My point? Your mileage may vary. Any position about correlating relative teaching or research expectations (or quality) with size of institution is hopelessly simplistic--at least in my field. I found the author's advisors' position as remarkable as the author's own position: both positions constitute hasty generalizations about the way of things based on very limited experiences. There are great schools, big and small, at which to develop a quality research agenda. There are schools, big and small, at which those opportunities are limited by finite resources of money and time. Those opportunities are certainly not even equitably available across departments/units at a single school, especially in comparison between humanities and sciences.
Is any of this really news--to the author or to the lurkers in these fora?
I agree with blackbart for the most part, but yes, I do think the "your mileage may vary" lesson is news to plenty of people in academia. I'm currently a doctoral candidate in the humanities at a large R1, and the pressure on graduating PhD students here to take jobs at other research universities is tremendous. Graduates who take jobs at state universities that offer only master's/bachelor's degrees are seen as "not fulfilling their potential." Graduates who take jobs at SLACs--even highly selective ones like Bowdoin--are seen as hopeless. So the author's message that it's possible to have a happy research career at an institution that's not an R1 is quite welcome news to me.
Mountainguy's comments reflect another way in which one's mileage may vary. I in fact earned my Ph.D. in a humanities field at an R1 (in fact, one of the top two or three R1s in my field in the country). At that department, I don't remember ANY pressure to apply to or make a career at any particular kind of institution. Many of our recent alums who were working at SLACs were heralded as crowning success stories of our department.
I mean to say that, not only do opportunities for research at SLACs vary widely, but that PERCEPTIONS of research opportunities (and of relative prestige) of positions at SLACs--as viewed from the bastions of R1 schools--also varies widely. I'm hoping to illustrate from my own experience that it's potentially misleading to generalize about SLACs and the perception thereof in EITHER direction.
