Goal Setting, Research Productivity, and the Associate Professor Survey

A friend asked me yesterday if I had goals. Not just "things I'd like to do some day," but articulated, specified goals. With a timeline.

In short, no.

All the career advice I've ever read suggests that goal-setting is an essential part of an integrated, successful career. And I do have "things I'd like to do some day," don't get me wrong. But writing down goals...well, for whatever reason, I haven't done it. One reason, I suspect, is that I'm a little uncomfortable with taking myself quite that seriously, with putting myself forward, in the way that goal-setting suggests. When I write it down here it sounds ludicrous, but there it is.

But here's the thing. I spent some time yesterday with the MLA's Associate Professor Survey, and I wonder if I'm not alone. The key finding for me, that women in private independent institutions (like my own) spend on average 9.6 years at associate professor before advancing to full, was sobering. (Especially since I'm already right at that mark, if not a little beyond it.) But even more telling was the paired statistic that in the same institutions, men are advancing on average three years more rapidly. (That's the largest gap between men's and women's advancement that the survey found.)

I wonder if women are less willing to label themselves career-focused than men are. I wonder if those women aren't articulating their goals, aren't naming them, and are therefore falling behind on them. I think in institutions like mine this could be a particularly insidious trap, as we are sought after and rewarded (up to a point) for our service and our teaching, and can make a pretty good career on them alone. So I wonder if when women like me say, "I'm too busy for my research," they really mean, "I haven't made it a priority." I wonder if they haven't made it a priority because they see that it's not really that highly valued, or because they truly prefer their teaching or service work, or because they have trouble carving out time for it at home. I am not at all ready to discount institutional and/or systemic discrimination against women, either--I know that the research work I do is, on occasion, measured and found wanting, at least in part because my field (children's literature--a female-dominated field) is not taken as seriously as, say, Renaissance literature. But such discrimination may fall into a larger pattern of discounting women's work that women themselves participate in. What would it take for us to claim our own work, our own value?

Or, on the other hand, are we choosing the saner course by pursuing more integrated lives? Sometimes that's what I think, and it does make sense. I have great autonomy in the classroom already; I do the research that interests me in the time frame that I can make work for my family, and that means an emphasis on conference papers and articles rather than on a monograph. (Psst--I prefer to read articles anyway, and suspect that they're more influential in most cases. But that's another story...maybe.) In my essay for Mama, PhD I call for us all to insist on the value of our work, to hold our senior colleagues and administrators to account when they pay lip service to teaching and service and then reward only original scholarship. I do think the work I do is valuable, but a small voice inside me also says, "you're not doing enough research." Maybe if I put some goals in writing I could measure my work against them and silence that voice. Maybe.

We think of these things when the semester ends and the research program hasn't quite ramped up again--or I do. Here's what I wrote yesterday about that survey, taking things in a slightly different direction:

Mothering at Mid-Career: The Associate Professor Survey - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Note: when I went to post this, I wanted to tag it for future reference and discovered that I have never used a tag for either "research" or "scholarship" before. Hmm.

Not at the MLA

I'm delighted not to be at the MLA convention this year. Though I love San Francisco, and the opportunity to catch up with old friends is one I'm sorry to miss, still I prefer spending Christmas and New Year's with my family, and without a convention in between them. Still, I'm glad Caroline is at the MLA and reporting on it for Inside Higher Ed--check out her insights here. (I'll be back blogging for IHE next week.)

Talk amongst yourselves

Posting has really fallen off here this week--and, if I'm honest, all semester. I've had a hard time keeping up with any outside reading and that leaves me less to talk about here. That said, I'm blogging elsewhere, and I realize I've forgotten to link to the discussion here. So if you want to read up on the shape of academic careers, and the difficulty of balancing work and family, here's a list of links for you. Discuss.

Tedra Osell gives advice to someone considering academe.

I follow up with some ideas about career ladders and lattices (original NYT article here).

Dana Campbell chimes in.

Laura McKenna at 11D joined the conversation about now; she also noted that ProfGrrrl, Professing Mama, and GeekyMom had more to say.

[edited to add] Wendy at Outside Providence has made her own luck, and talks about it here.

Tedra and I each blogged about it again the following week, and Aeron Haynie's next post also brings up a relevant point about including the dads.

Whew! After all that, do you think we've solved the problems of the universe yet?

Yeah, me neither. And now I need to grade some more papers.

Why Academics should blog

I think maybe this post should be required reading for academics and the administrators who don't know how to "count" blogging...

(link from Geeky Mom)

Already?

On Tuesdays you can find me at Inside Higher Ed. This week I'm wondering (again) where the month went...

John Green in Richmond

Tricia has summed up last night's talk so well, I'm just going to point you to her post. Eventually, I'll be writing up my own report for The Edge of the Forest, but it will be hard not to steal from her!

Reading and Writing

Since the end of the semester I've read 23 books. Really more--I haven't counted the three Harry Potter novels I've reread so far, for example. 23 that I had either never read before or (Roll of Thunder, anyone?) had forgotten ever reading before. I'm also partway through at least three other novels, and am in the luxurious position of being able to start a book and decide I just won't finish it.

I haven't written nearly as much as I'd like to since semester's end. I did finish up a column, of course, and I've actually gotten started with a writing group, I think. But there has to be a lot more reading before the writing really gets moving.

In the meantime I have today finished a draft of the most boring writing I do every year. More boring than the syllabus (which is actually quite fun to write) or the committee report, the annual review is one big exercise in tedium. After all, I already did the stuff; now it's just reporting and (even worse) collating.

Nonetheless, it's almost done, and then I can move on to...article revisions! Whoopee!

Emperor of What?

From Terry, this amazing piece of spoken word poetry. Watch it now. I mean it.

The Chronicle had a less-optimistic take on education and the internet. But check out the video first, really.

Tough Love

I'm not crazy about the academic who writes as Thomas Benton in the Chronicle. He strikes me as a bit conservative, curmudgeonly, and --yet-- at some level contented, since he has a tenured position in English, the job for which he trained. But he writes well, and sometimes it's hard to argue with his conclusions. This week is a case in point. He takes on the recent MLA report on "Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion" and notes that it focuses all its attention on people who, maybe, don't need it: those who already have tenure-track jobs. After all, as he notes (and as the MLA report acknowledges), the tenure rate is about 90%. The big problem in the academe is not that we are eating our own young on the tenure track (though it does happen, and though a discussion about standards for evaluating scholarship is, truly, long overdue). The problem is that we are producing too many PhDs and not enough of them are getting tenure-track jobs. The stunning statistic in Benton's piece is not that 90% of tenure candidates achieve it, but that tenured faculty now make up less than 25% of all faculty members. Contingent faculty are far less involved in faculty governance, in making curricular and hiring decisions, and in scholarship, than tenured faculty, but they are doing the bulk of college teaching. They are good teachers, most of them--that's not the problem. The problem is that they have little job security and little incentive or opportunity to control the conditions of their own employment. As work-for-hire faculty, they are far more subject to the encroaching corporatization of the university than are their tenured colleagues (like me).

I don't know what to do about the problem. I don't encourage many students to go to graduate school, and when I do, I try to make sure they have alternatives in mind right from the start. I still think the process can be rewarding (it would be more so if dissertations didn't have to be drafts of books, to get back to the MLA report), and valuable in its own right: but we need to figure out a way to protect the academic freedom of college faculty, to improve working conditions for contingent faculty, and to find other employment options for PhDs who don't land one of the increasingly-elusive tenure-track jobs. I don't think just shrinking the size of graduate programs, as Benton seems to suggest, will help much.

And here is where the MLA report could have done some good: the increased demands on tenure-track faculty over the past generation have in fact reduced the time and energy they have to commit to faculty governance, with the result that the increase in contingent faculty has gone on with little awareness or comment--except probably relief that someone else is teaching those pesky introductory courses. If we resisted the use of adjuncts to teach our classes--even though that would mean denying casual employment to very good graduate students and unemployed PhDs, and even though that would mean producing less publishable work--could we raise the status of all of us in the profession? Could we force a re-examination of the two-tiered academic system that pays lip service to students but rewards avoiding them? Could we re-invigorate faculty governance and academic freedom? Or is it too late, as Benton seems to suggest?