Month: July 2020

I had the good fortune of being chair of an English department for ten years. I genuinely enjoyed the work. Facilitating conversations with faculty members in the department about our needs and aspirations and then executing a shared vision came easily to me. Our faculty practiced shared governance and shared responsibility. My model of leadership involves consensus building, and our bylaws give all faculty members (tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track) an equal vote on all matters that affect the department as a whole. As members of the same faculty, we were more than collegial; we were cordial. And we shared a  mission of empowering and educating our students. I remained chair of the department until recently, when I was asked to serve as interim dean of the Graduate School. A hallmark of my tenure as chair (the verdict is still out on my deanship) was efficient faculty meetings laced with well-timed humor. It would therefore not surprise anyone in my department that my advice about considering an administrative position would begin with humor. Henny Youngman’s old joke “Take my wife, please” came to mind immediately, hence the title of this essay. A close second was the joke about there being no good academic jokes about chairs or deans. Clever and concise, it goes something like this:

Faculty member 1: “There are no good jokes about chairs and deans.”

Faculty member 2: “Some chairs and deans are jokes.”

This biting critique is ages old. It can also be well-founded, especially if a chair or dean is more concerned with the oftentimes false sense of power that attends the position than with being an advocate for faculty members and students. But not all administrators are jokes. Some are interested in generating meaningful, beneficial change and in implementing innovative ideas. Such administrators see themselves as stewards and find ways to help their universities respond positively to changes in higher education across disciplines. So before you reject outright the reputed dark side of administration, consider these three questions, which every potential administrator should reflect on.

Question #1: Can You Accept the Inevitable Delays in Implementing Your Scholarly Agenda?

People who are or who have been administrators will overwhelmingly tell you that your scholarly agenda will suffer as a result of your administrative role, that it will be difficult to assume administrative duties while spending as much time as you had been on research and publishing. Before I was chair, I could spend several hours a day reading or writing without fear of interruption. My time was my own. I had no meetings to go to, no reports to write, no fires to put out, and no faculty members, staff members, or students to answer to. But as an administrator, my days are filled for me, and any reading or writing I do, I must do after all else is done. Before you become an administrator, ask yourself whether you are willing to give up the solitude of research-oriented reading and writing in order to devote most of your time to working on behalf of others. The reading you will do as an administrator will most often be done in preparation for meetings, while most of your writing will be done in the service of reports. Faculty members whose primary focus is teaching should ask themselves a similar question: Can you accept a move away from the classroom—where an active engagement with students and their ideas was your primary laboratory—to a role that requires regular encounters with faculty members and administrators and where your assignments will typically involve problem solving? In most instances, some publishing and teaching will be possible, if not expected, but the change in rhythms is not to be taken lightly. Even the best laid plan to schedule reading and writing time frequently fails because, somehow, prioritizing scholarship as an administrator often feels selfish or delusional. That is why I make it a point to agree each year to at least three conference presentations related to my scholarship. It is important to me that I stay current in my field, and active conferencing is one of the best ways to do this—both as a presenter and as a listener.

Yes, I teach, and I continue to publish. But it is not easy. Most of my publications in the last five years owe themselves to the fact that I am known in the field and am seen as a valued member of a community of scholars. This has two benefits: first, I have the luxury of writing about ideas I have been mulling over for years, meaning that I am excited by the opportunity to think through these ideas with editors and peer reviewers; and, second, I do not have to search out publishers who might be interested in my work. This is why I think it is so important to be well established as a scholar before assuming a major administrative role. Publishing work others know you are doing is much easier than writing in isolation, with no guarantee that your work will ever be published.

For me, teaching is sacred time. All my colleagues know I am unavailable an hour before class, and I avoid scheduling meetings during office hours. Everyone knows that if I had to choose between administration and teaching, I would choose teaching every time. While teaching is what animates my work in the academy, I am no less committed to research. During summer and semester breaks I focus on my book project almost obsessively. I have been working on a book on Toni Morrison’s editorship at Random House for more than ten years now. There is no doubt I could have finished this project years ago if it were not for the administrative work I have agreed to do. But I have patience when it comes to research. “The project will still be there,” I remind myself, as I steal time to be a scholar during the semester. But my yearning for the classroom cannot be deferred. All this is to say: know what enlivens you and figure out just how much of it can and must be preserved when you take on an administrative role.

Question #2: Will You Be Supported?

No matter what administrative position you assume, you will need support. Department chairs, for example, need the support of all faculty members—non-tenure-track, tenure-track, and tenured alike. The difference between a department that reinforces hierarchies and one that works to mitigate them is palpable. A big part of what we do as humanists is help others imagine what is possible, including a world where we treat all faculty members well without regard for rank. As chair, it is important that you find meaningful ways of relating to all faculty members, not only senior faculty members. For instance, showing concern and compassion for the needs of adjuncts must be as important as ensuring that tenured faculty members have a reasonable workload and graduate students have affordable health care. Depending on your department’s or university’s policy for chair appointments, you may not have many opportunities to gain faculty support before assuming the position. Still, you can gain support after becoming chair by focusing on the needs of the department as a whole rather than on the needs of individuals; by showing that you have done due diligence, know the lay of the land, and are aware of the current and historical realities that inform a given situation; and by being forthright and fair. If an especially productive member of the faculty requests a course release to finish a book, consider implementing a policy that makes such a release available to all faculty members who have books under contract. Before you embark on a self-study of your department, read the last one and be sure you understand how all the department’s parts fit together. Make every effort to hear from every constituent group. Try to see yourself, first, as the person who has the fullest view of the department and therefore as the person best poised to share a vision with the group and, second, as the person charged with executing the agreed-upon vision. When I tell people that this actually works for me, they are quick to tell me how it would never work for them. Factions always emerge; the Americanists vote as a block; self-preservation is more important than progress, they say. But I think this type of leadership can work for anyone willing to do the hard work of leading by example. When we decided to redesign the courses in our first-year writing program and tenure-track faculty members wanted oversight over the process but did not agree to teach the courses, I signed up to teach the section offered to first-semester English majors and minors.

If it is the case that you have never succeeded in mustering support from colleagues, for whatever reason, you are likely to face the same challenge as an administrator. And there are few things more important to administrative success than having the support of the faculty members you are charged with directing. You can have the support of your dean—indeed, that is important—and as a dean you can have the support of your provost. But support from “above” will not go nearly as far as support from “below.” When several departments moved to hiring adjuncts instead of full-time faculty members as a way of addressing a budget crisis, English faculty members across ranks stood in solidarity and supported my appeal to the dean to allow us to continue to hire full-time faculty members. Being an unsupported administrator is a lot like swimming against the tide: you can do it, but it’s only a matter of time before you drown.

Question #3: Can You Make the Work Intellectual?

So much of the work of an administrator is, well, administrative. As an administrator, you will do everything from managing course schedules to fundraising. But you might also have to redesign your school’s general education program. Yes, you will need to be good at strategic thinking and planning; yes, you will need to master the art of compromise; and yes, you will need to be a good communicator. But to be a really effective administrator who enjoys life and work, you will need bring into that role the thing that drew you to academia—the life of the mind. While a prudent response to draconian cuts is nothing to sneeze at, it will not be what makes you proudest. What you will look forward to are those initiatives that require you to reimagine some aspect of the university in order to shore up its academic profile or to design and support projects that speak to the needs of the contemporary moment. Some of my most enjoyable work as an administrator involved collaborating with a team of faculty members to redesign the college’s first-year seminar. We shifted the focus of the course from institutional history and campus life to knowledge production and interdisciplinarity, a shift that prepares students to solve big challenges.

Can you foster collaborations that might otherwise have been unlikely or impossible? Can you make your own unique sense of the world? Can you win the war against the tyranny of the immediate and spend meaningful time thinking about far-reaching, complicated ideas and innovative approaches to disciplines and fields of study? Are you able to translate that thinking into action? If you can do all these things, you have the makings of an excellent administrator—and an agent of change. When students comment on their course evaluations for the new first-year writing course that they are happy they didn’t just receive an exemption from it because the class challenged them to become better readers and thinkers, to understand various literacies, and to participate differently in discourse communities, I feel a sense of pride that I helped design a course whose goal is to create a more engaged citizenry.

Being an administrator is hard work, but it can be done with grace, style, and humor. One day soon I hope to hear someone say, “Take my dean,” referring to me. If and when that happens I hope that those three words form an introductory clause and not a plea. There may be no good jokes about chairs and deans, but somewhere in the making are some good deans and chairs.

Mentoring midcareer colleagues is like mentoring graduate students and junior colleagues—except when it’s not. Midcareer mentoring is usually the result of individual efforts. Not all midcareer faculty members receive mentoring, and it is often not provided to those who need it most. Unlike mentors at earlier stages of the profession, midcareer mentors are rarely formally assigned. Instead, they may derive from earlier collegial relationships or they may be a logical result of shared academic interests or career paths. What served as good mentoring at earlier stages of an individual’s career may be inappropriate or inadequate for midcareer colleagues. A 2014 survey of workplace culture by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) reported low numbers for effectiveness of posttenure mentoring  as compared with pretenure mentoring (out of a five-point scale, 2.49 versus 3.25); sadly, the numbers were lower for women than for men (2.28 versus 2.60). The same survey found similarly low numbers for support for becoming a good mentor (2.39) (Benson and Mathews 3).  

The mentoring framework that supported faculty members as graduate students and in their pretenure years disappears after tenure, at the same time that career trajectory becomes less defined. The next official stage after tenure is promotion to full professor, but unlike earlier hurdles, this promotion rarely has the same urgency, set expectations, or timetable. In another 2014 survey, of associate professors, COACHE found that half felt a “culture of promotion” was lacking in their department, two out of three reported they had never “received formal feedback on their progress toward promotion,” and many reported they had “no plans to submit their dossier for promotion” (Mathews 4). Mentoring toward promotion should certainly be an institutional responsibility, not something that is left to chance, applied unevenly, or given only to those who know how to arrange it. However, in a stage that may last five to thirty years, promotion cannot be the only frame of reference for mentoring.  

The mentoring needs of midcareer faculty members may include a range of intellectual, institutional, and personal issues. Mentors help colleagues decipher the mores and hidden structures of institutions, understand what is at stake at the various checkpoints of professional life, and navigate the complicated balance (or imbalance) between life and work. Midcareer colleagues may need to consult on new syllabi and curricular projects or on new methods of teaching and assessment. In particular, they may value advice on their heightened responsibility with respect to graduate education and advising. They may present manuscripts to read, ask for advice about sending out book proposals, or request supporting letters for grant applications. They may seek advice on how to navigate the considerable demands they face regarding service and administrative work. They may wish to consult on job opportunities, grants, or administrative assignments. Such decisions require tact and privacy since their outcome may take colleagues away from teaching responsibilities, the department, or even the institution. 

Above all, midcareer faculty members need allies, sounding boards, intellectual companions, colleagues, and friends. But for those who have gone through the tenure process and come out on the other side, it’s often difficult to ask for or accept mentoring. At this stage in their careers, many have already experienced a great deal of mentoring—in graduate school, throughout the job search, and in the process of getting tenure—from colleagues assigned to oversee one’s progress, push one toward deadlines and hurdles, and monitor one’s teaching. However helpful or generous it may often be, mentoring is also a form of surveillance, and getting tenure may promise some freedom from such constant oversight. In “Against Mentoring,” Elizabeth Losh raises concerns about the nature of the mentor-mentee relationship, suggesting the problems with patronizing relationships or those that seek to exploit unequal power dynamics. Losh stresses instead the importance of “hospitality, generosity, reciprocity, foresight, and responsibility” (686). As is the case with graduate students and junior colleagues, the best mentors seem to listen more than they speak; they wait to be asked more than they jump in to advise. 

In It for the Long Haul

The lives of graduate students, non-tenure-track faculty members, and pretenure faculty members are precarious, often marked by a sense of impermanence, particularly with respect to location; in contrast, newly tenured faculty members suddenly (and strangely) feel as if they are planted in one place. They are in it for the long haul. The challenge of such unfamiliar permanence is two-fold: not only do recently tenured faculty members have to figure out how to survive and thrive within one institution, with many of the same colleagues, and within a received curricular and governmental structure, they also have to determine how to make the changes that will ensure the continued relevance and vitality of their work—whether this means working to introduce changes within their institution or taking on a new position at a different institution. 

One of the key functions of mentors is to help new colleagues navigate the institution and its structures of governance (both those that are acknowledged in official documents and those perpetuated through custom or departmental culture). Each institution has histories that shape its ways of valuing faculty members and its ways of communicating. It is important to help new colleagues understand some of that history without burdening them with old battles and tensions. In my first job, a generous senior colleague warned me about the perils of promotion and tenure in my department, advising me to keep a paper record. But the same colleague resisted telling me all the war stories, which ultimately allowed me to find my own way among colleagues and divisions. 

Mentors can give newly tenured colleagues access to some of the archives of their institution: proposals for new curricular ventures; lists of hired, fired, or retired faculty members; memos about teaching loads and service obligations. They can show them samples (or redacted samples for confidential material) of the kinds of documents faculty members produce and reproduce. It can be helpful for newly tenured faculty members to realize that the current shape of the department or institution has changed, and often for the better (e.g., with new programs, inspirational hires, or renewed support for research). Knowing whose efforts shaped the current array of certificates, majors, or centers can encourage faculty members trying to initiate new programs. 

It can also be important for younger colleagues to realize that senior colleagues did not necessarily have the kinds of institutional support now common, such as two-course teaching loads, parental or family leave, third-year research leaves, or research budgets. Such historical context can lessen some of the endless discontent felt by faculty members—the sense that the institution should always do more—or it can sharpen the sense of what changes ought still to be made. A deeper sense of a department’s past can help junior colleagues be more generous when it comes to assessing senior colleagues’ level of productivity, it can help junior and senior colleagues find common cause, and it can help younger colleagues connect with colleagues who have managed to carry out their work over the course of many years and in the face of many changes. 

Mentors can also help their colleagues explore the wider possibilities of the institution: they might introduce them to colleagues outside their program or department, suggest possible connections and shared interests, point them to administrative services geared toward faculty development and learning, or encourage them to make use of existing support systems such as reading groups, writing collaboratives, and faculty seminars. Mentors can help new colleagues see the rich array of connections—those that go beyond the superficial names of programs, disciplinary categories, or rank. Many colleges and universities now offer interdisciplinary programs in fields such as women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, area studies, and digital humanities. Especially at a small school, it is important that new colleagues not assume that their only allies will be their peers in rank, age, gender, race, or discipline. Mentors can point out individuals with shared interests that are less readily apparent, less formal: the medievalist who also reads Trollope novels, the scientist who composes inventive writing assignments, the avid union representative, or the experienced member of the senate. At a larger university, faculty members can seek out interesting colleagues from other schools or programs, or from professional schools and centers, for collaboration on grants or curricular projects, for intellectual exchange that goes beyond the confines of the department. 

The Collected Letters and Memos

One reality of midcareer professionals is the overwhelming urgency of service commitments—departmental and university committees, graduate student projects and undergraduate requests for independent studies or thesis committees, curricular development, assessment (and the list goes on). It is not much of a joke to murmur about publishing the “collected letters of recommendation” as the requests pour in for letters needed in October and January for present and former students, non-tenure-track and junior colleagues going through reviews and tenure, senior colleagues needing letters for grants, and staff members needing to be reviewed. Tenured faculty members are also asked to review colleagues from other institutions for tenure and promotion—to read long dossiers and write complex assessments of others’ careers. It may be useful to talk through this process or to share sample tenure reviews or graduate recommendations. 

In addition to letters of review, tenured faculty members devote much of their time to writing administrative documents—those semianonymous compositions that propose new majors and certificates, justify budget requests, describe departments and programs and curricula and colleagues—sometimes for use in the department, sometimes sent out to the public or used by administrative units. These documents often have to be produced quickly, under pressure. They may seem urgent and important but just as often disappear into an inbox or the void. It is usually not clear ahead of time whether what you’re writing is boilerplate or the key argument in a funding struggle, and that uncertainty is part of what keeps the pressure on such writing. These documents are often temporally, authorially, and discursively complex: they incorporate past decisions and drafts into a current version, speak for and through multiple stakeholders, and involve not only practical details, budgetary projections, timelines, and sample course descriptions but also statements of educational philosophy, defenses of the humanities, and claims about the importance of writing or reading.

Once the documents are sent out, they may be read, edited, rewritten, quoted, redacted, or repurposed. Faculty members often have the eerie experience of reading pieces of these documents years later as silent quotations in a departmental brochure or on a Web site, as part of a statement about plagiarism or a claim about the importance of the humanities. In rare, fortuitous cases, a faculty member’s prose may circulate as part of the institution’s narrative—in mission statements, speeches, exchanges with alumni. Such writing can thus be highly influential and long-lasting, but it has little of the usual pleasures of authorship or publication. Volunteering—or, more often, being volunteered—to write administrative documents can be a way to ensure one’s voice is heard, but such responsibilities are often stressful and time-intensive. Administrative documents take considerable time and care; they require kinds of public (and often collaborative) writing that are different from what most scholars have experienced. The better you are at such writing, the more of it you will be asked to do, but with experience you learn to do it faster, more effectively, and with less angst. It’s now more or less commonplace to have leadership institutes or initiatives, but most senior faculty members, indeed most administrators, learned to lead by doing it, by reflecting on their successes and failures, by observing someone they admired, or by learning from the shortcomings of someone they did not. Mentors can help midcareer faculty members learn how to be good at service work. Mentors can help midcareer faculty members make such work more visible. They can help them understand that this type of work is the result of not only labor but also expertise. They can help ensure that service work leads to leadership roles and positions. 

Mentors help midcareer faculty members make important choices about how to manage these service obligations. Faculty members need to know when to accept new service roles, when to say no, or when to defer for another year. They need to know which roles will teach them something valuable or bring them into significant conversations and which are less visible but still important. After the pressured focus of the tenure process, it may be challenging to reframe the sense of obligation—the need to be part of a community, to share administrative and supervisory responsibilities, to be active in decision-making, consultation, and maintenance. 

Most academic institutions have moved toward some form of protection  from service obligations for untenured faculty members, and tenure processes focus far more energetically on research than on teaching. Pretenure faculty members do of course take on service work, and some—because of their particular expertise or status—may take on quite stressful and demanding roles. Midcareer faculty members who find themselves overcommitted to service and advising roles may well be the same faculty members who had undue pretenure service burdens. Faculty members of color and women faculty members, for example, are often called on to diversify personnel or curriculum committees or are in high demand to advise graduate students. Faculty members, especially those in small programs or in fields like composition, often face considerable responsibilities with respect to teacher training, supervision of part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members, and oversight of required courses with large enrollments. Faculty members with special expertise—in digital technology or in archival or community work, for example—may well be asked to do more than they are capable of taking on. It is a challenge to mentor such faculty members about service, since they no doubt feel the urgency of the call. Still, it is important to remind them to preserve some of their time and goodwill for other initiatives. 

Of course, part of the pleasure of being a faculty member, whether tenured or not, is being part of important decisions, being someone whose opinion matters, who gets to know colleagues by working with them on important issues or projects. Some service is self-serving, done to procure resources for teaching or research: faculty members write proposals for digital labs and classrooms, design systems for using films and video equipment, and work with libraries on archival collections. Service is another aspect of professional and community life that faculty members need to practice to learn how to do it well. It is important not to overwhelm recently tenured faculty members with administrative and service assignments, but longtime tenured faculty members may be eager to have such colleagues take over (or at least share) some of their labors. In such situations mentoring is needed for both newly tenured colleagues and those who have been midcareer for what feels like a long time. 

Remaking Yourself

One of the facts of life for graduate students and pretenure faculty members is the pressure of time: time to degree, time between major milestones, time squeezed in between the competing calls of teaching and research (not to mention life), what seems like a long time and then suddenly a much-too-short time of working toward tenure. One challenge faced by a newly tenured professor is that time and time pressure change. There are no longer the same external and goal-driven calendars, the urgent sense of pushing through to the next milestone. Time seems freer, more expansive, more forgiving. The newly tenured faculty member comes up for air, looks around, and tries to remember the ideas that were deferred or postponed in the push for promotion. It may take some time for a second project to emerge, and faculty members also need to learn how to take time: to read widely and deeply, to uncover more elusive texts or problems. It is necessarily a moment for regrouping. Faculty members may share incipient plans with a small writing group or try out new ideas as a graduate seminar. Senior colleagues can be helpful mentors at this stage by letting go, by not assuming they know the right path for their junior colleagues. Instead they can check in to hear about new ideas, offer to read the beginnings of a proposal, encourage experimentation or refashioning. They can help their junior colleagues map out a plan—a project, a reasonable timeline for completion, the support needed—and remind them that they can do this. 

It is important for midcareer faculty members to be open to change—to shifts in professional interests and projects, to changes in teaching, to different affiliations. It can be helpful to seek out colleagues in other departments or other parts of the university, to spend time away from one’s department. Many colleges and universities offer seminars to help foster such change: seminars on teaching writing or speaking, on diversity, on digital humanities. These types of seminars can help encourage innovative forms of both scholarship and teaching and can also widen one’s circle of colleagues. Interdisciplinary programs can broaden the scope of intellectual and collegial life, prompting shared intellectual projects or affiliations with newly developed curricular arrangements. Faculty members can collaborate on projects with librarians or digital experts; they can work with curricular specialists or technology experts. The middle of one’s career can be a time to experiment—to redesign courses, develop new expertise, or engage with new subject areas. It can be a time to repurpose older interests to suit new curricular programs. 

Another way of remaking oneself can be to move into administration, whether within or outside one’s department. Administrative roles allow faculty members to see their schools from different angles, to collaborate with colleagues to effect change or innovation. Administrative roles may require interaction with the public—work with local schools, the corporate world, or state legislatures, for example. Faculty members often groan about administrative assignments and complain about “the higher ups,” but administrative work can be a fulfilling and welcome change. Such work may allow faculty members to circulate in different ways within their institutions, work with colleagues from other administrative units, or get to know nonteaching professionals (e.g., people in human resources or those who work in a medical institute). Administrative work can be highly instructive, offering insights that may prove beneficial if or when one chooses to return to a teaching role. 

Pretenure faculty members are often warned not to stray too far from their departments, from the academic framework that will structure their progress toward tenure. This traditional concept of a siloed academy is in many places giving way to teaching and scholarship that cross disciplinary and academic boundaries. Midcareer faculty members can afford to turn more insistently toward the broader public, to make the investments of time and translation that are necessary to articulate their interests to those outside the academy. Public work may be an extended form of teaching, as is the case in projects that connect students with prisoners or collaborate with high school programs for accelerated learning. Such work can also be an extended form of service—for example, community literacy programs or activist theater groups. The move toward public work may be understood as a way not only of bringing certain types of expertise to communities outside the university but also of learning new things, of testing ideas in a more compelling context. In other words, work that enables an articulation of disciplines to (and with) audiences not already trained in their value and traditions can be a valuable way of bringing new ideas and pedagogical practices into the academy. 

The Shape of the Career

I often have graduate students read an interview with the noted French historian Natalie Zemon Davis, who lost her United States passport in the 1950s because her husband was under investigation by HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee). Not able to travel to French archives (and also caring for three children), Davis turned to working on rare books in the New York Public Library. She continued doing her work, but in a different vein, with different kinds of materials; she made the combination of archives and rare books a signature feature of her work. Davis’s is an extreme story about the pressure to reshape one’s career and about the success of such a reshaping. Not everyone’s chosen path is stymied by the forces of political intrigue and history; not everyone can forge a second career into an award-winning, protocol-bending intellectual arc. But Davis’s story reminds us that many careers—even ones that seem highly successful, highly focused and motivated—have been altered, paused, even frustrated by circumstances. And many careers have changed, adapted to circumstances, and found new directions. Her story suggests the value of being open to different paths, different ways of working, and different ways of rescaling or relocating projects to suit the exigencies of life and institutional culture. 

This is a valuable lesson for faculty members in the middle of their career, when they may face shifts in their disciplinary fields. Graduate students or the publishing market may be more inclined to other fields; undergraduates may no longer be attracted to certain kinds of fields of study and ways of learning. Sometimes faculty members need to change course because they have family obligations that make it difficult for them to travel to archives or spend months away from home doing research. Sometimes they need to find ways to support new teaching assignments, to align their teaching and scholarship more closely so they can be productive in both arenas instead of giving up one to satisfy the demands of the other. These kinds of external shifts and pressures call for imaginative solutions, for an ability to repurpose interests to new materials or methodologies or to come up with new scholarly projects based more closely on teaching or community experiences. Such faculty members may need additional mentoring to help them navigate such changes, as they engage with unfamiliar scholarship and pursue projects outside their area of expertise or experiment with different forms of publication. 

Of course, faculty members may also decide to shift direction because they feel as though they have exhausted a set of interests or research agendas. They may want to teach in different areas or using different materials and methods; they may want to develop new ways of engaging the public. The pressure to change comes not from external forces alone, but from the need to reinvent themselves, to keep things interesting over a long career, to address a perceived need for social or political change. They may see such a need in the public, in their field, or in their department and may decide that they are capable of finding ways to address it, as when scholars trained in historical studies taught themselves to become feminist critics or scholars of diasporic literatures. They may decide that what’s needed now is more courses focused on writing, literacy, or digital humanities; courses that center on popular or contemporary texts; or courses that privilege activism or community engagement. These are generally happy circumstances, changes that inspire or energize midcareer faculty members, but even so they can be challenging. Such transitions may call for the support of like-minded senior colleagues, for shared study or working groups, or for collective curricular projects that also lead to new forms of publication. Emerging fields need the support (and mentorship) of affiliated colleagues, people who see the value in the changes in direction and can help articulate the spaces between older and newer formations. These mentors need not be in newer fields, but they can help by being engaged and intellectually curious. They may mentor by helping publicize newer work or by educating more traditional colleagues on the value of the new, on its continuities as well as its breaks with the past. 

Life beyond the Academy

And last but certainly not least is the question of what to do about the ongoing calls of life outside the academy. Midcareer faculty members may have dependent children as well as aging parents. They may need to navigate issues concerning their partner’s employment, relocation, school options for their children, health, and finances. Many midcareer faculty members have postponed important life events while pursuing their doctorates or striving for tenure, and others have grown used to bracketing off the spaces between work and life in ways hard to sustain for the long haul. Mentoring at this stage, then, requires thinking about how to balance work and life. The mentors themselves may not have had the kinds of support now available (e.g., parental or family leave, spousal hires, health coaches), but it remains important not to dismiss the ongoing concerns of more junior colleagues. 

I remember a recently tenured colleague making an appointment to see me in my office (this in itself was curious). She started talking nervously about plans and the future, then blurted out that she was pregnant and wanted to know how to ask for maternity leave. As her mentor and friend, I expressed my unconditional joy for her and offered to help her find the information she needed on the university’s human resources Web site. Just as important, I also talked with her about how to let her other colleagues know, what she might need to ask for, and how she might handle the timing and balance of having children and a tenured job. An independent, highly confident feminist, she was nonetheless concerned that other colleagues and I would feel she’d let us down. And indeed, she got some pushback from other colleagues about the possible effects of her leave on her graduate students and on the program as a whole. However progressive institutions have become, faculty members continue to feel the strain of taking time away from their work to concentrate on their lives outside work.  

Midcareer faculty members have many life needs that may conflict with their work. Their own health may need attention and care. They may have to deal with loss—with the death or retirement of long-term colleagues or with the departure of graduate students, for example. If they haven’t already, they need to work on developing ways of relaxing, exercising, and using other parts of their minds. They need to indulge in extracurricular passions (e.g., singing, hiking, gardening, taking care of the environment, working on social justice). Hopefully they can align some of their work responsibilities with such passions: they might, for example, develop ways of teaching in the community. 

When it comes to both life and work, colleagues of all ages and ranks need to look after one another’s well-being. At times junior faculty members may need to mentor their more senior colleagues, whether this means helping them learn new methodologies, discover new authors and kinds of writing as well as new ways of reading them, or collaborate on projects or institutional goals. This essay has advocated for certain types of formalized mentoring that may support the path toward promotion. It has encouraged steady and generous mentoring relationships throughout the periods of change and stasis that characterize midcareer professional life. In the end, the mentoring relationship is more complex, and certainly less vertical, than the term mentoring suggests. Mentoring is necessarily a reciprocal act: it means paying attention to each other, checking in on each other to see about progress or signs of distress. The academy can do much to make such relationships more likely, more evenly distributed, more valued. Mentors and those they mentor need to work on making such relationships and interactions productive and sustainable. 

Works Cited

Benson, R. T., and K. R. Mathews, editors. COACHE Summary Tables: Selected Dimensions in Faculty Workplace Climate by Discipline, Race/Ethnicity, and Gender. Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2014, coache.gse.harvard.edu/research/statistical-reports. 

Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Interview.” Visions of History, edited by Henry Abelove et al., Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 97–122.

Losh, Elizabeth. “Against Mentoring.” American Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 685–91.

Mathews, K. R. Perspectives on Midcareer Faculty and Advice for Supporting Them. Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2014, coache.gse.harvard.edu/publications/perspectives-midcareer-faculty-and-advice-supporting-them.

We are entering an era of higher education in which the capacity to adapt matters more than size alone. For faculty members accustomed to thinking that the goal of any major is to grow, and who are convinced that enrollment management is a zero-sum game, a different age has dawned. Bigger is not necessarily better.

Since the 1960s the number of degree programs offered by baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities in the United States has ballooned from under two hundred to over 1,100. More majors has meant, on average, a smaller share of students for each. While a few individual degree programs retain an outsize share, students are mostly spreading out to newer degree programs, some of which have miniscule numbers of graduates.

Language and literature departments interested in creating new majors would be well advised to consider the changing landscape of higher education, in which niche programs are increasing in number. Too much attention is given to the outliers: big majors that keep getting bigger or online programs that enroll thousands. A look across the country reveals a very different and potentially more important trend: growing numbers of interdisciplinary and subdisciplinary majors, as well as small, nondepartmentalized disciplines. This development poses new organizational challenges at the department, college, and university level.

A close examination of the United States Department of Education’s degree-completion taxonomy and classification of instructional programs can give us a more realistic understanding of current trends in majors in higher education, as well as better tools for cultivating and preserving humanities programs. Analysis of this taxonomy and the data collected by means of it supports our contention that, when it comes to helping the humanities thrive, innovation and collaboration across small programs may be a better strategy than doubling down on a few large disciplines.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), an office within the Department of Education, records degree completions at colleges and universities across the country using a system called the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). As required by the Higher Education Act, colleges and universities report degree completions using standard CIP codes. The Department of Education (DOE) defines an instructional program as a collection of courses or experiences offered by a recognized institution of higher education that lead to a degree or comparable award (“Introduction” 1–2). For nearly a half century, the DOE has given CIP codes to an ever-widening range of programs. The latest revision added a CIP code for Hawaiian Language and Literature and one for Anthrozoology, for example. Changes to the CIP code taxonomy reflect trends in major degree-program offerings and provide the means by which those offerings are reported.

To better understand the structural change in higher education over time, we will delve into the historical development of the CIP code taxonomy, which is often overshadowed by reports about the current state of degree completions. Most of the time we hear about the fate of individual degrees or variously constructed categories like the humanities. One learns that, like stocks on the market, English is down and computer science is up. Buy STEM. Dump your holdings in the humanities. These headlines grab the attention of faculty members who teach in these majors—and may elicit feelings of schadenfreude for others. But they do not tell us anything about the larger framework within which the fate of any particular degree is decided. That framework matters, because it allows us to understand how the fates of humanities majors are shaped by changes in higher education as a whole.

The Degree-Program Explosion

In 1967 the federal government launched the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), which in its inaugural year recorded degrees awarded in 187 programs of study. Its taxonomic architecture was revamped in 1980 with the introduction of the CIP code scheme, which itself has since undergone a series of updates. In 1992 the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) replaced HEGIS as a means of organizing higher education data, including CIP data.¹ As of the 2020 update there are 2,149 distinct CIPs. We estimate that around 1,400 of these CIPs will be offered as four-year degrees.

The growing number of CIP codes is the result of a highly choreographed process of program review involving DC bureaucrats as well as college and university personnel from across the country. NCES collects information from course catalogs provided on college and university Web sites, conducts research, and identifies and reviews potentially new species of degrees (“Introduction” 3). After receiving input and suggestions from stakeholders—state coordinators, for instance—a CIP panel releases a revised scheme to the public for feedback. Once this feedback has been reviewed, the new CIP schema becomes the basis for IPEDS’s reporting on degree completions.

Colleges and universities have some flexibility when deciding how they classify degree programs. Such decisions might well be driven more by institutional program structures than by the CIP scheme. For instance, similar curricula in film and media studies may lead to completions recorded as Mass Communication/Media Studies (CIP code 09.0102), Film/Cinema/Media Studies (50.0601), or even English Languages and Literatures, General (23.0101).² If film faculty members work in a college of communications, it makes sense to record the completions in Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09). It may not make sense to do so, however, if those faculty members are part of a school of arts, which likely houses degrees in Visual and Performing Arts (50). Reporting completions under English, in contrast, would reflect a decision not to award a distinct degree in film and media studies.

In 2020 new CIP codes have been made available as part of the scheme’s revision. A sampling of these codes indicates the range of new offerings (table 1).

Table 1. Selected Additions to the 2020 CIP Scheme. Source: Classification of Instructional Programs, 2020 Revision, National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/default.aspx?y=56. 

Examples like Anthrozoology, Thanotology, and Data Science demonstrate how the CIP code taxonomy is built, with an initial two-digit number indicating degree-program family, followed by a four-digit number, the first two digits of which indicate the genus and the second two of which indicate species. Since there can be no individual program species without a genus, in some instances both a new genus and a species with the same name will be added at the same time (e.g., Anthrozoology). The 2020 revision shows considerable growth in CIP family number 30, also known as Multi-/Interdisciplinary Studies.

There are various possible reasons for the new CIPs featured in the 2020 revision, especially given the breadth of the taxonomy, which covers all postsecondary degrees, from associate’s to doctoral. Changes in faculty research specialization, response to demand from students, response to demand from a changing national or regional economy, collaboration with local employers, and myriad other explanations might be behind the changes. A closer look at some humanities additions to the 2020 CIP scheme indicates that someone has a stake in developing these fields but does not explain whether those stakeholders are administrators or faculty members working in these fields (table 2).

Table 2. Selected Humanities Additions to the 2020 CIP Scheme. Source: Classification of Instructional Programs, 2020 Revision, National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/default.aspx?y=56.

This is important: the humanities are not balkanized by the CIP scheme but rather infuse the taxonomy in ways that may seem surprising. The scheme’s conceptual arrangement of fields does not correspond to the organizational chart of any institution.

In fact, the CIP might offer a more accurate picture of the history of the academy in the United States than can be gleaned from the various disciplinary histories through which so many of us know higher education’s past. The evolution of the taxonomy highlights cross-pollination and schism, novelty and innovation. In contrast, disciplinary histories tend to tell narratives of rise and inevitable fall.

Consider the degrees nested within CIP family 23, English Language and Literature/Letters. The history of this CIP category offers a snapshot of a disciplinary array that has grown increasingly complex. There were no changes in 2020, but previously the taxonomy was highly unstable, spinning off degrees, generating new ones within English Language and Literature/Letters, and reorganizing those degrees in various configurations (table 2).

Faculty members in English departments may recognize a process whereby some areas of teaching and instruction slowly differentiate themselves and then drift away. For example, in 2010 Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies came to name a genus of three different degree programs within English. Previously, those programs may have existed in English but been invisible to IPEDS, or they may have been organized under some other CIP. The same process of differentiation has also affected more explicitly literary programs of study. New degrees like American Literature (United States) as well as Children’s and Adolescent Literature emerged and were rearranged during the period from 1990 to 2010 (see table 3).

Table 3. English Languages and Literature/Letters (CIP 23), 2000 to 2010 Crosswalk. Source: Classification of Instructional Programs, 2000 to 2010 Crosswalk, National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/Files/Crosswalk2000to2010.csv.

Creative Writing might appear to be a possible still point in the shifting landscape. It was a degree option in the HEGIS scheme, and it remains one today. However, it has also spawned options in other CIP families, including Visual and Performing Arts (CIP 50), home of Playwriting and Screenwriting (50.0504) as well as Theatre Literature, History and Criticism (50.0505). Likewise, rhetoric has appeared in new locations beyond English, for example, as part of Communication, Journalism, and Related Programs (09).³ Writing instruction also appears in Basic Skills and Developmental/Remedial Education (32). One might be surprised to learn that Comparative Literature, Classics, and Linguistics were grouped with English in the HEGIS taxonomy. All of them had struck out on their own by 2000.

These changes to the scheme make apparent the realignment and dissemination of humanities degrees one might otherwise think of as neatly nested within a select number of traditional families (English, History, etc.). Each CIP revision not only captures a moment amid ongoing instability but also manifests areas of taxonomic coherence. A perfect example of this may be found in Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics (CIP 16).

Degrees in various languages and literatures nest right where one expects them to within a geographically delimited taxonomy. In the left-hand column of figure 1, expanded genus categories reveal the species within. The genus categories in the right-hand column may also have species under them, although we have not shown them here.

Biological and Biomedical Sciences (CIP 26) presents similarly tidy organization in some areas. At the same time, it includes categories like 26.11 and 26.12, which show the conventional definition of biology stretching to accommodate computational approaches, technology development, and other emphases that had not previously fallen under its purview. The sciences, like the humanities, evolve.

Aggregation Is Always Misleading

The proliferation of new credentials and the drama of defining relations among fields of instruction disappear, however, when CIP data is aggregated. This, unfortunately, is how that data is most typically encountered. We have all seen charts like the one included in Benjamin Schmidt’s 2018 Atlantic essay on the state of humanities majors. Colored lines labeled Religion, History, and English plummet toward the X axis, capturing graphically the fall from grace that dominates in disciplinary histories of humanities fields.

This kind of aggregation makes data recorded through the CIP code scheme intelligible, but it also introduces a misleading narrative. Precisely because it demands that we only see monoliths like “English” rather than the variety apparent within the scheme, such aggregation fails to render the way higher education is changing. As we have shown, humanities degrees show up in parts of the taxonomy where one may not expect to find them—for instance, in Medical Humanities (CIP 51.3204) or any of the multidisciplinary hybrids in CIP 30. The tendency of the humanities, like all disciplines, to cross-pollinate and propagate throughout the scheme cannot be captured by a plunging trend line. No future is anticipated by this kind of chart. Instead, such figures depict a fall from grace, while simultaneously erasing the new terrain created by the explosive growth of degrees.

It is possible to get a sense of what is left out of the plummeting humanities charts by comparing the aggregation scheme employed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the method used by the NCES. In NSF publications, including the Survey of Earned Doctorates, a field group called Humanities and arts includes four categories: Foreign languages and literature, History, Letters, and Other humanities and arts (“Technical Notes,” Table A-6). There is more here than meets the eye. No one can earn a degree in Other humanities and arts, of course. That label aggregates some nineteen different degree areas, ranging from Archaeology (which also appears under the aggregation Social Sciences) to Theology/Religious Education (SED). That latter category gets its own data line in the NCES aggregations (Theology and Religious Vocations), which also include lines for English language and literature/letters and the remarkable catchall Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities (“Table 318.50”). Perceptions of degree share will vary according to which of these competing schemes one follows. Neither the NCES nor the NSF, we stipulate, sets out to deceive its readers. Misprision results from the generic conventions of the share report, where intelligibility demands that the many hundreds of fields in which a college student might actually major be reduced to a few bundles—perhaps as many as fifty if the data is presented in tabular form, far fewer if a pie chart or time-series plot presents it. Representing share in this manner means obfuscating the university’s actual structure.

The Web site of the Humanities Indicators project, run by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, offers a helpful gloss on the challenge of aggregation, maintaining that “[t]he organizations and studies from which indicator data are drawn may include different disciplines within the humanities. For example, some count all theology and ministry courses as humanities instruction; others class history as one of the social sciences; still others assume all general education to be humanistic” (“Context”). The point is not that competing aggregations are wrong but rather that all aggregation is contestable. Aggregation reflects, to put it somewhat differently, the historical debates that have shaped and reshaped definitions of the humanities—and the social sciences, and the sciences.

Most practicing scholars in fields such as English and the languages are aware that the humanities, as a category, has changed over time. We see no reason to rehearse that history here. Neither are we particularly interested in valorizing one of the various present-day norms for including disciplines within, or excluding them from, that category. Instead, in recalling that the humanities are always an aggregation of existing degree programs, and in noting that the pretended clarity of such aggregations is always misleading, we want to make it easier to recognize what IPEDS data reveal by resisting the urge to aggregate.

Disaggregated shares of degree completions can be likened to television shares, the technical term for the percent of the total audience watching a given program at a given time. In 2018, the most recent year of NCES data available as we write this article, a given program in the CIP system captured, on average, 0.09% of all completed bachelor’s degrees. The top quartile of degree programs producing the most completions—285 CIPS—have a share of 0.04% or greater. That is not a typo: most of the most popular degree programs have an extremely small share of the overall pie. A very small number do very well, comparatively speaking. CIP code 23.0101, English Language and Literature, General, claimed 1.6% of all degree completions in 2018. CIP code 16.0905, Spanish Language and Literature, claimed 0.3%. And CIP code 52.0201, Business Administration and Management, General, ruled the roost with a 7% share. Those and the other select outliers are the lone dots on the right-hand side of figure 3.

The outliers are not the story, although they do get a lot of press. The story is the cluster of very small numbers on the left side of the chart, which confirms that mean share is going nowhere but down, as represented by figure 4, which also reveals the consequences of CIP revision for individual degree share. A significant drop in the average followed the introduction of new CIP codes in 2010, and we can expect another drop in 2020. More degrees on offer necessarily means that each can expect a smaller share on average. Meanwhile, the median share number remains basically flat, at around 0.01%.

Fig. 4. Source: Chart by the authors created using completion data and institutional characteristics compiled in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (provisional release data for 2018), nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx.

As average share drops, one should imagine undergraduate-degree seekers spreading out, taking advantage of new and different degree options as they appear. The resulting dynamic is not a zero-sum game in which an increasing number of business majors means a decreasing number of history majors, for example. Rather, a select number of degree programs with historically large numbers of graduates are losing share to upstart degrees. Many of those upstart degrees were designed and are taught by faculty members who once, or perhaps still, teach in the majors that are now losing share. Some new degrees, moreover, surely are administered by the very same departments in charge of other, older degrees that have lost share.

Degree and department are not the same thing. English departments offering literature degrees might also participate in interdisciplinary majors with other departments, as well as offer several majors of their own in rhetoric or creative writing. Humanities professors trained in disciplines other than English regularly teach both in English and in degree programs across campus. This is not a sign that the humanities are in danger. To the contrary, it indicates that they are nimble, responsive, and sustainable. A student majoring in medical humanities rather than English is still pursuing humanistic study.

A different measure of audience better reveals the reorganization of university curricula than does degree share. In broadcasting, reach is the term used to designate the percentage of a total target audience exposed to programming at least once during a given period. In translating this concept to higher education, one might define reach as the percentage of students who could have chosen to finish a given program because it was available at their institutions. Reach enables new questions: instead of asking how many students completed a given degree program, reach asks how many students could access it. Discovering the reach of a degree program further encourages us to recognize the increasingly common approach of attracting comparatively small, but often profoundly committed, audiences to degree programs that exist in relatively few places.

Reach thus also offers a different way to contextualize and evaluate program success, one that may allow us to think a little differently about curricular innovation. It requires us to acknowledge, in a way share does not, that no program is available at every baccalaureate-granting institution. A bigger reach is not necessarily better: to the contrary, programs might seek to attract students by cultivating relatively scarce niches. That strategy may explain why median reach is so low—1.48% in 2018. After 2010 the majority of degree programs reached fewer than 1.5% of those who completed degrees. The average is raised significantly by a handful of ubiquitous degrees (table 4) and by programs that are expanding their reach (fig. 5).⁴

Fig. 5. Source: Chart by the authors created using completion data and institutional characteristics compiled in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (provisional release data for 2018), nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx.

Very few programs are nearly ubiquitous. For those outliers, high reach guarantees high share, but there is variance in this group, as seen in table 4. There are eight CIP codes that have greater than 80% reach, and their share varies from 0.7% (Chemistry) to 7% (Business Administration and Management).

Table 4. The Eight CIP Codes with More than 80% Reach, 2017–18. Source: Table by the authors created using completion data and institutional characteristics compiled in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (provisional release data), nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx.

Reach indicates the full breadth and variety of institutional and student interest better than share does. Students find subjects to study for all sorts of reasons, and institutions create degree programs for all sorts of reasons, too. The mere fact that a degree program is available does not lead to large numbers of students in that program, although there are degrees with both high reach and high share, like psychology and business. Clearly, however, programs with both high reach and high share are not the only ones deemed sustainable in the current environment. Programs with dedicated followings can be low in reach. Low-reach programs will be necessarily low in share compared to the ubiquitous majors, but low-reach programs that find an audience might see their share increasing relative to other low-reach programs.

At a time when the broader landscape of higher education is changing, it would be perilous to rely on a singular metric of success. As every institution that has chased an emergent degree program knows, it can be costly to do what everyone else is doing, and to do so well enough to recruit students. It is far better, we think, to map the wider landscape and attempt to find a distinctive place within it. Humanities professors would also do well to adopt that broader view. If you mainly derive your academic identity from your department, it is likely that you are not thinking about the university or college where you work in a manner that will allow you to help shape its future.

Viewed together, reach and share suggest that when it comes to curricular development, it is easier to cultivate a new niche than to defend an old territory. Consider what is happening in the languages. Over the past decade the three major European languages of study—Spanish, French, and German—are decreasing in reach, while programs in other languages have seen their reach grow. Figure 6 shows this pattern for the twenty largest degree programs in foreign languages. For many of the other thirty-four CIP codes in family 16—for example, Sanskrit, American Indian/Native American Languages, Norwegian, and Turkish—increase in reach has been significant, although these programs’ share of total degrees remains negligible.

The languages follow the general pattern: as program variety grows, the overall tendency is toward increasingly uneven distributions. Colleges and universities distinguish themselves through differences in program offerings. To the extent that our programs help such attempts at distinction, we may understand ourselves as finding success in a different way than that available to us when we dwell on degree share alone.

Bigger may not be better if it does not allow your institution to distinguish itself in the context of decreasing numbers of traditional-age undergraduates and the resulting increase in competition to recruit and retain students. Lots of degree programs have very dedicated student and alumni populations, even if some of those programs are only graduating a handful of students every year. In an environment where niches proliferate, curricular programming is more like Netflix than basic cable, although thanks to the CIP scheme and the NCES reports, it is easier to see who is enrolling in what degree programs than it is to see who is watching what on video-streaming platforms. There is virtue in serving such diverse tastes and cultivating institutional distinction. The axiom that not all institutions can be all things to all people is abundantly clear to senior staff members, but it is best expressed through the creative activity of curricular development.

Thinking of reach instead of share may help us see how curricular innovation contributes to an increasingly diverse higher education ecosystem. Instead of imagining the goal as snatching students from another major, consider opportunities to team up with colleagues in other programs and departments in order to offer those students something new.

Finding ways to collaborate with other departments is an essential way to develop innovative degree programs. Many of the proliferating niche majors carve up existing institutional bureaucracies in creative ways, sourcing instructors from multiple units or identifying cohorts of faculty members within existing departments. Collaboration across departments to generate new programs is not in itself new, of course. Women’s studies, for example, has long enabled the joint efforts of humanists and social scientists, many of whom on small or less-well-resourced campuses have cross appointments. Today, such multidisciplinary experimentation is an emergent norm, as the wealth of new interdisciplinary degree programs in the 2020 CIP scheme revision confirms.

New amalgams like Economics and Foreign Language/Literature or Medical Humanities offer us intriguing possibilities to work with colleagues across campus rather than defend ourselves against them. In addition to responding to student demand and exciting changes in our fields, innovative emergent degree programs can breathe new life into existing ones, especially if they involve collaboration across departments. Faculty members who teach in both new and well-established degree programs may find that each program feeds the other in surprising ways.

In the decade ahead, large departments like English will likely continue to lose share. We should bear in mind that this decline not only indexes student demand but also indicates the ever-increasing diversity of fields with which all others clamor for attention. It is also true that the time of English as a big tent characterized by its ability to shelter other fields has passed. As degree programs proliferate across universities, these programs clearly want the distinction that comes from visibility within the CIP scheme. Embracing a future of program niches means an opportunity for English faculty members to make new alliances, and on more even terms. It is better to make allies than to claim turf, we can only conclude.

Notes

1 IPEDS reports on all sorts of numbers beyond degree completions, including financial data, faculty demographics, and staffing levels across student services and other types of administrative offices.

2 With the CIP Wizard tool (nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/wizard/default.aspx?y=56), users may look up particular CIP codes as well as compare various revisions to the taxonomic scheme.

3 There is surely a longer tale to tell here, one that would also include the drift of some versions of rhetoric from mass communications to English.

4 Space does not permit elaboration of data, but it is possible to identify the programs that are gaining traction in terms of reach, just as one can track gains and losses of share.

Works Cited

“Context for the Humanities Indicators.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018, www.amacad.org/context-humanities-indicators.

“Introduction to the Classification of Instructional Programs: 2020 Edition (CIP-2020).”National Center for Education Statistics, 2019, nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/Files/2020_CIP_Introduction.pdf.

Schmidt, Benjamin. “The Humanities Are in Crisis.” The Atlantic, 23 Aug. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/.

SED: Survey of Earned Doctorates: July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. National Science Foundation, 2019, www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctorates/surveys/srvydoctorates-2019.pdf.

“Table 318.50. Degrees Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Control of Institution, Level of Degree, and Field of Study: 2016–17.” National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_318.50.asp?current=yes.

“Technical Notes.” National Science Foundation, 2017, ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19301/technical-notes.

Founded in 2015, the MLA’s Working Group on K–16 Alliances, which I was an original member of, sought to connect the K–12 and postsecondary educational communities in order to build support for teaching modern languages, writing, and literature at all levels.¹ Bridging the gap between K–12 and postsecondary humanities education is a large and daunting task, but it can be done. The work of the MLA group and its successor committee has led to the discovery of a few strategies you might implement at your institution to engage secondary schools in communities near you. These strategies include participating in collaborative programs, such as summer institutes, writing camps, and writing contests, with like-minded organizations; publishing the writing and research of K–12 teachers; creating writing centers in local middle and high schools; fostering learning and teaching opportunities for secondary school teachers and their students; and organizing conferences with an eye toward attracting K–12 instructors.

Collaborative Programs

I’d like to share specific examples of how we at the University of Connecticut (UConn)—and others—have implemented collaborative programs with secondary schools. Our collaborations with educational and professional organizations have helped bridge the divide between secondary and postsecondary institutions in order to bolster humanities education at all levels.²

Summer Institutes and Writing Camps

In many ways, summer institutes work like cooperative programs, distributing university-level research to the public. A summer institute can help expose K–12 teachers and graduate students to current research on the teaching of writing. The National Writing Project (NWP), an organization that has been building alliances between secondary and postsecondary education since 1974, collaborates with higher education institutions to organize invitational summer institutes. These institutes typically run for four weeks and offer participants six graduate credits. Coursework focuses on both theory and practice (e.g., Research in the Teaching of Writing, Writing Workshop). Institutes distinguish themselves by attracting teachers from all levels and disciplines, which promotes both vertical and horizontal professional communication. The long-term benefit of this level and degree of communication for both teachers and students is tremendous. At UConn, these institutes are affiliated with the English department, though NWP sites around the country have historically been housed equally in English departments and schools of education.³

Although summer institutes can host only a limited number of teachers each year, the benefit over time is far-reaching. In the history of our NWP site, the Connecticut Writing Project at UConn, which dates to 1982, we average fourteen to fifteen teachers per summer, from grades K–16, and from just about all disciplines (though science teachers have been scarce and math teachers almost nonexistent). That amounts to more than 570 teachers in the last thirty-eight years, which may sound like a small number, until one considers the ripple effect those 570+ teachers have had on their colleagues and students, influencing statewide curriculum and instruction throughout the decades.

Similar opportunities exist for those who teach languages other than English—for instance, the long-standing summer programs offered by the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota and the summer and school-year offerings organized by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy at the University of Arizona. And certainly other models exist.

While not every educator works at a university with an NWP site that offers an annual invitational summer institute for pre-K–20 writing teachers, the NWP’s model for cross-level and interdisciplinary professional learning provides a helpful example of collaborative learning that fosters sustained intellectual and practical alliances built around research-informed pedagogy. Although some things have changed for the NWP since federal funding became irregular in 2011 and nonexistent in 2016, so that many writing project sites have had to adapt to the lack of funds and become more flexible (e.g., offering shorter-term institutes of a week or two, offering a virtual institute, or holding traditional four-week institutes only every other year), the NWP still provides one of the best frameworks for K–16 (or pre-K–20) alliances.

Besides summer institutes, writing project sites sponsor all kinds of activities in public, and occasionally private, schools, including professional development workshops, teaching observations, coteaching, and demonstration lessons. These sites also host on-campus writing groups, writing retreats, and professional development workshops on writing.

Summer writing camps for K–12 students are offered by NWP sites all over the United States. Examples include the Oklahoma State University Writing Project’s Teen Writers’ Camp, which has focused on genres such as the graphic novel and songwriting, and the University of Georgia Red Clay Writing Project’s Camp Red Clay for Kids. These programs allow educators from different teaching contexts to collaborate on projects involving program delivery, curriculum building, and assessment, giving them tools that they can take back to their home schools. These programs often bring K–12 students into direct contact with university teachers, who may participate as visiting contributors, even if only for a day or two. Such programs also enable students from otherwise marginalized groups to visit college and university campuses, helping make clear to these students that they would be welcome to apply to and enroll at these institutions later in their academic careers. These opportunities are usually advertised on NWP Listservs, in NWP print mailings, and on NWP Web sites.

Writing Contests

Writing contests provide another opportunity for K–12 students to hone and sometimes even publish their writing. Hosting writing contests can help students from diverse backgrounds feel connected to higher education. We at UConn have our own thirty-one-year-old contest, Connecticut Student Writers, which each year receives around eighteen hundred submissions from K–12 students from over four hundred classrooms and over two hundred schools. We host several other contests, including a Region-at-Large contest (for regions without a state contest), and we will soon be an affiliate partner for the Scholastic Writing Awards, a statewide scholastic writing contest for students in grades 7–12. We also host Connecticut’s Letters About Literature contest, which each year receives between one thousand and fifteen hundred submissions from fourth- through twelfth-grade students across the state. Different types of educators are involved in these contests. Between twenty and thirty K–12 teachers volunteer to be judges for the regional contest. For the statewide contest we plan to use a similar number of university faculty members from UConn as well as faculty members from other colleges and universities.

The winners of these contests are published in different places. Our own magazine, Connecticut Student Writers, publishes the writing of seventy-eight students (six per grade level) and the art of between twenty-six and thirty-nine students (an average of two or three works per grade level). The Scholastic Writing Awards program also publishes the work of its winners in a nationally distributed magazine of student writing, and while the Library of Congress no longer sponsors Letters about Literature and therefore no longer publishes the winners, we publish the writing of the statewide winners on our Web site.

There are a number of ways to get started on an endeavor to publish student writing. The easiest might be to piggyback onto an existing program such as the Scholastic Writing Awards or Letters about Literature, which many states continue to support through the sponsorship of a state Center for the Book or a university writing project. A teacher or professor could contact the Scholastic Writing Awards program about becoming a regional partner or contact their state’s Center for the Book about sponsoring a Letters about Literature contest. Because so many NWP sites sponsor some type of youth writing program, finding and reaching out to one of these sites, even one at a university other than your own, could be a good place to begin. The NWP home page allows users to locate NWP sites all over the country. Writing contests can be especially effective when paired with dual or concurrent enrollment programs.

Publishing K–12 Teachers’ Writing and Research

Another great way to bridge the divide between secondary and postsecondary education is to encourage K–12 teachers to publish their writing and research. When I took over as director of our writing-project site, I inherited a tradition of publishing a chapbook of creative writing by the most recent summer institute participants. I expanded on that tradition when I decided to begin holding an annual creative writing contest for teachers affiliated with our site. We now publish an annual journal showcasing the writing of the contest winners. We receive contest submissions from about fifty teachers each year. I have graduate students from our creative writing program serve as judges and pay them a small stipend.

I have also worked to promote the research of K–12 teachers by offering small research grants of up to $500. Teachers could use this money to buy books, attend a conference, or purchase technology. They were then required to write a short article about their research, which I would publish in a small journal.

Blogging is another great way for teachers to reach a larger audience. Recent articles by Paul Dicken and Leonard Cassuto in The Chronicle of Higher Education have urged higher education professionals to write for the public. One of the best ways to promote alliances with K–12 educators is to blog about our research and teaching. For the past decade I have published a weekly blog for K–16 teachers that is read by hundreds, and sometimes over a thousand, teachers every week. Sometimes readers tell me they even share my posts with their students.

Writing Center Outreach

Shortly after I was hired at UConn in 2007, I was approached by my colleague Tom Deans, who was interested in restarting a high school writing center program. He wondered if we could work together to tap into my network of middle and high school teachers to find schools interested in establishing writing centers fashioned after the university’s model.

Twelve years later, Tom and I are still working to establish peer writing centers in area middle and high schools. To date we have helped create centers in about a dozen schools, and since 2009 we have held an annual fall conference open to teachers from around the state that has helped a number of additional schools establish writing centers without our direct intervention.⁴

At UConn we use the writing project site to recruit teachers from area high schools, and a handful of middle schools, to host and run writing centers. These teachers will occasionally offer courses based on our one-credit practicum course for undergraduate student tutors. We dedicate a graduate student—typically one recruited from the dual degree bachelor’s and master’s program in English and secondary English education—and up to four undergraduate tutors to work with the secondary school teacher to recruit and train high school students to run a peer writing center. Because of the instantaneous and widespread interest in this collaboration, we began hosting an annual fall conference, entering its twelfth year this fall, that draws well over one hundred teachers and students.

Teaching and Learning Opportunities

K–12 students and teachers can be integrated into college writing programs in many ways. We help foster a community of K–16 learners when we allow high school students to take college-level courses and when secondary school teachers are allowed to take master’s courses or to teach university-level writing courses.

Early College Experience

As the director of the Connecticut Writing Project at UConn, I had the opportunity to become involved with the Early College Experience (ECE) English program, which I am now the assistant coordinator of. The ECE program is the oldest and largest dual enrollment program in the country.  Dual enrollment programs offer college-level first-year courses in high schools, which allow qualified high school students to earn college credit, sometimes transferring in a semester’s or more worth of credits and thereby saving thousands of dollars. Several years ago our program received national accreditation from the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships. As a result, we were told to conduct more site visits to participating high schools. In the process we learned a lot about what was taking place in these high schools. Most important, however, we began to build stronger relationships with teachers in these schools. These improved relationships helped us all feel more collectively and equally involved in the education of high school seniors and first-year college students. Site visits also helped establish regular contact between our faculty members and high school teachers. Each high school teacher was able to develop a personal and professional relationship with a graduate student or university faculty member whom they were encouraged to perceive as a peer and a collaborator, not as a superior or an evaluator.

I began volunteering to conduct site visits to observe teachers, and now I visit about twenty teachers a year and help organize two annual conferences for ECE teacher professional development (one each semester). My colleague Scott Campbell, the coordinator of these conferences, also runs a three-day summer institute for high school ECE teachers that is very popular and well attended. High school teachers must attend one of these conferences every two years in order to maintain certification. Similar concurrent enrollment programs around the country—including joint enrollment honors programs, for instance, which are similar to dual/concurrent/ECE programs except that they specifically recruit high school students into a university honors program—offer yet another way for university faculty members to connect with high school educators and their students. If your university or high school lacks a concurrent enrollment program, a great place to start learning about such a program is at the Web site of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships.

MA in English for Teachers

Offering courses for high school teachers allows postsecondary institutions to develop a core of highly qualified high school English teachers who are tied to our departments in myriad ways. In the state of Connecticut, teachers are required to earn a master’s degree to maintain their initial certification and to earn a second graduate degree or its equivalent to attain professional certification. The latter must include content-area-specific coursework. In my department we seized on this requirement by offering teachers an opportunity to earn that second degree (or at least to take some of the coursework for that degree) with us. Since 2010 we have offered a nonresidential track to the MA in English specifically for secondary school English teachers. This not only helps us fill classes and make sure courses run,  it also helps us meet the certification and professional development needs of the teachers. We also try to offer courses in areas like rhetoric and composition, young adult literature, and ethnic literature that are necessary for and of interest to these teachers in time slots that are favorable to their schedules. We’re also working on developing some of these courses as summer or online courses to further accommodate the needs of these teachers. We advertise this degree track to teachers as a way for them to qualify to become ECE teachers or to participate in the intensive portion of our writing center outreach program, which is when a graduate student and undergraduate tutors are dedicated to coming to a school for the purpose of training secondary students to run their peer writing center.

High School–College Partnerships

Partnerships between high schools and colleges can take many forms. Having K–12 English teachers teach first-year writing classes is a great way to build a pool of teachers for these courses. High school teachers do especially well with first-year sections designated for non-native English speakers and other students who aren’t quite ready for our regular first-year classes. In the past we have had as many as twelve high school English teachers and one Spanish teacher supplementing our core of graduate students and regular adjuncts.

This type of partnership is mutually beneficial. These high school teachers offer our students their teaching expertise. They also teach evening sections, which helps accommodate students who may have to work during the day. For the high school teachers, the benefits of teaching with a foot in each world is tremendous. They can bring their expertise with high school students to bear on their work with university students who are only one year out of high school, and they can bring their experiences with college-level writing courses, and the expectations of those courses, back to the high school classroom.

The opportunity to foster improved collaboration between the English department (or world language department) and the university’s school of education is another largely untapped source of outreach and contact. Schools of education regularly work with public schools through clinical placements, student teaching, and graduate internships, and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation requires every English department to offer a handful of core classes on topics such as advanced composition, grammar, young adult literature, ethnic literature, and world literature, in addition to a variety of historical and genre survey courses, which all preservice English teachers are required to take (NCTE Guidelines). And yet despite these requirements, English departments and schools of education, especially at large institutions such as UConn, communicate and collaborate very little.  Offering these courses can be advantageous to teachers, higher education institutions, and students of all ages.

I teach several courses that help integrate high school teachers and students into our university’s community. These courses include Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, which all the secondary English education majors are required to take. In this course I have my students work as reading and writing mentors to sophomores at the local high school.⁵

I also teach a one-credit induction course of sorts for incoming English majors who express interest in applying to the School of Education. As part of the requirements for this course, my students interview in-service middle and high school teachers. This is not merely another way to build relationships with secondary school teachers; after teaching this course for the last nine years, I now find that some of those middle and high school teachers direct their students to my class, making the course something of a recruitment tool for the English major.

Conferences

Another way to collaborate with secondary schools is to hold conferences that are expressly designed for K–12 teachers or that they are welcome to attend and participate in. Again, schools of education do this all the time. Central Connecticut State University has for years run a terrific conference for K–16 educators called Literacy Essentials, but English Departments don’t typically do this. Dual or concurrent enrollment programs might; our ECE program does. But there are other avenues one might also consider.

For nearly fifteen years, our first-year writing program has held a conference on the teaching of writing. While mainly geared toward college-level writing instructors, and especially toward university faculty members involved in first-year writing programs, this conference has always been advertised to the secondary school teachers in our network, especially those high school English teachers affiliated with our NWP site and ECE program. There have always been secondary school attendees, and in fact a few over the years who have given papers or even organized panels.

Other colleges and universities like Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus and Champlain College offer young writers’ conferences for high school students and summer institutes for high school teachers, which are similar in design to what NWP sites offer. Capitalizing on conferences as a means of K–16 bridging can be as simple as making area school teachers and school districts aware of opportunities to come to an on-campus event involving university faculty members. For instance, Stacie McCormick, a faculty member in the English department at Texas Christian University, is currently planning a symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. By reaching out to partners in the College of Education and recent alumni of undergraduate and graduate programs who are now working in secondary school settings, McCormick has been able to build attendance for the upcoming conference while also offering high school teachers a meaningful opportunity for professional development. Such outreach can eventually lead to more sustained partnerships, as seen, for instance, in the partnership between several faculty members in Texas Christian University’s Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and Forth Worth district school teachers, who are working together to develop new curriculum for the entire district in order to infuse Latinx studies across all grade levels.

Surely there are other programs and resources beyond what I’ve described in this essay, and I invite readers to share those with me and the readers of Profession. In addition to the resources listed at the end of this essay, I recommend starting with What Is “College-Level” Writing?, volumes 1 and 2, and Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom.

Overall, I and others involved in the MLA  Committee on K–16 Alliances have found that we have many opportunities for bridge-building and that these opportunities are as rewarding for university faculty members and our students as they are for the K–12 educators and their students. The MLA has been a tremendous source of professional support for so many of us, but by allying ourselves with other professional organizations that are more directly connected with our colleagues in K–12 education, we can broaden our knowledge and our influence. I speak for all members of the MLA committee when I say that creating these types of alliances and collaborations benefits all participating institutions by promoting forms of communication and collaboration that both affirm and embody the vitality, dynamism, and relevance of our fields.

Resources

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL): www.actfl.org/

Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) Aligning for Student Success: www.acct.org/product/aligning-student-success-2018

Association of Departments of English (ADE): www.ade.mla.org/

Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL): www.adfl.mla.org/

Bread Loaf Teacher Network: www.middlebury.edu/blse/bltn

Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) Summer Institutes: carla.umn.edu/institutes/

Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy (CERCLL): cercll.arizona.edu/summer-workshops-series/

Central Connecticut Student Writing Project: www.ccswp.org/

Champlain College Young Writers’ Conference: forms.champlain.edu/form_undergrad/youngwriters

Common Core State Standards: www.corestandards.org/

Connecticut Human Rights and Youth Action Summit, Thomas J. Dodd Center at the University of Connecticut: thedoddcenter.uconn.edu/k-12-education/chryas/

Connecticut Student Writers: cwp.uconn.edu/ct-student-writers-magazine-2/

Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University, Summer Young Adult Literacy Labs: cwpfairfield.org/summerlabs/

Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University, Ubuntu Academy: cwpfairfield.org/community/

Connecticut Writing Project at the University of Connecticut: cwp.uconn.edu/

English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE): www2.ncte.org/groups/elate/

Kennesaw State University Writing Center, High School Partnerships: writingcenter.kennesaw.edu/writing_support/highschool-partnerships.php

Library of Congress, Center for the Book: www.read.gov/cfb/

Library of Congress, Letters about Literature: read.gov/letters/

MLA Committee on K–16 Alliances: www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Committees/Committee-Listings/Professional-Issues/Committee-on-K-16-Alliances

MLA Working Group on K–16 Alliances: k16alliances.mla.hcommons.org/working-group/

Narrative 4: narrative4.com/

National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP): www.nacep.org/

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE): www2.ncte.org/

National Writing Project (NWP): www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/about.csp

New England Young Writers’ Conference: sites.middlebury.edu/neywc/

Oklahoma State University Teen Writers’ Camp: osuwritingproject.okstate.edu/2017-songwriting-teen-camp

Pre-Texts: www.pre-texts.org/

Right Question Institute: rightquestion.org/

Scholastic Art and Writing Awards: www.artandwriting.org/

Secondary School Writing Centers Association (SSWCA): sswca.org/

Texas Christian University Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies: sis.tcu.edu/cres/

University of Georgia Red Clay Writing Project: coe.uga.edu/events/red-clay-writing

University of Connecticut Early College Experience (ECE): ece.uconn.edu/

University of Connecticut ECE English: ece.english.uconn.edu/

University of Connecticut ECE English (Blog by Scott Campbell): ece.english.uconn.edu/blog/

University of Connecticut, Letters about Literature Contest: education.uconn.edu/letters-about-literature-contest/

University of Connecticut MA in English for Teachers: english.uconn.edu/pathwaystoteaching/

University of Connecticut Writing Center, Middle and High School Outreach: writingcenter.uconn.edu/high-school-outreach/

The Write Space: A Blog for Teachers and Writers (by Jason Courtmanche): jasoncourtmanche.blogspot.com/

Notes

1 The stated goals of the working group were to contribute to the development of the MLA’s advocacy policies and procedures on K–16 issues; identify ways to integrate the Association of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages into the MLA’s advocacy for teaching English and other languages at all levels, paying particular attention to the indigenous American languages; identify secondary school audiences for MLA publications; advise on the development of public-facing publications; organize MLA convention sessions addressing K–16 issues; and work with other MLA committees (e.g., the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities and the Committee on Community Colleges) to strengthen pathways to careers in education for graduate-student members of the MLA.

2 The National Council of English, the National Writing Project, and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages were the major organizations with which we first collaborated. Reaching out to English Language Arts Teacher Educators came later.

3 Though our summer institutes are housed in the English department, the credits that students earn in them are accepted by every graduate degree program.

4 You can read more about our collaboration in an article Tom and I recently published in the journal WPA: Writing Program Administration (Deans and Courtmanche), but we’re not alone in this type of outreach. The most prominent example of an association that works with local high schools to establish writing centers is the Secondary School Writing Centers Association, out of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. The Kennesaw State University Writing Center has similar partnerships with high schools in Cherokee County and Paulding County, Georgia.

5 The students in my course generally read two novels in parallel with the high school students, and my students each take on two or three high school students as mentees. My students use e-mail to discuss the novels with these high school students, to help them generate ideas for writing, and then to offer feedback on drafts. I conducted a two-year study on this now fifteen-year-old partnership, a version of which was published in Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom.

Works Cited

Cassuto, Leonard. “How to Go Public, and Why We Must.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 Jan. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Go-PublicWhy-We/242155.

Courtmanche, Jason. “High School–College Partnerships and the Teaching of Hawthorne.” Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom, edited by Christopher Diller and Samuel Coale, AMS, 2016, pp. 161–71.

Deans, Thomas, and Jason Courtmanche. “How Developing a Network of Secondary School Writing Centers Can Enrich University Writing Programs.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 42, no. 2, Spring 2019, pp. 58–79.

Dicken, Paul. “You Want to Write for a Popular Audience? Really?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 June 2015, www.chronicle.com/article/You-Want-to-Write-for-a/230781.

NCTE Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts. National Council of Teachers of English, 2006, ncte.org/groups/elate/ncte-caep-connection/.

Sullivan, Patrick, et al., editors. Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom. NCTE, 2017.

Sullivan, Patrick, and Howard Tinberg, editors. What Is “College-Level” Writing? Vol. 1, NCTE, 2006.

Sullivan, Patrick, et al., editors. What Is “College-Level” Writing? Vol. 2, NCTE, 2006.

No one is entirely sure what happens to academics at midcareer, but most would agree they don’t like it.

Jeffrey J. Selingo describes it as academe’s “mid-life crisis.” Anastasia Salter compares it to the “let down” that comes after training for a marathon. She calls the many recent testimonials about midcareer dissatisfaction a new genre of academic writing. Their authors depict careers that have stalled while others are advancing, which provokes jealousy and “productivity anxiety” (McPhail; Szetela). Midcareer faculty members report feeling irrelevant, isolated, bored with academic work, and frustrated with the monotony of administrative tasks. When combined together, these conditions are a potent contributor to burnout.

Changing demographics and fluctuating job security have aggravated but not fundamentally changed the discontent of midcareer academics. Surveys of faculty members from the 1970s discovered that thirty-one percent of those surveyed wanted an entirely new career; those who rated themselves less successful than their colleagues seem most acutely interested in leaving academe (Palmer and Patton 389)—having a sense of accomplishment at midcareer was crucial. A 1989 study exposed a general perception that midcareer faculty members were a liability, solidifying a sense that “older is not better” among academics because younger faculty members cost less and produce more than older ones (Caffarella et al. 404).

The situation has only intensified in the twenty-first century. The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), an institute at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education dedicated to the postsecondary faculty experience, found that associate professors had the lowest level of job satisfaction among all tenure and tenure-track ranks (Jaschik).¹ Kiernan Mathews, director of COACHE, concludes that faculty members hit a “brick wall” after tenure, as research productivity begins to sink and administrative burdens increase, which leaves them feeling discouraged (qtd. in Jaschik). Another study determined that there was widespread dissatisfaction about salary and facilities among associate professors (Trower 5, 8).

Women  faculty members and those from other underrepresented groups are especially vulnerable to midcareer pressures. Although more women than men have received doctoral degrees every year since 2006, fewer women are full professors, and women spend a disproportionately long time at the rank of associate professor (Johnson 4, 20; Snyder et al. 493). The MLA’s 2009 report on associate professors, Standing Still, found that difficulties with advancement after tenure affected women more than men: on average, women waited one to three and a half years longer than men to move beyond the associate professor rank (MLA Committee 1, 5). Women experience a “cultural taxation” that makes their careers “leakier” than those of men, meaning more women either stagnate in the middle of their careers or leave academe entirely (Htun et al.).

Why the midcareer experiences of women and men are different should be fairly obvious. Women encounter larger service and childcare demands than men, and those “microdifferences” of time commitments add up over the years (Guarino and Borden 680; MLA Committee 2, 21). Gender and ethnic diversity have increased across nearly all academic fields, but black faculty members in STEM fields remain chronically underrepresented, and wage gaps, for women and faculty members of color, remain pronounced, leading to a sense of stasis (Li and Koedel 344; Johnson 1). Parental leave and childcare options may have improved for all parents, but family-friendly policies can still be subtly discriminatory against women. Isolation within a department can inhibit people of color, who often carry the burden of representing specific ethnic groups to students and community members. Informal or nonexistent professional mentoring lead to the slower midcareer advancement of these vulnerable faculty members (Assendelft et al. 10).

Burnout is a common feeling among midcareer faculty members. Many of my friends and colleagues who had achieved tenure suffered from its effects. They were disoriented, unsure of what to do next, and stopped working on the books and articles that had felt so urgent before they had gotten tenure. Jonathan Flatley, a professor of English at Wayne State University, felt “desperately overworked” after receiving tenure: he was juggling all the new opportunities that came with a new professional visibility. Susan Nakley, an associate professor at St. Joseph’s College New York, worried that institutional demands might prevent her from building on the momentum of her recently published book. When it came to their next research projects, others reported feeling something akin to what Jonathan Kramnick, a professor at Yale University, described as “second-act anxiety.” Some faculty members, like Joseph Drury, an associate professor at Villanova University, wanted more resources to get started on their second projects. Finding time for writing was a common concern as institutional work pushed these midcareer faculty members into other tasks that shortened writing sessions and made sustained thought more difficult.

Yet for others institutional tasks felt rewarding, even if such work crowded out research that had once been the focus of their career. Manu Samriti Chander, a recently tenured English professor at Rutgers University, devoted his attention to graduate students and early career researchers (ECRs). Chander was eager to mitigate the funding reductions and tenure erosions that had upset the careers of younger faculty members who came after him (@profchander).

My own answer to midcareer burnout and posttenure anxiety was to move into administrative positions in my department. Though I am now employed at a large, research-intensive land-grant university in the American south, I started my teaching career at a liberal arts college in New England. Because the faculty size was small, I was involved in high-level collegiate decisions even though I had only recently been hired. All faculty members interested in the issues were listened to closely; seniority was not important.

Ever since that first teaching position, I have been a firm believer that if faculty members don’t want MBAs to run higher education, then we have to volunteer to run it ourselves. Early in my career I participated in committee work and encouraged coworkers to do the same. In 2019 I became my department’s director of graduate programs. A combination of enthusiasm and anxiety propelled me to take the position.

Higher education has been changing rapidly, often without frontline faculty members’ noticing. Public-private partnerships, revolutions in credentialing, and the erosion of trust in higher education were colossal forces that, because of their size, could seem perplexing to faculty members who need to focus on the day-to-day rhythms of teaching. Persistent financial austerity and budget cuts, when combined with unexpected disruptions, like school shootings or worldwide pandemics, felt overwhelming, like a “grief cycle that never ends,” in the evocative words of Rebecca Pope-Ruark (qtd. in McMurtrie). I was convinced that if I wanted to maintain the sense of autonomy, inquiry, and intellectual community that drew me to academe in the first place, I needed to help maintain it for future generations.

It’s too early to tell how naive I am

My choice to take on an administrative position as a cure for midcareer burnout was considered. I consulted with my family extensively and asked almost everyone I knew about their experiences as administrators. In some ways my decision has only exacerbated the elements that most faculty members point to as the source of midcareer malaise—additional administrative burdens, decreased time for research, and a proliferation of meetings. Maybe it would have been smarter instead to follow up on posttenure resolutions to exercise more or to learn Italian.

But I also believed that programmatic change might be one of the most meaningful and enduring contributions any faculty member can make during their career. We might be experts on the Anthropocene or on border crossing, but, as humanities faculty members, we rarely have an impact on larger policy proposals or political discussions in the way professors of economics or the law can. Instead, we are at the apex of our power when we involve ourselves in the operation of our academic institutions. There are real constraints in these domains, of course, but this is where we can make a difference.

In the twentieth-century star system, subfield omnipresence was the indicator of academic success. Fame was what happened when everyone at the conference could effortlessly recite a passage from your book or wanted a word with you at the cash bar. In the twenty-first century, the star system has given way to the academic capitalism of the corporate university, which encourages public engagement as a “market imperative” that provides an “empirical measure of a university’s reputational currency” (McMillan Cottom).

It might be better for us to abandon ambitions of subfield omnipresence or microcelebrity in favor of institution building and maintenance. A friend of mine who recently left her position as a tenured professor to become an administrator at a humanities institute had that impulse in the middle of her career. Her decision was informed by a fundamental shift in her sentiments. Early in her career she had wanted to be happy; now, she said, she wanted to feel fulfilled. At first the difference seemed like a maddening riddle, until she explained that fulfillment would come from running an organization that helped sustain others’ careers rather than from the happiness of having her own research agenda. Working as an administrator for the organization gave her a sense of purpose.

Midcareer or Middle Age?

My friend’s sentiments about seeking fulfillment reflect much of what we know about human beings in middle age, a period of life that has been associated with change, uncertainty, and self-discovery ever since the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques described the sags and stumbles of the “mid-life crisis” in 1965. David G. Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald have suggested there is some basis to the idea of the midlife lull. They have shown that psychological well-being is “U-shaped” across life, with the strongest dissatisfaction appearing in the midforties (1745, 1746).² Perhaps the midcareer malaise experienced by academics simply repeats the same dissatisfaction that is found in middle-aged people around much of the world, whatever their profession.³

There are limitations to the comparison between the situation of middle age and that of midcareer academics, however, because not everyone in the middle of their career is middle aged. Many middle-aged faculty members think of themselves as just getting started, especially if they have transitioned into academia from previous professions or imagine themselves teaching into their seventies or eighties. As Megan Peiser notes, because the time necessary to land a tenure-track position is lengthier than ever for graduate students, many scholars might age out of early career and into midcareer before they have the chance to get tenure (@MeganPeiser). More than seventy percent of instructors, who teach half of higher education courses in the United States, occupy nontenurable positions, making it hard to see a continued link between being in the middle of one’s career and having tenure (United States Government Accountability Office).⁴

Despite these differences, there is plenty of advice about how to manage midcareer burnout, most of which sounds like advice about how to thrive in middle age. Faculty members may be encouraged to stay engaged with their research, retain a sense of control over their career, or think of midcareer as a “second call” (Karpiak), a “process of discovery,” a time for “re-evaluation” (Maddox-Daines 45, 53), “self-assessment” (Strage and Merdinger 42), and goal realignment. Also recommended is saying no to uninspiring work (De Cruz; Rockquemore, “Art”) and focusing instead on the multiple “post-tenure pathways” that exist (Rockquemore, “Post-tenure Pathways”). Organizations with broad mandates, like the MLA, have advocated for more professional development; more time for research “in the form of release time, institutional paid leaves, and fellowships”; and more training on mentoring and networking (MLA Committee 9–10).

Such advice and advocacy are worthwhile, particularly when they focus attention on the prominent structural inequities faced by many midcareer academics. But much of this advice also perceives midcareer as a problem to be solved. What if we didn’t approach midcareer as a dilemma to be overcome with better planning or a more positive outlook? Instead of thinking our way out of midcareer slumps, maybe we should accept that they occur and talk openly about their effects. To do so might make it permissible for academics in the middle of their careers to feel bored, burned out, angry, and frustrated. If we accept that midcareer slumps will happen and we devote our energies to recognizing them, we might learn that we don’t necessarily need to make midcareer happier and more productive after all.

Slow Down

Research shows that feeling dissatisfied in middle age is normal. A closer consideration of this research might help us reconceive burnout and posttenure depression as crucial parts of a healthy career rather than as short circuits or glitches to be rewired out of existence. This, in turn, might lead us to admit that midcareer can be the right time for academics to slow down.

Drawing inspiration from the slow-food movement, the concept of slowness has been theorized extensively in twenty-first-century academe, in terms of slow reading (Miedema; Hofmeyr), slow thinking (Kahneman), and slow time (Sachs). Slowness might help us think differently about the qualities of midcareer and avoid trying to “pivot” our way out of it, in the words of Peggy O’Neill (178), or to thrive despite dissatisfaction.

In championing slowness, my intent is not to advocate for an orthodoxy that understands disappointment as the cocoon for some future success, as so many studies of failure now do. And I don’t think slowing down needs to be like the “slow violence” that Rob Nixon has identified with climate change (2), which defuses reaction because its incrementalism makes long-term consequences nearly invisible (4).

Instead, I think the practice of slowing down midway through one’s career should be inspired by Laura Micciche’s notion of “slow agency” in higher education administration. Micciche calls for an agency that is in touch with “productive stillness, resource preservation, and slowness” (73). For her, slowness requires rethinking agency as “action deferred,” as decisions not yet made (74). Deferral is not powerlessness, laziness, or “dereliction of duty,” she notes (74).

O’Neill has described how Micciche’s ideas have helped her function as a midcareer writing program administrator in an age of austerity. But ideas about slow agency might be more widely applicable. I would encourage midcareer academics to think about slowness and stillness as waiting for circumstances to dictate when actions need to be taken. It is less stressful to be reactive than to be proactive, which requires the exhausting vigilance of internally generated direction. Organizations often attempt to eliminate deliberation and deferral in favor of constant innovation and productivity (Micciche 84). This state of unrelenting alertness, reinforced by decades of competition within higher education’s star system, is now intensified by the demands of academic capitalism to individualize and brand oneself.

If we reject that sense of the academic arc and instead reconceive midcareer as a time to pause and see what happens, we might be content with nothing happening at all, at least for a little while.

Advocating for midcareer as a time to slow down recalls Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor, which seeks to undo the “beleaguered, managed, frantic, stressed, and demoralized professor who is the product of the corporatization of higher education” (ix). But unlike Berg and Seeber, I don’t see midcareer slowness as a “counter-identity” to corporate higher education among those who might claim with pride, as they do, that “we are Slow Professors” (Berg and Seeber ix). And I don’t see it as an extension of the “counterproductivity” movement that seeks to determine how “time mastery” became the defining feature of modern professionals (Gregg 4).

I hope, like Micciche and O’Neill, that we can see slower midcareers as an integrated part of higher education. In particular, slowing down would benefit the administrative turn of many midcareer academics, easing the burdens that such a turn entails, with slow agency—instead of productivity or job satisfaction—as central to the ethic and method of administration. It would suppress the instinct among faculty members to avoid the tiring work of administration and thus help to increase the pool of faculty members who are “admin curious.” Slowness and stillness allow for sustainability and regeneration at the personal and the programmatic level. The corporate university, like academic capitalism, is likely to endure. Working slowly might be a good way to start navigating the corporatization of higher education while redefining midcareer to make it more survivable.

This is not a call for quiet submission to the political forces that we need to resist. We should not abandon forms of activism that benefit academe’s most vulnerable students and employees. Slowdowns appeal to the tactics of twentieth-century labor activism that sought to balance corporate enthusiasm for increased productivity with a corresponding insistence on better working conditions (Silver 35, 56, 59). Such activism may be more necessary than ever as inexorable planetary transformations, such as climate change, and rapid crises, like COVID-19, reinforce how exposed we are to our alterations in our physical environment. But attempting to do away with midcareer burnout might reinforce the exact impulse toward productivity that creates burnout in the first place. Not everything should be made more productive. Maybe midcareer is the time to abandon the principles that make pretenure and contingent faculty members as engaged and overworked as surveys indicate they are (Ziker; Flaherty; Matthews).

Slowing down will not be an option for everyone. It will only be available to those in academe privileged enough to have time to reflect on what it means to be midcareer, in the same way that philosophizing about the midlife crisis can feel like a first world or middle-class luxury. Accepting rest, stasis, and lower productivity in the middle of one’s career will require us to challenge the prestige-based economy of higher education, which undoubtedly will have personal consequences for many faculty members. Research output, and judgements regarding the value of that research, certainly will remain the standard by which faculty members are measured, whatever academic positions they hold. As the 2019 undergraduate admissions scandal makes evident, higher education’s ranking system is only becoming more entrenched, incenting ever more desperate behavior.

To slow down midway through one’s career will be costly within many of the systems that determine faculty success. But there are advantages, too. Scholars in composition studies and writing program administration have begun to think about how to succeed within the corporate university while slowly resisting its dictums. The example set by these individuals might help the rest of us reimagine what it means to be successful in the middle of one’s career. Doing so will not eliminate the other structural problems that exist in higher education, but it will make our attempts to solve them more manageable and sustainable.

Notes

1 The survey was conducted between 2011 and 2012. It included 13,510 faculty members at sixty-nine four-year institutions. It found that associate professors scored the lowest on nearly every question about research, recognition, service, and overall job satisfaction. (Notably, COACHE did not survey contingent faculty members.) Summaries of COACHE’s quantitative data can be found in Jaschik.

2 More precisely, “well-being depends in a curvilinear way upon age” (Blanchflower and Oswald 1745). Blanchflower and Oswald note that they examined surveys of “500,000 randomly sampled Americans and western Europeans” (1733) and that these findings were unaffected by income, marital status, family life, nationality, and ethnicity (1746).

3 Blanchflower and Oswald claim that numerous studies, including their own analysis of survey data, demonstrate the same pattern of unhappiness in middle age among non-United States and non–western European populations, but they note that it would be “unwise to overstate this finding” for developing nations (1741).

4 The United States Government Accountability Office found that 71.6% of “postsecondary instructional positions” were contingent in 2011 (8). The American Association of University Professors claimed that 73% of “instructional positions” were contingent in 2016 (1). As both reports note, there are large differences among institutions in terms of the percentage and the employment conditions of contingent faculty. Women are also a disproportionately large part of contingent faculties: 57% according to data from 2016 (Snyder et al. 484).

Works Cited

American Association of University Professors. “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed.” 11 Oct. 2018, www.aaup.org/news/data-snapshot-contingent-faculty-us-higher-ed#.XXvZBpNKhTZ.

Assendelft, Laura van, et al. Would I Do This All Over Again? Mid-Career Voices in Political Science. American Political Science Association, 2019, preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/5d9ca075a6490200117d298f.

Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.

Blanchflower, David G., and Andrew Oswald. “Is Well-Being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle?” Social Science and Medicine, vol. 66, 2008, pp. 1733–49.

Caffarella, Rosemary S., et al. “Mid-Career Faculty: Refocusing the Perspective.” The Review of Higher Education, vol. 12, no. 4, Summer 1989, pp. 403–10.

De Cruz, Helen. “Happily Ever After? Advice for Mid-Career Academics.” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 24 Mar. 2016, www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/happily-ever-after-advice-mid-career-academics#survey-answer.

Drury, Joseph. “The lack of time and resources.” Facebook, 23 Sept. 2019, go.ncsu.edu/imhov2b.

Flaherty, Collen. “So Much to Do, So Little Time.” Inside Higher Ed, 9 Apr. 2014, www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings.

Flatley, Jonathan. “Desperately overworked.” Facebook, 23 Sept. 2019, go.ncsu.edu/imhov2b.

Gregg, Melissa. Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy. Duke UP, 2018.

Guarino, Cassandra M., and Victor M. H. Borden. “Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?” Research in Higher Education, vol. 58, 2017, pp. 672–94.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Harvard UP, 2013.

Htun, Mala, et al. Preface. Would I Do This All Over Again?: Mid-Career Voices in Political Science, by Laura van Assendelft et al., p. 1. American Political Science Association, 2019, preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/5d9ca075a6490200117d298f.

Jaques, Elliott. “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 46, no. 4, 1965, pp. 502–14.

Jaschik, Scott. “Unhappy Associate Professors.” Inside Higher Ed, 4 June 2012, www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/04/associate-professors-less-satisfied-those-other-ranks-survey-finds.

Johnson, Heather L. Pipelines, Pathways, and Institutional Leadership: An Update on the Status of Women in Higher Education. American Council on Education, 2017.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011.

Karpiak, Irene. “The ‘Second Call’: Faculty Renewal and Recommitment at Midlife.” Quality in Higher Education, vol. 6, no. 2, 2000, pp. 125–34.

Kramnick, Jonathan. “Second-act anxiety.” Facebook, 23 Sept. 2019, go.ncsu.edu/imhov2b.

Li, Diyi, and Cory Koedel. “Representation and Salary Gaps by Race-Ethnicity and Gender at Selective Public Universities.” Educational Researcher, vol. 46, no. 7, 2017, pp. 343–54.

Maddox-Daines, Kay. “Mid-Career as a Process of Discovery.” Career Development International, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016, pp. 45–59.

Matthews, Dylan. “Being a College Professor Isn’t Really a Cushy Job.” Vox, 24 Apr. 2014, www.vox.com/2014/4/24/5647300/being-a-college-professor-isnt-really-a-cushy-job.

McMillan Cottom, Tressie. “‘Who Do You Think You Are?’: When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 7, 2015, adanewmedia.org/2015/04/issue7-mcmillancottom/.

McMurtrie, Beth. “How to Cope with Covid-19 Burnout.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 May 2020, www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Cope-With-Covid-19/248814.

McPhail, Teresa. “On Academic Envy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 July 2016, www.chronicle.com/article/On-Academic-Envy/237094.

@MeganPeiser (Megan Peiser). “One that I hear a lot is that many funding/opportunity things support ECRs, which is usually defined by x-yrs since PhD. But bc so many are in Contingent jobs before landing w any stability, you may be shoved to ‘mid-career’/aged out of things before you have stability to apply.” Twitter, 23 Sept. 2019, twitter.com/MeganPeiser/status/1176249932573020166.

Micciche, Laura R. “For Slow Agency.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 35, no. 1, Fall–Winter 2011, pp. 73–90.

Miedema, John. Slow Reading. Litwin Books, 2009.

MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey. Modern Language Association, 27 Apr. 2009, www.mla.org/content/download/3120/80834/cswp_final042909.pdf.

Nakley, Susan. “Meetings and emails . . .” Facebook, 23 Sept. 2019, go.ncsu.edu/imhov2b.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

O’Neill, Peggy. “U-Turns, Pivots, and Gradual Arrivals: Navigating Midlife and Mid-Career in Academe’s Changing Landscape.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 40, no. 2, 2017, pp. 174–79.

Palmer, David D., and Carl V. Patton. “Mid-career Change Options in Academe: Experience and Possibilities.” The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 52, no. 4, July–Aug. 1981, pp. 378–98.

@profchander (Manu Samriti Chander). “so far a big part of mid-career (i.e. post-tenure) life seems to center around figuring out how to support grad students and ECRs given the fact that their prospects look way different than mine did when i started on the tt.” Twitter, 23 Sept. 2019, twitter.com/profchander/status/1176174740853145600.

Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. “The Art of Saying No.” National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, 16 Sept. 2019. Webinar.

———. “Post-tenure Pathways.” Inside Higher Ed, 25 June 2012, www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/06/25/essay-how-faculty-members-can-chart-meaningful-post-tenure-career.

Sachs, Jonathan. “Slow Time.” PMLA, vol. 134, no. 2, Mar. 2019, pp. 315–31.

Salter, Anastasia. “On Becoming Mid-Career.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 Apr. 2018, www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/on-becoming-mid-career/65388.

Selingo, Jeffrey J. “A Midlife Crisis Hits College Campuses.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 July 2008, www.chronicle.com/article/A-Midlife-Crisis-Hits-College/26952.

Silver, Beverly J. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Snyder, Thomas D., et al. Digest of Education Statistics 2017. United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, Jan. 2019, nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018070.pdf.

Strage, Amy, and Joan Merdinger. “Professional Growth and Renewal for Mid-Career Faculty.” Journal of Faculty Development, vol. 28, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 41–50.

Szetela, Adam. “Feeling Anxious? You’re Not the Only One.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 Apr. 2018, www.chronicle.com/article/Feeling-Anxious-You-re-Not/243117.

Trower, Cathy Ann. “Senior Faculty Satisfaction: Perceptions of Associate and Full Professors at Seven Public Research Universities.” TIAA-CREF Institute Research Dialogue, no. 101, June 2011, www.tiaainstitute.org/sites/default/files/presentations/2017-02/101a.pdf.

United States Government Accountability Office. Contingent Workforce: Size, Characteristics, Compensation, and Work Experiences of Adjunct and Other Non-Tenure-Track Faculty. 19 Oct. 2017, www.gao.gov/products/GAO-18-49. PDF download.

Ziker, John. “The Long, Lonely Job of Homo Academicus.” The Blue Review: Popular Scholarship in the Public Interest, 31 Mar. 2014, wayback.archive-it.org/8092/20190724180003/https://thebluereview.org/faculty-time-allocation/.

It may seem counterintuitive, but there is a connection between the administrative university and its push toward hiring contingent labor, now approximately seventy percent of college instructors (Betensky), and the status of a damaged species: associate professors. Long forgotten, these tenured professors find themselves burdened with extensive service and administrative tasks and with little guidance and few incentives to seek promotion. The pathway to tenure for an assistant professor, while onerous and fraught, is also fairly consistent, obvious, and, despite the inflationary model that requires one to have more and more accomplishments to succeed, likely to result in promotion. If I recall, the dirty secret of tenure at all but the most elite universities is that almost everyone who seeks it gets rewarded—the weeding-out process occurs earlier in one’s career. And the entire system of tenure is under attack because of the casualization of academic labor.

Departments that depend on contingent labor—graduate students, postdocs, adjunct instructors, and so forth—cannot presume that these already overworked and underpaid educators will take on roles involving mentorship, administration, and committee work (though they often do, and sometimes want to do more of this labor, despite its remaining unpaid or underpaid). At the same time, those full professors who have held these positions—as department chairs, directors of graduate or undergraduate programs, and committee members further up the administrative food chain—seek to extricate themselves from such responsibilities and concentrate their time instead on their work as senior scholars and teachers. Thus, associate professors become mired in an administrative trap for which they are often unprotected and unprepared. If they are good academic citizens, aware of just how many senior faculty members have contributed to their position, they commit to taking on the work. It’s how the system sustains itself: scholars labor to peer-review journal articles and books for presses, serve on editorial boards, organize conferences, advise graduate students, and assume administrative posts. Such types of work are done for the profession, for themselves, their colleagues, and graduate students—the future.

This long apprenticeship may appear cultlike to some—to those, for instance, who perceive that power resides in an embodied person not in the institution and its culture—but the system of academia is premised on paying back by paying forward, by helping the next generation of scholars (Marzoni). This requires maintaining the institution itself through service. Yet this unspoken system fails to outline how one moves from associate professor to full professor. And the longer one lingers at the associate level the harder it seems to move past it. Overcoming this hurdle takes a number of things, among them imagination—seeing oneself differently, as someone who is fully accomplished—as well as a senior colleague or chair who also takes time to help make this transition happen.

In Lydia Davis’s marvelous one-paragraph take on academia, “A Position at the University,” the narrator succinctly reveals this process of self-identification as a crucial, if somewhat soul-killing, aspect of institutional practices. Academia, after all, operates much like the many restaurants I worked in before graduate school: there is the obvious work to be done—making and serving food and cleaning up afterward—and there is the hidden labor behind the front end. This includes immaterial relationships developed with customers, with coworkers, even with the food. But it also entails the extra work necessary to keep the system running: filling salt and pepper shakers, scouring coffee pots, replenishing napkins. Depending on the restaurant, one might take some pride in the quality of the food served, in the elegant gestures required to deliver dishes to multiple tables at once, clear places for the lunch or dinner rush, and smooth the pace of labor. But there is also always the hidden psychic and physical strain of maintaining this system, avoiding catastrophes, and keeping one’s dignity in the face of lecherous members of the kitchen staff and creepy customers. Rarely does one think of oneself as a waiter, or solely as a waiter, and for most, this is not usually a long-term job. As in Louis Malle’s 1980 film Atlantic City, where Susan Sarandon’s character squeezes lemons across her torso and arms to wash off the stink of the hundreds of oysters she’s shucked at the casino where she works while studying to become a blackjack dealer, planning to escape to Monte Carlo, this service work often supports another underpaid dream gig: artist, writer, musician, actor. But who knows, who knows this other life?—you’re working tables, and that’s what matters when someone orders. You serve.

Davis’s narrator comments, “I think I know what sort of person I am.” And obviously, this sort of person, despite appearances, is not the sort who holds “a position at the university” or serves food to strangers. The narrator clarifies, “I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university.” The “problem,” as the narrator sees it, is that “when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely,” but this presumption fails to register “truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university” (299). Davis’s narrator is describing the condition of Erving Goffman’s “total institution” (4), where one’s sensibility is shaped by the routines and behaviors of the place. However, the university is a slippery example of such an institution: it is at once a physical workplace and an institution, like a monastery, that assumes those who enter into its halls will submit willingly to its precepts and endure the long apprenticeship required of them.

Thus, like me as a waitress struggling, at the time, to become a poet—of course, one’s life is always a cliché!—and Davis’s narrator with a position at the university, appearance and reality might not match up. And yet, given how stereotypical my story is, and how prevalent the so-called impostor syndrome is among academics, perhaps they align perfectly. Both situations are amalgams of individual psychology and the vicissitudes of one’s life, on the one hand, and the institutional settings in which one exists, while striving to make a living and make a mark, on the other. I realize that intellectual labor is not the same as slinging hash and that a university is a privileged site within late capitalist democracies, but the daily slog of researching, writing, speaking, revising, submitting, more revising, editing, and proofreading—the unglamorous and tedious work beyond glorious thinking that goes into making something happen with words—still resonates. We sometimes resent doing this type of work, but it must be done, by someone, by ourselves, in the case of the person with the “position at the university.” This contortion remakes time and identity.

Davis’s meditation on surface and depth, self and university, is an update of Franz Kafka’s 1917 story “A Report to an Academy,” in which the narrator, once an ape, who during the course of five years has become a bourgeois scholar, explains that he has transformed “at full speed . . . more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause, and orchestral music, yet essentially alone” (245). This period of five years—almost exactly matching the length of most graduate programs, tenure clocks, and the ideal interval between promotion to associate professor and promotion to full professor—offers enough distance from one’s past identity to the present one to convey not only the energy but also the pathos accompanying the transformation from ape to academic, from neophyte to senior scholar. This transformation entails forgetting and alienation as well as dogged effort.

Kafka’s story allegorizes the process of acculturation, even indoctrination—a kind of Stockholm syndrome—the academy demands of its members. Once you decide to leave your past (as an ape) and enter the halls of the human(itie)s, the doorway narrows, sending you irresistibly ahead. The ape becomes adept at the “artistic performance” of drinking and utters a first “Hallo!” Imitation was the vehicle of escape, “a way out” (253). The learned behavior brings “a success that could hardly be increased,” but this success is trailed by the “insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal” clouding the eyes of a “half-trained little chimpanzee,” a mate who waits at home (254). This achievement, pretensions to a bourgeois life, comes at a brutal and brutalizing cost that cannot be completely registered and can never be forgotten.

Literary history is replete with academic novels—it’s a mini-genre—but, to my mind, these two short stories offer more insight into the psychic processes by which one makes oneself into a professor than other, longer narratives. Both Kafka and Davis understand the intricacies of survival and abasement entailed in claiming a professional identity, of subsumption into an institution, beyond captivity or conversion narratives. A self submits, both willingly and unwillingly, to the organization, or rather an organization—an academy, the university. Definite and indefinite articles slide through these tales, almost interchangeably, so that it becomes difficult to differentiate between a self and the institution. And that is the point. By the time one moves from assistant professor to associate professor and then to full professor, there is no going back. One holds a position at the university for life. So why the reluctance or reticence or resistance or whatever it is that holds one back . . . if that is what is happening?

More than a decade ago, when I was on the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, we initiated the Associates Project to investigate whether women were disproportionately getting stuck at the associate professor level. It turned out, however, that almost everyone—no matter the gender—was stalling mid-career. One thing we learned back then was that funding often began to dry up and did not get restored until one became quite senior and perhaps earned an endowed professorship. Another was that service was thrust upon people almost immediately after promotion and with little training. Shortly after the report was published, I became chair of my department and as a result of the committee’s findings, I pushed a number of associate professors into promotion—seventy-five percent were women, fifty percent were people of color, and all were long overdue to become full professors. Why they had not done so before was complicated and telling: for one, they felt that there was no financial incentive. Because of this, I pushed the dean to drastically increase the pay bump for promotion. These professors also felt, as I had (but with the opposite result as I hurried to be promoted four years after getting tenure), that at this stage in their lives they did not want to submit to a process that appeared to be degrading at worst, time-consuming at best. They were just too jaded. Finally, nobody had suggested to them that they might seek promotion. They had reasoned there was little to be gained from imitation. None was a careerist; all were massively accomplished. Helping these individuals become full professors was among the best things I achieved as chair.

In preparation for this brief, I interviewed a terribly unscientific group of associate professors about their professional situations and about what they might want to see done for them if they were to move into more senior roles.¹ Men and women, single and partnered, parents and not, gay and straight, people of color and not, ranging in age from their thirties to their sixties. They came from institutions across the country. Some worked in the humanities, others in the social sciences or STEM. Some worked at large, prestigious research universities, both private and public, while others held positions at small liberal arts colleges, ranging from A-list to C- (or worse). Each echoed the thoughts of those I had helped shepherd into full professorships. They wondered, Was there a point to enduring the process? There is something still wrong institutionally. Blame needs to fall in part at the feet of overstretched department chairs who must give priority to other pressing cases—that is, tenure and hiring, budgets, staffing, curriculum, and so on. But of course, these departmental chores—ever expanding as bureaucracy bulges—derive from the same endless administrative bloat (another strategic plan!) fueled by deans and provosts and vice presidents that has resulted in the enormous increase in contingent faculty. This is the modified total institution that orders the backstory of the academy now.

One newly minted associate professor commented on the pressures and fears connected with promotion to associate professor—the endless time commitments, the countless urgent e-mails demanding immediate responses that come with being thrust unprepared into administrative and advising positions—and, more crucially, the anxieties about being responsible for someone else’s career. Up to this point, as a graduate student, a postdoc, and an assistant professor, all that was really necessary was for one to focus on one’s own work and to make sure this work was of the highest caliber to land a job and get tenure. Now, as a mentor to assistant professors, graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates, and as an administrator trying to juggle advocating for these individuals and dealing with administrators beyond the department, it seems unfathomable that anyone would want to proceed further—doing so would only mean getting bogged down in even more administration, taking on even more responsibilities for others. The payoff, even at an elite private university, does not seem worth it. Unlike the ape, this associate professor was content to remain facing the wooden locker—or, having made it out of the cage, to bide time among accumulating books and papers, preferring not to go further. Moreover, if one has young children, advising work can feel like an extension of domestic labor, creating a confluence of emotions that can feel overwhelming when, for instance, one is caring for both a sick child and one’s advisees. This is even more acutely felt now under coronavirus lockdown. Many, like Bartleby, would prefer not to.

While rereading Capital for a course on Marxist cultural criticism, another recently promoted associate professor at a small liberal arts college was stunned to realize that the concepts of absolute and relative surplus value, especially as these values are created through the “productiveness” and “intensity” of labor, meant that the institution was not a metaphoric machine but rather an actual industry under capitalism. The expectation that after all the teaching and advising accomplished during the academic year, one’s unpaid summertime would be made productive by writing articles, which would eventually become fodder for one’s promotion case, meant that doing what was supposed to be what one entered the academy for—researching, writing, and creating ideas—was another form of alienated labor (508–09). Because going further, getting promoted, means aligning one’s labor with that of the institution, as the addendum to Susan Briante’s remarkable volume of poems about labor—productive, nonproductive, and reproductive—in an age of decline, The Market Wonders, indicates: “For weeks after weaning, my breasts sting. I spend the day poem counting. One book gets you a job, two get you tenure. The poem machine turns factory” (81). So much of academic labor is a form of Marx’s “primitive accumulation” (713)—instead of counting poems, for instance, we counted turds for our faculty activity reports, or FAR(T)s, as I used to call our yearly ritualized debasement of merit review, which resulted in pittance raises often less than the cost-of-living adjustments to social security checks. This is the form of self-promotion one must master.

This attitude of futility is pervasive and suggests that the drive to administer knowledge in the neoliberal academy is pushing away those who might assume position away. People become professors, like they become waiters, in part because they vehemently refuse to sit still in an office and churn out memos. But that is what is demanded of those who, as good academic citizens, find themselves supporting the institutions that support them. If one is a decent person who recognizes the ways that the system has enabled one to attain a certain status, it’s an offer one can’t refuse. You must pay back those who came before you and guided your success by helping steer others who come after you; that’s the implicit bargain.

Some just plod through the mire because they love their work and because they know that, at the end of a project, they will have produced new research and gained satisfaction from it. If they are lucky enough to work at an institution that recognizes the dynamic nature of scholarship—how thinking provokes new areas of interest and how research and theory breed new avenues of analysis—then this absorption in one’s own work can eventually lead to promotion. But often this only happens if one has a chair or at least a senior colleague who is willing to push for it. Some colleges actually restrict what can count toward promotion: it must be a book, and it must be a book in the field in which the scholar was originally hired. Such restrictions preclude the branching out of a curious mind into new areas of research spurred by current scholarly or classroom discussions; they also fail to consider that without the infrastructure needed to conduct research—without free time in the form of teaching reductions, sabbaticals, graders, and so on—writing a book is nearly impossible. What is the point after the burnout experienced while undergoing promotion and tenure that discounted more than fifty percent of one professor’s work because it was deemed beyond the area designated when this professor was hired? And the six years minimum between promotion to associate professor and promotion to full professor? Thus, full professors become an endangered species. One associate professor commented that “success seems disgusting. I’m repulsed by the thought of giving in the article for a pay raise.” As productivity becomes increasingly commodified and quantifiable, the long stretch of time needed to think and write evaporates. Another associate professor observed that, in the neoliberal academy, “the elimination of any pockets of slowness, meditation, or deep learning—of languages, of history, of reading, all of which require investments of time-money, of sleep, of off-screen time, of anything complex (or compound-complex: sentence grammar, for example), and [of] the attendant right to be bored, or even depressed, let alone out- and enraged” disappears. This is not the call for self-help implied in Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor but instead a fierce acknowledgment of the attenuation of being “passionate about knowing—the very meaning of study” in the corporate university.

Another associate professor explained that some years ago, the policy of their English department was to double the college recommendation for research requirements for promotion to full professor, even though no one in literature had been promoted in the previous ten years. Since the implementation of that policy, no others have been promoted either, because there is “[n]o consideration of promotion unless the associate proves they have the full number of publications and gets an OK from the full professors to move forward. Obviously no real weight to teaching, service, etc. So planning a month-long road trip on the west coast for next summer! Ha!” (Clearly this plan is now out the window.) The open, though unpaid, summer months were once seen as a welcoming expanse of time for research and writing; now, this unpaid labor seems pointless as the writing “machine turns factory.”

Associate professors are now assuming senior posts, such as chair, but must negotiate how to advance through a mire of requirements that were often instituted by the very same full professors who feel they have already performed their service obligations yet are reluctant to assist those left in the middle of navigating new and more stringent requirements. As much as I despise the term mentoring—and the concept, which represents a mode of institutional infantilization—promotion also depends on the guidance of senior faculty members. As the ranks of assistant professors shrink as a result of the casualization of labor in humanities departments, alongside the slow attrition of full professors, who even without mandatory retirement do eventually move on, the number of associate professors expands. Unless chairs (many of whom are associate professors themselves), deans, and provosts attend to this growing cohort’s situation, full professors able to vote to promote associates will become a rarity. The pathways to the first promotion (and tenure) are relatively clear, but as Dante foresaw, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la dirrita via era smarrita” (22). The straightway was lost somewhere in the middle of one’s journey—and Virgil is not stepping in to guide us out of this, our life.

This story is not universal. Some newly tenured and promoted associate professors, many of them female, do feel the surge of liberation that job security and respect bring. They can relax and enjoy their status as scholars who have had an impact on their fields and who have been recognized for their contributions as teachers and researchers. They no longer feel beholden to an increasingly remote set of senior scholars who they see as riding on the backs of energetic associate professors now given enormous departmental and programmatic responsibilities. So, where some feel exploited by serving as directors of programs or being charged with revising the curriculum, others exult in the freedom to affect institutions—while they are still young enough to look forward to years of working under conditions of their own making.

Rarely, though, are humanities associate professors part of departments where the administrative load includes running an institute connected to their research. Instead, administrative responsibilities frequently consist of fulfilling departmental responsibilities, often as director of graduate studies or undergraduate studies, an apprenticeship and prelude to eventually becoming chair. As one associate professor said of administrative work, “I’m good at it . . . I like it, but it almost killed me.” Many who are newly tenured—and thus highly successful at garnering grants and leaves—are given a huge service load seemingly out of resentment. Service shirkers increase the scope and burdens of service. “In the neo-liberal university, associates get the shaft—you’re still a bit frightened . . . and if you are competent, you are punished because you then do the work others who pretend incompetence or actually fail to follow through on their work, don’t do,” commented one associate professor. Many see this situation as highly gendered because if you have the type of personality that enabled you to become a professor at the university in the first place, you are probably the sort who will step up, if only out of guilt. In the eyes of associate professors, full professors appear either to have checked out or to be overly immersed in the bureaucratic and advising tasks required of them. Neither stance looks good. These conditions foster a desire to leave rather than get promoted, because the consequent raise is not big enough and it is harder to find another job as a full professor. Moreover, promotion requires being in the middle of potential fights within a department full of enemies. In departments fraught with infighting (and, realistically, which one isn’t?), achieving tenure and promotion can mean pressure to choose sides in long-standing interdepartmental conflicts. Who wants to repeat this?

The feeling of having to choose sides or of being trapped resounds among newer associate professors who are still trying to stake out their careers, especially as teaching and advising loads increase when these scholars attempt to move from liberal arts colleges to research institutions. Few at these larger universities understand the enormous amount of teaching, advising, and administrative work required of associate professors by smaller departments and colleges, so these energetic scholars feel stuck, despite their accomplishments. Paradoxically, remaining an associate professor might improve one’s chances of being hired at another, more suitable, institution—because one is cheaper to employ. But one cannot remain an associate professor for too long, either, because then one appears stale, old news—deadwood. As one associate professor put it, “associate professors are running the show plus doing all the administrative work . . . running twenty-two programs, hiring, staffing, advertising, curriculum. The ones who can leave, leave . . . and those who remain, become ghosts.” Even so, the security of tenure makes a palpable difference for associate professors who can choose with whom to collaborate or whom to mentor and thus contribute to shaping the next generation of scholars in ways they may have been reluctant to do as assistant professors. These professors in the early and middle stages of their careers know they entered the academy at a moment of diminishing resources and status and they know, despite complaints, that they are the lucky ones in this cutthroat ecosphere.

Acquiescence occurs, as one associate professor described it, “under the cover of a learned hypocrisy inculcated for decades: we support a broken system which pretends that all professors at all institutions have the same kinds of job” and that compensation across institutions and disciplines is similar even when the conditions of labor are radically different.

A final word on the administrative contortions that characterize the working life of associate professors at small colleges, from an associate professor in the later stages of their career. This story completes the sense expressed by others I interviewed who are decades younger—that the whole system needs a wrench thrown into its machinery:

I’ve always considered myself an academic outlier. Promotion means nothing to me. Would I ever go up at this late date in my career? Very doubtful, but if I do, it will only be if I have a slam-dunk case. Teaching: check. Service: check check check. Publication: no book. I am like my colleagues; most earned their full-professor promotions through conference presentations, edited collections, and service service service. The full professor mark is just the final hoop—but it signifies nothing.

However, our tenure and promotions committee likes to pretend the standard academic expectations still apply. The pretense leads to insecurity and paranoia. I’ve seen the portfolios of those who have asked me for letters: the absurd overdocumentation of service; the overstatement of every little on-campus talk, the level of slightly ashamed self-promotion—all to mask the fact that the candidate’s publication record is not ever on the level one would expect from a full-professor candidate at a major academic institution. The masquerade is exhausting for all concerned.

I have bitterness about this college, but the full-professor dance is not part of that bitterness. I took the sinecure—and was lucky to get it, all things considered. But it was not a good move for me if intellectual and creative productivity was a significant consideration.

What does this poignant revelation of how the academy has become a total institution say about a job, a career, a profession, to invoke this journal’s title, that is still among the most desirable and fulfilling work to be found in late capitalism? Like Kafka’s ape, I offer no verdict: “I am only imparting knowledge. I am only making a report. To you also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report” (254–55).

Note

1 I have promised anonymity to all who graciously disclosed to me their experiences as associate professors. This essay was researched and written in fall 2019, a lifetime ago, and its concerns are hardly those of this moment, in spring 2020, when the novel coronavirus has remade every facet of life and death on the planet, including the academy.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Translated by John D. Sinclair, Oxford UP, 1968.

Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.

Betensky, Carolyn. “Exclusion of NTT Faculty from Scholarly Research and Travel Funding.” Academe Blog, 23 Oct. 2019, academeblog.org/2019/10/23/exclusion-of-ntt-faculty-from-scholarly-research-and-travel-funding/.

Briante, Susan. The Market Wonders. Ahsata Press, 2016.

Davis, Lydia. “A Position at the University.” The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Picador, 2010, p. 299.

Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Anchor Books, 1961.

Kafka, Franz. “A Report to an Academy.” Translated by Willa and Edmond Muir. The Basic Kafka, Washington Square Press, 1979, pp. 245–55.

Marx, Karl. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Edited by Frederick Engels, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, International Publishers, 1963. Vol. 1 of Capital.

Marzoni, Andrew. “Academia Is a Cult.” The Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/academia-is-a-cult/2018/10/31/eea787a0-bd08-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da_story.html?noredirect=on.