Category: The Happy Academic

It might seem odd to be posting this now, halfway through July, but summer finally started to sink in for me around here this week. See, I taught until June 22 or so, I was on the road for a family trip/vacation until July 3, and then my wife and I went off on a side trip to Niagara Falls for a few days, and then we were entertaining the in-laws until Tuesday. So while it has (obviously) been summer for a while, it is just now “summer” for me.

Other than my wife, no one in my family is an academic, happy or otherwise. My family is a pretty well-educated lot (almost all of them have undergraduate degrees, a few have some graduate work), and I have an aunt who was a high school teacher, but other than that, the academic life is pretty much a foreign concept to them. It is then perhaps not surprising that when I speak with these fine folks about work and such, they always refer to my summer “break” as “vacation.” During my recent family trip/vacation, I had at least one conversation where a well-meaning member of my family reasoned that, since I wasn’t teaching and I wasn’t expected to be in my office on a regular basis, I must be “not working” during the summer.

Ha! Happy academic that I am, I sigh bitterly at this naiveté!

Though they have a point.

Compared to people with “normal” 9-5 office-types of jobs (and this is what everyone in my family means by “working”), the work schedule of an academic can seem pretty bizarre, even in the middle of the normal semester. Take my schedule from last winter, for example: if I didn’t have any meetings or other obligations, I had to be at school two days a week. I almost always had meetings and such, so let’s say that on average, I was in my office, in class, and/or on campus 3.5 days a week. Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that really ticks off people who associate jobs with actually being someplace for 40 hours or more a week.

Of course, I do work 40 hours or more (usually more) a week; it’s just that I do most of my work at home, in coffee shops, and in libraries, and there’s often a kind of fuzzy definition of what and isn’t “work” for me. Furthermore, I (like most other happy academics I know) tend to work at kind strange times, at least compared to a “real job:” nights, early mornings, weekends, etc.

Anyway, this extremely flexible schedule becomes all that more problematic in the summer. On the one hand, I have a lengthy “to do” list, stuff I had hoped to finish earlier, stuff I need to absolutely get done before school starts up again in earnest in the Fall, stuff I said I would do over the summer, etc. I’ve got plenty of work to do over this summer, plen-ty.

On the other hand, the lack of any clear schedule markers– no teaching, no meetings, and the only reason why I need to go to school until late August is to water the plant in my office– my ultra-flexible schedule becomes a receipe for getting not much of anything done. The proverbial enough rope to hang myself.

Can you tell last week was a pretty unproductive one?

In any event, I need to start putting my “to do” list into action; maybe I need to get it all down on a hipster PDA….

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a kind of interesting piece called “What’s in it for me?” by Chris “not his real name” Barnett. It’s the story of how Barnett had a meeting with his dean, who was frustrated by the faculty not being willing to propose new or different classes without “getting” something out of it, like additional money. The dean complains about the poor faculty attitude, though Barnett has a different perspective:

At our college, at least, there is no pay for directing independent studies or developing new courses (though, of course, teaching those courses is compensated) or giving up part of our weekends to attend an alumni event. The dean is right in that such things are our job and help sustain the life of the college, and since we are hired by the college, we ought to willingly take on such opportunities to help the college and its students.

I understand why the dean feels we’re being selfish. And we are, indeed, being selfish. But for me and many of my colleagues with family obligations, our responses are fundamentally different from our students’ responses. For when we say, “What’s in it for me?” we really mean, “What’s in it for my family?”

Time spent at the college is time not spent at home. It is time not spent with visiting grandparents or cousins. It is time not spent with spouses. It is time not spent with children who grow up faster with each passing semester.

Now, I agree with part of what Barnett is talking about, but it seems to me that he’s talking about two different things. Showing up at “extra things” on weekends (recruiting functions, alumni events, award ceremonies, etc.) are things I think of as “above and beyond” the normal functions of the job. When I attend these things, I usually get a letter or something that becomes part of my tenure and promotion file. It counts as “service;” not a lot of service, but some service at least.

In any event, I don’t think faculty ought to be required to do these things. I think faculty should have to attend graduation once in a while (I’ve been once in the time I’ve been here), but that’s about it. I do a couple extra sort of events like this every year when they fit into my schedule and when I’m interested in the event in question.

But I think that developing new classes and directing independent studies is clearly smack-dab in the middle of an academic job. This just doesn’t seem “beyond the call of duty” to me at all, and I don’t understand why Barnett is trying to collapse these two different kinds of things into one.

I do think there are some ways in which developing new classes can be not quite in the job description. Take online classes, for example: I think creating a new online class is a bit different, and at EMU at least, faculty get compensated for doing this extra work. In my department, directing MA projects earns faculty some compensation for teaching. But for the most part, of course faculty create new classes, update old ones, direct independent studies, etc. Showing up on weekends is extra; showing up during the week isn’t.

Surfing around the other day, I came across a couple of posts– this one from New Kid on the Hallway, and this one from jill/txt— about the transition from being a graduate student to being a tenure-track faculty member. Interesting and worthwhile reading, especially for those out there who are thinking about trying to make a life as a happy academic as well.

(BTW, I very much like the look of these blogs and other blogs powered by things other than Blogger. One of the things on my “to do” list for the spring/summer is to do some significant revision of my web sites and blogs, and one of the things I want to do is to create some kind of free-standing web site that collects my “Happy Academic” musings. A lot of what I wrote previously on this topic was on the MoveableType version of things, and folks did read those posts via a Google search of some sort. But I had to take that down because of all the spam. Anyway, whenever I surf around other blogs that are powered by things like MoveableType or WordPress or even Drupal, I think “ooohh, those blogs look so much cooler than mine,” and I contemplate a switch back. Then I remember the spam and the lack thereof with the less than cool Blogger. Anyway, changes are coming, but probably in the form of more static web sites and probably not away from Blogger).

I’m quite a bit more removed from the graduate student life than both the New Kid and Jill Walker– I finished my PhD and started my first tenure-track job in 1996– but I still remember being a graduate student, and I still remember the transition from graduate student life and professor life.

What was it like, you ask?

For starters, I much prefer being a professor to being a graduate student, and I have from the beginning. Years ago, I remember having lunch with my dissertation advisor one afternoon. Among other things, she used this lunch as an opportunity to give me the “you just wait– it just gets harder” speech. I recall that she gave me this speech while I was waist-deep in the confusion of the opening chapters of my dissertation, and I am sure that my wife and I, both living on grad student assistantships, were trying to decide if I could afford both food and heat that month.

My advisor was right about many things, but not about this. Being a PhD student was not completely without joy, and I was excited about the things I was learning of course. But in general, I thought being a PhD student sucked, certainly relative to being a professor.

Don’t get me wrong– the transition was tough. My first job was at Southern Oregon University, and faculty were responsible for teaching three four-credit courses for three quarters in a row. That’s a lot of teaching. I think the first three months or so at SOU was probably the most difficult time I’ve had on the tenure-track, and in my two years there, I had nine different preps. Besides the teaching load problems, SOU was (and still is, I think) perpetually broke, and there were always rumors that they might have to “let go” some of us non-tenured-types. These are some of the reasons why I’m not there anymore.

Still, by far the worst time of my academic life was the time I spent finishing my dissertation. By far. I had the job offer from SOU and I was determined to start that job with a degree in hand, so I pretty much spent night and day in the spring term of 1996 so I could graduate in August ’96. I was so stressed out and took such horrible care of myself that it literally hurt my body just to walk from my car to the English department building, pretty much the only exercise I got. Leaving graduate school meant getting an enormous monkey off my back.

And in a lot of ways, my move from “student” to “professor” was easy, perhaps unusually easy. I was (am still) married, and I came into SOU with two other “freshly minted” PhDs. I think coming into the job with both a social life and fellow new hires as colleagues made a big difference. We didn’t have graduate students in the English department at SOU, so there was no “I was just like you last year” sort of encounters with ABD folks. And besides all that, my wife and I literally doubled our income with my first job, and Ashland was (and is still, I think) a pretty groovy place to visit and live. So life then was not completely “problem free,” but on the whole, my move from grad student to professor wasn’t so bad.

And for the New Kid and Jill and anyone else who happens to come across this: I do think that the transition continues to get easier. Sure, there is the whole “getting tenure” thing, which is stressful (though it varies so much from school to school, and since neither of my jobs have been in “publish or perish” departments, my journey to tenure was a lot less stressful than many others). But distance from graduate school builds perspective and confidence (good things), and, to a certain extent, forgetfulness.

I think a lot of folks have stumbled across my blog lately as the result of a “Ward Churchill Blog” Google search because I had a few posts earlier this month about that mess. Fair enough. I still don’t think Churchill ought to be fired over his infamous 9/11 essay, but the more I learn about him, the less crazy I am about “defending” Churchill. It’s like that bad feeling you get about defending the Klu Klux Klan’s right to march or Eminem to be Eminem: it seems to me that if you want to protect free speech, you’ve got to defend bad speech, too. This seems especially true in academia.

Anyway, that’s not really why I decided to write tonight. At least not entirely.

Churchill is still in the news in some interesting ways, including a deal where CU would offer him early retirement, and all this stuff about whether or not he is or isn’t Native American. But the piece that really caught my attention was the article “Faculty feels ‘beaten up'” in the Boulder, CO newspaper The Daily Camera (which, by the way, has one of the most annoying free registration procedures I’ve ever come across).

Basically, the article is about how the Churchill matter has been an enormous distraction for faculty at the University of Colorado, dragging folks into the mess who want nothing to do with this and to just get on with their teaching and scholarship and lives. And this is coming on top of budget problems, some other questionable administration decisions, and a bunch of controversy with the football team. I feel your pain, CU folk.

And just to add to it all, CU faculty had to deal with a “special speaker” earlier this month:

Nationally known conservative author David Horowitz told a crowd at CU that university professors work six to nine hours a week, eight months a year for $150,000. Horowitz’s comments came earlier this month, after Churchill’s essay comparing victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks to a Nazi bureaucrat ignited a political firestorm.

Wow.

Well, I am indeed a Happy Academic, but I’m not that happy of an academic. Shockingly, I make considerably less than $150,000 a year, and I spend more than six to nine hours a week just answering emails from students, colleagues, and administrators. I’m only in the classroom teaching about nine hours a week, but, as anyone who has ever taught at any level can tell you, most of the work of teaching is “behind the scenes:” reading, research, planning, grading, etc. It varies from week to week and from semester to semester, but I easily spend an average of fifteen or twenty hours every week out of the classroom getting ready for those nine hours in it. Plus there’s office hours and meeting with graduate students, both of which are more or less “teaching” activities.

Plus there’s scholarly work, which is part of the job description for a university professor, especially one at a place like the University of Colorado. Giving presentations, writing articles, writing books, and doing other kinds of scholarly activities are things that most happy academics (especially those at “fancier” schools) want to do, but it’s a hell of a lot of work.

And plus there is a surprising amount of work that almost all college professors have to do that has nothing to do with either teaching or scholarship. This tends to be called “service,” and I suppose it is. But really, it’s more like “administration” in just making things within the institution… well, work.

Horowitz’s characterization of the money and the workload of a college professor is of course incredibly wrong. But I suspect his characterization jives with the perceptions most folks in the general public have on the work of a college professor, and perhaps that is really the source of all this outrage against Churchill. Not only does Churchill get paid an outrageous amount of money from tax dollars to say incredibly stupid things; he doesn’t even really work! The Daily Camera article just fuels the fire when it reports “Churchill, a tenured professor who has only a master’s degree, earns more than $94,000 a year, teaches five hours a week and charges a $3,500 guest speaking fee. Last year, he spoke at a dozen campuses.”

Anyway, other than a few unusual situations like Churchill’s, I’m not entirely sure where this perception of the highly paid non-working college professor comes from and how its sustained. Part of it is perhaps because college professors tend to work weird hours and in untraditional settings. Everyone I know in academia does most of their work away from their university office (at home, in coffee shops, etc.). Another part of it (maybe the main part of it?) is that most people in higher education are pretty happy, even the ones who complain once in a while. Academics really seem to enjoy their jobs, so it doesn’t even really seem like they are working at all, at least not working in the way that far too many people in this country “work.” Like what you see in the movie Office Space or something.

Anyway, I think the academic job I have is pretty typical and it’s a far cry from 9 hours a week at $150K/year. But I’d really like to know how I can cash in on one of these gigs Horowitz is talking about. Call me, David.

Oh, and judging by this web site, I think Horowitz does okay paycheck-wise too.

I came across an article in the CHE today, “Making Time” by Julia “not her real name” Goode that rang awfully true to me. It’s another essay that discusses the peculiar problems of the “work time” of academics.

Now, Goode’s experiences are slightly different from mine because her husband is a practicing attorney (whereas my wife is also an academic and we both have these strange schedules), and because a lot of her problems in the article seem to revolve around what she admits is a “pathological need for social acceptance among peer mothers” (something I don’t think either my wife or I have).

But there are two things she writes about I can completely relate to. First, because she’s not teaching in the summer, people in the rest of the world think she isn’t “working” in the summer. Nothing could possibly be further from the case. Second, there is a constant “ying/yang” thing about the academic concept of “work time.” Eliminate the word “legal,” and I think this quote from the essay sums it up pretty well for me:

I generally appreciate the fact that producing legal scholarship is a solitary effort. I don’t have to worry about others pulling their weight or finishing their piece so I can start on mine. I work at my own pace, on my own time. I don’t have a senior partner or a supervisor calling me every day asking me where I am on a certain project. No one is watching.

The downside is that I have no daily or weekly deadlines to push me or keep me on track. I have a six-year deadline that requires marathonlike pacing. Unless I am extremely self-disciplined, I could wake up the year before my tenure vote having written nothing. Obviously, that is extreme. But come mid-July, more than once I have realized that I’ve done very little research in the previous six weeks and the new semester is rapidly approaching.

That much freedom is like enough rope to hang yourself, and it can also lead to a feeling of always working. That can lead to an unhappy academic if you don’t like the “work” in the first place.

This morning, I came across this entry at Collin’s blog about a Stanley Fish article in CHE called “The Case for Academic Autonomy.” In the nutshell, Fish is saying that academia ought to be autonomous from the “real world” in the sense that we academics ought to not merely respond to market forces, we shouldn’t try to make ourselves more like businesses, etc.

Collin’s take on the article is that Fish is misreading what Mark Taylor means by “networks” and what Taylor concludes in his book. I am at a disadvantage there because I’m not at all familiar with Taylor’s work (though it certainly sounds like something I ought to read), and I’m also not familiar with what Collin refers to as a “spectacularly miscalculated keynote” speech Taylor gave at a C&W a few years back. Which one, Collin?

Anyway, on the CHE site I also came across this article, “The Grand Poobah,” written by Frank “not his real name” Miller. By “Grand Poobah,” Miller means his new role as the graduate coordinator in his department, which is described as at a large midwestern research university. From the way he describes the job, it certainly sounds like an English department. Miller is a newly tenured faculty member, and he’s afraid that he will move away from “scholarship” and become an “administrative hack.” He writes “The relationship between the terms ‘academic career,’ ‘scholarly discipline,’ and ‘teaching vocation’ has never seemed more complicated to me.”

A couple of things strike me about all this:

* In my own department, I had put my name in to be the graduate coordinator for the next three years and I didn’t get it. On the one hand, I was (and actually, still am) displeased about this because of the departmental politics that were involved. On the other hand, not getting this has renewed my interests in my scholarship, which has been fun and something I can do on my own terms, more or less.

* Like Miller, I don’t have any interest in full-time academic administrator positions– you know, department head, dean, etc. I can’t say that I’ll never be an administrator since “never” is an awfully long time. But I’ve always believed that being an administrator is like having a “real job,” one where you are expected to be there 9 to 5, where you have to wear nice clothes, where you end up pushing a lot of paper around, etc. If I wanted to do that, I’d leave the academic world for the “real” world, which pays a lot better.

* Having said all that, Fish and Miller both remind me in different ways that being “an academic” means more than being a “scholar,” or even a “teacher/scholar.” I’ve had two different tenure-track jobs at “regional college/universities,” schools that focus on undergraduate education and that are considered “opportunity-granting” institutions. At both places, I’ve done “administrative” work where I was given release time. On an interim basis, I was a WPA and I ran a writing center at my previous job, and I used to be the “computer guy” of the department at this job, doing things like maintaining a computer lab and running the department web site. But beyond these “official” administrative roles, I also find myself spending a fair amount of my time as a professor doing administrative stuff– advising students, going to meetings in the department and beyond, etc.

I don’t think my experiences are all that unusual, especially for folks in composition and rhetoric. I think most professors, even those who don’t have any explicit administrative duties, actually do a lot of administrative work. And because of that, I think the definition of “academic career” that Miller is talking about is indeed always in play, even if you don’t take on any official administrative duties. I suppose it’s possible to be an academic whose only obligations are to sit around and be really smart, but those positions are few and far between.

* And for me, this raises questions about Fish’s desires for an “autonomous academy.” When he says “the walls between the academy and society,” what does he mean by “the academy?” And isn’t “the academy” a key component of contemporary “society?”

I kind of understand what Fish is getting at, and I even agree with it a bit. Schools ought to not be run like businesses; rather, schools ought to be run like, well, schools, meaning the goal should not be to turn a profit through finding “synergy” with “customers” or whatever. Our goal should be to provide students with access to an education.

But really, the world of academia is “the real world,” or at least it’s a part of it. Students attend schools because of societal pressures (e.g., a college degree will help you get a better job), not purely for academic pursuits, and people work at schools because of societal pressures (e.g., working at a school as a teacher, administrator, staff person, janitor, and so forth is a job that pays the bills) and not just the love of knowledge. Don’t get me wrong– being a college professor is a great job, but it’s still a job.

If the academy really were separate from society, maybe the job aspect of it wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe it would be sort of like being a monk or being Amish, communal living where all of my day-to-day needs and pleasures would simply be part of the lifestyle. Of course, if the academy really were separate from society in this fashion, I wouldn’t be in the academy.

Well no, not really.

I was a bit surprised when I surfed by the Invisible Adjunct blog yesterday to discover that she had already posted about my blog, and then somewhat surprised again that her post about my blog generated a fair amount of discussion. You can read all about it by clicking here.

The fact that a lot of folks at Invisible Adjunct weren’t exactly willing to share in my academic happiness didn’t surprise me. For one thing, as I had said in my original post, these folks have a point. But more importantly, many people who follow the Invisible Adjunct blog are seeking a community of like-minded folks who share their complaints and laments about the academic world. Complain and lament with a group, and there is a problem with “the system;” complain and lament alone, and there is a problem with you.

No, what really surprised me is that anyone actually read my blog in the first place. I mean, I know that there are several bloggers who link to my blog (many of the people I link to link to me), and I know from my own blog surfing, it’s easy to wonder into a new blog space. This is one of the appeals of blogs to me: it reminds me of the very old days of the web, where the pleasure was just surfing about. Still, I mainly see my blog as a space to post things that are of interest to me and maybe a few others, links to sites I want to go back to later, thoughts on teaching and the academic life. Sure, it’s a public space, and I want others to read it, but it still always surprises me that anyone else actually does.