First Person

Redefining Myself on a Seven-Course Load

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America Yearning After Books Why are so many artists and writers preoccupied by the so-called demise of bookish culture? First Person What Am I Doing? Shouldn't seven years of graduate school have helped me avoid taking a job just to have a job? Career News Too Much Information Colleges encourage the use of cellphones for emergency-alert purposes, but professors have begun to worry that students can use their phones during exams to cheat off the Web. First Person Moving a Step (or 3) Up the Ladder Why would a newly tenured associate professor in the sciences decide to go on the job market? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By James M. Lang

As far as I can tell, all academics share a common dissatisfaction with their job: Everyone believes they would be happier if they had a lighter teaching load.

I have known people who taught five courses a semester at community colleges, and I certainly empathized with their desire for a lighter teaching load. But I have also known people at research universities who taught two courses a semester, and they also whiled away their Sunday afternoons dreaming of a lighter teaching load.

I am no exception to this rule.

At the liberal-arts college where I am on the tenure track in the English department, we teach three courses in one semester, and four courses in the next. In my third year now, I have learned to live happily with my three-course semester. During the fall, when I have the lighter teaching load, I can find time both to write and to live my life outside of the college -- go to the dentist, get the oil changed, take the kids swimming once a week.

I have not yet learned to live happily with teaching four courses in a semester, and I don't expect to anytime soon. As a committed writer, one who generally will log anywhere from 5 to 20 hours a week at my desk -- depending upon whether I have papers to grade -- I hate and resent the fact that I can find almost no time to write during the spring semester, when I teach four courses. I also tend to feel like my personal life gets put on hold in the spring semester -- no dentist, no oil change, no swimming.

Life would be just perfect, I tell myself for those three months out of the year, if only I had three courses in both semesters.

Of course, I suspect that people who teach three courses a semester imagine that they will be really happy only when they have two courses in one semester, and three in the other.

But still, I can dream.

The longing for a lighter teaching load, though, has been tempered for me in the last year or two by a growing appreciation of one benefit of working at a teaching institution like mine: the flexibility this institution offers me in how I define myself as both a teacher and a scholar.

The job ad to which I responded three years ago sought a specialist in (among other possible areas) contemporary British literature, and that was the field in which I had done my academic research and publishing. I came in and immediately began teaching courses in contemporary British fiction and British postcolonial literature.

But even as my reading and teaching in these areas continued, my interest in writing academic scholarship about them began to wane. Spurred in part by the columns I had begun to write for The Chronicle, I became increasingly interested in writing creative nonfiction and memoir.

During my first and second years on the tenure track I spent most of my writing time working on just such a book, a memoir titled Learning Sickness: A Year with Crohn's Disease, which found its way into the hands of an agent this summer who assures me that we will sell it to a commercial publisher.

Working on that book has been the most satisfying intellectual experience of my life, and perhaps my greatest professional accomplishment. The promise of a successful writing career, something about which I have been dreaming since eighth grade, has been the most exciting new stage in my life since the birth of my first child nearly seven years ago.

Were I at a research university, though, and had I been hired there as a scholar of contemporary British literature, that book would likely prove meaningless in my case for tenure. If anything, it would probably hurt me: The time I took to write this piece of creative nonfiction was time away from potential scholarship in my field.

Here the story is quite different. I have asked a variety of faculty members and administrators about the value of my book, and have been assured that it will most certainly count toward the college's expectations for their faculty members to write and publish. One faculty member, who spent the last year on the tenure and evaluations committee, told me that, if he were considering my tenure case, he would make no distinction between the book I had written and a book of academic scholarship.

This may sound irresponsible to some -- shouldn't faculty members produce scholarship in their fields? But one other piece of information is important to know here.

While I was working on this book, I have also been working on developing credentials in this new field as both a teacher and scholar. I have been writing and publishing creative nonfiction aimed at journals and periodicals that specialize in or feature the genre. I have supervised two independent studies with senior undergraduates in advanced creative nonfiction.

And, perhaps most importantly, I proposed, developed, and taught the college's first writing seminar in creative nonfiction last year. I'll teach it again in the spring.

So I now count creative nonfiction as one of my two major fields, along with postwar British literature. And it is in this new area that I will submit publications for both my third-year review and my tenure case.

I am not the only one at this college, or even in this department, who has redefined himself in this manner. One of the members of my department, who wrote his dissertation on Old English poetry, is now our specialist in modern Irish literature. Another, who wrote her dissertation on Victorian fiction, now teaches our courses in 20th-century African-American literature. Our chairman did his M.F.A. work in fiction, and wrote his dissertation about contemporary American fiction; he recently completed his first book of poetry.

They would certainly all agree with me that one of the joys of teaching at a college like ours -- heavy courseload and all -- is the flexibility we have in defining ourselves as both teachers and scholars.

Many readers of these pages are looking through the job ads right now, and are searching for positions in the specialized areas in which their graduate-school careers have defined their interests. And many of those job seekers begin their search looking for the light teaching loads and writing time offered to them by the sort of research universities that are awarding them their degrees.

I would encourage those readers to think hard about how they are defining themselves through their research: Will the topic hold your interest for a lifetime of academic scholarship? Will it hold your interest for even the six years until tenure?

If you're not certain about the answer, take another look at those job ads. Don't let the slightly higher teaching loads scare you away.

At a college like this one, the teaching load may be heavier, but the chains that can define and constrict your writing and publishing selves are much lighter.