The Chronicle asked academics from across the country to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of working in their geographic locations. Here’s how they responded.
Peter S. Cahn, associate provost for academic affairs at MGH Institute of Health Professions, in Boston, and director of its Center for Interprofessional Studies and Innovation
In my doctoral program in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, students typically followed one of two paths. Those who couldn’t imagine living outside the San Francisco Bay Area limited their faculty job searches to nearby universities. Some succeeded, but others eventually repurposed themselves as academic administrators, executive coaches, and — in one case — a trial consultant.
The second group cast a wider net. Willing to relocate wherever a tenure-track position was available, they secured assistant professorships at campuses across the continent, including — in my case — at the University of Oklahoma.
It wasn’t until I spent a sabbatical year in Cambridge, Mass., that I began to reconsider my choice. Oklahoma had provided intellectual freedom to teach and write on topics that interested me, but off campus, it became increasingly apparent that the values of the state’s voters and leaders didn’t match my own. In the fall of 2008, I celebrated as Barack Obama won the presidential election, and the marching band led an impromptu parade through Harvard Yard. Back in Oklahoma, not a single county voted for Obama.
In this special report, we look at diversity through a somewhat novel lens — that of geography. Our coverage examines how a college’s location affects its mission, its ability to recruit students and faculty members, and its campus culture.
A month later, I began dating a man in Boston. By the summer, we were discussing how to formalize our commitment. Although his work was more portable than mine, it was clear where we would build a future. Massachusetts had led in the legalization of same-sex marriage. By contrast, while I lived in Oklahoma, three-quarters of Oklahomans voted to amend the state Constitution to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.
Eight years after arriving in Oklahoma, I gave up tenure to accept an administrative position at Boston University. Since then I have joined the senior leadership team at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, a graduate school affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital. Where I had once viewed my geographically selective colleagues skeptically, I now understood the priority of place. I also discovered that my career could grow on a nontraditional path, particularly in a city as dense with academic institutions as Boston. Best of all, I don’t hesitate in bringing my husband to the campus holiday party.
•••
Chris Gilliard, professor of English at Macomb Community College, in Macomb County, Mich.
At conferences, I answer the inevitable question about where I teach in terms of my institution’s distance from Detroit. (It’s 30 miles away.) While I teach in Macomb County, the Motor City forever looms large. The raised eyebrow, the knowing nod, and other standard gestures remind me that the city always “means” something, and that something is a projection of how people think about cities, about race, about unions, about industry, about teachers and students, and about gentrification.
Detroit is simultaneously the “Paris of the Midwest” and the poster child for post-industrial decay. It serves both as the emblem for gentrification and tech-fueled optimism and as the living embodiment of geographic and digital redlining. However, the city also presents tremendous pedagogical opportunities that are invisible to those who have never been there. Detroit bears the marks of its racist history in a way that easily illustrates processes like redlining. (Just drive down Mack Avenue or 8 Mile, two of the main roads that delineate the borders between Detroit and “not Detroit.”) Its current “rebirth” is tied to a particular vision, fueled by people like Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, and Mike Ilitch, the late founder of Little Caesars Pizza and sports-team mogul. The advantage, then, of teaching in this area is that ideas about what the city is and what it represents are rich starting points for discussing not only where we as a country have been, but also how we might approach different paths forward.
The industrial Midwest traces much of its roots to the standardized methods popularized by Henry Ford. His notion of assuring predictable outputs, assessing quality, and rewarding labor derived from the “scientific management” articulated by the industrial-efficiency expert Frederick Taylor. But the failure of that vision creates a vacuum that can be filled many different ways. Solutions such as gentrification embody a nostalgia for an imaginary past filled with prosperous hipsters; other solutions lie beyond the city’s central corridor and reach even further back in time: commercial forestry plantings, urban farms, and vast parklands.
However the people of Detroit decide to envision their path forward, the city’s history is written on its geography in a way that demands to be recognized and reckoned with. Living and teaching in the Detroit area means that I must embrace the challenge of doing that difficult work with my students.
•••
Cynthia Lindquist, president of Cankdeska Cikana Community College, in Fort Totten, N.D., and member of the Spirit Lake Dakota Tribe
Academe and corporate America have embraced the buzzword “diversity.” There are now offices and career roles for “diversity officers,” and most organizations have a diversity component in their strategic plans. Generally, people roll their eyes, snicker, and believe that “diversity” is just another exercise for political correctness run amok. So how does “diversity” play out for a small, rural college controlled by a Native tribe?
There are many advantages to working as an academic in rural North Dakota and on an Indian reservation. Sometimes the advantages can also be disadvantages, such as our geographic isolation: The benefits of having fewer people, less traffic, and the wondrous beauty of the Great Plains are in the eyes of the beholder, and thus can be scary to those who thrive in concrete cities and congestion. Isolation also means fewer resources — human, financial, and opportunity — but also less bureaucracy, more flexibility, and more freedom, particularly for a college like ours.
Even in this era of information overload, ignorance persists, rooted in stereotypes that play out in cultural attitudes. “Rural” can mean different things to different people, and if you add on being Native — if you’re a rural Native or reservation Indian — the clichés abound. Compound that with endemic poverty, historical trauma, and college unpreparedness. Education matters in so many ways and levels.
Tribal colleges were formed to address the glaring failure of mainstream institutions to serve and graduate Native students. We serve our tribal community, but any and all are welcome to attend, not just Native students. Our core mission is the teaching, learning, and preservation of our respective cultures and languages. (All students at my college must take a Dakota-studies course.) We have many amazing student-success stories that are mostly Native stories, but that also include non-Indians and other people of color.
The challenges of working as an academic in a rural reservation located in a county with a 30-percent poverty rate are not easily addressed, but knowing how our work makes a difference in the lives of students, families, and the community makes me stronger. For the Dakota people, our daily mantra is, Have I been a good relative today?
Mitakuye oyasin: We are all related.
•••
Gregory Pence, professor and chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
Some 42 years ago, I left Manhattan as a new Ph.D. from New York University for uncharted territory in Birmingham, Ala. Perception of my new city then was of police dogs attacking black protesters and of then-Gov. George Wallace’s “stand at the schoolhouse door,” attempting to block integration at the university’s main campus.
However, the University of Alabama at Birmingham was morphing from an extension school to its present campus with 21,000 students, and, along with the university’s Huntsville and Tuscaloosa campuses, grew more liberal than the rest of Alabama. Taking my chances on a temporary position at Birmingham worked well because our medical center grew dramatically over the next 40 years. To get a tenure-track job, I also took a chance by jumping into the field of bioethics.
Not everything went so well. In 1998, I published a trade book opposing the criminalization of human cloning. TV networks wanted interviews and assured me that local affiliates would cooperate, but they did not. (I was told they did not regard anyone local as an expert.) Eventually, Birmingham had to build its own studio for such requests.
My late mentor at Birmingham, James Rachels, whose textbook in ethics for many years was a best seller, once counseled me, “Greg, to be noticed in our fields here, we have to be three times better than if we were at Harvard.”
Birmingham worked well for me because of its financial stability, its place inside a big, diverse city, and because leaders (like the late Tom Hearn, who served as vice president of Birmingham’s University College, and the late Jim Pittman, who served as dean of the medical school) allowed me to do things I could never have done elsewhere: to teach medical students a required, graded course in bioethics for 30 years; to mentor brilliant young adults pre-admitted to medical school; and to coach Ethics Bowl teams that won national championships.
Recently Alabamians chose the Democratic candidate Doug Jones as their U.S. senator instead of the Republican Roy Moore, in a special election. And in Birmingham, we’ve got the top restaurant in America — Highlands Bar & Grill — as rated by the James Beard Foundation Awards.
I’m glad I’m here.
•••
Cynthia Teniente-Matson, president of Texas A&M University at San Antonio
Located on San Antonio’s South Side, our university serves greater San Antonio and much of South Texas. The seventh-largest U.S. city, San Antonio is home to the Alamo, historic missions, Riverwalk, museums and theme parks, and more than 20 colleges and universities, including three campuses representing the state’s two largest systems. Nicknamed “Military City USA,” San Antonio is also home to three military installations and one of the largest concentrations of cybersecurity experts in the nation.
At Texas A&M-San Antonio, established 10 years ago, we leverage our geography and embrace our mission to provide a quality education in a historically underserved region. Our university inhabits a place that has been home to many peoples, originally the indigenous Coahuiltecans, and our campus celebrates San Antonio’s diverse cultural heritage in a spirit of equity and inclusion.
With its location south of San Antonio’s downtown area, our university does not have the type of seamless walking integration into city neighborhoods that some urban campuses may have. But we embrace the rugged beauty of our 700-acre campus and its native plants and wildlife as our university’s setting.
Students, faculty members, and staff members appreciate that our young campus is evolving in its own traditions. Our setting fosters a spirit of exploration and innovation. Anecdotally, I have found that our inclusive mission and embrace of equity resonates with the faculty and staff members we attract. I have also seen a boomerang effect among faculty members who are returning to familial roots in Texas, further enhancing our “fit” with our culture and community.
San Antonio today foretells the future demographics of our nation. I believe our university is creating a national model for student and academic success that builds on the unique assets of our geography and the cultural capital of our vibrant student body.
