Among faculty members at small colleges, Kathryn D. Blanchard’s experience is increasingly common. “It used to be one and a half people in my discipline,” says Blanchard, a professor of religious studies at Alma College, “but my half person left.” Now Blanchard is the department chair as well as the utility instructor, serving the 1,450-student college’s general-education needs and at the same time offering enough different religion courses to graduate a handful of religion majors and minors every year.
“Basically I’m always inventing a new class that I think students should have,” says Blanchard. Her scholarly background is in Christian ethics, but “World Religions” is her biggest class. “Women, Gender, and Religion” is also popular, as is “Religion, Business, and the Environment.” For good measure, she also teaches “African-American Religion,” “Judaism and Islam,” and “Jesus in Gospel and Film.”
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But to do all that, she has had to learn “a lot of things that I don’t really know a lot about, that weren’t really part of my education,” she says. “I love that, but it means that I’m always a dabbler. I’m not someone who can use my teaching to feed my scholarship.” Despite going to religion conferences twice a year and continuing to publish regularly, she worries that she is “kind of out of touch with ethics — as much as I try to keep my hand in, it’s not what I teach.”
As small colleges across the country try to keep up with changes in the markets they serve — adding programs here and cutting or consolidating others there — it’s not uncommon for faculty members to end up alone in their departments, like Blanchard. Other professors have seen their diminished departments merged with others, so that department meetings at least bring enough people to fill a whole table.
Although such changes can be disruptive, conversations with a variety of small-college faculty members who are alone in doing what they do at their institutions suggest that they feel anything but isolated as scholars or teachers. Conferences, social media, Google Hangouts, and Skype keep them in touch with friends from graduate school, mentors, and scholarly collaborators. And while they might not be on the cutting edge of research in their fields, they say they enjoy — and regularly learn from — working with campus colleagues from other disciplines.
At Mills College, in Oakland, Calif., a 2017 reorganization cut the number of departments from 18 to 13 — and merged Margaret Hunter’s department, sociology, into the new department of social and historical studies (which also includes philosophy). The college’s difficult financial situation was to blame. But, says Hunter, “in sociology we had gotten down to very few positions. It’s hard to have a robust department with very few people. It’s nice to have more colleagues, because academe can be kind of a lonely endeavor as it is.”
Hunter, now associate provost as well as a professor of sociology, studies skin-tone discrimination, mostly in African-American and Latinx communities. (“Latinx” is a designation meant to include all genders.) “I interact a lot with my colleagues from the American Sociological Association, and I have other colleagues that I know from different projects over the years.” That professional network outside of Mills, she says, keeps her up to date on her own field. But when she came to Mills 11 years ago, she says, she did not expect to learn so much from colleagues in fields like physical chemistry, paleo oceanography, or African politics. “I might not have even met them at a larger university.”
Tyler Carrington makes a similar point. He’s the only German professor at Cornell College, in Mount Vernon, Iowa, but it’s actually more complicated than that. “I’m in three departments at once. I’m our German-studies professor. I’m also our modern European historian. And I teach in gender studies.” It’s seemingly a perfect fit for someone whose research interests are in turn-of-the-20th-century Berlin and late-19th-and-early-20th-century urban history and masculinity. (His forthcoming book from Oxford University Press is titled Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin.)
At a small college, Carrington says, faculty members aren’t siloed the way they might be at big institutions, where many of the people they encounter from day to day are on “the same well-worn track.” He’s likely to talk with colleagues from all kinds of disciplines about their intellectual approaches, and says that those conversations are often fruitful. Indeed, a colleague from computer science will soon accompany Carrington and 20 students on a three-week course in which they’ll travel to Vienna, Munich, and Berlin — and the colleague has asked if he could contribute lessons about German scientists and inventors.
At Centenary College of Louisiana, in Shreveport, Jessica Hawkins is the only graphic-design professor, although she’s not in a department of one: The communication-arts department also has one art historian, one studio-art professor, and one “communication theorist/film studies person,” she says. “Does the phrase ‘alone together’ make sense?” she asks.
To keep up with the latest design developments, Hawkins is active in a local graphic-design organization, and she has a monthly Google Hangout with three other graphic designers at other small colleges. But she also works with Centenary colleagues in other fields, and she’s particularly proud of a project she did recently with Jessica Alexander, an assistant professor of psychology. They had their students collaborate on an exhibit at the college’s Meadows Museum of Art that used works in the collection as a basis for examining color and perception.
Conversations with small-college faculty members suggest that they feel anything but isolated as scholars or teachers.
“I had friends at design conferences who were like, How did you connect with someone in the psychology department?” says Hawkins. “The answer is that I’m at a small college.”
Small colleges can present research challenges, of course. Kristin E. Bonnie, an associate professor of psychology at Beloit College, isn’t alone in her department. But she says she is one of just a handful of small-college faculty members nationally whose research is in nonhuman primates — in her case, studying how chimpanzees, gorillas, and capuchin monkeys make decisions when they’re surrounded by other members of their groups.
“When I was hired, I was explicitly told, twice, by the president at the time that there would be no nonhuman primates on campus — ever,” Bonnie says. “I was totally OK with that, because I don’t want to be responsible for maintaining even a small primate colony.” But it meant she had to be creative in finding ways to continue her scholarship. So she organized a collaboration with researchers at the Lincoln Park Zoo, in Chicago, visiting regularly and sharing authorship of journal articles.
“I don’t feel isolated,” she says. “The harder challenge for me is with other researchers in the field who are like, Why do you teach so many classes? Why aren’t you at a bigger research university where you could do more of this all the time?”
“While I love my research, at the end of the day I like working with students more,” Bonnie says.
There are also teaching challenges for faculty members alone in their disciplines. Not only must they provide a broad array of courses, says Michael Selmon, Alma’s provost for the past 15 years, but even then “you have a concern when you have a student taking a lot of courses with one professor — what you always want is for students to get multiple perspectives.” That means programs need to include courses by faculty members outside the department. “You want that tension between different voices, so in small departments you have to work to make sure you have a structure that creates that tension.”
Blanchard, Alma’s religion professor, says another worry for people in her situation is, frankly, expendability. That’s one reason she continues to publish often, even though she is a full professor with a named chair, and even though she says that compared with friends from grad school, her scholarship “is a joke, because it’s all over the place — this random thing here, this random thing there.”
But she knows Alma colleagues in business and nursing are “teaching overloads all the time — no one really expects them to publish because all they do is advise students and teach overloads. I feel pressure to publish because I know everybody could count my advisees and count my overloads and say, What is she really doing for us if she’s not publishing?”
“Honestly, religion professors are a dime a dozen,” she adds. “If I left, they could have 300 applicants for this job.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
