The Evolution of a Small Department

I have been chair of two English departments, one of which had six full-time faculty members and the other had more than 20. Since then, I’ve been dean and vice president for academic affairs at universities with small departments (no larger than nine), and, thus, have had the occasion to think extensively about the challenges they face in hiring.

Defining faculty qualifications is a special kind of challenge in small departments. They generally are involved in an internal tug-of-war between specialization and generalism, and it’s beyond doubt that most recent Ph.D.‘s are extremely specialized. While a department may need a broad range of coverage, most candidates right out of graduate school will be comfortable only in a narrow slice of that range.

The strongest candidates, then, usually are the ones who appear temperamentally inclined toward exploration across a discipline, and also are comfortable not being a profound expert in everything they teach. Such people will likely teach themselves what they need to know to provide good, interesting courses on a range of topics.

When the time comes to replace such faculty members, however, another challenge kicks in. In my experience, faculty members who evolve as I’ve just described will develop niches in their institutions’ curricula that suit the interests they’ve developed. That’s a good thing, and it’s one of the reasons many small institutions have distinctive—even quirky—programs that have a durable influence on their graduates.

However, by the time the careers of those faculty members’ conclude, their institutions’ programs have stretched to fit them, and they have stretched to fit the curricula. There is virtually no chance that a new hire will have the same interests and skills as the departing colleague. So, the process has to start all over again, which will once more require adaptations large and small by both the institution and the incoming faculty member.

Thinking back on my years in that six-member department, I have no doubt that they were intellectually the richest of my career. I learned a huge range of texts and approaches that didn’t figure at all in my graduate training, and in some instances they turned into some of the best courses I’ve taught. There’s certainly a price to such a career, particularly in terms of research productivity, but if you’re the kind of person who thirsts for breadth and continuous learning, you can certainly do a lot worse.