When there's a direction in a University's Name

The Chronicle of Higher Education <http://chronicle.com/> _____

The Chronicle Review <http://chronicle.com/review/>

>From the issue dated June 10, 2005

In the Right Direction

By STEVEN L. VANDERSTAAY

In 1999 I received a postdoctoral research fellowship. At the first
gathering of fellows that I attended, I spent much of my time attempting
to memorize names and match them with faces. I assumed that the same
task explained why other people were scrutinizing my own name tag. But
one of my new colleagues put me straight, waving a long finger at the
plastic holder pinned to my lapel and announcing, "You teach for a
university with a direction in the title."

"A direction in the title?" I asked.

"Western Washington University," she explained, adding: "A regional
institution."

I checked more name tags as I mingled that night. Besides my own
Western, I found only one direction among the many institutions
represented: a "Northern" on the tag of an assistant professor whose
grant was for a study of literacy in Botswana.

I fielded lots of questions about my place of employment. Yes, I teach a
fairly heavy load -- six courses a year, including an
introductory-course section with 75 students. Then there's summer
school, an unfortunately necessary supplement to my salary. Advising
takes up three to four more hours a week. My fellow fellows -- nearly
all of whom taught at research universities -- shook their heads in
consternation.

But they were asking the wrong questions. Eventually I could bear it no
longer. When I met a new colleague in hiking boots, I took a gamble on
the semiotics of his attire and ignored his question about my teaching
load.

"Listen," I began. "I teach 60 minutes from Vancouver, on a coastline
nestled between a volcano and the San Juan Islands. The skiing is great,
the hiking is amazing, the sea kayaking is superb.

"And the mountain biking," I said, saving the best for last, "is
sublime."

He stared at his drink for a long moment, swirling the ice. Then he
raised an eyebrow quizzically. "Single-track?" he asked, referring to
the narrow trails that mountain bikers like best.

"Hundreds of miles of it. I've been riding for a year, and there are
entire trail systems I haven't tried yet."

He swirled his drink some more and looked at his feet. Then he asked
plaintively, "Any chance they'll be looking for a criminologist?"

Thus I found myself both snubbed and envied -- a combination of
reactions that will probably be familiar to other professors at
directional state universities. While frequently maligned and far from
perfect, regional public institutions offer so many privileges that I'm
happy to be teaching at one of them.

I didn't know how lucky I was when I arrived at Western. Like most
junior faculty members, I saw little but the library, my students, and
my computer screen in my first years on the campus.

Then one spring the director of the Outdoor Center called me. There were
not enough students to fill out a sea-kayak trip, and they were inviting
professors to join the group. Did I want to come? A simple yes put me in
one of the university's sleek, deep-water kayaks for a three-day sojourn
through the San Juan Islands. We saw seals, porpoises, countless birds.
"All we need are orcas," a student said.

And then, rounding the point of a rocky island that serves as a sea-bird
preserve, we found J Pod, one of the three extended families of killer
whales that live off our coast, filling the channel before us. My jaw
dropped in disbelief.

Unfortunately the wonderful natural setting comes with a cost. We tell a
joke about the department chair who, taking a job candidate on the
requisite campus tour, steers her toward the student union and its
panoramic vistas of the San Juans, the Canadian Rockies, and Mount
Baker.

"Like the view?" the chair asks.

"I love it," the candidate responds.

"Good. It's worth $10,000 off your salary."

The joke has it about right. According to The Chronicle, my pay is at
least $6,000 less than what I would make at most comprehensive state
universities. My colleagues and I gripe about that, of course. And it
does affect morale.

Some faculty members feel trapped by the setting. "I'd leave if I didn't
have to move," an unhappy colleague once quipped.

Older professors, their salaries suffering from years of compression,
can be bitter. Perhaps I will be too, one day. Compressions will
probably worsen as our state government, rocked by tax-cutting ballot
initiatives and the dot-com bust, faces diminished revenues and
increasingly larger freshman classes. As soon as my children apply to
college, I'll almost certainly regret not pursuing a more lucrative
position, or the tuition waivers that many private liberal-arts colleges
offer their faculty members. I may also tire of trying to write after
long days of teaching and service.

For now, though, I'm happy to stay. When I am invited to apply
elsewhere, I hop on my bike or take a walk on the beach. Temptation
subsides like the tide.

The natural setting that keeps me at Western also entices other
professors to move here. Interestingly, we often lure faculty members
away from research universities -- which can cause some shock to their
administrators. When a friend of mine told his chairman that he was
resigning from his tenured research appointment to accept a job at
Western, she pulled him into her office, shut the door, and asked him to
tell her exactly what he had been offered.

"An assistant professorship at $17,000 less than my current salary," he
said.

"Get it in writing," she countered, "and we'll match it."

Western is not alone in having an incredible setting. While a few
research institutions are located in beautiful places, many states seem
to have reserved their choicest sites for regional and comprehensive
institutions. Many of those campuses -- like mine -- owe their beauty to
their beginnings as normal schools, strategically located in
out-of-the-way places where the need for teachers was greatest.
Yesterday's remote setting is no longer hard to get to, but it has kept
its pristine appeal.

Regional institutions typically offer other benefits, including an
emphasis on teaching and a more flexible sense of career development.
Meeting with the chair of my department shortly after I was hired, I
told him I might not try to get my dissertation published right away. He
cautioned me not to wait too long, but told me to take as much time as I
needed. His patience paid off when I published papers in better places
than I could have managed if I'd tried to rush them into print.

Positioned somewhere between a junior college and a research university,
directional institutions permit varied professional lives. Such
flexibility can lead to changes in professors' personal lives as well.

That was certainly true in my case -- I didn't come to Western a
mountain biker. In fact I initially thought that a faculty member with
time to mountain bike wasn't working hard enough. Even after I had
gotten used to changing my clothes and hitting the trails near the
campus -- still making it home in less time than many professors at
urban campuses spend commuting -- I preferred to keep my riding private.
I even hid my biking clothes at work.

You can imagine my chagrin when I saw my university's president and her
husband -- both respected chemists and administrators -- at a
mountain-bike event I was competing in. Of course as it turned out, I
had nothing to worry about: She was there to watch him race.

Steven L. VanderStaay is an associate professor of English at Western
Washington University.

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Received on Tue Jun 7 10:00:18 2005