The Most Important Choice in Your Career

THE MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE IN YOUR CAREER

 The professorship is one of the few jobs left in America where you are largely your own boss.  Certainly, there are departmental and institutional rules and regulations, but, for the most part, you are fee to do as you please as long as you don’t violate the taboos of the profession.  You are free to design your own courses.  You can choose committees on which you want to serve.  You can establish your own consulting contracts.  You can write as much or as little as you choose.  Your office hours are flexible.  Even your teaching schedule can be manipulated to serve your own needs.  Your students are totally under your domain.  There’s no obligation to show a financial profit from your endeavors.  And, once you are tenured, you are basically protected from unreasonable termination.  As I once heard it described, it’s the last good job in America. 

Over my professional lifetime, there have been some changes to the profession but they are relatively minor.  National accreditation, for example, has imposed a loose organizational structure over programs, regardless if you’re engineering or an educational professor.  But these restrictions are relatively minor.  And, a shrinking pool of students has required institutions to be more pro-student than they once were.  Basically, however, the professorship marches on, much as it has always done.  While our attire has changed from black cloaks and robes to blue jeans and turtlenecks, the job demands remain unchanged.   

As I look back on my interactions with faculty members from the past quarter century, I would categorize these faculty as one of two type of individuals.  There are those who see their mission as one to promote the welfare of their chosen profession and there are those who see the profession as a way manipulate situations to better their own situation in life.  Both can be powerful means of achieving their personal goals. 

The first group is those individuals who have an altruistic bent to their thinking and living.  They see the their goal as advancing the knowledge base of their profession.  In my discipline, Reading Education, these professors attempt to get their students to be critical consumers of a plethora of research on what constitutes the most effective ways to teach reading.  They teach their students strategies and techniques to impart those procedures.  More often than not, they work side-by-side with their students as they seek to gain knowledge and impart wisdom to their younger charges.  There is a high degree of collaboration.  They listen to what their students have to say.  There may be times when the professor doesn’t have all the answers, but they willingly acknowledge that fact and collaboratively seek to resolve unanswered questions or complex issues. 

The second group of professors is those that have learned to manipulate the system for their personal benefit and welfare.  One of the most blatant examples of this existed when I first arrived on campus many years ago.  There was a faculty member who no longer wanted to teach but still wanted to collect a paycheck.  Once she got her teaching assignments, she would attempt to subcontract her courses to an outside instructor who she would pay a paltry amount, pocketing the balance in her own account and traveling around the US on her time off.  Obviously, this couldn’t happen in today’s environment but I think you see my point.

Today’s professors are much craftier.  They finagle teaching loads that employ strategies that allow them to teach the same content in two or more entirely different courses.  Less prep for them.  Or, they construct their teaching schedule so they only have to be on campus a minimum number of days.  (And, I do mean MINIMUM!)  Or better yet, with on-line learning, they never have to come to campus.  It’s a virtual world out there, baby.  Let someone else deal with student issues that require face-to-face contact. 

Then there are those individuals who have been teaching the same content for decade after decade.  I know at least two individuals who never changed their course content for their entire careers.  If you examined their course outlines, the only things that substantially changed were the dates of the lectures!  I know, because I’ve seen them.  That’s what I call the advancement of knowledge! 

The most infuriating professors in my mind are those that put on an outward persona of caring for students and others but their actions give away their true intentions.  They are using the system for their own personal gains.  They are master manipulators and have learned the strategies of stonewalling and hiding behind union protection.  When everything else is stripped away, their overall modus operandi is one thing…greed.

Which brings me to my last point.  These same two types of individuals exist in the world outside of education, too.  We, in higher education, don’t’ have a corner on the market.  Over the years, I’ve tried to make a study of human behavior and motivation.  There are those who leave the earth making it a better place and those that are busy grabbing and snatching everything they can for themselves.  In her book, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin describes both types.  The former have a much greater chance of finding happiness in their lives.  The latter group is never happy, because there is always so much more to be had.  As a young professor, the decisions and choices you make on a daily basis will put you into one of these two camps.  It’s up to you to decide what type of person you want to be.

February 2, 2012