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[cleochase]

Just out of curiosity, is SFA as bad as, or worse than Prairie View?  I've heard horror stories about that place too.

[captainwillard]

Doesn't sound pretty.  But, in this rather extreme buyer's market, would you take a tenure track job there or (barring other tenure track offers at more highly reputed schools, of course) take some other option, and what might that be?

[gollum]

Doesn't sound pretty.  But, in this rather extreme buyer's market, would you take a tenure track job there or (barring other tenure track offers at more highly reputed schools, of course) take some other option, and what might that be?

Hmm...I don't know maybe something--gasp!--outside of academe that pays better, is in a better place than Naconowhere (as it's called in Texas), and that generally requires one having to put up with less petty b.s.  Just a thought.

[history_anon]

Just out of curiosity, is SFA as bad as, or worse than Prairie View?  I've heard horror stories about that place too.

I grew up in Texas, but haven't lived there in a while.  Neither SFA nor Prairie View has a particularly good academic reputation, but they are both niche schools that provide a college education to groups that otherwise might not have the chance to get one.  SFA is in very rural East Texas and mainly serves the local area, I think, and Prairie View is an HBCU, which I believe is relatively close to Houston and draws African-American students from the Houston area and other Texas cities.  I think both are chronically underfunded--the UT system, especially the flagship at Austrin, and Texas A&M, which has a large and very active alumni base, get most of the state funding for higher education, and places like SFA and Prairie View make do with the crumbs from the table.

[jones41]

Any chance that those of you that endured your time in hell at SFA could reveal the general areas in which you worked, such as social sciences, arts, humanities, hard sciences, etc.?

I was a member of the English department.

Doesn't sound pretty.  But, in this rather extreme buyer's market, would you take a tenure track job there or (barring other tenure track offers at more highly reputed schools, of course) take some other option, and what might that be?

Well, I obviously chose the tenure-track bird in the hand and took the SFA job.  I'm glad I did, but I do wish I was more prepared to deal with the department politics--very draining emotionally.  I don't know how I could have prepared for something like life at SFA: things like this aren't exactly covered in grad school.

I guess there are several options for someone who enters or finds herself in a toxic department like SFA: 1) work your butt off to get out and get another job, 2) work to try to change things, 3) keep your head down and try for tenure (and then change things or check out), 4) walk away.  I guess I did a combination of #1 and 2, and then 4.  (I'm very very happy in my current position, by the way, and the work I did at SFA helped me to get this job.)  To survive at a place like SFA, you need thick skin, an unflappable zen attitude, intense self-discipline, and the ability to entertain yourself in the middle of Nacofrickinowhere.  For a lot of people, it's just not worth it.  Thus, the constant hiring and faculty retention problems there, in my former department especially....

[princeofd]

I read the posts about SFA in Nacogdoches with great amusement and sadness. There is an informal group of us who constitute a Survivors of SFA English Recovery Society who try to stay in touch, either by email or in person when we can.  We even have a type of underground railroad to help people get out and find other jobs. I think I recognized virtually everyone who wrote in by her or his prose style alone, and must say that together we would have made a very good department.  I miss you all, my dears. You were wonderful. I am only sorry that I was not more helpful.

The environment / milieu of Nacogdoches and the university as a whole certainly constitutes a contributing factor to its awfulness: 60 miles from an interstate; three hours from a major metropolitan area with an airport, decent restaurants and bookstores; a small town with seventeen Baptist churches.  Even if the departmental and administrative culture had been somewhat less noxious and toxic, many if not most of the fine young faculty members we lost would have departed anyway.

Much of the difficulty there can be traced to the problems with finding a suitable chairperson. Several years ago, the Dean of Liberal Arts (inexperienced yet autocratic) appointed a very fine internal candidate to be chair. The senior faculty rebelled and made the dean depose her. Then most of them retired, and one of their number became an interim. Then the younger people in the department (some of whom have recently posted, including me), along with the same dean, made a disastrous choice of an outside candidate for chair.  Her amorality and incompetence were so complete (and by now, legendary) that the only thing for her to do, after herself getting deposed, was to become a dean at another university.

Then the real hell began. Someone else became chair, a person I will call the Horror. ...

[Edited for personal attack and potentially libelous material. -moderator]

It occurred to me as I left after many years that the faculty members who are still there are quite a bit like those who were there when I first came almost twenty years ago: local degrees; no scholarship; innocent of most trends in criticism, theory, and writing; not particularly collegial. I once calculated that the attrition rate for new faculty in English over a 12-year period was 78%.  Only two people hired between 1988 and 2003 are still there.  And I bet if you got all two dozen or so defectors together, almost all of them would mention this repellent chair as an important factor in their leaving.  The Survivors, I think, were the aberration. 

I think what usually happens is that the younger people are supposed to take over. I have heard that nature took its course thus felicitously at neighboring peer institutions such as Sam Houston in Huntsville and TSU in San Marcos (formerly known as the party school Southwest Texas). But what occurred instead is that the English dept. at SFA ate its young.

Eventually, the bell tolled for me, too.  When I found out that the Horror was signed on for another three years, I knew I would have to sell my house and hope I could find another senior position. As it happened, one of the Survivors sent me a job ad and, miraculously, I was delivered from mine enemies, marvellous to behold.

I will say that there are things I miss about Nacogdoches, and even about the campus.  But as I was driving away in the moving truck those few years ago, it occurred to me that it made no difference whatever whether I stayed at SFA or not. It was as if I had never been there. I had no impact, had no influence, baleful or salutary.  Publications, teaching awards, many years of hard work, all those awful committee assignments--none of it made a damned bit of difference.

[dogvomit]

Does forestry have these problems?  I know that biology probably does, but I always hear good things about forestry.

[princeofd]

Does forestry have these problems?  I know that biology probably does, but I always hear good things about forestry.

I always heard good things about Forestry. The kid who bought my house as I fled the scene did his work there.  There are other departments that are good individually, as well, such as Music, Theater, and I think Art is good, too. My son-in-law is taking his degree in the latter.

Tier 3 schools (the majority college experience in the USA) all have their own varieties of badness, I think.  Some more examples from SFA:

My stepdaughter is in the speech pathology program, and in some of the courses she's taken, the professor has warned them that if they ask about their grades or question them, they will be lowered a full letter.

My last dean, the one who fired the amoral-incompetent chair who then went off to be a dean, helped ensconce The Horror, then himself left to become a provost at another school. The entire Liberal Arts faculty had given him votes of no confidence and some of the History professors had been writing letters, daily, to the president to get this dean fired.  One good thing the dean was trying to do was to make the awarding of summer courses more equitable, so that junior faculty could have a shot at the money and that the senior folks could not, for instance, get two courses to teach for both summer terms.

The current president is, of course, a local person who has served long and well as an upper-level administrator. The previous president was either removed or resigned without having another job just to get out of there. I think the Board of Regents decided that he was not committed enough to spending university funds on football (a program that always was, and still is, an enormous money-loser).

[dogvomit]

Thats interesting to know.  I used to be at LSUS and while my department was in shambles, some programs seemed to be in decent shape.  Of course, its a much smaller school!

[thedude]

I am one of those younger SFA faculty members in the process of leaving, although I haven't notified my chair yet, mainly because this school does everything in its power to screw its faculty out of benefits.  It's just as bad as everyone on this forum suggests, if not worse.  Several departments are losing two or three tenure-track faculty this year, which seems fairly consistent.  The English department in particular is notorious for turnover.  All of the horror stories I've heard about their chair are confirmed on this forum.  At last count they were losing two very good people who were hired just last year, and they've lost two who were hired two years ago.

Which is more important--raising faculty salaries (second to bottom in the state of Texas) or building a baseball complex no one, including most of the people in the athletic department, really wants? 

Guess which one SFA chose?

[princeofd]

I am one of those younger SFA faculty members in the process of leaving, although I haven't notified my chair yet, mainly because this school does everything in its power to screw its faculty out of benefits.  It's just as bad as everyone on this forum suggests, if not worse.  Several departments are losing two or three tenure-track faculty this year, which seems fairly consistent.  The English department in particular is notorious for turnover.  All of the horror stories I've heard about their chair are confirmed on this forum.  At last count they were losing two very good people who were hired just last year, and they've lost two who were hired two years ago.

Which is more important--raising faculty salaries (second to bottom in the state of Texas) or building a baseball complex no one, including most of the people in the athletic department, really wants? 

Guess which one SFA chose?

For some reason, a tv show from my h.s. years featuring David Carradine has come to mind, especially a line from it: "When you can snatch the pebble out of my hand, Grasshopper . . . "

If you don't know the show, that of course makes no sense. Probably doesn't make sense anyway.

SFA has always been an administration-heavy school.  Their administrators are some of the best paid in the state, whereas the faculty are paid quite poorly.  The administrators, in turn, love sports because they think that they are revenue-producing.  Far from it. My third year in the saddle there, the football program lost a million dollars.

Among most of us Survivors of SFA English, we blame the environment to some extent for the horror (and The Horror) in the department. For it is just such an environment that allows such a weed to rise up from the leaf piles to find the light.

Welcome, Survivor. Here's a tip--don't even make a MOTION that you're leaving until your last paycheck is already written.

Then run for your life.

[captainwillard]

Does this obsession with athletics and troubled history with academics come from the president?  the governing body, whatever that is (is it part of a system--UT, Texas State, TAMU)?  the legislature?  the culture of the state?

How does such a terrible chair in English hang on, and how do bad chairs in one department get replaced by other bad (or worse) chairs?  Bad dean?  Bad academic vice president?  Bad luck?

Just curious about thoughts on the sources, roots, etc. of such problems in a troubled institution.

[athena1]

It's not a part of the UT system.

[thedude]

The Horror has managed to hang on, by all accounts, because the former dean (the one who ran off to mismanage a university in Ohio) fully supported her despite objections from her own department and the rest of the college.  The current dean is either unable or unwilling to do anything about her, despite the fact that I know that several faculty members have been making constant complaints about her for months.  She counts among her allies the provost and the president, so there's little chance she's going anywhere soon.

At this university it's who you know and whose ego are you willing to stroke.  If you expect things to run by the "rules" or any sense of justice you're in for a nasty surprise.

[helpful]

In order to get a job there, you have to be able to pronounce the town name correctly while saying it real fast 10 times. Then  try it standing on your head with marbles in your mouth.

It's probably the most unprounceable city name in the country. Unless someone can come up with a better one. (Poughkespskie or whatever it is spelled in New York is a close second).