coldhearted scientist وداد

This is iconoclastic, I know, and I have posted on this matter before, and in some of my posts, I link to other classic posts. Therefore I will not repeat anything that has said before (unless I really have it on my mind today), but making a few other points, from a less classic lens.

Graduate Students: No matter what anyone says, you are going into teaching. Yes, people remind you that it is really research, but that is only because they, in their condescending superciliousness, imagine you did not know this. There are more faculty jobs at non R1 or R2 schools than there are at these kinds of schools. The question is not what I was told it was.

I was warned that if I became a professor I might have to move from my home in Greater Mexico to terrible places in the United States of America like Evanston, Illinois, Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Madison, Wisconsin. I would have to deal with humidity and snow, and I would have to come up for tenure. “That is fine,” said I. “It will be exotic, and many people make tenure. That is how they create tenured faculty, after all.”

The real questions to ask yourself, though, are whether you see yourself making a career of teaching the kinds of courses you are teaching as a TA, and whether you are willing to do this in small towns without libraries, far from everything. If you love teaching that much, and you are so committed to your research program that you can rise above any environment, then there is no doubt you should be a professor.

That question is important, I think, because the key is that if you are an academic you are an educator. That does not mean you do not do research, nor that you should not avoid obsessing on teaching, but it does mean you are in the education business and not in some other business. You may think you like that but I see constantly that people whose only experience is R1 places, and who think of adjusting to somewhere different as adjusting to, say, an R2 in another region, soon discover that they did know what they were getting into by going into academia.

In many ways being a professor is a “sweet gig,” as Gayprof puts it, in comparison to many other jobs. I do not deny that, but I think a lot of people who are oriented toward research and upper division / graduate teaching (i.e. teaching in field), and/or who do not aim to buying a suburban house and settling down (which I discovered to my surprise was an important goal of many of my cohort in my first job) ought to realize what the profession really is like, what it really offers, first.

Because a lot of people who have the background and skills of the professors I had in college and graduate school would be a lot better off in other industries than in smaller time academia — unless they are also the educator type described above, through and through.

Graduate Students and Assistant Professors: you must really specialize. I mean, be willing to really specialize. In R1 and R2 institutions, where people specialize is at the level of teaching: they teach introductory courses in their subfield, and specialize on from there up. Then they engage in the kind of broad, ambitious, deep research program I was taught to design. At most schools, however, it is the opposite. You will teach anything and everything, and you will teach a lot of it. This being the case, you must commit to a very narrow research specialty if you are to get anywhere. For me the inability to renounce being the kind of researcher I wanted to be was the hardest aspect of becoming a professor. I had writer’s block for various reasons, but this was a large part of it. And it is not that I had poor time management — I did not — nor is it “procrastination” to make the considered judgment that a particular project cannot be engaged in in a particular place. You have to develop something very narrow and yet also very marketable if you are in this situation and you have to be a person who will not feel they are twisting their beings to do this — or you have to figure out how to do this without also twisting your being.

Assistant Professors: First, be aware that you must create your own social life. It will not be provided you automatically by other assistant professors or other faculty in your field. I did not have this problem in graduate school because I had been an undergraduate in the same place, in my first job because it was in a place where I knew people, or in my subsequent jobs because I have spent a lot of time in foreign countries and I know how to arrive somewhere new and build a life. But many assistant professors are used to having their social life provided by their college or their graduate department, and are surprised to find that academic departments are not like monasteries or something, they do not provide a complete life. Sometimes there is a jolly group, and sometimes there is not.

I am saying this because of that Blackguard, for whose loneliness we are all sorry but about which we can do little, not only because we are busy but because ze is not fun. And a large part of why ze is not fun is that ze does not have anything pleasant to say about us.

Second, be professional and positive. And if you have not read books on office politics, do so. I am quite tolerant about new faculty who are shocked, horrified, and angry to discover what their new institutions were actually like. As we know, I found mine utterly intolerable, and could hardly believe that it not only was it as it was, but that people actually liked this. There were also some abusive things happening which I did not know how to identify as such at the time, but to which I reacted. I vocalized my shock and people did not want to hear it. I then realized that a dossier was being prepared that would prove I was a poor teacher, which was very confusing since I did not have poor evaluations and had not had teaching problems before.  I took it to heart and realized I would always be vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, so I became paranoid and guilt ridden about teaching — I knew I had to be perfect so that I could defend myself against that dossier, but I had always been told it was a dangerous to spend too much time on teaching. So I was anxious about it in three conflicting ways: spending more time and energy than I thought appropriate myself, but even more time and energy than did the voice of my academic superego, and doing this because I knew I was under the gun. I became teaching paranoid and research guilty, because the other thing they kept doing was tell me that the more I published, the more I would prove I was not fit to teach, and that they did not respect research (I knew that was just to undermine me, but it was still an effective terrorist technique).

I have been terribly insecure about teaching ever since and I have only recently realized fully that that dossier was a complete fabrication — the reason I did not see what was wrong was not that I was so blind, but that it was a complete fabrication. I did know the dossier was being fabricated to build a case for a negative tenure decision, and I knew this was being planned because I had been placed in, let us say, a sticky situation to which I had reacted with anger. What I did not know was (a) as I say, exactly how false the teaching dossier was; (b) exactly how insulting certain reactions I had to certain things that happened in my first week and month there had been (I was living in university housing and repair people would come in in my absence and leave the doors standing open; I was robbed four times the first semester and every time one of the items taken was my bag of books for my classes; I was horrified and wanted the house secured; this was not happening; I had some friends and family pressuring me by telephone with wild directives to be more assertive, sometimes using expletives, sometimes feeling smug and saying things like “you see — you probably should be at home with two little babies, then you would understand what bad is”) and so yes, I was horrified and under mega stress, and I did not know how to handle it although I would know now.

This is why I am so tolerant of new assistant professors who express horror in inappropriate ways, and why I try to give them some actual help and advice for this sort of situation. However, that Blackguard is quite beyond the pale in the ways the post linked above indicates. Ze says, for instance, that ze hates the town and is embarrassed to work for this university with venom in hir voice. Ze says so in the main department office, and expects to get away with it. I understand hir pain and I even share some of it, but ze is speaks violently and it is really inappropriate. Ze has also done a lot of research on the cracks and divisions in this department, so as to attempt to exploit them to hir purposes — which include setting people to arguing just so ze can be entertained.

And it amazes me how many assistant professors I have known exhibit behavior like this. I tend to think it is because of anxiety over tenure, and overwork, and culture shock in a new institution and a new town, but I also note that a lot of them really are convinced that this is the way to get business done.

*

Here is how business is really done, and this is what these assistant professors should know. I will not give a major example, but a minor one, and I am falsifying it to protect the guilty and the innocent. I hope it may be applicable to some situations in your very own life.

I have a colleague who dislikes me and who has stabbed me in the back a few times. We have a cordial relationship, however, largely because I know that none of hir backstabbing will ever do real harm — ze has no power over anything very consequential to me. Now, the Blackguard discovered the tension in our relationship and decided to try to use it to hir (the Blackguard’s advantage). Ze started telling tales and trying to whip up tension.

I e-mailed this colleague saying I was aware of what the Blackguard was trying to do and interested in stopping it. I of course did not say so in direct terms. I got an answer back: “I understand and I am in complete agreement. Let us close ranks and freeze this Blackguard out. Ze will never know what hit hir and will either shape up or leave.”

Assistant professors, you entitled and easily bruised beings, do you hear me? Do not try this kind of thing. I hired you and I have no desire to bury you, but I can if you make me.

Axé.