theater. I expect Carol Verburg's Ourselves among Others: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers, also from Bedford-St. Martin's, to do the same next semester in my composition class. I have high hopes, too, for Robert DeMaria's British Literature, 1640-1789 (Blackwell), which I am adopting for my courses on the Restoration and the Enlightenment and which offers a balance of canonical and noncanonical texts, a historical approach to literature, and several unabridged longer selections, including the full text of Paradise Lost.
I'll mention one final issue in my transition to Warren Wilson College, since students have asked me about it repeatedly: Do I find it difficult to be the only woman in the department? (I point out to them that the director of the writing program is a woman, too, but, as in many schools, writing unaccountably seems to occupy a separate sphere in people's minds, and, in fact, the writing program is in a separate building.) The gender of colleagues is really not an issue for me, but intellectual affinity is. I have spent the past decade working primarily on eighteenth-century British women writers and twentieth-century African American women writers, yet I also take a great deal of pleasure in teaching the Western canon and expect that I will continue to do so for the rest of my career. I have been pleased to discover that if my own scholarly interests are not identical to those of my colleagues (as I don't believe they should be), they are certainly compatible, and I appreciate--and actually feel comforted--that my colleagues teach courses on issues of race and gender, in addition to historical period and genre courses. It has indeed been important to me that I have been able to have conversations about books and ideas with sympathetic minds.
The author is Assistant Professor of English at Warren Wilson College. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar East, hosted by Purchase College, State University of New York, in Rye, New York.
Gregory, Marshall. "From PhD Program to BA College; or, The Sometimes Hard Journey from Life in the Carrel to Life in the World." ADE Bulletin 107 (1994): 20-24. [Show Article]
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
ADE Bulletin 125 (Spring 2000): 37-39 |
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