This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from:
altany@email.wcu.edu
The following message was enclosed:
As new faculty at WCU, it is of course my hope that you are
finding the art, craft and mystery of teaching to be central
in your academic life here.
Is that how you have experienced the role of teaching at WCU
so far?
Why or why not?
Since I work in faculty development, I want to explore all
ways to have teaching be the epitome of being a WCU faculty
member.
Thank you for any comments you can make.
Alan
_________________________________________________________________
This article is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i14/14b01001.htm
- The text of the article is below -
_________________________________________________________________
Finding it hard to keep up with all that's happening in academe?
The Chronicle's e-mailed Daily Report keeps you up-to-date in a
matter of minutes by quickly summarizing current events in higher
education while providing links to complete coverage on our
subscriber-only Web site. The Daily Report and Web access come
with your Chronicle subscription at no extra cost. Order your
subscription now at http://chronicle.com/4free?es
_________________________________________________________________
I'm Not a Chairman, I'm a Professor
By ANDREW FURMAN
Six months ago, I made the smartest decision of my academic
life. Or thedumbest. I told my dean that I didn't want to
become chairman of our English department.
It was hard to decline the offer, not least because I have a
near-canine desire to please those around me, students and
superiors alike. (That is, I suppose, why I'm already serving
on more than a half-dozen departmental and university
committees and chairing more masters' theses than I can shake
a translation of Foucault at.) What's more, the job would be
quite a feather in my cap: I received tenure only last year,
have been out of graduate school for only seven years or so,
and am closer to 30 than 40.
The job has its share of perks: a salary of $60,000 -- which
would be a substantial raise for me; a spacious office with a
panoramic view of the university's new butterfly garden; a
teaching load of one course in the fall and one in the spring,
which could be negotiated down, the dean implied; and, of
course, the chance to pursue my distinctive administrative
vision (whatever that is) in a department of more than 20
professors, nearly 300 undergraduate majors, and a thriving
graduate program, which might soon be offering Ph.D. and
M.F.A. degrees.
I have been brooding over two questions: Why did I reject this
golden opportunity? And why had I been offered the position to
begin with?
The first question largely contains the answer to the second.
Maybe my diffidence about pursuing leadership positions within
my department and college -- which I've expressed in several
ways over the years -- has made me an irresistible candidate
for such positions. (Similarly, I've noticed that my
reluctance to become more active in my synagogue has only
intensified the demand for my participation. "You're going to
ëno' your way to the synagogue presidency," my rabbi quipped
recently.) So here's a counterintuitive bit of wisdom: If you
really want a job, the best way to go about getting it is to
act as if you don't want it.
Yet I truly didn't want this position -- which, for some
reason, my too-generous dean feels I can perform. It's not
that I'm inured to the enticements of power. As I strode up
the stairs to the dean's suite in response to his summons, I
pondered the figurative implications of my ascension. When I
arrived at the office, his neatly coiffed secretary asked me
whether she could brew me a cup of coffee. Hmmm. The dean's
position, it occurred to me, was only one small step up from
the chairman's. And what an office the dean occupied! During
our introductory small talk, I surveyed the cavernous
environs: the billboard-sized windows on the north and east
walls; the sleek computer system; the door leading to his
personal bathroom (complete with a shower); the assortment of
hard candies in an elegant serving dish on the conference
table.
As my gaze settled back on the dean, resplendent in his
trademark suit and suspenders, I found myself wondering
whether his natty, freshly pressed shirt was made from that
special weave called chambray. For a fatuous moment, I allowed
myself to think, This all could be mine! The next instant, I
found myself grasping for an Oscar Wilde quotation about the
intoxication of power, but all that came to mind was a line
from an old Mel Brooks movie, "It's good to be the king."
Still, I managed to say no. The main reason was that I didn't
want a 1-1 teaching load, or possibly less. The fact that this
sounds strange is what most concerns me. The culture of
research universities, or of universities that, like mine, are
striving toward such status, rewards research and
administrative activities and discourages the pursuit of
undergraduate-teaching excellence. Undergraduate teaching is
viewed here (and elsewhere, I'm afraid) as little more than a
service assignment, rather than as a creative and scholarly
activity in its own right. That seems to be the one thing on
my campus that professors and administrators agree on -- which
is why, of course, deans and provosts would like to see
faculty members teaching more (while still maintaining their
research productivity), and why faculty members lobby to
"serve" less.
On the administrative side of the fence, the devaluation of
teaching seems to come from a tendency to view it in
quantitative rather than qualitative terms -- a result of
pressure to ensure "access" to an ever-growing pool of
potential students despite an ever-shrinking state budget.
It's not as if the quality of instruction means nothing to
administrators. They just don't reap any immediate, palpable
rewards from excellent teaching. Nor, for that matter, do
administrators bear any immediate consequences from poor
teaching. Their essential concern is to provide taxpaying
residents with as many classroom seats as possible, at the
lowest cost.
True, my university offers a teaching prize each year, but, as
a senior faculty member warned me during my first year, after
I too volubly celebrated my favorable teaching evaluations,
"No one earns tenure here because of excellent teaching,
kiddo." I'd be better off, he implied, putting more emphasis
on my research.
But that advice misses the link between research and teaching.
The energies I have devoted to teaching fuel my creativity as
a writer and critic -- and, in turn, my creativity as a writer
and critic enhances my classroom performance. My efforts to
revisit and revise my syllabuses, the exchanges of conflicting
literary ideas and interpretations during class discussions,
the student papers that often exasperate but also inspire me
-- all have shaped the way in which I read and write about the
literature I study. I may not have published as many articles
and books as I might have had I bucked harder for that course
reduction here and there, but I have certainly written better
articles and books because of my active engagement with
undergraduate students and the readings we discuss in class.
Yet, how can young professors not view teaching as a
bothersome distraction, when it is not the work for which we
actually will be rewarded -- pressured as we are to publish
ever more articles in ever more prestigious journals? Indeed,
the way one rises up the ranks at universities is through
taking on greater research or administrative roles. I'm not
the first to recognize the irony that a professor's esteem in
the typical university can be gauged inversely by the amount
of time he or she must actually profess. The phrase "course
reduction" is practically fetishized at my university. The
latest carrot in front of our noses is a proposal to
distinguish between teaching-faculty members, who will
generally teach a 3-3 load, and research-faculty members, who
will receive a coveted course reduction placing them at 2-2.
To his credit, our dean believes that this new configuration
will make both research and teaching more rewarding and
rewarded activities. Teaching-faculty members, the logic goes,
will be able to concentrate on their teaching and have their
performance evaluated by criteria different from those for
research-faculty members, who, unburdened by that extra
teaching section, can produce more prolifically. But I suspect
that the unintended consequence will be a two-tiered faculty,
with chairmen and researchers enjoying an extra jolt of
prestige, and the "teachers" -- those unlucky souls who
haven't generated the requisite number of words in refereed
journals -- commiserating over the copy machines as they churn
out yet another syllabus.
Even more troubling, the proposed configuration, by its very
nature, will reinforce what administrators and faculty members
already assume: that there is a hard division, even a
conflict, between research and teaching. Indeed, how many
colleagues have you heard refer to their teaching in one
beleaguered breath, and to "their own work" in the next?
I don't want to give the wrong impression: I'm not clamoring
for greater teaching loads or the elimination of hard-won
sabbaticals. I recognize, for example, that professors can't
revel in the harmonious interplay between their teaching and
writing while laboring under three or four sections of
freshman composition, or four sections of, well, anything. The
number of hours one must spend grading papers absolutely
limits the amount of time one can spend agonizing over one's
own writing. Nor do I mean to disparage administrative work.
If my current administrative duties have taught me anything,
it is to appreciate the difficult, necessary, and important
work that chairmen, deans, and provosts perform, while
simultaneously convincing me that it's not work for which I
have a particular yen.
What I'd like to see is an attitudinal shift, on the part of
both administrators and faculty members. If we don't explore
more-innovative ways to recognize and reward the art of
teaching, I fear that it will never overcome its unfortunate,
marginal status in academe.
I had intended to remain in the classroom for as long as I
could, but last month, I caved. Our acting chairman retired,
and a department needs a chairman, after all. I start my new
duties next semester. In the meantime, the president of our
university has resigned, and the Board of Trustees is looking
for his replacement. If any of the trustees happen to be
reading this, please don't bother looking my way. You couldn't
pay me enough to take that job.
Andrew Furman is an associate professor of English at Florida
Atlantic University and the author of Contemporary Jewish
American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of
the Exiled (Syracuse University Press, 2000). He is currently
working on his first novel, set in South Florida.
_________________________________________________________________
You may visit The Chronicle as follows:
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
------------------------------------------------------------newfaculty-+
You have received this message because you are subscribed to this mailing list. If you wish to be removed from this list, please send an email (in PLAIN TEXT) to:
listproc@lists.wcu.edu
Leave your subject line blank and in the body of the message, type:
unsub NEWFACULTY
Or, you may choose to send an email to (a real human being): listmgr@lists.wcu.edu.
------------------------------------------------------------newfaculty--
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 11/25/02 EST