admin Faculty, Higher Education

Day in the Life of a Tenured Professor, Day 2

Day 2, Tuesday. Historic day: First half-Kenyan to be inaugurated as President of the United States. Is the dream still alive?

Had an inch of snow overnight, so kids home from school because of school closure, and university opening is delayed until 10:30a — for some folks. Not me.

6:15am: Wake up, coffee, shower, dress, read Sunday New York Times, check gmail and eBay.

8:15am: Arrive at office. Only one here.

To 8:45am: Check work email, organize for day, eat two muffins at desk.

To 11:00am: Write letters of recommendation for students, check in with departmental admins

11:00-11:40am: Meet with student re honors thesis project

To 1:15pm: Prep for and teach class

To 2:20pm: Eat lunch in dining hall with students

2:30-3:40pm: Write letter of recommendation for colleague at another college who was nominated for an award

To 5:45pm: Prep for and attend chairs’ meeting with dean

6:00pm: Leave office

To 10:30pm: To indoor tennis center for tennis night

To 11:00am: Email kid’s teacher, eBay, check email, finish blog

11:30pm: Bed (hopefully)

Total hours worked: c.10

admin Faculty, Higher Education

Day 1 Work Log

What is a week in the life of a slappy tenured professor like? Here’s Day 1, Monday. Kids home from school because of Martin Luther King Holiday so was able to sleep in:

8:00am: Wake up, coffee, shower, dress

8:45am: Quick check of emails and pack up computer and work stuff

9:00am: Drive to indoor tennis center and drop off rackets strung over the weekend

9:30am: Arrive at office

To 10:30am: Review documents for and email correspondence with class I am teaching, honors student I am advising, independent study student I am working with, and miscellaneous chair related business.

To noon: Review on-line submission system being developed for the journal I edit, prepare for meeting with editorial interns, and prep for chairs’ meeting with dean tomorrow.

Noon – 2pm: Train interns on on-line submission system for journal I edit

To 2:30pm: Check mail in office, do scheduling

2:30-4:40pm: Eat lunch in dining hall, bring laptop to write up evaluation of on-line submission system testing, 10 minute phone conversation with friend

To 5:30pm: Meet son back at office, make dinner for him, lay down in break room and watch Australian Open tennis

5:30-7:45pm: Work on documents for evaluation of department faculty for salary review (as chair), intermittantly check email and do scheduling

7:45pm-9:45pm: Show movie to intro. class (“Hoop Dreams”)

To 10:00pm: Log assignments completed by students during the movie, follow-up with intro. class on enrollment issues by email, reschedule meeting with student for tomorrow

10:00-10:20pm: Check eBay auctions, email tennis coach, close down computer, wash dishes, straighten office to get ready for tomorrow

10:35pm: Home

To 11:15pm: Unpack from work, eat muffin, drink scotch, finalize eBay auctions, update blog

To 11:30pm: Change clothes, get clothes ready for tomorrow, pack tennis bag

11:30pm: Bed (hopefully)

Total hours worked: c.12

admin Faculty, Higher Education

Tenure!!!

The follower of this sporadically updated blog will notice a change in its title and description. These changes reflect the fact that I earned TENURE in the spring of 2008 and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor effective last July.

The landmark moments in the life of an academic are few, but all are quite significant. Completing the PhD, getting a tenure-track job, publishing your first book, and so on. But there is probably no moment more significant than earning tenure. (Tenure being the contractual right of faculty not to be terminated without cause, and particularly not to be terminated because of the particular ideas being taught or topics being researched, hence associating tenure very closely with academic freedom. I think the Wikipedia entries on both of these subjects are pretty sound.)

In my case, the victory was bittersweet because my decision was twice delayed. First, when I left Our Lady’s University prior to standing for tenure there. (See early postings for more on that.) Second, when my colleagues here insisted that I wait until 2007-2008 to stand for tenure, rather than considering me in 2006-2007 (which was my 8th year of continuous employment since earning my PhD in 1998).

Putting together my tenure portfolio was both CATHARTIC — allowing me to see that I actually had accomplished some things as a junior professor — and FRUSTRATING — because I knew my friends (and “aspirational peers”) had long since crossed over the tenure and promotion threshold. I had a hard time accepting that I had been consistently productive over a period of nine years and still had to worry about whether I would get tenure or not (more on that in a later post).

In any event, tenure was granted and I began the 2008-2009 academic year with all of the security it affords. I also found myself having to defend the rationale for the tenure system. Why should I as a faculty member have job security when others do not? And having tenure only compounded the beliefs of some of my friends that faculty don’t really do anything anyway. If we didn’t do anything before tenure, why would be do anything after tenure?

Of course, there is some “dead wood” in every forest. And there are certainly some faculty who use tenure as an excuse to slack off. As for me, I find myself busier than ever, in part because I became chair of my department on January 1st (more on that later). To give anyone interested a sense of what a week in the life of one faculty member looks like, beginning tomorrow (if all goes well), I will post a log of how I spent my time each day for the coming week. I only hope I have enough time to do that! Stay tuned.

admin Clothes, Culture, Faculty

Frump and Circumstance

At the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association meeting in Toronto in August 1997, I was riding the escalator down into the atrium of the conference hotel with my fellow sociology graduate students Josh Rossol and Black Hawk Hancock. Black Hawk noticed alot of people milling around, so he turned to Josh and me and asked, “How do I know which ones are the sociologists?”

To which Josh famously responded, “They’re the ones who are dressed like flood victims.”

Of course, this flood victim chic is not limited to sociologists, as pointed out by Tim Gunn of “Project Runway” and former chair of the department of fashion design at the New School of Design (interviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Education):

But for so many people in the academic world at large, I really believe that disdain for fashion is something that they are quite proud of, and that they want to demonstrate in what they’re wearing and how they’re wearing it. It’s a kind of an intellectual snobbery that says: My brain is important to me, and how I look is not, because it goes beyond the clothes. They’re poorly groomed, they’re schlumped over and practically drooling. I mean, I’m making some exaggerations here, but when I go to meetings with the rest of Parsons, I look around and think: Just comb your hair!

 

I think it has to do with the academics’ perception of lifestyle in general, which is that they drive beaten-up, rusted-out old jalopies of cars, they tend to live in environments that are messy, piled high with stuff-mainly books-and covered with dust. I say it comes from a disdain, but in some ways even that can be cultivated, though, so that is looks almost studied, like: Gee, did you buy a bag of dust and spread it around before I came over?