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Williams College says there is no smoking gun behind the departures of 11 of its faculty members this academic year. David L. Smith, dean of the faculty, attributes the unusually high number of resignations to "bad luck." But faculty members cite a few problems that helped push them out the door. At the top of the list: the teaching load at Williams. [. . .] "When they want us to produce university-level research, then they are competing with the universities in terms of course load," says Diane J. Macunovitch [of the economics department]. [. . .] Williams officials says the college's workload requirements are similar to those of other selective liberal-arts colleges.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 June 1999
THE first time I did an outside review of another department as a member of a visiting team, I was struck by something I hadn't seen so clearly at my own institution even though it was also there to be seen. The department I was visiting had just hired two new faculty members, both recent PhDs who had publications already, books under way, lots of ambitions and contacts they had built up during their time in graduate school and who were now in a situation that perplexed them. Each was thrilled to have landed a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college that attracted good students. They had been welcomed warmly into the faculty community; senior colleagues mentored them in the classroom with tact and wisdom. The teaching load was not one that precluded research. But their senior colleagues never asked them what they were working on, and the unspoken message they were picking up was that it would hurt them when they came up for tenure if, as one of them put it, they had "published too much." How much would be too much he wasn't sure, and he sensed that a direct question was not the way to find out.
Meanwhile my colleague and I were also struck by something the most senior member of this department said to us rather wistfully: that the collegial exchange he used to enjoy from day to day with other members of the English department just didn't happen anymore. "Everyone seems so busy; half of us are in fancy new offices in another building now; my colleagues don't stop by to chat." Was this just an old man's nostalgia for a bygone time when people cared what he thought and his colleagues had more spacious lives because they had wives at home full-time? Or was the problem that his senior colleagues no longer had anything to chat about, because they had long ago ceased doing new scholarly work? Another senior member told us he'd been hired at this college right out of graduate school and had never intended to be anything more or other than "the best [College of X] professor I could be. That seemed like enough," he said to us wryly. His tone of voice implied "believe it or not." Yet another told us she had been delighted to secure her first job out of graduate school at a college where there would not be any pressure to publish.
We thought we knew how to read the remarks of these senior members--clearly their junior colleagues had broader horizons and were more ambitious professionally than they were. And if they didn't know how to foster and be supportive of their junior colleagues' professional aspirations, then we would have to be. We wrote a review, which I now cringe to remember, in which we said, more or less, that these people were no longer worthy mentors or models for their newest colleagues.
I am fictionalizing this anecdote; it's based on visits to more than one institution. To make a better story, I've also exaggerated my own arrogance a bit in retrospect, but I don't think I have exaggerated the tension that exists between different ways of being a college teacher in many small college departments nowadays, sometimes within as well as between generations. The way faculty members at small colleges conduct their professional lives has changed greatly over a thirty- or thirty-five-year period, especially since the availability of free unlimited e-mail. People are busier now; they don't stop by to chat because they don't have time. But they also don't stop by the office of a colleague at their own institution because they are busy having more specialized conversations with colleagues at other places. Each of us now has access to a national network of colleagues with whom we can be in contact not just once or twice a year at conferences but on a daily basis; it's easy to form the habit of spending more time online with the Spenser Society or the Marxist Theory Collective than in face-to-face conversation with colleagues in neighboring offices.
Thus we can, if we choose, give priority to a research program geared toward publication that is in tension or even at odds with the obligation and opportunity we also have, as undergraduate teachers in small departments, to be generalists. Faculty members at liberal arts colleges need to be generalists for a number of reasons. We are called on to contribute and even perhaps give leadership to the college's general education curriculum or its first-year seminar program, but we are asked as well to mount an English major curriculum that is not just a collection of disparate courses tied to department members' special interests but also a more sustained and integrative experience of what is entailed in literary study. Candidates for jobs in departments of small colleges often learn that they will be expected to be generalists when they are asked questions geared toward finding out if, for instance, a specialist in narrative theory also likes to teach poetry or a Miltonist could work up a Chaucer course for the year after next.
But most of the people we hire fresh out of graduate school have done their graduate work at research universities; the point and purpose of their work has been to make them capable of publishable scholarship in a subfield of their discipline. In their PhD dissertations they've taken their first steps toward becoming an authority relative to some particular part of the terrain of literary study; they've apprenticed themselves to faculty members who have that status already by dint of their own published work. It's not their teaching but the books and articles these mentors and role models have published that have secured them tenured positions at Harvard and Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. And the same can increasingly be said of faculty members at elite small colleges. Successful teaching is necessary but not sufficient for tenure at such places; we describe the faculties we are trying to build as corps of scholar-teachers whose scholarship nourishes and is indispensable to their performance in the classroom.
But does it and is it? When I asked my political theorist husband why, as he was coming out of graduate school in the early 1970s, he formed the deliberate intention of teaching at a liberal arts college rather than a research university, he didn't use the word generalist. He said he "wanted to find out what [he] was really interested in" instead of having to establish himself right away as an authority on the subject of his dissertation. The article that got him tenure was enabled by the thinking he had done for the dissertation but went beyond it to discuss the relation between ethics and politics in a broader and more encompassing way. He did eventually publish more directly from his dissertation but went on to do his most extensive and significant work in another part of the field entirely. His teaching and his published writing have been intertwined throughout his career, but not because he teaches from his research. Just the opposite, in fact: thirty years of working with lively, thoughtful undergraduates have given his published work a range and breadth that are the envy of fellow specialists. He is one of the architects of our new college seminar program, for which he recently collaborated with colleagues from other departments to design a course on religion and public life and another on the meaning of change.
I myself, with a dissertation on The Faerie Queene that I did not publish and a book on Renaissance lyric that was published after I got tenure, began a few years ago to write about feminist poetics in the United States since 1950. I think some of my senior colleagues would have preferred me to stay put in the Renaissance--a colleague who specialized in British modernism every so often would refer to my having "started to play around with modern poetry." But they voiced no objection to my offering a women poets course as soon as I suggested doing so. And whereas we no longer have a pre-1800 requirement for the major, I find my generalist capacities becoming more and more important as time goes by. I can't get a dozen students to sign up for The Poetry of Spenser, but I can get more than a dozen to read the whole Faerie Queene in a course on allegory that begins with The Play of Everyman and ends with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; I've also started offering a course called Transformations of the Sonnet from Petrarch to Marilyn Hacker, which attracts more students than my Renaissance lyric course.
The notion that you are a better teacher to the extent that you are a specialist who teaches from your research is questionable on a number of levels, but these days I don't see its being questioned much. A few years ago Robert McCaughey reaffirmed the viability of this notion in a study of a group of selective liberal arts colleges. In Scholars and Teachers McCaughey cites statistical evidence that the more actively a college's faculty engages in scholarly work, the more students that college sends to graduate school, and argues that "statistical evidence aside, it makes sense that faculty intent upon sustaining their scholarly lives within institutional environments that properly insist on the importance of good undergraduate teaching will find ways to integrate the two activities" (95). But is success in getting your students into graduate school the best measure of how well you're teaching them, and is this way of sustaining your own scholarly activity in your students' best interest? McCaughey seems too focused on vindicating the selective liberal arts college model of the scholar-teacher to address such questions squarely. Yet increasingly the scholar-teacher model his study promotes is becoming the very model of a liberal arts college faculty member, notwithstanding an older tradition that still flourishes alongside and at odds with it, a tradition associated with character formation and with preparing undergraduate students to lead examined lives.
Clifford Geertz has argued in Local Knowledge that most PhD graduates are doomed to a life of "exile from Eden": having learned to be anthropologists or physicists in a setting in which cutting-edge work is being done, they must settle for a professional career in exile from that vibrant center, lumbered with tasks and responsibilities that will keep them from ever getting back there. "The majority," says Geertz, "follow a career pattern in which they are for several years at the perceived heart of things," but then, "in differing degrees and with different speeds," they are, or perceive themselves to be, "downwardly mobile." Geertz suspects that what he calls the "exile from Eden syndrome" is "rather more important in shaping our general cast of mind" as well as "some good part of the nature of our ritual life--professional meetings, for example--than we have allowed ourselves to realize" (159). But there is another way of experiencing exile from Eden, with different implications, which I suspect may have just as much currency among the professoriat. Liberal arts colleges send a far higher proportion of their graduates to graduate school and into college teaching careers than research universities do, which suggests that before many of us embarked on the process of professional formation that occurs in graduate school it was our undergraduate experience that turned us into would-be professors of English. For many of us, I suspect, graduation from college was the moment of exile from Eden--the moment when we had to stop writing unpublishable papers and begin to be, or begin more directly preparing to be, gainfully employed. It was the end of a four-year period in which we were allowed and even encouraged to have all-night conversations about books and undergo epiphanies while writing our unpublishable papers at four in the morning. If we went to a residential college, our rituals were local: we danced around the Maypole every spring, we attended chapel several times a week perhaps, or "collection" twice a month. At my college every member of the senior class rings the bell in the main administration building after handing in her last undergraduate paper and taking her last exam.
As we said goodbye to all that, we also said goodbye to undergraduate teachers who knew us by name, who read our unpublishable papers themselves, and who turned us on to books and ideas by showing us how to inhabit and work with them. In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois propounds a particularly eloquent vision of this kind of education, writing about the black universities (Atlanta, Howard, Fisk) that were founded in the South in the wake of the Civil War. It's a vision of "delving for Truth and searching out the hidden beauties of life [. . .] not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes." "The riddle of existence," says Du Bois, "is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is today laid before the freedmen's sons" by these educational institutions of the New South (420). Du Bois's vision of higher education is not, of course, his own invention; it belongs to a tradition older in this country than the research university; it is one that is at odds with a research university model of knowledge and intellectual work. It is associated historically with the religious founding of many of this country's colleges, but chapel talks are not crucial to its sustenance; what is crucial is a particular way of thinking about the "function" of this kind of institution, which according to Du Bois is "above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization" (421).
As liberal arts college faculty members, should we still be trying, and can we still afford, to re-create the kind of educational experience and the kind of learning community Du Bois's vision presupposes? I have a new colleague who came to us a few years out of graduate school, by which time she had become a scholar of unusual range and breadth. She had gone to a liberal arts college and had always wanted to teach in one; she has kept both her teaching and her research horizons broad, which is one reason she stood out amid a very strong field of candidates in her primary area of specialization. But the conditions of professorial employment have changed at these kinds of institutions since my new colleague was herself an undergraduate. Nowadays our three-two teaching load is just barely acceptable; during her first year she got it reduced by one course. Recently I asked her to give a lecture on Parents' Day in October, a day on which we do our best to give our students' families a feel for the academic mission of the college. She was pleased to be asked to do this, but the next day stopped by my office to say that she wouldn't, after all, be able to. She had already engaged to give four talks during the first semester in other academic venues; she hoped I would ask her to do Parents' Day next year instead. Next year, as I reminded her a bit grumpily, she would be on junior faculty leave. My colleague knows that being the best small-college professor she can be is not simply a matter of local visibility and good teaching--nor, if I may hark back to the vignette I began with, does it have a whole lot to do with stopping by to chat with colleagues in English House. The department's already tenured members want her to be professionally active beyond our local community; we want the reflected prestige her scholarly achievements will bring us. But we don't even agree among ourselves on what kind of balance the members of her professional cohort should be trying to strike between teaching and scholarship, local involvement and national visibility. It's a different balance from what we had to strike to get tenure, and that makes for difficult mentoring.
And what about junior faculty members who come to us while the ink on their PhD diploma is still wet, before they've had time either to teach very much or to develop a sturdy professional network? Should they be protected from committee service so that they can write more articles and give more papers at professional meetings? As department chair, should I negotiate a lighter teaching load for them without their having to ask for it? Since good teaching is necessary though not sufficient for tenure, they need to take their teaching seriously, obsess about it, put it first. Really good college teaching is local; you learn it on site, in the context of a particular college, its curriculum and mores. So no, they shouldn't be given less teaching to do; they need to show us they can teach our standard load and also publish. Maybe the Internet and a decent travel allowance will enable them to have it both ways: the feeling of having to rob Peter to pay Petunia or of having more balls in the air than they know how to juggle is one they will have to live with and might as well get used to. Is that the best survival advice I have to offer junior colleagues? Perhaps.
But how much and what kind of publication is enough for tenure? We need to be talking openly about this as part of the process of helping new faculty members get their institutional bearings, but it isn't an easy conversation to have, for many reasons. Even in relation to the norms and history of a single institution there is no recipe for tenure. There are a lot more venues for publication than there used to be, and our collective sense of the relative prestige of these venues is changing. The more fundamental problem is that at colleges like mine we send a mixed message to new colleagues about the relation between teacherly and scholarly "productivity." We make obeisance to the ideal of scholar-teachers who succeed by finding ways to teach what they are working on, whose courses are exciting to students because they stay at the cutting edge of the discipline. That ideal is in line with the habits and expectations our newest colleagues bring with them from graduate school, but it's finally not who we need them to be. That kind of scholar-teacher is not enough of a generalist.
But if not, what then? Are undergraduate teaching and scholarship, as scholarship is currently defined and practiced, less compatible than we can afford to admit? I think this is the case, though I'm not sure what to suggest doing about it or where it leaves us.
The author is Professor of English and Associate Provost at Bryn Mawr 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.
I would like to thank Steve Salkever, Ed Folsom, and Louise Yelin for their help with this essay.
Du Bois, W. E. B. "Of the Wings of Atalanta." The Souls of Black Folk. The Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1986. 415-23.
Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic, 1983.
McCaughey, Robert A. Scholars and Teachers: The Faculties of Select Liberal Arts Colleges and Their Place in American Higher Learning. New York: Conceptual Litho, 1994.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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