I am a unicorn in higher education. I landed a tenure-track job at an R-1 (research-focused) university straight out of my PhD program. Most people (and I expected to also) have to take visiting, one-year jobs or non tenure track jobs that may or may not be full time. There are a lot of really great things about the job I have, though there's also things that could be better. A friend working at another university tells me that she believes the grass isn't greener at any institution, it's just that the cow pies are in different spots so you have to learn where to dodge.
One of the great things about being at an R-1 though, is the opportunity to work with graduate students. I have one at the moment who taught in K-12 for a long time before starting her PhD, and she's about the same age as me so we have similar observations about changes we've observed in the K-12 profession over the years, and likewise about what we see in higher education both from the student and new faculty perspectives. Some of those conversations have made me wonder what are the criteria that make a job 'good' versus just 'a' job? I know there's all sorts of studies on this, but I mean something more ineffable than that. I've worked in a few places that should have been "good" jobs by all the factors and measures, and they just simply weren't.
Some of the things I really loved about teaching K-12 have carried over to my academic career, as I teach pre-service teachers so I get to teach about what I love---but from a completely different angle, analyzing what it was I actually did, why, and how---and then figuring out creative ways to get that information to my students. I do believe wholeheartedly it's made my teaching stronger in some ways. But it's also made me lazy about other things. You see, higher education does not value good teaching. Of course they say they do, it's an educational institution after all. But you can see evidence everywhere that it's not rewarded and incentivized the way other things are. And that, for me with 17 years in K-12, has been a hard and bitter pill to swallow.
But back to what makes a job a good job?
What was it in K-12 that I loved that I still get to do now and make this current job great?
1. The people
What things in K-12 made me want to go become a flight attendant and are also true in higher ed?
1. The people
Obviously the groups of people above are not the same people (sometimes). In my doctoral program, I learned that sometimes people you have built relationships with and trust, under the right circumstances, can turn on you and sabotage everything they get their hands on. In my current job, I'm learning the ways in which job perks (like relative autonomy) can be weaponized when someone feels petty or territorial. I'm also learning the loneliness of being siloed from other colleagues or departments.
And this is not to call out either institution, because I am SURE those sorts of problems are not unique to those places. Plus, in both K-12 and higher ed it has almost never been the students. At this moment I have taught thousands of students and only one or two stand out to me as real problems. The adults though? At least one or two everywhere I worked. And whether it was a good job or a bad job depended on who that person was. A terrible parent? Wait it out a few years, they go away. Miserable colleague? Just avoid them. But someone in your department or a feckless admin? Time to find a new job.
Unfortunately, that's not an easy thing to do in higher ed ---finding a new job usually means relocating somewhere very far away, away from any support system you may have built. And there's no guarantee that the new place will be any better, you just hope the cow pies are in a more manageable spot. So people do what they can to make the job good with what they have. Some sculpt the manure piles or move them. Some people write grants and get money so they can stand outside the pasture. Some people just put on rubber boots and slog through the best they can. Some people create their own piles. And I can live with that. I can put on rubber boots, I can navigate outside the pasture and do my own thing.
What I can't tolerate, and what makes a higher ed job miserable, is when you try to remove a cow pie and someone comes along and says "I WAS SCULPTING THAT. THAT'S MY CRAFT" and actively prevents you from fixing it even though you can see it's causing infections in the herd. And because everyone else is just trying to navigate the pasture, they either don't care or don't have the capacity to help you.
I really wanted to close this blog post with some life advice, a pithy little philosophical bow, but I can't. It's a messy ending to a messy post, because it's about people and people are messy. I guess the moral of the story is that jobs are good when the people are good and the opposite of that is also true.
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