Things They Do Teach You in Grad School

I’ve discussed here several times the discontinuities between graduate education and what’s really called for from faculty members at small, teaching-oriented institutions. I’ve also discussed the even bigger discontinuities between my education as a Ph.D. in 17th-century English literature and my current administrative role. These gaps sometimes yawn widely, though I have certainly found that a lot of the skills I developed as an English student and professor have served me extremely well in my administrative career.

Sometimes my academic training and interests come to the fore in surprising and rewarding ways. At the moment, I find myself especially well served by my scholarly interests, which focus on travel writing around the time of the English civil wars in the mid-17th century through the death of Queen Anne in 1714.

“How?,” you might ask.

Well, my institution is making an intensive effort to globalize the curriculum, to provide our students with enhanced experiences both here in rural Iowa and around the world to broaden their perspectives and help them to think of themselves as members of a global community. It turns out that the reading I did about young male English travelers to the Continent in the mid-17th century is remarkably relevant to our current needs. For example, one of the prevalent elements of the conversation in the 1640s and 1650s had to do with various attitudes towards Catholic countries on the Continent, and how young travelers should manage their interactions with those countries. We are, oddly, having a very similar discussion now about travel to Muslim countries, and for some of the same reasons and from some of the same (good and bad) motivations.

In 17th-century England, the big question was, “Why travel?” The encounter with difference, even the relatively mild difference between Dover and Calais, was a tremendous leap for many people in 1640. But the advocates of foreign travel at that time believed that knowing the world, even if just a little, would give young travelers tremendous benefits and advantages when they returned home.

My university is making exactly that same argument to our students now. So, actually, my graduate-school training is directly relevant to what I now do daily as an administrator.