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A Few Perks No One Told Me About

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By James M. Lang

As I stood a few dozen yards from the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, on the west coast of Ireland, and gazed down at the surf hundreds of feet below me, one thought kept repeating itself in my mind:

"This wasn't in the job description."

When I interviewed for my job as an assistant professor at a small, liberal-arts college, nobody told me about the Cliffs of Moher -- just like they didn't tell me about the tour of the 14th-century castle outside of Limerick, or the leisurely afternoon meanderings through the shops and pubs of the pedestrian mall in Galway, or my evening at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, or the visits to the Irish National Art Gallery and the Guinness Brewery. Nobody told me how much fun I would have helping to organize and chaperone a group of college students around a spring break tour of Ireland, on a trip for which I paid only for my food, beer, and souvenirs.

They didn't tell me these things, of course, because they didn't know I would take advantage of such an opportunity at the college. They couldn't have anticipated that -- and neither could I. But one of the most important lessons I have learned in my nearly two years on the tenure track at a liberal-arts college is just how many opportunities and benefits this job has that often only appeared to me after I accepted the offer.

I am not talking about having my summers free, or about having a flexible schedule, or about the reasonable publishing expectations, or about all of the other institutional benefits of faculty life at a small teaching college that most of The Chronicle's readers might already know about.

I am talking about concrete benefits -- some financial, some personal, some intellectual -- that, as faculty members at small colleges, we may learn to take for granted. But they are benefits that, were prospective candidates more aware of them, might make a huge difference to someone struggling to decide between a position at a major research university and one at a small college like mine.

Any laundry list of such benefits must of necessity be an individual one, because some of these benefits are ones that we become aware of as they fall into our laps.

Like, for example, my trip to Ireland.

Shortly after I arrived at the college, a colleague told me that he wanted to begin organizing annual spring-break trips, sponsored by the English department, to various places in the United Kingdom and Ireland. As the resident expert in post-World War II British literature, I was a natural choice to help plan these trips. For every 10 students who joined us on the trip, we received a free faculty spot. We found 30 participants this year, and I earned myself an unforgettable tour of Ireland last month.

Other such unexpected benefits may not be so dramatic -- but they are having a significant, and decidedly positive, impact on the quality of my intellectual and personal life:

• I learned in the first departmental meeting I attended that I have a nearly $1,000 annual budget to order books for the college library in my field.

• I have a $1,500 annual travel budget to attend conferences or conduct research in my field. I have a friend at a larger, more research-oriented university who receives only a third of that amount for his travel expenses. He is expected to pay for his conferences and travel costs through competitive grants from external agencies.

• I have a budget for membership in two professional organizations, and for a subscription to an additional professional journal.

• Every other year, I am eligible to apply for a summer grant from the college of up to $3,500 to support research I am conducting in my field. I received one of those grants in my first summer on the job; it helped me write my first book. I will be applying again next spring.

• When I publish an article or a book, I receive a salary supplement from the provost's office.

• Our college has a program that brings two dozen students to Florence each semester to work with two faculty members who accompany them on the trip. Someday, I will apply to teach in that program, and I hope to have the opportunity to spend a semester abroad.

• In my first year at the college, I proposed a new writing workshop in creative nonfiction; I taught the class last semester. At lunch last week I spoke to the dean of faculty about proposing a new workshop on writing for children; she loved the idea, and I intend to begin thinking about that proposal over the summer. The college both encourages and rewards that sort of entrepreneurial thinking in new pedagogies, courses, and programs.

All of these benefits, and others like them, are not described in the contract I signed when I accepted my job here. But they are substantial benefits to me -- supplementing my income or offering real contributions to the quality of my intellectual and personal lives.

Benefits like these are certainly part of a trade-off I have accepted. Given my teaching load -- four courses in one semester, and three in the next -- I do not have as much time as my colleagues at research institutions to apply for grants. I also don't have as much time to produce new research and writing.

But the college seems to understand that, and -- despite the teaching load it requires of us -- to do its very best to offer its own, internal support to our professional and scholarly activities in the form of these additional benefits.

When I went on the job market over two years ago, I had set my sights on a teaching college, and I was willing to accept limitations on my research activity as a result of the increased teaching load. But for others on the market, who are weighing difficult decisions about the pros and cons of positions at research or teaching-focused institutions, these benefits are worth learning about.

Questions about such benefits might not be for the dean or provost, with whom you will generally find yourself interviewing at a small teaching college. But most faculty members will be happy to share information about these sorts of perks. They are, after all, part of what makes our jobs at these colleges so rewarding.

I made certain I told the candidates we interviewed last year, including the one we eventually hired.

She was a quick study. Next spring break, she's leading a group of students to London in conjunction with a senior seminar she will teach on the reconstructions of London after the 17th-century Great Fire and after the German Blitz of the city in World War II.

I think I'll tag along.