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.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.

All semester I've been chairing a committee to review and revise our first-year curriculum. One big part of most universities' first-year curricula is, of course, some kind of expository writing course. Maybe this one?

ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham

Course Description

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

truly, read the rest. I find myself guilty of several days on the syllabus...

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.

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(I'm sending you to her main page rather than to this specific link because I want you to see all the fabulous poetry-makers she's featuring this month. It's a treasure trove over there, really!)

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, as Told to Me by My Father.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped for the Recession, as Told to Me by My Father.

Try this one, for starters:

Humpty Dumpty

Sure, in a perfect world, we'd all help put Humpty Dumpty back together, whether we were on the king's payroll or not. There's no question about that. But the world isn't lilacs and lollipops anymore, kid. I can barely afford all your mother's pill ... pillows, all the pillows she insists on sleeping with at night.
[it goes on...]

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first seen at The Miss Rumphius Effect

watch the president read

How Children's Literature Changed my Life

Wow, that sounds portentous, doesn't it? But I mean it quite literally. I have a very different life--ok, a sort of different life--than I had before I was teaching children's literature. One big difference is that these days I occasionally--even, often--write about living authors. One of the big perks, frankly, of being a Victorianist is that the authors are all dead. I mean this in the nicest possible way. They died many years ago, most of them of natural causes, having already written many wonderful (and sometimes not-so-wonderful) books, and I don't have to feel bad about anything I say about them because they don't know I've said it. (Or if they do, I think I'm safe in assuming they don't care.)

When you write about living authors, however, you can't just irresponsibly say whatever you want. (Not that I ever did that, of course...) You feel responsible. You can even occasionally wonder what they think. And, sometimes, you can even find out. Now, so far, this has actually been all good. I still have the message on my voicemail that John Green left me after he read my review of Paper Towns. (Yes, I'm a nerd that way. Or maybe a nerdfighter.) (He liked it. That's why I kept the message.) And the other day Neil Gaiman linked to my column on Coraline (scroll down), and said he liked it, and that made my day.

So actually of course I'm really glad to be writing about living authors. It's exciting and unpredictable. And it makes me feel like part of a community.

I'm giving a talk about Stephenie Meyer this weekend. Do you think she cares?

Small Rant

I try to support my kids' schools, I really do. I have volunteered at fundraisers, donated money, donated time, and--especially--overseen homework projects even when I have some questions about them. I never once asked why Nick should make a biography "cube" with six facts about his subject on the six sides (silly gimmick?); I sat with him while he researched women mathematicians and scientists well into the night (good idea; not enough direction); and I coached him through the "Christmas shopping" project so he found things on sale and calculated the reduced prices, figured the sales tax, and kept within his budget (great project; he just procrastinated on it). But lately I've been pushed close to my breaking point.

The culprit was the project on identifying clauses. OK, fine, he's learning to identify different kinds of clauses. I'm all in favor of that. But did he really have to write each one out on a separate piece of paper, rather than just marking them in the article? Maybe he did. But did he really have to separate out the adjectival and adverbial ones? OK, fine, it's important to make distinctions, and he really does seem to have figured something out here about how to modify subjects and verbs. But did he really have to make a graph of the ratios of adjectival to adverbial clauses? And independent to dependent? Ah, yes, math across the curriculum. All right, I can live with that, too. And then writing a paper on his process? Well, fine, reflection is good, even if his process was mostly "Mom, I think this one is an adjective clause, right?" (Actually, it did get better than that...) I'm not sure I would want to read a paper on this process, but I'm not the teacher. If she wants to read these, more power to her. The fact that he was doing the project mostly over the snow days, and that there seems to have been some missed communication on the due date, well, these things happen. I guess that's OK, though if you tell a kid in an e-mail that a due date has changed, and then change your mind, well, you can expect some angst, right?

But it's March, and as far as I can tell, he hasn't yet read a book in this class. I'm not sure I can forgive that. If language arts is all labeling parts of speech and making graphs, I think it may have lost its soul.

[edited to add: Nick is 11, in sixth grade. The projects in the first paragraph were in elementary school, except for the "shopping" one, which was just before Christmas.]

Kids' books for adults

I had the pleasure today of leading a discussion on "children's classics for adults" at the West End branch of the Richmond Public Library. A committed group of grown-ups gave up the most beautiful day in months--well, an hour of it--to talk about Bud, Not Buddy, Becoming Naomi Leon, A Single Shard, and The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place. We talked about art, families, agency, and finding a home--and left all kinds of things unsaid.

Which is just as well, as there are two more meetings, over the next two Saturdays, at two more branches (Ginter Park and Belmont, for those of you in town). I'll have a different group at each discussion, but some folks today said they wanted to come to the others, too. I hope they will--I want to hear more from them!

A fascinating sidelight: three out of the four books have important scenes in libraries. My favorite is in Bud, Not Buddy: the title character's first impulse when he's in trouble is to seek out his local librarian, a Miss Hill, who has (to his dismay) just married and moved to Chicago. I hadn't known this before, but a little research revealed that Miss Hill is in fact a historical figure, Charlemae Hill Rollins of the Chicago Public Library. I'm sorry I hadn't known about her sooner; read a little more about her here, and here, and you'll see why I'm glad to know about her now.