I'm still an English professor. Shoot.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I'm still an English professor. Shoot.

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

I'm doubling in history and poli sci, but I figure you'll have some perspective on my question.

Being a professor is something i've toyed around with, but i've been told by a lot of people that it can be a living hell trying to get there. I'm definitely interested in a few specific subjects in both fields, so the research part of the PhD program wouldn't really bother me. What really concerns me is the admissions. I look at the faculty list for my university (which isn't a top university, but it's definitely up there), and 80% of the professors come from the Yales, the Stanfords, and the Johns Hopkins of the world. You mentioned that you got tenure out of a lower-ranked PhD program, but how common is that? How common is it for the graduates at those top universities to fail to get tenure within the first few years out of grad school? Finally, how difficult is it to get into a top program?

By the way, I consider myself a decent writer, but i'm by no means great. Do you recommend any books that contain useful advice? I've heard Elements of Style is a good one, but i'm not sure if reading it will be useful(in other words, i'm just afraid it's a bunch of talking points out of an intro-level writing course)

xcdude24 fucked around with this message at 23:02 on May 6, 2009

# ¿ May 6, 2009 22:59

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:52

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

do you have to have an MA in English to enter an English PhD program?

# ¿ May 24, 2009 03:52

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

Brainworm posted:

Nope. Most PhD programs run you straight through from the BA.

Whoops, I had a mental lapse there. By MA I meant BA.

# ¿ May 24, 2009 18:54

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

Brainworm posted:

This is a really good question, since liberal arts education is right now beginning a sort of systematic re-evaluation of its place in the higher ed. ecosystem. And this is tough. Every school has, or says it has, its own flavor, and to some extent each does. At the same time, it's really difficult to see substantial differences between undergraduate education at, say, Ohio State and U of Michigan. Each have their flagship programs, but their educational philosophies and the implementations of those philosophies seem largely identical.

What I'm saying is, there's tons of room to disagree with what I'm going to say, and that's that liberal arts colleges are defined by their approaches to general education, and not principally by faculty/student ratios, class sizes, foreign travel, and so forth.

In other words, what I teach as a liberal arts prof qua liberal arts prof isn't about my majors. Any decent college should have junior and senior level courses taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty who are current on field research (if not themselves active researchers), a major designed for both field coverage and selective depth, and classes that encourage majors to work with other majors and field professionals on collaborative projects as part of and increasingly self-guided learning process (which means discussion-based classes, which means no more than, say, 15-20 students in the room). I'd guess that this educationally necessary situation is more common at liberal arts schools, but liberal arts doesn't own it -- I'm sure you'd see it in the top half of US universities, regardless of their liberal arts disposition.

But general education is totally different. Liberal arts colleges as a rule commit to making general education as extensive and rewarding as in-major education. I'm actually working on a report right now where I codify this GenEd commitment in the form of twelve insanely vague rules. So I'll pretend to clarity by quoting them here:

Good General Education Programs

Explicitly answer the question "what's the point of general education?"

Explicitly embody a college's institutional mission

Continuously strive for educational coherence (meaning that e.g. course requirements and offerings create logical educational arcs or articulate meaningfully between fields)

Are self-consciously value-based and teach social responsibility

Attend carefully to student experience

Are consciously designed to evolve (using e.g. feedback loops and periodic reviews and redesigns)

Require and foster academic community

Have strong faculty and administrative leadership

Cultivate substantial and enduring support from multiple constituencies (e.g. alumni, athletics boosters, local, state, and federal government)

Ensure continuing support for faculty

Reach beyond the classroom to the broad range of students' co-curricular experiences

Ensure each student assesses and monitors his or her progress toward an evolving vision through ongoing self-reflection

That's a lot of stuff, but what it basically means is that general education shouldn't be treated by faculty, administrators, or students as a second-class academic citizen -- it's not a set of requirements to get out of the way, and it's characterized by the same deeply-collaborative discussion-based experience as good upper-level courses. It should also have a clear set of purposes in line with students' personal, academic, and co-curricular goals and experiences, the college's institutional mission, and individual students' commitments to self-improvement.

I teach at a liberal arts college because I think that a good GenEd experience, more than anything else, can make students better people. I don't just mean this in the sense that they become good citizens or more closely conform to our college's mission; I mean this in the sense that GenEd teaches students to see education as a deeply individual process of self-evaluation and self-improvement, apart from a forum for more general types of intellectual discovery. That's where students learn to see education as intrinsically valuable, rather than just an instrument one uses to get a better paying job or make better jokes at parties.

In that sense, my field expertise matters much less to me than my overall abilities as a teacher and widely-literate intellectual, since those are the things that are really going to help my GenEd students build something useful out of their experiences with me.

That's a really interesting perspective on GenEd. I attend a rather large(T1) university, and my experience is that GenEds are just something you have to get out of the way before you delve into the "nitty gritty" of your upper-division major requirements. I finished all of my GenEds during the fall quarter of my second year, and I didn't really feel that much more "well-rounded" because of it. I'm a reading/writing guy, so I just took all my quantitative stuff pass/not pass, and i've probably regressed in that cognitive department since high school. I definitely found a few of the GenEd classes interesting(a couple of them literally changed the way I think about the world), but they won't by any means play a major part in my overall educational experience.

# ¿ May 25, 2009 04:55

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

what's usually the average grade in your classes?

# ¿ May 25, 2009 18:20

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

Am I allowed to post an E/N-type post in this thread? If not, ignore it, I guess. Anyways, i'm compiling a list of books I want to read this summer, and although none of them really deal with your area of expertise, I was just wondering if you've read any of these. If you have, which ones did you like?

-A people's history of the United States
-Structural transformation of the public sphere
-Anything by Jorge Luis Borges
-Anti-intellectualism in American life
-A confederacy of Dunces
-Travel novels by Bill Bryson

Again, this is also outside of your area of expertise, but I'll have a go anyway. Me and one of my roommates had a pretty heated discussion about No Country for Old Men(we've both seen the movie, but only I have read the book). I think the book is about the generational gulf in America. Bell is basically from another time- he can't keep up with the "new" face of crime in his county(and, on a greater scale, the "new" American culture). Then again, I could be completely off the mark. What do you think of McCarthy's writing in general?

# ¿ Jun 4, 2009 18:54

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:52

xcdude24: Dec 23, 2008

Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but what's the difference between comparative lit and english?

# ¿ Jun 19, 2009 18:38

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I'm still an English professor. Shoot.