Now I've gone and done it. I've said yes to yet another department calling to ask if I would come and examine its program as an external reviewer.
I never mean to accept those invitations, but when the requests come, the dates always seem so far in the future that it doesn't look as if it will be a problem at all. I can work up to it, plan for it, schedule around it.
Many academics run into trouble when they accept too many speaking invitations at conferences. For me, though, the problem is external reviews. Doing one is much like presenting a conference paper: I have to travel to a campus, reschedule my classes, do some research in advance, and then write up my results.
External-review duty, I've learned, is part of advancing in rank as a tenured professor. You are expected to get involved in your field at a national level. In my department, I have colleagues who do reviews, too, but we never talk about it. It's like a secret assignment -- one of those jobs you have to take on but you don't advertise it.
So why do I keep saying yes? What I have come to understand is that conducting a review, although it's one of the most complicated and difficult aspects of being a senior professor, can also be one of the most fun. It feeds the ego, it introduces you to fascinating new people, and it even pays (a little).
When a department decides it wants an external review (or, more likely, when it is told by the dean or provost that it's time for one), it puts together a report summing up the state of the department -- its major, its courses, its faculty. Then it invites a team of outside experts, folks who have chaired departments at comparable institutions, to visit the campus. We read over the report, talk to faculty members and students, and write a review. If all goes as it should, the review helps the department to think about some alternative ways of doing things. It might help the chair to argue for a new faculty line or new courses.
When departments at research universities bring in an external reviewer, they are often looking to move up in the rankings. But at liberal-arts colleges like the one where I teach (and, I suspect, at small colleges and universities in general), we are not so much interested in moving up -- although that would be nice -- as we are in having an outsider take an objective look and tell us what aspects of our program look especially strong, where we could use more support, where we might focus our future hires, and how we can make a case to our deans for more support.
And that's where the task is tempting for me as a reviewer.
One reason people go into teaching is that they are convinced they are smart, that they can see things other people can't, and they can help those other people to see better. External reviewing appeals to my ego and my sense of my own intelligence at the same time that it allows me to think of myself as helpful, friendly, and selfless in my service to others.
I do not speak here for other members of reviewing teams with whom I've worked. They seemed remarkably ego-less. But perhaps they hide it well.
It surprised me to find, at this point in my career, that I felt confident enough to tell another department what to do. When I was a department head, I had trouble enough figuring out what my own department should do. But of course it's a lot easier to judge a department other than your own, and on my first external review, I found that the individual interviews, the meetings with students, and even the dinners revealed patterns against which I could weigh my own department's patterns.
And that was the other great benefit of reviewing, and one that is largely unsung but absolutely key.
Reviewing other departments makes me see my own department more clearly. It gives me great ideas to take back to my place. It puts my department into a larger perspective and sometimes makes me more sympathetic (and sometimes less) to my colleagues.
I've learned a lot, for example, about how other English departments handle creative writing in relation to literature. Before I started participating in external reviews, I was impatient with creative writing, worried about its integration in the department.
But what I've seen from participating on external reviews has given me more and more respect for my own creative-writing colleagues and the balance they have worked out with the rest of our department. In the course of doing many reviews, I've seen how complicated the fit between creative writing and literature can be in other departments, and how much the integration of those two areas in one administrative unit depends on personalities and goodwill.
Personalities and goodwill are what a good external review depends on, as well. A review team that works well together is a beautiful thing, and I suspect that English professor Dennis Baron's experiences at research universities and mine at liberal-arts colleges are the rule rather than the exception. The people who take on the task of helping out another department must be kind of nice, or they wouldn't have accepted in the first place.
External-review teams usually have three members who together write up a single report. It is arduous work -- from the breakfast meeting with the department head to the nightcaps with the other team members to go over your notes. After two days of nonstop interviewing and meetings, members of the review team must hammer out a substantial report that synthesizes what they have seen, what they think, and what they recommend. And they must agree.
I hope that I am as easy to work with as "John" and "Jean," the two other members of the review team on which I recently worked. They quickly became close friends -- smart, sensitive, hardworking professionals who held themselves, each other, and the department we were evaluating to high but not unreachable standards. We produced a review that was, I hope, readable and helpful.
That is not to say that it was entirely welcome. How could a thorough outside review please everyone? On the final day, when we presented our broad-brush findings and recommendations, it was to a stony-faced audience. The faculty members were certainly wondering, "How can these outsiders possibly understand?"
And we couldn't. But that was the point. Because we could not understand the history of various relationships, the nuances of the course distributions, the stakes of the structure of the composition program, we could blithely say what the department looked like to outsiders. We could ask the department to take a step back from its own history and examine itself with our eyes.
Sometimes the process works. Sometimes it doesn't. But this time it did. John and Jean were great counters to my own failings, and perhaps I complemented their strengths.
What's a bit scarier is when you are asked to do an external review on your own, as sometimes happens with small-sized institutions. You have no teammates to bounce ideas off of or give different perspectives.
Ideally, I believe that all external reviewing should be done in teams, even if they are teams of only two. But a small department's budget sometimes doesn't allow for more than one reviewer.
So I have decided that the next time I am asked to do an external review on my own, I'll think of John and Jean, and try to ask myself, What would John and Jean do? When I am interviewing department members and writing my results, I will try to step outside myself and think like an Americanist, a film person, a creative writer, a junior faculty member, and a medievalist.
Can I be a review team all in one person? How far will that midcareer confidence carry me? Guess I will find out.
