If you read the major higher-education publications, including this one, or the newsletters of scholarly associations, it is easy to become convinced that only two types of institutions exist: research-based universities and community colleges.
Life at a four-year teaching college is often ignored, leaving those of us who teach at that type of institution shaking our heads as we read about the concerns of those who dwell at the other two types. I encountered that gap firsthand last year when I attended a conference at a state university that focuses on research and doctoral education. I had lunch with the chair of the campus hosting committee (because a colleague and I are leading the panel for this year’s conference), and, needless to say, our conversation revealed some interesting differences between our work lives.
We all know the major distinctions: Professors at research universities teach one or two courses a semester and often have 10 to 15 graduate students, while those of us at small colleges teach four courses a semester with 20, 100, or more undergraduates in each. To earn tenure, they are expected to publish. If we publish, that fact is celebrated, but it doesn’t matter much when we come up for tenure; instead, we must have excellent teaching evaluations and significant involvement in campus life.
However, some differences that arose during our conversation were ones I had rarely encountered or never given serious thought to before. The first involved office hours. At my four-year institution, we have recently increased our office hours from six to eight a week, just a few years after having lowered the number from 10. We thought we could work in our offices for a shorter time because so much of our communication with students now takes place via e-mail messages or even Facebook, but there was a concern that we needed more face-to-face time with our students.
At the conference, however, when I wandered around the state university’s English department, I noticed that almost every office door was shut. The professors who were in their officers were not interacting with students, who were nowhere to be found. Such a scene would never occur in my department, as we have students hanging out in our offices for a large portion of every workday.
Then I noticed that professors at the state university kept two office hours a week, which I should have known as my doctoral program had the same schedule (my dissertation chair actually had no posted office hours). One can easily see how having students around throughout the day could prevent a lot of research from getting done. On my home campus, because we don’t have graduate programs, whatever time we have at home for work is usually spent preparing to teach or grading essays from those large sections of composition we teach. For us, research becomes either a summer project or nonexistent.
We need both types of professors in academe. We need people who spend their lives specializing in research because those of us who focus on teaching draw on their research to make our classes better. However, conversations between the two types of professors are almost a cross-cultural experience, as the conference-hosting chair spent his time talking about editing books and attending national conferences, while a colleague of mine at the lunch and I talked about our students.
Another aspect of working at a research institution that I hadn’t considered much was the competition for grant money. I had always written off such endeavors as applying only to the sciences or social sciences, not the humanities.
However, evidence to the contrary was everywhere we went on the state university’s campus. We stayed in a hotel on the campus that had been financed by a local business leader who began a hospitality management program at the university; we walked by one of its largest meeting centers, which was named after a business, not a person; and the English department had found a sponsor for a chair of excellence in creative writing.
On my campus, we are expressly told not to directly seek out money from alumni or other donors, as any fund raising goes through one office. We can apply for grants, but almost the only professors who do so are in the sciences and mathematics. Finding time for grant writing is as difficult as finding time for research, so only those faculty members who truly want and need such grants apply for them.
The last difference was one that I would not have noticed were I not planning a conference. As we chatted with the conference chair, he often talked about having to compete with other departments for meeting locations, which led to his conference being held in a building that was certainly not the university’s best.
At my four-year university, when we’re discussing whether to host a major meeting, people across the campus understand that we want to put forth the best image of our institution for visitors, and are willing to work with us on arrangements. In fact, some departments might have to move their courses for a day to give us the space we need in the best environment for our conference, and they seem willing to do so.
Along the same lines, the conference chair at the state university said he had gone over budget for the meeting because he had had to pay for the use of the campus facilities. We have never had to pay to use any of our campus facilities for such meetings. In the same way that we work with other departments to share facilities, we readily loan spaces out to various campus groups (and off-campus ones) for their events.
Professors at research universities tend to see their departments as the defining aspect of their employment at the institution, fending off space and financial concerns from other departments, while we tend to see the university as a whole, with subgroups within it that help shape us, but do not define us, per se.
That distinction seems to be the one that holds the greatest importance for those of us who teach at small four-year institutions. Because we teach students from every major across the campus, we celebrate all students when they succeed, not just our majors. We meet with any student who needs to talk to us, and we allow them to use whatever resources we have to attain their goals. That feeling of connectedness is not one I would give up, even if it would mean fewer undergraduate essays to grade.
