Teaching or research?

Posted on | August 3, 2008 | No Comments

My unfortunate lack of blogging lately is partly due to travel and the impact this has on other deadlines: I have three articles/chapters due this month and more presentations in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as a graduate course to convene and an engagement party to organise! This workload was partly designed to fill in some of the space since William left to take up his new job in Sydney, and so it’s probably appropriate by now to mention that I’ve also been involved in some protracted job negotiations of my own. Ultimately this will mean I too can move to Sydney in a couple of months.

For the moment I will be continuing my current fellowship for as long as I can, particularly given the amazing material that is coming out of the second round of Working From Home interviews. But because my APD is a contract position, even if I wasn’t MOVING FOR A MAN as my senior feminist colleague so kindly put it, now would in any case be a suitable time to start embracing the serendipity of job advertisements and fellowship due dates.

Keeping a few different options in place and talking with several universities over the past couple of months has actually provided a fascinating insight into a range of different administrative structures. It’s also been interesting to reconnect or develop relationships with a range of people in my field, in sometimes surprising and mostly delightful ways. In fact, if it wasn’t so emotionally draining, the whole process has made me keen to recommend moving, or trying to, as one of the fastest ways to learn some very important lessons about academic life and your place in it. Then again, I think I *did* learn this last time I went on the job market… and had forgotten… which is why it is the right time to leave.

With nothing yet concrete, I’ve been gathering lots of opinions on what someone like me would be best placed to do in the current tertiary environment: whether a track-record in obtaining funding and fellowships suggests I should continue a research career, or whether I should pursue the traditional tenured route. This would finally allow me to contribute to a university program in an ongoing capacity (the problem with teaching at the junior level of a research only position is that you are generally confined to ‘parachute lectures’, that is, one-off guest appearances. This is an almost impossible genre to master when the courses and students for your teaching regularly change. It also means additional work adjusting lectures to meet idiosyncratic requirements, and a lot of diplomacy when the time involved can’t be justified for every request).

A number of higher level advisors have mused that mine is the first generation to have the possibility of a research career in the humanities–with new initiatives like the Future Fellowships, and recent changes to the rules for ARC Professorial Fellows. While this means they feel genuinely unable to give me clear advice, it also goes some way to explaining why I have often felt guilt-tripped or shamed by other tenured colleagues who argue that without teaching, you aren’t really contributing to or experiencing the full dimensions of the vocation. The news for them is: the profession is changing. Graeme Turner’s argument about teaching – a reflection building on last year’s CSAA plenary, and forthcoming in Cultural Studies Review – recognises this. It pivots on his perception that there has been a shift away from seeing teaching as the more glamorous and critically challenging side of academic work, especially in cultural studies. He cautions the majority of young researchers away from thinking that just because grants exist a career in research is possible. He also wonders, as others I’ve spoken to do, whether the grant system has significantly altered the self-perception of teaching staff, and how this poses real dangers. Among these we could list the careerism and competitiveness grant funding encourages, and the prospect that students graduate without having benefited from the latest research available.

With all this in mind, it doesn’t give me any more security to know that my efforts to prove that RO jobs are possible would be a interesting experiment for those in tenured positions to watch from afar. And as a close friend described it, just because a research career is valuable – in the sense that it will bring in more money for the university – doesn’t mean it is the right thing for me personally.

My mother was a teacher, and many of my aunties and cousins are too. Growing up around schools and teachers showed me how teaching changes lives, even while I was told as much by many of my mother’s ex-students (who were often from modest backgrounds in outer suburban Hobart). But maybe this history is precisely why I don’t think teaching should be the only way intellectual work should make an impact. Something that’s struck me this week is that my current position means there are now 3 people I directly employ who can pay their rent or gain a foothold into a job they want because of my fellowship project. And because of their help, I can write the three or four books I currently have underway which I hope will have their own kind of impact too. This means reaching audiences in the present and the future (or at least, this is what writers must hope) in more places than I could ever teach. I was reminded of this in Jamaica when I had conversations about my work with people from almost every continent. That’s not just fun, it’s amazing! And I so want it to continue in whatever job I may be lucky enough to have.

The thing I have valued most about this difficult period has been the generosity of those colleagues who have wanted to offer advice as friends, in spite of their professional location. The choice between teaching and research, one such friend has noted, is that teaching will still allow you to have a life. That’s the reason people fought so hard for tenure in the first place. The logic here is that the cycle of teaching and research provides the security – that is, the freedom – to operate at different speeds depending on what else might be happening in your world. Feeling inspired or getting stuck. Having a baby or losing a family member (my mum died during my PhD). Reveling in the ordinary or seeking travel adventures. Research contracts, by contrast, demand constant productivity, in spite of outside demands.

Clearly it’s hard to argue against that logic, since my research deals directly with the question of overwork and its many seductions. And yet, sitting here in the busiest kind of limbo, I can’t help but wonder whether there might be a way to prove everyone wrong.
:-)

Category: Academia, Saturn Returns, Teaching, Work

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