On most campuses, February is an anxious and unpleasant month — and not just because of the weather.
It's a time when we see faculty job candidates shuttled from office to office. Outfitted in the latest interview finery, with their smiling faces masking both fatigue and nervousness, candidates tend to stand out among the crowds of students and faculty members in their everyday winter wear.
February also marks a time of anxiety for some of our brightest undergraduates (and their mentors), who are awaiting word on their graduate-school applications.
Add to all of that the fact that, in many parts of the country, February marks the third and (with any luck) last consecutive month of snow and bitter temperatures, and you have the recipe for general unhappiness. I have a teacher friend who vows every year to hold a "February Stinks" party. He never does, of course. It's February, after all. Who has the energy to throw a party?
I can't offer much help to Northerners who are pining for spring, but this past month I did come across a book that can offer some solace and guidance to faculty aspirants. Steven M. Cahn's From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor (Columbia University Press, 2008), is aimed at graduate students and advanced undergraduates who are starting down a path that they hope will lead to a faculty position in higher education.
In an e-mail interview, Cahn said the book stemmed from his many years of experience advising graduate students. "I have been offering a course titled 'Colloquium on College Teaching' at the City University of New York Graduate Center each semester for a decade now," he said. "It is open to graduate students from all of our 30 or so doctoral programs. This coming semester I expect enrollment of about 40 students."
In addition to that general course for all graduate students, Cahn — a professor of philosophy at CUNY and the author of many books on philosophy, religion, and academic life, and ethics — has taught intensive courses aimed at the graduate students in his own department. He has also served as a dissertation adviser to many students, and that was how the impetus for the book came about.
"As a dissertation director," he said, "I have not only directed the writing of theses but also guided students in obtaining faculty positions and seeking to earn tenure. Once, as I was giving advice, a student asked whether I had ever thought of writing down what I was telling her so that others could benefit from it. That suggestion sparked my undertaking the project."
It took Cahn only three months to turn his decades' worth of experience as a teacher and a mentor into a book — which is not quite as impressive as it may sound, since the book clocks in at under 100 pages. But of course graduate students have enough to read, so its brevity, and its simple and clear writing style, should make it a trustworthy companion for many a student seeking to enter academic life.
The book, like Cahn's writing style, has little ornamentation. He devotes short chapters to major experiences and transition points in academic life: "The Dissertation," "The First Interview," "Tenure," "Teaching," "Research," and so on. His advice tends to be self-assured and directive, without much personal anecdote or support from research literature.
But his advice struck me as wise and sensible throughout. In the conclusion to his first chapter, "Graduate School," Cahn asks, and answers, a question in a way that I think most graduate students need to hear: "What is the most important ingredient for success in graduate school? Many might answer 'brilliance.' I, however, would choose 'resiliency.'"
As he points out, most students who are admitted into graduate schools are capable of handling the work on an intellectual level. Many students who end their graduate careers prematurely do so because they have become discouraged by the endless series of tasks and obstacles that lie in the way of the degree — not because they have been unable to hack the academic work. Thus, when he sees students walk across the stage to receive their Ph.D.'s, he writes, "I'm not convinced that all the recipients possess remarkable intellectual talents. I am certain, though, that every one has demonstrated the power to persevere."
On the time needed to complete a dissertation, Cahn's advice is equally brisk and demanding: "Any time beyond two years is excessive. Indeed, I would expect the task to be completed in 12 to 18 months."
That advice might sound hard to graduate students in the midst of dissertation projects that seem to stretch out endlessly before them. But projects that run far beyond the normal time frame often do so because the students want to produce that perfect book, and so they bog themselves down in revisions — hoping to pre-empt their mentors — and turn in a near-finished product. In the end, as Cahn points out, "no one will ask you whether your dissertation was passed with major or minor revisions. All that matters is that you have fulfilled every requirement for the degree."
Of course I was most interested, for the purposes of this column, in Cahn's chapter on teaching. I probably expected more from it than I should have, but it has the same focused and brisk quality as the others. After some preliminary advice on routine matters such as selecting texts and holding office hours, Cahn boils down his pedagogical advice to four points, each of which gets just a single paragraph of attention: find strategies to motivate students; organize your presentations and use plenty of concrete examples; don't pitch your classes toward only the brightest students in the room; and make sure that students always have in view the broader framework for a course rather than just the details of a given lecture or discussion.
All four are wise injunctions. But in this chapter, as in others, I would have liked to see Cahn apply his advice about concrete examples to his own writing. On pedagogy, as on almost all other matters he discusses, I found Cahn's advice and principles right on the mark. But an advanced undergraduate or graduate student might have a hard time understanding how to put those principles into practice without some real-life examples to flesh them out. Some anecdotes from his own teaching, not to mention from other aspects of his career, would have been a welcome addition to the book.
The most interesting section, to my eyes, was the conclusion of the teaching chapter, in which Cahn gives future academics his realistic, some might say cynical, perspective on the importance of teaching in higher education today: "Administrators claim to value teaching highly, but their actions tell otherwise. When considering candidates for faculty positions, they usually view as more attractive the promising researcher rather than the promising teacher. When salary increases are distributed, the larger ones go to the successful researcher rather than the successful teacher."
Cahn delivers that assessment in decidedly neutral terms, so I couldn't help asking his opinion of the imbalance between teaching and research.
"I believe the balance could be improved," he said. In fact, he pointed me to the January/February 2004 issue of Academe, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of University Professors, in which he published a manifesto of 10 reforms that research-oriented institutions could undertake in order to demonstrate their support for teaching excellence. The article remains available online, and deserves a read by anyone who shares Cahn's desire to see teaching taken more seriously in the evaluation of faculty work.
From Student to Scholar will take its place on the short list of books that I recommend to undergraduates who are thinking about faculty life, or to graduate students who need guidance in the job-search process. It's a book that I believe needs to be supplemented by others, since its advice comes in fairly skeletal format.
In addition, the book does not acknowledge the fact that many job seekers do not meet with the success that Cahn assumes his readers will have in finding a faculty position. The fictional protégé that Cahn addresses in this book moves seamlessly from her first graduate courses into her first faculty position. The vicissitudes of both the economy and the job market mean that many hopeful graduate students will not have such good fortune.
Don't look to the book, then, for an explanation of hiring trends in academe or for a critique of the faculty-labor system. Its focus stays squarely on providing an overview of academic life and its challenges and opportunities, from graduate school through tenure.
But a job candidate trudging through the slush of a February interview on my campus, or any other one, will assuredly be a more knowledgeable and prepared candidate for having sat down for an hour with Cahn's overview.
