I’ve spent the past several days at the Council of Independent Colleges’ annual Institute for Chief Academic Officers. The CIC is an association of small and midsize private institutions that offers its members developmental conferences such as this one, a similar one for presidents, a series of workshops for chairs, and other programs and projects including a valuable tuition-exchange program for children of faculty and staff members.
While a number of the more elite private institutions are members, for the most part the academic officers attending this institute were from the less rarified strata of private higher education. As such, many of the discussions revolved around the issues that have been the subject of my entries here for some time: attracting and retaining a strong faculty out of the limelight of prestige and outside compelling locations; how graduate programs can prepare people for such positions; how to provide strong faculty-development opportunities in the current economic climate; how to orient new professors effectively to campus culture; and so on.
One of the common themes throughout the meeting was the gap between graduate training and the realities of faculty life at an institution like mine, or like those of a great majority of the colleagues at this conference. One of the more interesting comments at a panel was about how hard it is to find new faculty members who are genuinely interested in teaching general-education courses, and who are, more broadly, willing to expand their teaching into new areas to meet the needs of an institution that probably has fewer faculty members than the specialties in a discipline might ideally call for.
Most faculty members at small, non-elite institutions will teach at least half their loads in general education or far out of their particular academic specialties. Professors can respond to this in two ways. One is to opt out, either literally or simply through putting minimal effort into teaching such courses. The other is to take the opportunity to learn more about their disciplines, embark on pedagogical experiments that will enrich their courses, and simply to become more broadly educated. Following the second path can be immensely rich, but it’s not, probably, what a candidate may expect from his or her graduate training.
One thing for sure is that, based on what I’ve been hearing, candidates for the sadly small number of academic jobs on offer this year will greatly increase their chances of success if they have interesting things to say about teaching in an institution’s general-education program, and express a willingness to stretch themselves at least a bit out of their disciplinary comfort zones.
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5 Responses to In Search of the Flexible Candidate
lfathe1 - November 12, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Perhaps if a significant part of consideration in hiring and evaluation for tenure and promotion came from faculty members’ teaching in general education, then it would be easier to convince them to take it seriously. While it would be great if graduate schools prepared people to do this, it’s not required at many larger places that use adjuncts for their service courses, which are the same institutions that prepare the graduate students. If your institution feels that faculty need training in this area, then provide it. If you make this an important aspect of the position, hire people at least partly for interest in doing this rather than simply for achievement in their research area, and then give them the support to succeed in teaching these courses, then faculty will do well in this endeavor. By and large, the faculty members are responding to the local system. Change the system and you can change the outcome.
11161452 - November 12, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I taught at a non-elite small liberal arts college, and there I knew very few faculty who were truly interested in being generalists, despite the requirements of our jobs. In my field, graduate study is invariably about expertise in a narrowly-focused area, and any current slight move toward general studies has more to do with the terrible job market than anything else. In other words, the shift is happening only grudgingly, and ultimately, diversification in graduate school is still left up to the individual student. Of course, many graduate advisors view employment at a small non-selective school as a consolation prize for their students–a sort of dues-paying exercise until the person gets a “real job”. It will be interesting to see if a permanently-depressed market leads to any meaningful change in attitude. Also, the previous writer is correct in saying that many institutions not only hire specialists for generalist positions, but they don’t really provide support for diversification once the person is on campus and dealing with the daunting prospect of more than half his teaching load outside his preferred discipline.
gspaulsson - November 13, 2009 at 7:56 am
Diversification = dilution = bad teaching. As an historian, I teach my students that each historical event is unique and that historical understanding increases by deepening our understanding of that event, not by finding parallels with other superficially similar events. We learn from history a great deal about people and how they respond to concrete dilemmas, and very little about abstractions like war, genodide, revolution, the rise and fall of civilizations, etc. Yet invariably when I am forced to “diversify’ it is into fields like European History or Western Civ, at which level I can’t offer much more than superficial chronology and generally idiotic grand theories. On the other hand, things like philosophy of history or research methodology would be much more useful areas for me to expand into, and things students really ought to be learning. I have lots of flexibility, just not in the directions the small colleges seem to want to go.
thehighking - November 16, 2009 at 9:43 am
Plus, this seems like nonsense to me. What would happen if you wrote a cover letter expressing your interest in the general curriculum and in being a generalist?Your application would immediately get tossed by the SC for not being focused enough or not having enough of a plan or being a dilettante.SCs don’t know what they want.
david_r_evans - November 16, 2009 at 10:53 am
#4, I think it’s safe to say that when a sizable group of chief academic officers is saying something (there were over 320 at the CIC meeting), it’s not likely to be “nonsense” in a hiring context. You’d find, I’m quite sure, that at small colleges SCs are thrilled to find someone who’s not only interested in, say, the English Novel 1865-1868. #3, if you’re talking graduate school, yes. If you’re talking a 200-level world civ course, you’re a historian: you ought to be able to teach it. Put another way, who’s better: a second-semester grad student, or you with your Ph.D.? Granted, someone who’s got deep research on a particular area is likely to be stronger in that particular area than someone who doesn’t, but this progression can be taken to an absurd extreme. Besides which, in a small college, it’s very likely that you’ll only be able to teach in your research area once every couple of years, or even less. In my 15 years of full-time teaching, I have in fact never taught a text that shows up conspicuously in my research, which was ridiculously specialized and rarified–not mainstream British lit at all.If you don’t have the kind of flexibility I’m talking about, you probably don’t belong at a small college. That’s perfectly fine, but if you want a career at a small institution, you need to think differently about teaching.