How to Build a Life in the Humanities

Meditations on the Academic Work-Life Balance

Anthony Grafton, Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, G. Semenza, G. Sullivan, Jr, G. Semenza, G. Sullivan, Jr

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137428882, 9781137511522
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428899
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

A follow-up to the popular Graduate Study for the 21st Century, this book seeks to expand professional development to include the personal aspects of daily lives in the humanities. How to Build a Life in the Humanities delves into pressing work-life issues such as post-tenure depression, academic life with children, aging, and adjuncting.

P a r t I

Professional Life

C h a p t e r 1

Life in a Liberal Arts College

William Pannapacker

I have been a humanities faculty member at Hope College, a liberal arts institution in Holland, Michigan, for more than 14 years; I also attended Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia as an undergraduate. (For graduate school, I attended two private research universities—the University of Miami and Harvard—and I taught briefly at a community college: Miami-Dade.) I have been a “Careers” columnist at The Chronicle of Higher Education for more than 16 years; more recently, I have been serving as the founding director of an undergraduate program in the “Digital Liberal Arts” and an initiative that seeks to foster collaboration among the 13 liberal arts colleges of the Great Lakes Colleges Association; both are funded generously by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

While I feel at home in the culture of liberal arts colleges, I don’t presume that my experiences are representative except in the broadest sense. But, I hope that my thoughts about those kinds of institutions will be useful for readers who are considering employment at one, or who are interested in the experiences of others who have worked in similar institutional contexts. I have found that there is a distinct culture of liberal arts education in the United States that permits a kind of immediate mutual recognition—an unspoken set of shared assumptions and attitudes—among those who have been associated with them for significant periods of time. In many respects, in the last few decades, a life at a liberal arts colleges is one that is caught between hopeful idealism and deepening anxiety.

Today, there are approximately 125 to 250 private liberal arts colleges, depending on the method one counts by, enrolling between 100,000 and 350,000 students, constituting almost two percent of the students in accredited postsecondary institutions.¹ Liberal arts colleges are, arguably, the most diverse of the institutional types: public and private, single-sex and co-ed, secular and religious; they each have their own unique missions, histories, traditions, and curricula. They typically are four-year institutions that focus on undergraduate education, usually in a residential setting, although there are many exceptions. For example, Saint Joseph’s University, my alma mater, has numerous master’s programs in professional fields, and a large number of commuting students, of which I was one. However, Hope College, where I now teach, is overwhelmingly residential, and it has no graduate programs.

In general, liberal arts colleges are small enough to foster a sense of familiarity and community, although there is disagreement about the scale at which that is possible. St. Joseph’s and Hope are large schools by liberal arts standards, with approximately 8,000 and 3,000 students, respectively; colleges such as Earlham and Albion are more typical with approximately 1,200 and 1,350 students, respectively. Many liberal arts colleges, like Oberlin and DePauw, have roots in religious denominations and movements; most, although not all, of those colleges have become secular: Hope, for example, has become an ecumenical Christian college, but it remains affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. Liberal arts colleges often regard themselves as preparing students for leadership, not by focusing on technical or vocational learning, but by exposing students to a wide range of transformative experiences that are both curricular and co-curricular. They typically offer a general education program that includes literature, languages, history, life science, mathematics, physical sciences, psychology, social sciences, the visual and performing arts, philosophy, religion, and various interdisciplinary and area studies. While holding on to that ideal, most liberal arts colleges now provide pre-professional training, too, especially in business, education, engineering, computer science, and the health-related fields.

Even with significant adaptations, and a service ethic among their faculty, many liberal arts institutions are coping with severe pressures that threaten their continuing existence. In the 1950s, approximately 40 percent of US institutions of higher learning were liberal arts colleges, and they enrolled approximately 25 percent of all undergraduates. They have been losing ground ever since, and many of the survivors have seen their missions erode to the point wherein their status as liberal arts institutions is debatable.² Many liberal arts colleges are facing significant financial risk, especially the ones with small endowments that are primarily tuition-driven, and that have taken on substantial debt to maintain their competitive position, often through extensive building campaigns. Although endowments have been improving in recent years, many colleges still are recovering from the recession with accumulated deferred maintenance, larger classes, and fewer faculty members—all of which undermines one of the major reasons to attend a liberal arts college rather than, say, a less expensive state university with larger, more impersonal classes.

Increasingly, students and their families are concerned about the relevance of liberal arts degrees in a highly competitive, seemingly winner-take-all labor market. The demographic outlook for the United States suggests that the number of students available to attend college will be shrinking and that the search for talent and tuition revenue will become more challenging than before. One admissions officer described to me the future as one of “fracking for students.” Meanwhile, public institutions are attracting a larger percentage of their target students—often by creating honors colleges that seem to replicate the liberal arts experience—and wealthy private institutions are driving many colleges toward unsustainable discounting and an amenities “arms-race” of expensive building campaigns, as students come to expect high-quality residences and athletics facilities. Many liberal arts colleges will no longer exist in the next couple of decades, at least not without some changes in the “value proposition” that they offer their students in terms of cost, the quality of the experience, educational outcomes, and access to various career ladders and alumni networks.

Often, from the perspective of larger educational institutions—especially the major research universities, community colleges, and the for-profit sector—liberal arts colleges are seen as idyllic and laid-back, evoking the imagery—but not the educational struggles—of Dead Poets Society. However, like every corner of higher education, liberal arts colleges are struggling to negotiate the contending pressures that I have just described: to remain small or to grow large; to preserve a founding mission or to adopt a more encompassing vision; to expose students to a wide range of intellectual experiences or to embrace preparation for employment. None of those is an either/or decision, of course, and for that reason, to work in a liberal arts college is to grapple with these issues, among others, on a regular basis. Inevitably, one will find oneself engaged in conversations among the institutional stakeholders—the students, the faculty, the administrators, employers and the larger community—to which we are all accountable. When I was first hired by Hope College, a senior faculty member advised me, memorably, that the nearly 150-year-old institution is like a sailboat—it tacks one way and then the other, adjusting its sails to the changing winds, but still moving forward. Liberal arts colleges have a great advantage in their ability to adapt relatively rapidly, and experimentally, in comparison to large universities that, arguably, move more like oil tankers.

Another crucial feature of liberal arts colleges is that, in general, they are small enough for individual faculty members to have a voice and, eventually, a major role in institutional governance. For most new faculty, that is a significant change. At Harvard, for example, the role of graduate students in setting the course of the institution was vanishingly small; an individual could easily get lost in the immensity of the institution and the momentum of established practices that are the outcomes of battles and compromises that most of those employed today don’t remember. It is worth recognizing that, as a candidate for a position at a liberal arts college, it’s quite likely that you are being evaluated for your views on the mission, and the controversies about institutional identity, especially as they are reflected in the curriculum and the courses that you might choose to teach. What institutional committees and boards might benefit from your expertise, and what—in the fullness of time—are you likely to become: a program director, a chair, a dean, a useful gadfly? Liberal arts colleges are not just looking for scholars—although that is important—they are looking for a whole person, and search committees are, inevitably, trying to assess what any given candidate might contribute over the course of a career.

Institutional culture, faculty governance, and leadership are not matters that I thought carefully about when I was on the academic job market 15 years ago; like most PhD graduates, I applied for every position for which I could possibly be considered. But I am sure it helped me that I had been a student at a liberal arts college: I understood reflexively the culture of such institutions and believed in them enough to seem like a potential long-term fit. That is not to say that one must have a liberal arts degree to teach at such an institution. However, if you are a graduate student or a recent PhD looking for a position at a liberal arts college, you should have a good idea, first, of why you want to work at that kind of institution, and, second, how you might fit into its specific mission. I have been on at least a dozen hiring committees in English—one of the most desperately competitive fields—and it still surprises me how many job letters are not written for liberal arts positions, in general, and for our institutional context, in particular. Scholarly research is important, of course, and hiring committees want to know that you are likely to have an active, productive career that will complement the needs of the college’s curriculum. However, it is essential for candidates to demonstrate that they are committed to teaching and service as well as to scholarship.

The ideal graduate school experience will have lots of time for seminars, research, conferences, and publications. Teaching often gets less emphasis, although that is changing as programs adapt to access employment opportunities for their graduates that demand teaching experience and skills at least as much as an active research program. As a graduate student, I partially qualified myself for a liberal arts position because I had a considerable number of teaching experiences in multiple disciplines in different institutional settings. I wasn’t strategic about it; I simply sought teaching opportunities to sustain myself financially in expensive cities. But, the fact that I had taught so much was enough to complicate the suspicion that I was really looking for a research university position, since that’s what most PhDs are encouraged to prefer because it can be hard to maintain an active scholarly career in a liberal arts setting. Teaching loads are variable but significantly higher than those at most research universities: Three is the norm (three courses in the fall and three in the spring), but four and even five are not uncommon. I have taught 12 credits per semester (three of the four-credit courses), fall and spring (usually with preparations for at least two courses each semester), and three one-month courses in the summer for most of my career, although I have benefitted from sabbaticals and other releases that have enabled me to remain productive by the standards of our institution.

While new hires often gain traction in their scholarship by teaching aspects of their dissertations, there is seldom much room in the curriculum for highly specialized courses. For that reason, liberal arts faculty typically teach a large number of so-called introductory service courses in their disciplines and general education courses, sometimes outside of their areas of expertise, narrowly defined. One needs to find ways to adapt and stretch scholarly interests to a wide range of contexts, and it often will be necessary to revisit subjects that one last studied as an undergraduate, if at all. For example, the course that I have taught the most—generally five times per year—is a survey of global civilization from the 1500s to the present in three disciplines: English, philosophy, and history (and, to some extent, art, music, economics, and the sciences). It has taken me away from my original scholarly field, but it also has stretched me in many ways, and broadened my ability to be conversant with colleagues across a wide range of disciplines. Although it can be demanding, especially at first, that kind of broad teaching experience requires faculty members to role-model the ideals of liberal arts education in their professional lives.

In addition to the challenges of becoming more of a generalist (or a “super-generalist”), new liberal arts faculty members will, quite likely, encounter students who are different in many ways from the ones they knew in graduate school. You have to adjust your expectations and strategies; for that, your colleagues will be helpful, but the students will teach you even more effectively. In a small liberal arts college, new faculty members quickly establish a reputation among the students, and an empty classroom, even more than mixed student evaluations, is a strong indicator that a faculty member has failed to adapt to the needs of his or her students. Liberal arts faculty are expected to provide a lot of personalized support, too; it’s one of the major reasons that families choose such institutions: because they perceive that their children are more likely to be successful in a nurturing environment. That is not to say that liberal arts faculty should not be demanding and rigorous, but that high expectations need to be matched by a high level of personal commitment. Students will recognize that, and, in general, respond positively to it.

In most cases, a poor teacher—with empty classrooms, and no students who can testify to having been positively impacted as individuals—will not get tenure at a liberal arts college unless his or her other contributions are truly extraordinary. There is a wide range of expectations about scholarly productivity, and—with the rise of digital, collaborative, project-based forms of scholarship—there is increasing openness to the various forms that scholarship can take. For the most part, elite liberal arts colleges continue to have the most demanding, traditional expectations: at least one scholarly monograph plus some notable scholarly articles are the norm for tenure; with a second book—and an established reputation in one’s field—for promotion to full professor. Beyond those elite institutions, however, there is a great deal of freedom to define what constitutes scholarly productivity, what “counts.” One can write for a more popular audience, serve the community as a local expert, or create projects in collaboration with students and colleagues at other institutions. Faculty members are expected to have ongoing research interests, and to publish, but that is not the sine qua non of their institutional standing. Liberal arts colleges, with some variation, espouse the same values for their faculty members as they do for their students: everyone should have time to think and explore questions of ultimate meaning for themselves and society. To a great extent, that freedom is a source of their creative energy as distinctive institutions, and I think it is one of the major benefits of being a liberal arts faculty member.

One of the greatest risks liberal arts colleges face, in the context of rising costs and a more challenging job market, is the concern that a non-technical degree—one without an obvious career track—is a path t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Professional Life
• Part II   Personal Life
• Part III   Diverse Lives
• Part IV   Life Off the Tenure Track
• Notes on Contributors