With the fall semester imminent, Tenured Radical offers some sage advice for tenure-track faculty newbies on how to succeed on the job without succumbing to work overload and burnout.
Her first tip is know where your job begins and ends:
Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to manage, and what the department average is for each category and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of “body management,” I am counting major advisees, non-major advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students, other faculty.) These categories can overlap—but count them twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that cannot be folded into the same hour of your time).
Whatever the category is, count it and stay at, or preferably under, that number. Anyone extra is an overload. This is the basic outline of your job description, because whatever people say, a full-time teaching job is primarily about the students. That said, you have to come up with a strategy for how—particularly if you are a popular teacher, or are teaching in an underrepresented field (more on this below)—you are going to say no to students that you don’t have time for; and you will send them away to someone whose job it is to help them.
Be willing to help if asked, but don’t get sucked into being a doormat, she writes:
Do not volunteer, stupid. You know who you are—whatever your biological gender, you are a girl. You are the one who finds the silence insufferable when the chair has asked for someone to step up, and you think it is your job to make everyone feel good again. Why you? And why now? At least go away and consult your job description before you go all Do-Bee on everyone. It isn’t your job to see to it that everything gets done—it is the chair’s job, and believe me, s/he will figure out how to do it.
Tenured Radical notes that minority and gay and lesbian faculty members may find it especially hard to draw boundaries. Her advice to them? Learn to say no.
Underrepresented faculty in underrepresented fields have no obligation to extend themselves without end to underserved students. Sometimes I look around me and it is so frackin’ obvious why the scholars who are perpetually sicker, angrier, more exhausted, and frantic about meeting deadlines for their scholarship share certain characteristics. We are queer, we are of color, we are international scholars, we are women, we are feminist men. We are the ones who, in order to make space for what we care about in institutions, do it ourselves. We invent the programs, then we chair them. This is what Jean O’Brien and Lisa Disch write about in an article I strongly recommend (and that partly inspired this post): “Innovation Is Overtime: An Ethical Analysis of ‘Politically Committed Labor’” (in Aikau, Erickson, and Pierce, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories From the Academy, Minnesota, 2007). We are the ones that advertise our universities’ “diversity” when we labor outside the classroom. We are the ones who students seek out to teach the things they never had a chance to learn in high school. …
The best thing a tenure-track faculty member can do is “get your damn writing done,” she says.
Your scholarship is part of your job. Schedule between 25 and 30% of the time you allot for work during the week to keeping your scholarship going. You know you should do this—and yet many of us see our writing as the thing that we have time for when our family, teaching, and committee responsibilities are done. Which means it can get put off—sometimes fatally—for months at a time, causing us to get out of touch with projects we care about and go without sleep at various points in the semester to meet a commitment that has now become a burden.
What other tips would you add to TR’s list?
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11 Responses to Starting Out Right
mraymond - August 4, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Keep track of everything. Make a folder every year for “Teaching,” “Scholarship,” and “Service,” and put a note about everything you do into one of those folders. It helps you to remember everything you did when it’s time to report on your activities in those three areas.
starrett - August 4, 2010 at 4:08 pm
Be a good friend to the office staff. They, more than almost anyone else, can help make your first year a good one.
nyhist - August 4, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Frequently consult senior colleagues for advice. Don’t just ask one person, ask several, and seek a consensus. In addition to helping you make decisions about teaching, dealing with students or staff, or just about anything else, the very process will teach you about your new colleagues. Which of them will be helpful to you in the future? who has the best advice and insights? Plus, you will start to build important relationships with them.
drrom - August 4, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Trust yourself and your decisions. Don’t spend 2 years guessing if you should speak up at a meeting. (What are you doing at that meeting and on that committee anyway?)
pchoffer - August 4, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Folks: the advice is adversarial, no? You have the job, and your job is to give to the institution that picked you out of the 300 equally qualified applicants as little of your time, your energy, and your spirit as you can. Find and keep boundaries–do not let the institution (faculty self-governance? departmental commitment?) take your eyes off the prize–your own time, space, and satisfaction. Do not under any circumstances go the extra mile for a student, a colleague, or the school. Protect yourself at all times (as if employment were a boxing match and your opponent is the institution). And if your colleagues start to think that you are selfish, well, that’s just too bad. Humanistic scholarship and teaching in a college setting would simply grind to all halt if all of us, throughout our careers, followed the advice of the radical tenured mentor: don’t volunteer to read one another’s work, don’t volunteer to referee mss for journals, don’t volunteer to serve on grad student thesis, dissertation or exam committee, be only for yourself. Perfect advice–if we all followed it–what would our world be? Best, Peter
22011344 - August 4, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Oh, Peter, you miss the main point: advice to the newbies. I have seen too many youngsters burn out because they responded to all the flattering requests for their “help.” “Old Prof. so-and-so won’t help me.” So Assistant Prof. Rookie-do ends up with the life-sucking chronic student cases that have been around and have not been helped by [fill in the blank - student advisor, department chair, Veteran Affairs, etc.]. Then, Rookie-do doesn’t publish; and — after perhaps being voted teacher/advisor of the year, Rookie-do either burns out and quits or Rookie-do gets turned down on [fill in 3 year review, tenure application]. Some — not all — of the best young professors in my 30 years in higher ed — are now no longer in higher education because no one told them how to protect themselves long enough to get job security and avoid pre-mature burnout. Everyone is not born to be Audie Murphies.
richeym - August 5, 2010 at 12:11 am
I agree with Peter. That this sort of “advice” is offered is a sad commentary on the state of the professorate. We wonder why this honorable, can I even say noble, profession is under assault from all sides. Part of the reason is that we have created a situation in which such sad and disheartening advice is considered worthwhile. I, too, have been in higher ed for almost 30 years. I know many examples of successful colleagues who took a very different approach than the one offered in this depressing column.
rthull - August 5, 2010 at 6:45 am
With your chair, set specific personal goals for the year, especially completion of manuscripts, manuscripts in circulation (both to conferences and to journals/publishers. The goal for the first review should be meeting or exceeding these goals.Look for areas into which you can expand your scholarship beyond your dissertation, while milking the latter for what it can yield. Be prepared at that first review to propose some new interest that doesn’t duplicate colleagues’ interests. Look to adding one course that has the potential to grow into a cash cow for the department, meaning one that attracts students, becomes a requirement for other majors, or generates majors for your department.If in a lab science, make a goal for the year to get your lab up and running so that data begins to flow. Mine your first semester classes for the best and brightest looking for lab experience.
firstyearttguy - August 5, 2010 at 8:12 am
I’ll add one important piece of advice: learn as much as you can about your university, college, and department. What does the administration REALLY care about when it comes to tenure and promotion? What is the history of your department’s relationship with the administration? Who has been denied tenure and why? Is the current adminstration continuing the policies of the past or is the school’s/department’s culture changing? Talk to as many people as possible and try to understand your school. General advice is great, but you need to understand your own school’s scholarship/teaching/service expectations in order to succeed. That being said, err on the side of investing extra time into scholarship/publishing… since only that is likely to land you another position if things at your current school don’t work out!
tuxthepenguin - August 5, 2010 at 9:23 am
Research comes first. In many departments, the assistant professors are expected to do the research, because the senior faculty are busy with other things. You are the department’s strongest connection to the scholarly world. Write that on an index card and place it somewhere so that you can see it first thing every morning.Don’t overprepare for your teaching. Spending two more hours to research this or that little fact will add nothing of value to the course. Your first semester just do your best while you learn the school’s culture. But be realistic.Make a good set of lecture notes. Spend a little extra time scanning everything, and marking down the schedule you followed, so that you don’t have to prepare all over again the next time you teach the class. I speak from unfortunate experience.Most importantly: Make a realistic set of goals, and then set a schedule for each day, so that you can achieve them. Adjust as necessary. At the end of the week, spend 10 minutes reviewing how well you stuck with your schedule. Again, I speak from unfortunate experience, having fallen into the trap of doing the urgent rather than the important. Meeting with students is urgent, not important. Spending a minimum of two hours working on research without interruption is important, not urgent. Learn the difference.
nyhist - August 5, 2010 at 10:37 am
Peter Hoffer, above, is right. . .and wrong. Especially when you are just starting out, it’s hard to judge what you should spend your time on, what you should volunteer for, and what you should say no to. That’s why I suggested in my first post on this thread that you should consult senior colleagues. Make use of their experience and wisdom to help you strike a balance between helping yourself and helping others. It worked for me! I learned to say yes to the things I wanted to do, and no to the others, using the prior yes as an excuse for the no. Long ago I read a book entitled, “Only You, Dick Daring!” I don’t recall much about it other than the title and the theme, which was basically that only in the movies is there only ‘Dick Daring’ to save. . .you name it. My motto is: I am not Dick Daring. There are always other people around if one says no to something one really does not want to spend time on.