I want to start this post by mentioning some things that I like. I'm going to do this because after that, I'm going to talk about how I don't like some of them as much as I like others, or, at least, how some have become more important to me than others, their value more obvious, and I don't want to give the impression that I dislike the less-liked things...I just like them less than maybe I once did.
When I switched my undergraduate major from Computer Science to English Literature way back in 2001 (or maybe 2002), I did it because over the first 2.5 or so years of college, I'd realized that I fundamentally, absolutely loved the lifestyle higher education allowed me to have. I was perfectly happy working 12 hours a day if that work was reading, learning, questioning, writing, exploring, and if that time was spent with and around others who also valued those activities. I was happy enough with this lifestyle and wanted to live it badly enough to give up a major that would have easily (in the early 2000s) landed me a job right out of college that would have paid significantly more from the onset than my current tenure track job will ever pay even at the full Professor level.*
My enthusiasm for this lifestyle has waxed rather than waned over the years. It's become less and less financially practical to actually make a living by working in higher education as an actual educator (it's another story if you want to be an administrator), but that continues to not really matter much to me. I still love writing, I still love reading. During my time at WSU, where I was required to teach courses while pursuing my graduate degrees in order to receive funding, I even discovered that I actually really like teaching, something I would never have imagined about myself back in the KSU days, when I was just desperately looking for an excuse to stay enmeshed in the intellectual environment of a large public university after getting my bachelor's degree. That said, some of my favorite memories of my graduate career involve participating in great seminar discussions after wading through hundreds of pages of theory, and condensing that theory and tweaking it to plot and write up a dissertation that I thoroughly enjoyed and am (mostly) proud of. So, by the time I received my Ph.D, I had, usefully, realized that I loved both teaching and researching.
Interestingly, my new job wants me to do one of these and not the other. It's 2013, so I'm pretty sure you can guess which is which.
When I first learned this, during a post-interview phone call with my then-potential employer, my heart sank a little. Taking a job where I taught a heavy course load and wasn't expected to engage in research (read: "We won't give you time or money to do any research"), seemed utterly depressing to me. I loved the research I was doing, and couldn't imagine giving it up to "just" teach more classes.
Well, as you can probably guess, this is the part where I decide that I don't like some things as much as others: flash forward about seven months, and I feel completely different about the whole teaching vs. research thing. I realize that my opinion isn't for everybody, and I'm not writing it here to force it on anyone else, but just to share my own experience. So.
Working at a teaching-oriented university is awesome.
See, the always-underlying issue I had with the work I was doing before was that it was pulling me in two opposing directions basically constantly. I love teaching and I love doing research, but when you're doing both at the same time, you're always doing both to about half of your ability. Or, at least that's how I've always felt. When I was able to just sit and read and write for a week, I was able to create some of my best-ever work. When I was able to just focus on lesson planning and teaching for a week, I was able to teach some of my best-ever classes. Out of eight years of work at WSU, how many times did I get these "one-only" opportunities? Maybe 2-3 times apiece. That's not an indictment of any particular person or department or policy, just an observation of how the general expectations that come down from on high at a huge public research university force you to mix, mingle, and often ultimately shortchange your priorities.
Here, it's easy: I work on teaching all the time, except for when there's a committee meeting or another service-related opportunity, and then I put the teaching aside for an hour and focus on that. The transition back is much easier, because helping to guide the course of a small department has a lot in common with teaching (and learning). Research, though it can certainly inform one's teaching, doesn't have a lot in common with pedagogy itself. Unless, I suppose, you are researching pedagogy. Which I was not.
So, practically speaking, my job's not nearly as confusing. I'm switching gears much less often, and though I work just as hard and often get just as tired, I'm not burdened with that feeling of being stretched too thin, of knowing I could teach better if I didn't have to attend my fourth conference of the year or knowing that I could really knock this article out of the park if I didn't have to teach three classes this semester, and so on.
Existentially, focusing just on teaching is a lot nicer, too. This is what's really surprised me, and what's possibly going to piss off some of the gentle readers out there. Surprisingly, "service" is no longer a bad word to me. Once, it was that pesky thing that you half-assed on your CV, the grad student equivalent of putting Who's Who Of American High School Students on your college application. Now, it's things that I do naturally every day as a result of being part of a small department, in a small town, with a recognizable and manageable community of students and faculty and administrators.
Because this is such a small school and the only thing that's more important on faculty evaluations than "service" is teaching, there's (generally speaking, at least) a positive attitude toward university- and department-related activities built into the way most people approach their work here. And this is great for me. Since I started in September, I've already made progress on helping to introduce a new academic program to the school, created six new courses that should all be seeing the light of day over the next 2 years or so, made inroads toward getting placed on two faculty committees whose work I think of as very important to the university and community at large, and met informally with a large number of faculty members to discuss how we can improve our Humanities offerings to more directly suit their programs' needs. I have a lot more time to meet with students individually, I've talked to every member of my department at length, both about work and more mundane things, and I'm setting up one-on-one, face-to-face meetings with the Provost and President of the university to discuss my thoughts on revamping the Humanities offerings and general education requirements.
I don't list all of those things to brag, but to make the points that a) I'm doing lots of things that are going to (hopefully) be directly valuable to the university and its student population and b) all of these things are way more meaningful to me than getting another article published in some obscure journal after months of toiling away alone in my office.
I once read an article (and I really wish I could remember where, because it would help this post out a lot) that suggested, pretty compellingly, that requirements for "research" in the humanities was something colleges and universities just sort of started requiring middle-level faculty to engage in before they could qualify for tenure for the sole reason that there wasn't much else for them to do besides teach classes. In larger universities, departments got so big that there was really no meaningful way to include all faculty in the processes of governance and upper-level decision-making, so they were, essentially, given something else to do instead to hide the fact that the system had become too cumbersome to care about their input anymore. Now, I don't know how accurate that is (like I said, the article was pretty convincing, but I also didn't follow up by investigating its claims in detail or anything), but it rings fairly true based on my own experience.
Like I said at the onset, I love doing research and writing articles, and writing my dissertation is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done academically. But it's hard to regularly put so much time and effort into publications that are likely to only be read by a few people who are already hanging out in the same echo chamber as you, especially when the time spent writing could be applied to teaching or to working to make a positive change in your immediate department or university. Research is great, but if given the choice between working on an essay of mine for an hour or serving on a committee that's working toward a positive infrastructural change at my university for an hour, I'll always choose the latter. It's more immediate, and to me, more ultimately meaningful.
Certainly, when you write to publish, you're learning a lot about your field and then you're "creating new knowledge." But I can still do that by reading a bunch of books before choosing one for a class (which I do every semester) and then discussing that text in class, requiring my students (and thus myself) to critically think about the material in it for a couple of weeks. I can blog, tweet, talk to my colleagues, and engage in other forms of meaning-making based off of the things I'm reading and the concepts I'm pondering, all without having to resort to the draconian and ultimately somewhat hollow experience of hurling myself into the maw of academic publishing again and again. I haven't written any new article material yet this year and I don't really plan to, but I don't feel dumber as a result. I feel both smarter and more like my energies and talents are being applied to tasks that have a more immediate benefit both for me and for the rest of the university.
Of course, I don't mean this as a condemnation of humanities research or anything dramatic like that; it's just that it's been striking to me to realize how much more focused and simultaneously more relevant and productive I feel without having to worry about it as much anymore. I've been surprised at how hollow it seems (again, just to me) now that I have an actually well-defined and relatively powerful role to play in a small department that's excited about my input in a way that a larger department just couldn't be. It's a combination of factors that obviously isn't available to everyone who is in this line of work, and even if it was, I imagine a lot of people wouldn't want it. But it's working out really well for me by allowing me to stop focusing on the things that I've been told Matter Greatly and focus instead on things that matter to me intrinsically.
* At least two friends of mine who majored in CS around this time immediately started jobs with six-figure salaries after receiving their B.S.
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