On Your First Year Out . . .
Listen and learn
Your first year out, use this as your mantra: research
teaching
service
(This point was especially important for me to realize.)
Determine which of these your institution values highest. Find out "how much" of each is expected of you. Do not just ask the colleagues you get along with best. Ask everyone. Hang around people's offices, go to your chair, and be especially conscious of those who have just going through T&P review, those going through T&P, and those like you who are looking at T&P process for the first time. Listen to what people say they value, and then look at what is actually being done in the department.Balance your workload
Before you say "yes" to any request, think to yourself how you would categorize whatever it is you are being asked to do. Research teaching and service: be sure you are doing some of each, and be sure your categorization of your workload accurately reflects your colleagues' expectations. And be sure your workload is categorized at the different levels of administration that apply to you. I have to be sure, for instance, that the other technical communication faculty members recognize the program administration I do, that the English Department Chair values that same administrative work, and that the Arts and Sciences Dean recognizes my administrative work. In the case of program administration, it isn't difficult to have all three groups see this as service. But once we begin talking about online class construction, my colleagues in technical communication are apt to see that work as teaching, my department chair as service (if it is recognized at all), while my generous and forward-thinking Dean is likely to regard online course development as research.Find allies
One colleague of mine has been very generous. Sometimes too generous: my second week at Northeastern, she handed me a packet of printed material that was two-inches thick along with a zip disk. She informed me that this was a copy of her third year review dossier, and apologies for the zip because it no longer fit on a single floppy. I felt like I was in free-fall: I felt butterflies in my stomach and realized that the department demanded much in its T&P documents.
This person is a wonderful colleague: not only did she hold the technical communication program together for three years by herself, but she guided another colleague through her first year last year and me through my first year this year. Remember that this year was her third-year review. Not everyone is going to have colleagues like her: willing to take the time to explain both what she has gone through and talk with me about what she expects I will face.
My department has also created a probationary faculty committee: three tenured professors who have accepted a mentoring role as part of their departmental service. I believe that each of these professors would have been interested and willing to mentor me both formally and informally and created a mechanism – the probationary faculty committee – through which to gain credit for their service efforts. The committee was instrumental in getting me a course release, stipend and funding for student staffers for the department's new computer lab. Before I talk about the lab, let me describe my colleagues' own strategic planning by creating the probationary faculty committee.
The department felt it was not doing enough to guide new faculty members through their first years at Northeastern. Third year reviews seemed to come too late and there were some problematic tenure cases. Intent on improving its internal processes, younger faculty formalized the mentoring process into a committee. From the University's perspective, the expectations of the faculty and administration had not been clearly conveyed to younger faculty and this gap in communication had resulted in misunderstanding and, in a few cases, denial of tenure. Those faculty who had been awarded tenure proposed and instituted the probationary faculty committee (PFC) specifically toMy probationary faculty mentors observe my classes, read my syllabi and advise my scholarly work (come to my presentation on research profile later in the conference). The PFC offers a valuable lesson regarding the rate of change in the academy: I remember Becky Rickly talking about the academy as if it were a battleship. At that point 5 years ago, as a field computers and writing had just fought its way on to the bridge and had gotten its first taste of command, roughly when Cindy Selfe was chair of the 4Cs conference committee. But it takes a long time and a lot of ocean to change a battleship's course. We're just now starting to see the stars in the sky change as the ship lumbers onto a different course.
- Demystify tenure processes, procedures and expectations
- Make mentoring visible and rewarded.
To return to the probationary faculty committee from the deck of this imaginary ship, let me say that I am aware of this committee as the outcome of years of reform effort. The department I am part of is better for this committee. New faculty members have the support and mentoring they need and mentors who give so much time and energy have a mechanism for having their efforts recognized. Remember that need as you go through your first year on a job: how will this faculty, this institution, this program recognize, categorize and reward my activities?
On to the lab. I have been teaching a Usability class for graduate technical and professional writing students this spring and one of the texts we are reading has to do the politics of usability in different organizations. Students are reading theory about the practices that they have already developed on the job: they come to Northeastern for credentials and get me along with a sizable dose of rhetorical theory. In one of the essays, the authors warn newly trained usability experts to beware of responsibility without authority. As a first-year tenure-track professor newly named director of the literacy technology lab, I have accepted sizable responsibility with little authority.
This is not to say that you should necessarily avoid taking responsibility for a facility or a program in which you believe, rather, in Fred Kemp's words, sometimes you leap before you look. If I knew what it meant to actually be responsible for the lab before I took the title, I probably never would have accepted the responsibility. But now I cannot imagine the department without the lab I run. We just had our grand opening.
In many ways at Northeastern, I am very lucky. My colleagues are concerned about my progress, interested in my rhetorical scholarship, and willing to provide guidance.
However, in many ways I am facing a difficult professional situation. Much of the work I value and am interested in pursuing is grouped under the "service" category. My department does not agree with many of the values held by the college of arts and sciences or the university at large. For instance, Northeastern is committed to cooperative education (or co-op) and is interested in expanding service-learning and experiential education curricula. These values and interests attempt to balance "practical" education with a liberal education. From the Northeastern website:Northeastern doesn't reflect the outdated notions that the arts and sciences are disconnected from the practical world, that students have to choose between the arts and sciences and professional education. [. . .] Northeastern creates curricula that enable you to obtain the full benefit of a liberal education as well as opportunities to develop professional skills. [http://www.neu.edu/as.html]Comparing this statement of value with the English department's literature curriculum reveals some interesting disjunctures between University and Arts and Sciences College values and departmental values. Now, I am not choosing sides but merely recognizing that there are different values in play, not accepting either the department's or the administration's values as true (rhetorician that I am) but recognizing that these perspectives both conflict with each other and simultaneously define expectations for my work. My task is to describe my specialty, as well as my research, teaching and service, to these different audiences so that my contribution is comprehensible. Thankfully, I am a rhetorician.
The gap is especially problematic for the relationship between the English Department and the program in technical communication and similarly categorized "practical" rhetoric classes like "writing in the professions," "writing for the web," "rhetoric, technology and culture" and "usability." The conflict between professional writing and literature is not a new phenomenon, certainly, but indicates an interesting and unique situation peculiar to an institution that calls itself "practice-oriented." It is also a particularly daunting challenge for new faculty, who yesterday were graduate students, who have just begun to understand the machinations of their home department , let alone the political structures of the Universities to which they are applying for employment.
Northeastern University is committed to developing innovative programs that integrate practical experience with the arts and humanities. I believe technical communication broadly defined, and closely integrated with Computers and Writing interests, does much of what the University desires. Yet the department, any department, is unlikely to listen to its newest member – particularly not during your first year (although as CJ points out, you do get a whole pack of "get out of jail free" cards – only good your first year). And as one of three rhetoricians in a faculty of 21, my interest in placing rhetoric as an intellectual core to a practice-oriented humanities curriculum is unlikely to be embraced.
There are currents, crosscurrents, trends and counter-trends, ebbs and flows to the ways in which my work and professional identity is understood at my institution. The flows, circumstances and representation of your situation will differ as, well, as your unique situation. But you can and will figure out the idiosyncrasies of your place of employment. Always remember that Universities are complex places, and it is amazing how important cultural, critical and rhetorical theory are when applied to one's own institutional situation. Taking a few pages from Sullivan and Porter's Opening Spaces, let me offer a Salvo's-eye-view of the complex territory know as Northeastern University.
The first thing you will notice is fragmentation at the departmental level. Not something new to English departments, I know. But there are some unique characteristics. Without belaboring the point, know that some of my colleagues wonder why the English department needs a computer lab, while others are relieved the "new guy" stepped up and took the responsibility. So long as it is not on fire and no one complains too loudly, I can do pretty much what I want with the lab. But at the same time, I am expected to maintain a scholarly profile which requires significant publishing in highly-regarded peer-edited scholarly journals. Oh yeah, and a book. Published with a University Press. Preferably one over 100 years old. East of the Mississippi is best, or the West Coast wouldn't be terrible. Some place that will ensure it gets reviewed in the "right" places. Make sure it sells enough copies to be "important" to my field, but not so many that it can be considered "popular." And don't forget we want you to teach.
While the department makes its desires known, I can hear my Dean talking about the lab. It exists in the department, among the faculty offices, so that it is visible to the department and becomes part of its daily working. Or so he hopes. It is designed to transform literacy instruction at the University, but the folks teaching in the lab are not tenure track. It is designed to allow research into the nature of literacy in the information age, yet the scholars we hire study 19th century literature. The Dean is very happy that I have taken on the responsibility of the lab. I like making the dean happy. Remember to think and act strategically: making the Dean happy makes my Chair happy. That makes it easier to spend a few of the department's always-scarce dollars on the lab that no one understands to begin with. Yet the Dean is justifiably concerned that I present a "tenurable" dossier to my department.The contradictions do not end here: I will simply let the lab serve as my representative anecdote and gesture towards the fault lines and institutional trends it reveals. My advice is to work as hard as you can to accomplish recognizable goals and to be wary of work that is difficult to categorize. And difficulty in categorization has been the bane of Computers and Writing scholarship. It does not mean you cannot do innovative and meaningful work. However, it does mean that you need to also do the mundane work the department expects of you and of everyone else.
For instance:
My participation took less time than writing a manuscript for publication. It probably took less time than I spend on email in a week. But this work has recognizable, tangible outcomes that (when asked "How's Michael doing?") the Dean, my Chair, and my colleagues can say, "He helped do these things." And now I can honestly say that without the lab, none of these things would have been possible. So the lab is worth a little something in my administration's mind, my chair's mind and my colleagues' minds even if they still do not quite understand why it is the English department needs a Multimedia Literacy Technology Lab for the study of literacy practice in the information age. But perhaps if they hear the title and mission statement enough times, they'll repeat it like a mantra without worrying too much about what it means. And if you notice, I slipped the title of my modest lab into this presentation without you even being aware of it. Ah, the power of rhetoric.
- I received a Provost's Faculty Research and Scholarship Development Fund Grant to turn my dissertation into a book. It bought me a laptop and two round-trip train trips to DC to pursue research at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and a course releases to write in the fall.
- I am working with the director of the Middler year writing requirement (Northeastern is a 5 year program - freshperson, sophomore, middler, junior, senior - it's one of those campus-specific terms that left me feeling like the outsider I was my whole first quarter even though I taught a middler class that first quarter.). We're developing a "hybrid" course: a course taught via the web using Blackboard combined with regular class meetings – and received a small institutional grant for curriculum development.
- Through this pilot project, we joined the Educational Technology office and offered the hybrid pedagogical experiment as a "breakthrough model" and participated in putting a three-hundred thousand dollar grant together through a private foundation. None of that money gets to me. Most of the money does nothing directly for the department. But the Dean likes saying that the College of Arts and Sciences won funding for a big grant and the Chair likes saying that the English Department participated in securing the grant. The writing programs like saying that the model program is a writing program.
I got lucky. The campus was ready to put me to work on interesting projects, and I got to play a role I enjoy. I am lucky enough to work with talented grant writers and committed people in a variety of positions. But I have also made some difficult choices. The one consolation I have is that it takes a long time to turn a battleship on to a new course and I will have opportunities to engage similar situations in the future. I only want to be on the ship long enough to encounter these opportunities the next time they come around. Maybe next time I will get to say more, or there will be more support for a rhetorical curriculum, or perhaps circumstances will be aligned a little differently and enough pressure in just the right way will open up new opportunities.
Just remember to fill in all the blanks: research, teaching and service. Say it with me: research, teaching and service. Like it or not, it's what we have got to do: research, teaching and service.
Interestingly enough, I started writing this presentation thinking that I was going to be depressing and dark and cynical. But here I am adding an ending that is hopeful and even a little optimistic. I am going back for my second year at Northeastern in the Fall more curious about the opportunities that may reveal themselves than the problems and heartaches that I know will appear along the way. If you find yourself willing and able to put up with small inconveniences like poor pay, lack of respect from your colleagues, and pressure from administration, you'll have access to what I consider my greatest reward.
I actually stopped class during the winter quarter one night (I meet my graduate classes in the 6-8pm slot so they can attend class after a full day's work). It was the kind of frozen, snowy, nasty night that comes late in January in New England that convinces me that Spring will never come and it will eternally be winter and the sun will set at 3:45 in the afternoon for the rest of my life. I looked up and realized that 15 intelligent, talented adults were interested in what I was thinking, that they had each braved 4 inches of frozen slush to come to my class, and that at that moment there was no place I would rather be. That's what makes all the other things worth dealing with. If teaching makes you happy, if you like working with people and refining their rough-hewn thoughts, then this is a gig worth all its difficulties. If there isn't a part of the job you love, then there is no reason to put up with the rest. Hate a job that pays better. I'm staying as long as they'll let me.