Guitarsophist

I have been directing university writing centers for 18 years, nine years at one institution and nine years at another. Last week I decided to resign my position, exercise my retreat rights, and go back to the classroom full time.

I love writing centers. When people ask what I do, I say that I hire students who write well to help students who don’t write well. That is it in a small nutshell. I love hiring and training tutors, watching them grow in skill and confidence, and watching them move on to careers in teaching, publishing, law, medicine, whatever. They often return to say that the writing center work improved their writing, helped them learn to deal with people, increased their confidence, and helped them get jobs. They form a community, learn from each other, and often remain in touch with fellow tutors for years after they leave.

I also love working with the students who come to us for help, especially when they come back with big smiles telling us that they passed the course or the test, and that they are more confident about their writing skills. Late in the quarter, when all appointments are booked and the desperate walk-ins are lined up in hope of a no show, I always left my office and started tutoring to help reduce the backlog. It was always a joy to work with them, interesting students doing interesting things, working hard to succeed.

However, I never intended to make a career directing writing centers. I was just about to defend my dissertation back in 1991 when the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the institution I had been working at as a lecturer contacted me. He had been told by the president to create a writing center. He didn’t even know what a writing center was, exactly. Did I know? Would I be interested in creating one? That led to the first nine years, which was great, except that I didn’t have retreat rights to the English Department, so I was faculty without a department. I applied for retreat rights, a process which turned into a big fiasco that took years. Another campus offered me more money, a promotion to Associate Professor, and tenure, an offer I could not really refuse. That led to the second nine years.

Administration is a skill I learned on the job. You need to budget, plan, project, and act. You need to hire, train, and occasionally fire. You need to lead, and manage your employees and your student staff. You need to set policies, and know when to follow them and when to bend them. You need to market your services and defend your program from harm. You need to maintain a network of connections of all kinds, at all levels, from janitors to presidents, and treat everyone with respect and good will. In good times it’s fun. In bad times, it’s challenging, though it can be interesting. Right now, we are in very bad times. The university is shrinking, and parts are going to be lopped off.

So why resign now? I have wanted to do this for some while. It’s not that I have been out of the classroom all this time. I have been teaching two courses a year for the English Department and serving on their Teaching and Learning committee, which was charged with developing an outcomes assessment plan. The courses I have been teaching are mostly graduate seminars in rhetoric and composition with an occasional section of a general education science fiction course. I enjoy designing and teaching courses. I found that in the quarters I was not teaching, I missed it. I wanted to do more.

The English Department also has a lot of re-design work to do. Most campuses in our system are eliminating remedial English courses and introducing “stretch” models in which some students are allowed to take more time to do the same college-level work. They need someone to coordinate this work. In addition, members of the department are talking about creating a writing major, a program in which one could get an undergraduate degree in English focusing more on professional writing than on literary study. I want to work on designing this new program.

I will direct the writing center for one more quarter. In winter, I am currently scheduled to teach an honors section of science fiction, a course in professional writing, and and undergraduate literary theory course. The literary theory course will be the toughest preparation for me, as it has been many years since I thought about much of that material. Back in 1991 I would have been ready to go at it. However, I am already looking at syllabi, talking to other professors, and reviewing the textbooks that are generally used. I am confident that I will be ready. And most importantly, I am having a great time.

My colleagues in English and elsewhere seem to be delighted about my decision. No one has questioned the wisdom of it, even though it involves a pay cut and is occurring in a very uncertain time. I have begun to realize that most faculty think of the writing center director as a very low-level, if useful, position, a sort of chief grammar corrector. When I told one colleague, a philosopher, that I was going to teach Literary Theory, he asked, “Can you do that?” I laughed. I came out of a rhetoric and composition doctoral program that was nationally recognized (and criticized) as being more theory-oriented than most. My colleagues, except in English, just didn’t know.

People come up to me and say, “Congratulations!” I am not sure what they are congratulating me for. But I do know that this decision feels right, and I am looking forward to winter quarter in great anticipation.

Apparently, California State University is facing a 20% budget cut in 2009-10, about $583 million dollars.  As campuses make plans for cuts, some people have begun to ask, “Why do we need all of those professors, who only teach 12 hours a week anyway?”

I have read a couple of op-ed pieces which said that even if the state fired every single state employee, including all of the professors, it wouldn’t even begin to solve the budget problem.  It is not possible to close the budget gap with cuts only, yet some in the legislature are still trying to do that.  It would seem that most of the so-called leaders in state government are more interested in ideological posturing than problem solving or good government.  However, this post is not about that.

Professors are evaluated through a process that on my campus is called “Retention, Tenure, and Promotion” or “RTP.”  The three main categories of evaluation are teaching, scholarship, and service.  Different types of institutions have different priorities for faculty.  At a community college, the emphasis is on good teaching, and lots of it.  A community college professor could easily see 150 students a week in five courses.  At a “Research 1″ university such as a University of  California campus like Berkeley, the emphasis is on scholarship.  At a comprehensive university such as a typical CSU, teaching and scholarship are weighted more equally.

University service is a wild card.  Service means serving on university and college committees, running programs, presenting at campus events, coordinating activities, advising clubs, etc.  Service is strongly encouraged, but often not rewarded.

Traditionally, scholarship means creating new knowledge through experimentation, analysis, and study using whatever methods and practices are appropriate to the discipline, and publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal.  In recent times, the definition of scholarship and publishing has expanded a bit to include such things as curriculum and program development and publishing online, although some of these things are still controversial.  In the sciences and increasingly in other fields, scholarship cannot even begin without grant funding, so writing grant proposals is a major component of faculty workload.

Faculty have a required teaching load.  My campus is on quarters, so the load is 3-3-3, or three classes in each of three quarters.  A typical semester load is 4-4.  Faculty do generally have summer off, but their contracts are for nine months, and nine months pay is stretched out over 12 months.  Summer is typically when much of the grant writing and article writing is done.   Without research and writing, new faculty will not be retained by the campus, and tenured faculty will not be promoted.  Every year, probationary faculty must submit an RTP packet with a description of everything they are working on, all publications, student evaluations, and a plan for improvement.  This packet, which sometimes fills two three-ring binders,  must be approved by the department, the college, and the university.

So, do faculty work only 12 hours per week, nine months a year?  Let’s look a little more closely at those 12 hours.  If one has a three course load, one will indeed be in class about 12 hours.  However, if you were going to stand in front of a class of 30-40 or even 100 students expecting you to be a font of wisdom and insight for 100 minutes, wouldn’t you want to be prepared?  In my experience, even if one has taught the same course many times, one still needs to re-read the materials, go over one’s notes, and update information.  If the course is a new preparation, the professor will spend hours reading the books and figuring out how to teach them.

Designing a new course, or a new way to teach a course,  involves knowing what to teach and how to teach it.  One needs to read new textbooks, consider the goals and desired outcomes of a course and  the students who will take it, design and sequence assignments, write quizzes and other assessments, and generally imagine the conceptual and intellectual progress of the students.  Last spring I taught a seminar called “Pedagogies of Reading” that I had not taught before.  I spent much of the summer reading books that might possibly be assigned in the course.  After choosing the books, I read them again, writing reading and discussion questions, creating assignments, and making notes for lectures.

In addition to preparation time, faculty must interact with students outside of class.  Office hours are required, but email has actually increased the amount of contact that faculty have with students dramatically.  Many of the emails say something like, “Hey Professor, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to class, did I miss anything important?”  However, we also get legitimate questions about the assignments and the course content, advisement questions about the program, career guidance questions, and requests for letters of recommendation.

I have found that the better I teach, the more students contact me.  Thus, the harder I work, the more work I have to do.  However, interacting with students is the most rewarding part of the job.

The part of the job that becomes a real grind after a while is grading papers, exams, quizzes, and other assignments.   It is hard to evaluate real knowledge and understanding with a multiple choice scantron test, although scantrons can be useful.  Evaluating written work takes so much time, and involves so many potential problems, including the possibility of plagiarism.  Many students have trouble expressing themselves in English.  If a student gets something wrong, is it because of their expression of a concept in English, or because they don’t understand the concept?  And there are so many ways to get something wrong.  Written work is hard to evaluate and grade, and requires feedback from the instructor.  However, multiple choice tests often simply hide a lack of understanding. In most disciplines, the harder way is the better way.

Any time that is left over after all of the above activities will be spent keeping up with the field by reading journals and books, participating in discussion lists, and attending conferences.

Are there tenured faculty who slack off?  Of course there are.  There are professors who just stand in front of the class and read the textbook to them.  There are some who are still reading from 20 year old lecture notes.  However, in my experience these are the rare exception, not the rule.   Most faculty became professors because they had a passion for their field of study and most remain passionate and interested in helping students throughout their careers.