Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

What’s it like to be an Associate Professor? (Research University version)

Several years ago, I tried to sum up the perspective I had gained on being an assistant professor at a research university. I attempted to capture all of the things I either wasn’t told in graduate school or didn’t have a real grasp on until I was on the tenure track — and they were largely behind-the-curtain, what-the-job-is-actually-like details, including lots of meetings, emails, and teaching prep-work, alongside the demands of publishing and other scholarly activity. What does the job look like on the other side of tenure? Mostly the same, but there are some important differences.

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Sisyphus and his beloved rock (representing institutional demands post-tenure)

The ink was barely dry on my tenure contract when I was asked by my dean to serve in an administrative role. It was probably about two weeks between when I was notified of the administrative approval of my tenure and this request on the part of my dean, which made it kind of difficult to say no to it (but it was really compelling administrative work, so I probably would have said yes anyway). In a nutshell, if the road to tenure is largely anticipatory and structured by tenure demands, the associate professor road is characterized by managing social relationships — with other faculty, with administrators, with students, with colleagues at other institutions, with journal and press editors, with university bureaucrats — many of whom helped on the road to tenure, and are now calling in their debts.

“Debt” seems like a slight mischaracterization, but “favor” also seems too light. These activities can range from work like peer reviewing for presses or journals (especially those you’ve published with) and reviewing grant applications, which I had been doing pre-tenure, but after tenure there was a significant increase in requests. It can also include serving on committees at departmental, university, and national organization levels — and being asked to do that rather than volunteering for it. In addition, there’s serving on ever-more dissertation committees as well as doing tenure review for colleagues at other institutions. Singularly, they don’t seem like much, but taken together, they can be time consuming — and for some faculty, they seem to provide a trajectory while they figure out what their path to full professorship looks like. This isn’t to begrudge these various debts and favors and the people attached to them, but just to note how they pile up — and continue to pile up — and to recognize that strategies need to be developed to handle them maturely.

I’ve been thinking about the non-arrival of tenure for years. After all the stresses around tenure and its quasi-mythological nature, when it happens, it’s actually a slow and drawn out process, which makes it less of a rite of passage and more of a long, bureaucratic process (which is what it is). Between the department vote, the dean’s approval, the university personnel committee, the chancellor or provost, and the president (and regents), there are a lot of not-final approvals (i.e. it’s still not a sure thing). At each stage, the appropriate administrator makes sure to tell you congratulations, but it’s not over yet. And by the time the tenure contract arrives, it has both felt inevitable and had some of the wind taken out of its ceremonial sails.

At least that was my experience. Some of my feelings about the tenure process may be due to the fact that I met my institution’s tenure requirements early and was able to go up for tenure a year ahead of schedule. I’m sure that for people who are in more precarious positions, tenure might come as more of a relief. But in any case, the non-arrival of tenure is also about what happens after tenure.

The assistant professor period is characterized by the project that is getting tenure — there’s real momentum around publishing the requisite amount of stuff, and there’s a deadline. But between associate and full professor, there’s not usually a deadline even when there’s clear expectations (usually doubling whatever it took to get tenure in the first place). Sabbatical is meant to serve as a research period, but it seems like most people use it as a period to reconnect with family and catch up on what they missed during the march to tenure. And unless you’re primed to get to work on the next big research project immediately, it can be hard to use sabbatical to its full effect. For better and worse, things slow down after tenure for a lot of people.

Part of that slow down is bureaucratic and an effect of the job and its duties. Part of it is also just straight up existential. After being told that tenure is the most magical thing in the world, the reality is that the job doesn’t fundamentally change — and, in many respects, there’s less time for research and writing when all of the other institutional demands are factored in. Teaching might be at a new plateau — you might get to the point where you’re teaching the same classes with few or no revisions and can autopilot them. But in my case, I was tired of teaching the same classes and needed to change things significantly (I moved from teaching mostly medical anthropology courses to teaching more general intro and social theory classes). And that meant spending more time prepping classes than I had in several years.

I had started working on my second book before I finished my first one, but like so many people’s second projects, it didn’t work out quite the way I had planned (insufficient funding, lack of dedicated time, difficulty with the IRB, etc.), leading to some redevelopments in the project and some slow down. Because it was a significant shift in focus, it also needed some time devoted to developing new contacts, reading new stuff, and just thinking through the problems of the project — all of which started during the assistant professor phase, but couldn’t really take off until after tenure. I also had a second child, changed institutions, and moved across the country, all of which slowed things down too. For some people, any of those events or aforementioned difficulties might have led to abandoning the project and starting over from scratch with something new — so I can understand why some people take a long time between getting tenure and going up for full professor.

But here’s the other thing: if tenure is marked by its non-arrival, full professorship is marked by its deferral. The difference between associate and full is largely administrative (yes, there’s a pay increase, and maybe there’s some prestige?), meaning that most associate professors are protected from being department chairs or serving as associate deans or conveners of university committees. For some people, it seems like the pay increase isn’t worth the trouble — which is compounded by the difficulties people face in getting a second project off the ground. Maybe we need better incentives, but more likely, we probably need better support to help people have time, money, and space to develop new projects.

This isn’t to diminish tenure — it’s important job security and helpful to have the bandwidth to explore new ideas and projects — but to point out how it isn’t a panacea. In some respects, tenure is integral to the kinds of favors that need to be returned (i.e. with tenure, you can be asked to do things that you can’t be asked to do without it). But the job is the job, and that fundamentally doesn’t change with tenure.

So what do I wish I knew about the post-tenure phase?

1. If you can change when you take sabbatical, wait until you know it will be immediately useful and not for preliminary work (like seeing if a project is viable). Make sure that you have the funds and access to get the data you need, and then use sabbatical time to make it happen.

2. Change your teaching only enough to freshen it up, unless you’re committed to finding a new niche in your department’s curriculum and spending  year or two doing so.

3. Be selective about what you agree to do. Sometimes opportunities quickly become obligations, and there will be plenty of both. It’s okay to say no to an invitation, especially because there will be more coming.

4. Develop small projects that can result in an article or a book chapter. These might be collaborations with graduate or advanced undergraduate students, experiential learning classes, or cannily constructed classes. Steady projects like these help to allay the big existential dread that might present itself in the absence of a second book-length project.

Post-tenure is a strange place. Prepare yourself.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization, Uncategorized

The Mysterious Teaching Statement, Part 1

This is the first of a two part series on teaching statements. In this entry, I focus on my own expectations as a reader of teaching statements; in a future installment, I’ll present similar expectations from colleagues at other institutions.

My general sense of teaching statements as part of the job application process is that they’re principally used to separate the wheat from the chaff — that is, they’re used to disqualify job seekers on the basis of having little or no actual teaching experience, which can often be seen in teaching statements that include phrases like: ‘I embrace the Socratic method’ or ‘I believe that research papers are important in every class.’ Those are clear red flags that the author of the statement has spent little or no time in a university classroom, and might not be the best person for the job.

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That all being said, I do think there are some key things to cover in a teaching statement, and they are (in no particular order): 1) how you would approach teaching a ‘service’ course, 2) the curriculum that you bring with you (including courses on the books that you’re prepared to teach), 3) examples of your actual classroom practice, and 4) your approach to research or mentoring experiences. I don’t think they necessarily need to appear in that order — it should be organic in its presentation — but as a reader, that’s the stuff I would want to see.

So, to explicate a bit:

Service classes are things like Intro to Your Discipline, Methods, Theory, and maybe Intro to Your Area or Subfield. Every department offers these classes, and they’re often the staples of the curriculum. Seeing that a job applicant has taken the time to think about their approach to one of these classes shows that the applicant has thought about one of the likely courses they’ll be facing in the short term; it also serves as a good way to see what makes a job applicant characteristic in their thought. For example (and please forgive the italics):

I’m committed to teaching Anthropological Theory, which, as I teach it, focuses on the relationship of imperial centers of thought and the colonies; as much as I find it necessary to include canonical figures and topics, I also include a number of thinkers from the postcolonies — anthropologists and not — in an effort to make evident to students how anthropological theory arises in dialogue with local forms of thought and expertise. Rather than organize the course historically, with theory progressing from Boas to the present, I instead structure the class around current ethnographies to make evident how anthropologists both produce and engage with anthropological — and cultural — theory. For example, I’ve recently begun teaching Elizabeth Povinelli’s Empire of Love as a way to approach ideas about globalization, postcoloniality, and indigenous rights. Alongside Povinelli’s work, we read pieces from Walter Mignolo, Achille Mbembe, Franz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, and anthropologists George Marcus, Aiwha Ong, and Anna Tsing. Students are asked to stage debates between anthropologists and their interlocutors, and, to do so, are tasked with uncovering and explaining the theoretical underpinnings to their arguments.

A paragraph like that lets your reader know that you’re willing to tackle a service class, and that you’re able to bend it to your own strengths. Moreover, it also gives your reader a sense of your perspectives as a teacher, which may vary significantly from your presentation of yourself as a researcher. For instance, I don’t think my commitment to global knowledge production is necessarily apparent in my description of my own work (which is largely U.S.-based, and pretty Continental in its theoretical influences). That being said, being honest about my approach might not make me friends among faculty who think that Anthropological Theory begins with Boas and ends with Sahlins…

On the subject of your perspective as a teacher, it’s worth thinking about what 3-4 classes you could offer a department on a two year cycle. Most departments will expect faculty to teach 1-2 service classes each year (or more), but also give you some flexibility about upper level courses, particularly tied to your training and interests. For example, although I’m tasked with teaching Intro to Medical Anthropology every other year (as well as another service class) at UCSC, I also offer at least two classes that are directly keyed to my research. So, I often teach a course entitled The Biology of Everyday Life as well as a class on Medicine and Colonialism. It’s worth including a sentence or two about each of the classes.

In addition to teaching Intro to Cultural Anthropology, Ethnographic Methods, and Anthropological Theory, I am also interested in regularly offering classes related to medical anthropology and science studies. My Intro to Medical Anthropology is structured around four ethnographies, one each on Western biomedicine, Indian Ayurveda, African ‘folk’ medicine, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. My interest in exposing students to these four traditions is to unsettle their ideas about the lack of history of Western medicine and the naturalness of non-Western practices. I find that students often naively assume that non-Western practices are more authentic, and also, paradoxically, acultural. Situating these four traditions alongside one another exposes how each is historical, cultural and influenced by contemporary politics and concerns. I follow some of the concerns presented in this Introduction in Medicine and Colonialism, in which I focus the class on the use of colonies as a space for experimenting with medicine, subjectivity and governance. My Biology of Everyday Life class allows me to teach content related to my research on sleep, but put into a broader theoretical context regarding how basic biological functions — reproduction, eating, defecation, breathing — become the basis for subjection and politics across societies and history. Additionally, I regularly offer topically focused seminars in medical anthropology and science studies; over the last five years, they have focused on ‘risk and insurance,’ ‘chronic illness,’ and ‘the brain.’

If it hasn’t already been covered, it’s also useful to explain how your classrooms are organized and what kinds of expectations you have of students:

My classes are highly regimented, and through a combination of reading questions (that ask students to identify key concepts in the readings and provide examples from other class readings) and reading guides (a set of questions designed to help students identify an author’s thesis, evidence, and theoretical commitments) I help students work through difficult empirical and theoretical texts. Because the courses I teach are often very theoretically focused, I regularly quiz students and rely on extensive exams to assess their knowledge of the course material. Students who take multiple classes with me and excel in them are offered the opportunity to write a research paper instead of taking quizzes and tests, and I ask them to write ethnological papers, relying in part on HRAF. Across my classes, I work to include documentaries, podcasts, and other multimedia learning experiences; between these media exercises and the format of my classes, I am able to engage students from diverse backgrounds and with varied learning styles.

Reading that paragraph makes it apparent that I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the classroom and that I know what my teaching style is. Near the beginning of your teaching career, it’s difficult to be so succinct and honest; instead, it might be best to take a look at syllabuses from faculty you’ve worked with. See what kinds of assignments they use, and, if you can, see how their assignments and classroom policies have changed over time. Often, by the time someone has taught for a decade, their teaching becomes fairly stable — so try and find an early associate or late assistant professor and take a look at their syllabuses for a few years of classes. And, if you can, look at some of their exams and other assignments to get a sense of what they actually ask students to do.

Finally, you should have a paragraph about your research opportunities for students, as well as your mentoring style. For primarily undergraduate institutions, the former is more important; for institutions where you’re be interacting with graduate students, the latter is more important (to the degree that you might cut any discussion of undergrads).

Much of my mentoring at UCSC has been designed around the problems that many students experience, and my own recent memory of being a graduate student. Broadly, I provide students with ongoing, direct intellectual support, as well as professional development opportunities, with the intent being that by the time they have earned their Ph.D. they will have published one or more articles, and they will have begun to work on a variety of individual and collaborative projects. In the category of intellectual support, I offer a monthly reading seminar for my graduate students, wherein we read an article or excerpts from a book of mutual interest, and use this as a centerpiece for our conversation; we then segue into conversations about individual work, and the status of writing projects. Along similar lines, I offer a professionalization seminar that runs fortnightly over the course of the school year, offering from 15 meetings. We cover topics such as writing job letters and preparing curriculum vitae to dealing with problem students and syllabus development, to writing articles and planning publishing trajectories. It’s a demanding seminar, but the students who participate find their anxieties about the transition from student to professional to be much less stressful through my demystification efforts.

Taken together, the document should be 1-2 single spaced pages. If the institution asks for ‘evidence of teaching effectiveness’ or has some other way to ask about teaching evaluations, it’s better to summarize what you have in a page or two (included representative comments from students) than it is to include copies of evaluations (which can vary significantly from institution to institution). Ultimately, it shouldn’t be too long, and, like a job letter, should not overstay its welcome.

Questions, comments, experiences? Post them in the comment section.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

Conceptualizing the Second Project

One of the challenges that academic job seekers confront is conceptualizing a second project to engage in after the completion of their dissertations. Some brief description of a second project is always part of job letters, but it’s even more important in conversation with potential colleagues during interviews. Broadly, it seems like they can be reduced to pragmatic and ideal projects. But, in either case, they need to convince your potential colleagues of your intellectual (and work) trajectory.

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Pragmatic projects directly stem from dissertation projects, and consist of work that develops a dissertation project into a marketable book project. Basically, this kind of project is described in terms that convince readers that you have a sense of what it will take for you to get tenure at their institution; it might mean returning to your original fieldsite, some comparative fieldsite (either locally or abroad), or some other kind of research (archival, textual, etc.). I don’t think it’s an admission of inadequacy to suggest that your dissertation project needs more work to be publishable as a book — everyone’s dissertation needs work to be a book. Instead, it makes it apparent to your reader that you know that there’s still work to be done, and that you know what needs to be attended to.

Ideal projects, on the other hand, are the sequels to dissertation projects. Whatever you feel about your dissertation, your ideal second project should build upon it in some fashion and convince your reader that you have some kind of intellectual commitment. At the time I was sending out my first job applications, I was pretty convinced that my second project was going to be about the idea of ‘public health’ as it touched down in postcolonial India and China, especially around ideas about breathing. Because my dissertation was so rooted in the U.S., I really felt the need to work internationally; I also wanted to work on the transmission of particular ideas about the body outside of the U.S. And, most importantly, I wanted to continue working on everyday biology. I abandoned this project as a second project (traipsing to India and China, and developing research partnerships in both places, was too much to ask of myself pre-tenure), but I’ll get around to it eventually… But what it indexed to my readers was my interest in everyday biology and how it gets caught up in medical and scientific thought and practice — it showed my readers that I had a ‘research agenda.’ And that seems to be key in thinking through a second project: what are you planning on working on — in your research, in your teaching — for the next decade, if not your entire career? If you can index it by pairing your current and future projects, it will give your readers and interviewers a clear sense that you have a plan and know what you’re about. Even if there are some bumps in the road.

There are a couple other things to consider as you think about second projects. None of this needs to be covered in a job letter or during an interview, but it is worth keeping in mind as your career develops.

It’s not a contract between you and your potential employer. That is, if you’re hired by an academic institution, you don’t have to produce the second project you said you would. Things come up, both in life and through writing and teaching, and what seemed like a good second project when you were finishing your dissertation may not be quite so compelling a few years later. And, realistically, if you spend time applying for funding for your second project, and no one is coming through with funding, it might be worth abandoning for something more fundable.

Be realistic. Starting a new academic job (tenure track or not) comes with a lot of work commitments — faculty meetings, meetings with students, service, publishing, new course preps, etc. — and having the time to develop and carry out a robust second project can be slight. This can be seen with a lot of more senior academics, who often develop local or historical projects. It can be worth looking around a potential employer to see what, if any, resources or sites might exist that could provide fertile ground for developing a new project.

Other thoughts, experiences or questions? Post them in the comments.