The rigors of the professoriate begin to weigh heavily on three assistant professors who are no longer rookies
Joseph Flynn: Even though being an assistant professor is a cool gig, at the end of the day it’s only a gig. You file a W-2 just like everybody else.
In my second year on the tenure track, I am finding that I am less and less excited about it all. Why? Simply put, I have so many items on my agenda — and the fear of failure that comes along with them — that it’s not easy to just sit back and bask in the glow of being a professor anymore. The honeymoon is over. The problem is not that this is my second year, it’s that I am one year closer to tenure review, and my time for acclimation has been exhausted.
In year two, you are no longer a rookie. You are expected to get better student and faculty evaluations for your teaching, to serve on more committees, to do community outreach, to get IRB approval, and, the killer, to get your research published. You are expected to be more understanding of the institution and its politics. You are expected to be more understanding of your role. You are expected to be ... more.
I love my job, but every morning as I roll over, the list of things I need to get done today, and in the coming days, washes over my mind like a North Shore wave on Lake Michigan. This needs to get done. That needs to get done. I have how many meetings today? When can I write? I thought this was going to be done a week ago? That proposal is due Friday?
What I once fondly viewed as a beautiful lifestyle and culture has become a long list of tasks, failures, and accomplishments.
Maybe it’s not that the glow is gone. Perhaps I am just a little jaded right now. I remember telling people in the final months of writing my dissertation that I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, a common cliché. But now I am in a new tunnel, too far in to see the light behind me and nowhere near close enough to the end to see the glow of tenure.
A colleague just handed in his tenure portfolio (note to self: keep track of what you are doing, because that is one intense document), and we all could see the feeling of peace and tranquility that radiated through his face as he declared, “This is it!” Right on. More power to him. Hopefully I can use his light for a little while, until I rediscover my own.
***
Samara Madrid: It’s Friday evening, and I am at home alone looking at my “to do” list. There is the usual ache in my stomach as I realize that the list will not get much shorter even if I spend the entire weekend in my office. Sadly, nothing on the list has anything to do with my research agenda.
I visited the library a few weeks ago. The smell and sight of those books revived my senses and enthusiasm for academe. The purpose of my visit was to get a reference for my current research project. Instead of getting one book in a five-minute visit, I left with two bags full. Both bags are still sitting untouched in my office, and little has been done on my research project.
My visit to the library helped me to remember why I chose to become an academic. It was the creation of knowledge and the process of discovery that I enjoyed most — those moments when I was challenged by new evidence that made me see the world in a different light. I became an academic because I thought it would give me the space to uncover the unknown. To ask questions.
Instead, in my second year here, I spend my time sitting in committee meetings, grading endless papers, and navigating the political and social terrain of the university. Is the glow gone? I don’t know, but I do know my time for research is gone. The notion of discovering the unknown has been replaced with multiple discussions about topics that never seem to get resolved.
As I sat in the middle of the library, basking in the light of unread knowledge, I reflected on my lack of time to conduct meaningful and engaging research. I decided that I must reclaim a space to ask questions and do research if I am going to reignite my passion for academe. If I don’t feel passionate about what I am doing, the struggle of the process can become suffocating rather than freeing. And I am all about free choice.
My choice this weekend is to recapture the excitement I lost along the way. The weekend “to do” list will have to wait as I open the books sitting in my office and revisit partially analyzed data. I took this job to do research, to write, and to share knowledge with my students. The glow is not gone. It just has been dimmed by all the other activities that take up so much of my time, my enthusiasm, and my light.
***
Andrew Kemp: Through the chaos of learning a new job, moving across the country, and finding a new home, I realize now, I lost part of my self, the part of me that loves education.
Throughout my life, I have made a slow progression from lazy high-school student to average undergraduate to anal-retentive master’s student to willing and eager doctoral student. Along the way I taught English-language courses in the Marshall Islands, spent time as a high-school teacher, developed an international program and other projects as a program coordinator, and finally won this position as an assistant professor. It has been a long, consistent, almost predictable march to the front of the line. Now that I am here, in my second year, I’m wondering, where is here?
I have developed a terrible habit of starting lots of projects and struggling to find time to finish them — something my professors warned me against. I’ve read columns on these pages in which academics write about feeling like a sham, and sometimes, lately, I feel that way, too. I have earned national leadership positions. I am sitting on dissertation committees, I am working on a series of papers related to my research agenda. I am collaborating with colleagues on interesting topics. But I am doing many of those things because I have to, not because I want to. Somehow this culminating experience in education, the professoriate, has become just another part of my 35 consecutive years in education, as either student or a teacher (minus one year when I worked for my father). How do I feel about it? I know there is something here that I love; I just need to get reacquainted with it. Life has become complicated in ways that I hadn’t imagined but I am starting to find my way again.
I don’t mean to sound like I don’t appreciate what I have. Northern Illinois is a great place. I have ample support from my colleagues and the administration. I have been given the freedom to follow my interests. Maybe it’s that with everything that has happened this past year with my family’s health, the shootings on the campus, the floods, the blizzards, the ice storms, and some strained finances, I am looking at the world differently. My priorities are no longer eager and naïve.
Perhaps that is what I know. Faculty life is deeply personal. It is a combination of academic freedom and the awful existential freedom of having to be. Yet, in the end, there is still a glimmer of excitement. I still have conversations with colleagues that make my head swirl. And just the other day, I finally figured out how to create something publishable out of my dissertation. So perhaps it isn’t all gloom and doom.
***
All of us: As we move through our second year, we are finding that the rigors of the professoriate are beginning to weigh heavily. The first year is a grace period of sorts, a series of exhibition games meant to ease you into this strange new world. The life and work of the mind is a noble and honored profession, of which we all feel blessed to be a part. But we are also beginning to see the degree of perseverance that is required to sustain us in a world that is, at times, anxiety ridden, sometimes elating, and always challenging.
Joseph Flynn, Samara Madrid, and Andrew Kemp are assistant professors in the department of teaching and learning at Northern Illinois University’s College of Education. They are chronicling their experiences on the tenure track. To read their previous columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/fp/authors/joseph_flynn/fp_articles.html.