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WHY is undergraduate teaching no longer as enjoyable as it once was? Why is it increasingly difficult to integrate research and teaching? These and related questions have been on my mind a lot for a number of years. They are also implicit, and often explicit, in discussions with colleagues across the disciplines. Attempting to answer them has helped me understand the declining morale of professors on my campus. Unless the State University College of New York, Plattsburgh, is unique, my conclusions may be relevant to many midsized state institutions whose “primary emphasis is undergraduate education,” as SUNY Plattsburgh's mission statement declares (1).
But aren't the reasons for dissatisfaction obvious? Chronic financial problems in state systems have led to the virtual disappearance of sabbaticals and discretionary increases, the frequent denial of tenure or contract renewal, the reorganization of departments, the elimination of so-called marginal programs, and the persistent fear of retrenchment. At the same time, state bureaucrats publicly allege that professors are lazy and overpaid (see, e.g., Cage). Yet I believe that budget cuts and their consequences don't fully account for the decrease in enthusiasm, for the growing indifference to teaching and professional activity, that I see at many institutions and, in particular, among the tenured professors.
My own departmental faculty is middle-aged. The typical tenured professor is fifty-one and spent nearly twenty-five years in the classroom. My assistant professors are well into their thirties. Half of my recent full-time instructors have been over fifty. We are all moving toward or through mid-career, which to many is naturally a period of crisis. Whether we continue to be productive teachers and scholars or lay ourselves on the deadwood pile is often decided during this transition from early to later career. Discussions of faculty development do not, however, pay attention to the needs or concerns of this cohort. Junior faculty members must, of course, be nurtured, and individual luminaries will always make their own entrepreneurial way. But university administrations are usually rather callous toward the burned-our-professor and are generally unwilling to ask how his or her exhaustion came about, how it could have been prevented, or what can be done about it now. Official indifferent of this sort, shading perceptibly into animosity, only increases faculty members' bitterness.
Mid-career (between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five) is a time for reconsidering aspirations and assessing the degree to which they have been fulfilled. It's a time for coming to terms with achievements. Sometimes this reflection produces a sense of satisfaction. Often it results in disappointment and regret: “I shouldn't be her”; “I'm better than this”; “I'm not sufficiently appreciated, recognized, rewarded”; “I haven't accomplished what I could have”; and so on. A sense of personal frustration or failure can lead to giving up. Lack of intellectual stimulation can also foster dogmatism and rigidity. The feeling that one is effectively excluded from serious decision making evolves easily into a generalized sense of impotence and futility (Kets De Vries 134, 139, 140, 146, 151).
In this article I examine some of the needs and concerns shared by my middle-aged, tenured faculty members and suggest some ways in which these concerns might be acknowledge and these needs at least partially met. For I think it is possible to maintain, even to increase, professional energy in mid-career and thus to avoid stagnation or a decline into inactivity. I begin by looking honestly at the two questions I posed at the start.
Professors trained as literary scholars are increasingly obliged to teach, primarily, if not exclusively, language or culture courses. Usually that means elementary and sometimes intermediate sequences in general education programs or preprofessional language skills courses. In either case, professors are doing things other than those for which they went to graduate school, teaching things that they have not been trained to teach and in which they may well have no particular ability or interest. We all know this phenomenon, probably firsthand, and it has repeatedly been discussed in professional journals (e.g., Green; Waldinger; James; Motiff).
This emphasis on general education and service courses, which are often remedial, means devoting extensive faculty time and energy to intellectual drudge work. The increasing demand for such courses implies, moreover, a corresponding decrease in resources for advanced courses in the major. This reallocation of money and personnel leaves full-time faculty members with fewer opportunities to teach their own fields. Literature courses are simply disappearing from lists of current course offerings. Some critics have even derided as mere vanity the very desire to teach an occasional class on the subjects one knows best. Literary studies, in particular, are widely considered irrelevant to students' educational needs.
Yet the problem is not just that we must teach mostly lower-division language courses. Faculty members at small to medium-sized public institutions have done so for decades. They all know that these courses have sustained our major programs by increasing departmental FTEs, thus protecting small upper-division courses. No, even more important is that students are increasingly ill-prepared for college. Everyone knows that many student's basic reading, writing, speaking, and computational skills are inadequate; that they have little or no training in the higher-order cognitive skills; and that they have little or no sense of historical time or geographical space, as well as insufficiently developed habits of self-discipline, self-motivation, and responsibility. They don't know how to study and have minimal interest in learning. Narrowly pragmatic, they show little appreciation for so-called high culture, especially literature.
The foreign language teacher thus finds it increasingly difficult to be a literary scholar. In a schedule dominated by large lower-division courses and numerous “student-centered” activities, there is no place for what has been called the “scholarship of discovery” (Boyer). Any research requires uninterrupted periods of sustained reading, reflection, and writing, particularly at institutions with a less intellectual environment. Our peers constitute “the most demanding of all student audiences,” but only if one can produce significant articles and books. The idea that research is a “subcategory of teaching” with colleagues as one's students (Mancing 32) is, moreover, unlikely to impress administrators unless it can be translated into increased enrollment or grant moneys. Otherwise it will be dismissed as self-aggrandizement or self-delusion.
This discussion leads me to the question of rewards. Dorothy James has described the conflicts between teaching and research and between language and literature that have dominated tenure and promotion committees on many campuses, damaging the morale and sometimes the careers of faculty members. This conflict has not been a big problem in my department. We look for relative balance between effective teaching and professional activity, insisting that faculty members teach at all course levels and that professional activity lead to publication of some sort. We tend to accept a wide range of publications, including pedagogical articles, textbooks, anthologies, culture studies, and creative works, as well as literary criticism.
Nevertheless, members of my department faculty and our colleagues in other disciplines feel that their efforts are neither acknowledged nor appreciated. There are many ways in which campuses might recognize faculty achievements (Jarvis 25). But while peer appreciation and public recognition are important and faculty members should receive them more often than they do, I believe that there is a more fundamental cause of dissatisfaction: lack of commitment to and support of intellectual activity on campus. My college is primarily focused on student life rather than academic affairs. This focus gives a different slant to the term student-centered university. What seems to matter most is that students enjoy their college experience, that their self-denied needs be met, that they register and remain in numbers sufficient to meet enrollment quotas.
How did we come to this focus? Who determines enrollment quotas and admission requirements? Who decides how much money to allocate to programs that rescue students facing probation and dismissal? Who selects the direction the college should take, the areas it should emphasize, the projects it should support? Definitely not the faculty. In fact, faculty members don't even know who does. It's no wonder that they feel powerless, for they have been cut out of the real decision-making process. Faculty members are seldom even consulted in any meaningful way. Top administrators make decisions with the advice of their staffs. Many top administrators are, of course, former faculty members who left teaching in mid-career, often in response to this same frustrating realization. Increasingly, however, those in power never have been full-time faculty members. Many members of their staff, moreover, are nonacademic. Decisions that affect the academic community are thus made by people largely out of touch or out of sympathy with the experience, the concerns, the aspirations of the teacher-scholar. Since faculty members can seldom even help to shape policy, they can have little hope of changing the campus conditions that militate against the very idea of the productive teacher-scholar.
You may think that I have strayed from the issue of faculty development. Certainly the problems that I described above are too broad, too profound and pervasive, too rooted in the structure of United States higher education and culture, to be addressed by any single department or even an entire campus. So why bring them up? Because identifying the factors that undermine faculty enthusiasm for teaching and scholarship is an important prerequisite to honest, realistic analysis, without which we cannot address admittedly complex problems.
Success, it seems to me, can be measured by the extent to which teaching and scholarship can be not only combined but associated to their mutual advantage. Literature specialists who don't teach at select or research-oriented institutions will surely have trouble achieving this goal. To link teaching and scholarship at all we may have to broaden our interests to include pedagogy, applied linguistics, area studies, or even institutional policy. I think we can be inclusive without forsaking literature; we may even help safeguard a place for literature in the undergraduate curriculum. Some academics, of course, are uninterested in anything but literature in the conventional sense. Others may simply find that concomitant redistribution of time and energy unacceptable. A few still believe any association with other disciplines necessarily compromises the integrity, the purity of literary studies. I myself balked for many years and envy those whose academic work remains more strictly literary. That's what I trained for; that's what I enjoy most. Nonetheless, given the climate on many campuses—indeed, in the nation at large—I believe we must expand the concept of our field if we are to resist marginalization and retain respect in a culture that is increasingly antiliterary, if not antiliterate.
Gerald Bakker, a chemist, suggests that “every request for research funds include a description of the impact that the research is likely to have on teaching.” I'd like to suggest the inverse: that every time we make programmatic changes, undertake instructional projects, consider cooperative teaching ventures, or even prepare commentaries on university policy, we make explicit the ways in which these things draw on or incorporate the research interests of our faculty members or could lead to professional work for public presentation. I'd also like to suggest some partnership arrangements that can help build the collegial relations that support scholarship but are very often missing at colleges such as mine.
Let's look at the first problem: the change in students' academic skills, needs, and goals. Many educational commissions and coordinating boards across the country have lamented the “lack of progression from high school to college” and the consequent “millions spent annually by higher education institutions…to bring students up to speed to do college work” (James 42–43). Many United States colleges are in fact no more than “inefficient, high-priced secondary schools,” and Dorothy James maintains that this is nowhere more apparent than in foreign languages, where a good deal of what goes on “could and should go on in high school.” James accordingly argues for the active involvement of foreign language faculty members in articulation efforts (43).
One of our biggest challenges is to design undergraduate foreign language curricula that dovetail with high school programs at the beginning and intermediate levels, prepare our students to enter graduate schools or professional life, and take them from the first to the second stag smoothly. To do this we must understand clearly the skills and knowledge necessary at each. Then we must structure programs to enable students to meet these proficiency goals and we must sequence courses appropriately.
Those trained in literary history and criticism need to be involved in discussions of how language, literature, and culture interrelate from the lowest to the more advanced levels (Henning, “Integration”). They could investigate many questions alone or in collaboration with colleagues in applied linguistics, foreign language methodology, or other disciplines. What, for example, should undergraduates know about literary history, textual analysis, and culture? What reading, writing, interpretive, and cognitive skills should they have? What skills and knowledge do they lack? How can they acquire these skills? What obstacles do they face? How can we incorporate literary texts even at the beginning and intermediate levels? How can significant literary texts be taught and significant themes and issues be broached in the third and fourth years, given the students' skills and our proficiency goals? How do popular culture and high culture relate to each other? How do texts relate to their sociocultural and historical contexts? What are the symptomatic, critical, or transformative aspects of a particular text that has been selected for inclusion in an undergraduate course? At what point do we leave the domain of foreign languages and enter the domains of other departments, such as history, anthropology, sociology, and political science? All these questions can be approached from both pedagogical and scholarly perspectives.
Undergraduate courses, even at the beginning language level, can become areas for experimentation and hence research fields. Even elementary school foreign language teachers can conduct valid research in the classroom (Chamot). By asking questions related to our training and interests as literature specialists—for example, about reading and interpretation and about how students do or fail to do them—we can ensure that our scholarly skills are not unused as we teach even general education, service, and remedial courses. By publicizing our findings. we can show why our literary perspective should not be excluded from national discussions of foreign language education. In particular, the proficiency movement, which emphasizes skills assessment, could benefit from greater scrutiny by those with expertise in literary criticism and hermeneutics (see, e.g., Henning, “Assessing”). We can, in other words, transform impediments to scholarship into scholarly investigations.
Any arrangement that enables faculty members to share resources, expertise, and experience as part of a mutually supportive network can strengthen the relation between teaching and research and thus help faculty members maintain a positive outlook. Partnerships with colleagues, long common in the social and natural sciences, would, I believe, be beneficial to us in foreign languages and literature. They can take many forms, including linked courses, team teaching, joint research, and even simple informal discussion.
Linked course, for example, were developed by the learning community movement as a variant of, or alternative to, team teaching. Students in a foreign language program might be required to register for two courses with coordinated syllabi or assignments. A third-year course in composition and conversation could be linked with a literature or culture survey. Or a survey of the nineteenth century could be linked with a course on realism. The rationale usually focuses on the benefit to students, notably the broadening and integration of course materials. Linked courses may also mitigate the problem of student preparation and attitude that I mention above. Teachers can acquire collegial support for the ongoing effort to incorporate research and expertise into their undergraduate courses. In some arrangements, foreign language teachers may even be able to share the responsibility for teaching language skills.
Linked courses can also be part of cooperative arrangements with other departments, especially if the foreign language programs offers courses in English to fulfill a general education requirement. A linkup with other departments can allow faculty members to teach students who have or are acquiring more extensive background. Students who are better grounded in, for example, historical, political, or sociocultural contexts or who have higher-order cognitive skills can read and discuss in more sophisticated, intelligent ways. All students are encouraged to make connections and thus to develop their synthetic and relation skills. Linked courses may therefore provide some means of addressing the preparation and attitude problems that have robbed teaching of its pleasure.
Collaboration that provides opportunities to integrate teaching and research can also help establish and maintain a collegial climate that supports and encourages intellectual activity. It should not, however, be coercive. It should not impose on faculty members a specific pedagogical, critical, or ideological approach or a specific degree or kind of collaboration.
I would particularly encourage partnership arrangements between senior and junior faculty members of different language sections or departments. In my departments new groupings tend to be beneficial. Old associations are often fraught with tension and animosity. By breaking the routine, faculty members may be more willing to admit their weaknesses, more open to suggestion, more amenable to change.
For the past year, I have been working on a departmental assessment plan with a junior colleague in Spanish whose specialty is applied linguistics. Our discussions revealed differing but not incompatible approaches to teaching culture. I use works of literature as authentic texts to teach synchronic aspects of culture. My colleague prefers magazine and newspaper articles. As part of a project funded by the United States Department of Education, we decided to experiment with intermediate-level students. My colleague and I meet regularly to share information, offer comment, and generally support each others' endeavors. We have already made presentations at conferences and plan to publish our results, both together and separately. For me the value of this joint effort has been twofold. First, it demonstrated that teaching culture even on the lower levels did not mean abandoning literature. Second, I had the chance to remind my colleague that, at least for many foreign language speakers, literature remains an authentic cultural expression.
Any such arrangement that brings together junior and senior faculty members can also instill in the latter what Kets De Vries calls “generativity,” that is, a willingness to help younger colleagues develop. The sense that one is still actively, constructively involved in the future of the institution or profession can counter the perhaps inevitable tendency to resist innovation (163).
Partnerships can also provide an alternative to the institutionalized mentoring that has become so popular. Mentoring relationships have, I believe, been patterned too closely on the family, which puts the junior member in a subordinate, almost childlike, position psychologically and risks drawing inappropriate emotions into the professional setting.
Chairs and administrators, particularly deans, can encourage and facilitate cooperation in a number of ways. They can bring together faculty members with similar interests. They can arrange flexible course structures and teaching schedules and even sharing of teaching assignments. They can provide resources and funding. They can recognize faculty efforts and accomplishments. They can give people the time to reflect and act and the leeway for less than complete success. They can participate more actively as well.
Faculty can, however, apply their skills and expertise to campus life in another, somewhat less conventional, way. They can bring them to bear on important academic and professional issues, such as recent controversies over the literary canon, academic freedom, multiculturalism, political correctness. But there are also local issues of university policy—for instance, workload, departmental reconfiguration, general education, the foreign language requirement, organizational structure, and the budgetary factors that underlie them all. Activity of this sort gives new relevance to the term critical faculties . Faculty members should be more consistently consulted and engaged in institutional problem solving. We all know that too often they are not. Sometimes the decision-making process excludes them, openly or covertly. Junior faculty members are often surprised to find that their opinions are not necessarily heeded just because they are solicited. Most administrations have established multiple decision-making mechanisms, some of which function largely as legitimating facades. Sometimes, though, faculties actually give away access to decision-making (knowingly or not) through the way that they word their bylaws, for example. Other times, they simply turn away in frustration. Faculty members often don't recognize that they can use the very abilities that make them effective teachers and scholars to influence institutional policy. One way of doing so—surprisingly often overlooked—is writing. The thoughtful memo, the well-argued position paper, the forceful essay: all can have effects long after comments at a meeting have been forgotten. Moreover, campus issues most often have broader relevance, so local discussions can become the basis for published work. 1 Literature specialists are particularly well placed to analyzed campus discourse, disclose assumptions, reveal implications, and challenge conclusions. This kind of political engagement would force administrators to think more deeply and more carefully about their decisions and would counter the alienation that fosters low morale.
Faculty members do have a responsibility to identify and confront constructively the causes of their dissatisfaction. They should regularly reassess their goals and opportunities. They need to recognize the danger signs of obsolescence and redundancy caused, for example, by changes in their institutions, particularly in the student clientele and educational missions. They should then realistically consider their options and decide for themselves what action to take rather than react to what administration imposes. It is especially important—and too rare—that chairs have sufficient integrity to act in the best interest of their departments and disciplines. Large and influential units such as English departments can sometimes resist change, but small, endangered departments of foreign language and literature cannot. Individually and collectively, they must engage in the fray, preferably by proposing their own solutions to problems of faculty and curriculum development.
Yet I am fully aware that their individuals nor entire departments can by themselves create the climate of participation and support that is necessary to maintain morale and sustain faculty development. Top administrators, those who really make institutional policy, must solicit comment; refrain from discouraging open, honest discussion; and engage faculty members in problem solving. They must therefore accept that faculty members hold diverse views—disciplinary, methodological, political, ideological, personal—some of which may differ sharply from those of administration. Too often administrators simply play one perspective off against another, deepening existing divisions and rendering faculty members in general less political effective. The more we are at odds with one another, the more isolated and fearful for our positions we may become—and the fearful are more easily coerced. I'm convinced that top administrators know this well.
Nonetheless, a demoralized faculty whose commitment to teaching, research, and service has waned is, in the long run, not in anyone's best interest. A stimulating, collegial environment based on a network of cooperative arrangements; the interconnection of teaching, research, and service; an integrated disciplinary curriculum that addresses the needs of students, community, and faculty members: these conditions will enable us to develop and maintain intellectual vigor and professional creativity.
The author is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the State University College of New York, Plattsburgh. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 15–17 June 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina.
1 A portion of this essay, for example, first appeared in “Declining Faculty Morale,” in Insight and Outlook (Dec. 1994), a campus newsletter that I edit with three colleagues: the chair of the departments of economics and the former chairs of the department of political science and the department of philosophy.
Bakker, Gerald. “Using ‘Pedagogical-Impact Statements’ to Make Teaching and Research Symbiotic Activities.” Chronicle of Higher Education 17 Mar. 1995:B3.
Boyer, Ernest L. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate . Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990.
Cage, Mary Crystal. “Regulating Faculty Workloads.” Chronicle of Higher Education 20 Jan. 1995: A30+.
Chamot, Anna Uhl. “The Teacher's Voice: Action Research in Your Classroom.” ERIC/CLL News Bulletin 18.2 (1995):1+.
Green, Tamara M. “Between Scylla an Charybdis: Teaching and Research on the Academic Deep.” ADFL Bulletin 23.2 (1992):13–18. [Show Article]
Henning, Sylvie Debevec. “Assessing Literary Interpretation Skills.” Foreign Language Annals 25 (1992):339–56.
———. “The Integration of Language, and Culture Goals and Curricular Design.” Profession 93 . New York: MLA, 1993.22–26.
James, Dorothy. “Compensation and Rewards.” ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994):38–48. [Show Article]
Jarvis, Donald K. “Who Needs Development.” ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994):23–25. [Show Article]
Kets De Vries, Manfred F.R. Organizational Paradoxes: Clinical Approaches to Management . New York: Tavistock, 1980.
Mancing, Howard. “A Theory of Faculty Workload.” ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994):31–37. [Show Article]
Motiff, Judith A., and James P. Motiff. “Difficult Situations, Difficulties with Faculty Members.” ADFL Bulletin 25.3 (1994):26–30. [Show Article]
State University College of New York, Plattsburgh. “Mission Statement.” Plattsburgh: State U Coll. of New York, 1995.
Waldinger, Renée. “Faculty Development and Enlightened Self-Interest.” Profession 93 . New York: MLA, 1993. 55–58.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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