First Person

Teaching Versus Research

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By Peter S. Cahn

I sent out 30 job applications and landed conference interviews with six institutions in searching for my first tenure-track job in anthropology. Fortunately, two of the six invited me for on-campus interviews.

One was a public research institution in America's heartland with 30,000 students. Its anthropology department maintains a full complement of faculty in all the discipline's subfields and trains dozens of graduate students a year.

The other, a private, liberal-arts college near a coast, boasts a student-faculty ratio of nine to one. There are no anthropologists on the faculty and no traditional departments at all.

I told both places that their intellectual environment was just what I was looking for.

At the public research university, I felt immediately comfortable in the anthropology department. This was the type of campus where I had studied, and the expectations for junior faculty members were transparent. "To get tenure," the department chairwoman told me at our first meeting, "you need a book or a series of articles. If you have great publications but lousy teaching, you'll still get tenure. If you have great teaching but not-so-great publications, you won't get tenure." Her bluntness confirmed what I had always suspected and reassured me of the university's priorities.

The teaching load would be manageable -- two courses a semester, with the possibility of release time in the near future. During the two-day visit, I received only one question about teaching, a standard inquiry into how I would structure the introductory graduate theory course. The rest of the conversations focused on my research, which suited me since I have more experience with research than with teaching.

Aside from the obligatory lunch with graduate students, I met no other students at the university. Instead, I heard about the generous research stipends for summer travel and the library's hefty book-acquisition budget. I talked to the director of the international-studies center, who spoke enthusiastically about a forthcoming conference and opportunities for leading study-abroad programs.

The visit climaxed with my job talk, a public lecture attended by about three dozen members of the department. After I had presented an overview of my research with evangelical converts in Mexico, the audience asked informed questions drawing on their own experiences in Latin America. They suggested citations that I might find useful.

With this focus on scholarship in mind, I could honestly tell the search committee members that I found their university a good professional fit for me. However, in expressing my enthusiasm for the job, I had to suppress other misgivings.

As a public institution, its resources are dependent on the state's finances and local priorities. While the football stadium and basketball arenas had been recently remodeled, the academic buildings showed their age. The remote control used to advance the slide projector I used during my talk was broken, so I had to ask a student to forward the images. And when I went to dinner with the faculty members, one person paid for the meal with a credit card, then collected $20 from each of the other professors present.

In addition to financial constraints, the university suffers from distinctly mediocre students. Faculty members described the undergraduates, who came mostly from the region, as "provincial" and graduate students as "diamonds in the rough." Teaching them, it seemed, was a chore to be suffered until you could return to your writing.

By contrast, when I visited the liberal-arts college, the student-teacher bond was celebrated -- almost too much so. Walking with the dean of the faculty to lunch, I noticed he greeted many undergraduates by name. Passing open offices, I saw professors writing comments on student papers. Over the course of my two-day visit at the tight-knit campus, I too began recognizing some of the students and staff members, who would wave to me in the cafeteria.

Everyone I talked to, from administrators to professors to students, was enthusiastic about the innovative curriculum and opportunities for productive interaction. They told me how committed they were to the mission of the college and to effecting global change. I don't know that the large research university even had a mission statement, let alone a communal commitment to improving the world.

The burnish of private money also helped make the college more of a supportive community. The whole time I was there, I spotted crews of gardeners repairing fountains and arranging flower beds. When it came time to give my public lecture, not only did the slide projector work flawlessly, but also the room's lights dimmed by way of a computerized touch pad next to the podium. When faculty members treated me to dinner at a chic restaurant, the college paid for their meals as well.

Yet the student-centered approach left little room for my own intellectual development. Given the small size of the college, professors admitted to me that they missed contact with other professionals in their disciplines. While I tried to make my anthropological talk accessible to non-specialists, I found that the questions afterwards did not directly engage my findings. The audience wanted to know what else I could teach besides Mexico and how I would incorporate technology into my pedagogy.

Unlike at the research university, there was no established plan for sabbaticals or release time to further my own projects. Interviews with faculty members made clear that I was expected to be accessible to students at all times. I wondered how I could be an effective teacher if I had no chance to stay abreast of the current thinking in my field. And I wondered whether I wanted to devote my professional life to hanging out with recent high-school graduates.

Before I began this job-search process, I did not consider whether I preferred working in a teaching or research institution. Instead, I applied to positions that I felt qualified for, regardless of geography or type of university, and figured that the responses I received would decide for me.

After visiting two campuses with two diametrically opposed philosophies, I realize that even if I had made a list of pros and cons early on, I would not have been able to reach a satisfying conclusion. In either position, I would find aspects of the job that both inspired me and frustrated me. So, my accommodation to each search committee's questioning was not disingenuous. I could honestly claim that both institutions would be as perfect for me as I could hope to find.

Rather than debating with myself which hypothetical work environment I would prefer, I will return to the now familiar posture of waiting. In the end, it may turn out as I had planned: The job offers I receive will determine where I go.