Defining Success Part Two

So this is my third installment of a series I"m doing that reflects on my first year as a tenure-track professor. The third installment has turned into a series of its own about how we define success. The first post in this series about success attempted to get you thinking about your own definition of success and the costs of how we approach it. My final post, next week, will share some of my own personal and specific definitions and practices of success. This post will briefly touch on an extremely compelling article by Anne-Marie Slaughter (professor at Princeton, director of policy planning in the State Department for two years) in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." Slaughter's article addresses some personal concerns for me, as a woman in a professional career field, but her solutions to the obstacles women face are in some ways gender neutral (if there is such a thing) because they are focused on revising many of our notions of "work" and "success." It's well worth the read.


Aside from my dismay that women are the only ones that outwardly struggle with the difficulty of balancing work and family (and indeed are almost expected to struggle with this or something must wrong with them, despite the fact that men are also part of a family), Slaughter does make some refreshing points in that she does not solely focus on what how women need to change their approach to careers, but rather on what we all need to change about the system of work in America. The main problem Slaughter identifies with our work culture today, what she calls "The culture of time macho,” is the theory that work must be done in the office and that the sign of a good worker is one who is in the office all day. That this myth still holds so strongly today is a rather depressing fact for Slaughter: "a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today." Slaughter's solution is to begin changing the perception that work must be done in the office and in person. 


Another major problem is the hypocrisy of claiming to value families in this country when in reality family is considered a liability in the workplace. She provides two amazing examples comparing the perception of a marathon runner and a parent and someone who strictly observes time off for religious reasons and someone who tries to do the same to spend time with their family (I encourage you to read this section, "revaluing family values," for a fuller account of these examples)


And finally, the last and perhaps most provocative problem she identifies is the singular narrative we have for the arc of the successful career path, which entails staying with the same company (or University) and climbing the hierarchical ladder of rank steadily and quickly. Slaughter suggests that in today's culture of 1) switching jobs, 2) starting a family in your mid to late 30's instead of early 20's, and 3) working well into your 70's, we need to "think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips)."


Slaughter's article, in conjunction with the spirit of the Olympics this summer (which I'm obsessed with) has really gotten me thinking about our maniacal pursuit of success, a success defined by climbing in an upwards (rather than say lateral) direction and measured in how many hours we put into the job. Did Ahab and his whale teach us nothing? 


At the same time, I am deeply moved when I watch an Olympic athlete, who has devoted years of her life to pursing nothing but the dream of a gold medal in a specific sport that requires a very specific set of skills. Why is that kind of dedication so moving? And is that the same kind of dedication we should pour forth in our careers, or is the cost of such dedication that at the end of our life we only wish we hadn't worked so much? (Slaughter cites this from Bronnie Ware's book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, in which she found the second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”)


I think success and hard work go hand in hand, and I think hard work is admirable. But have we somehow fooled ourselves into thinking that hard work has to displace other important values? In my final post I will look at my own struggle to achieve success in my first year at tenure track while also having a life outside the walls of the ivory tower. 

Defining Success Part One

I am finally getting around to writing the third post in my series reflecting on my first year as a tenure-track assistant professor. This post was a little long in coming partly because I’ve been on some whirlwind travels (yay summer!) and partly because I wasn’t sure what to say (or, more likely, how to say what I wanted to say).

At one point on my whirlwind travels I found myself at the Cheesman Reservoir, the area of the Hayman fire in Deckers, Colorado ten years ago. We were actually there two days after the ten-year anniversary. There is no way to describe this area in words, and really the picture I’ve included doesn’t capture it either. As we hiked through the area, surrounded by the craggy peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the steep canyon walls down to the river, all I could see were burnt trees everywhere. It was a sobering hike indeed, especially knowing at that moment a new fire was burning 15 miles northwest of Fort Collins, creating another desolate area like the one we were currently hiking through.

During one of our rest stops on the hike (trust me, you need them for this landscape), Justin and I just stood there quietly for several minutes. I could almost feel the weight of the area’s trauma sinking into me, filling me with the kind of quiet and respectful sadness you get at funerals. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I heard a bird call. Then another. Then a butterfly flitted past my line of sight. Then another. A bee swirled around my elbow and two birds hopped along the log in front of me.

The desolate landscape and oppressive silence magically came alive with wildlife and sounds in a matter of minutes. But it took standing still and being quiet to bear witness to this life, where I had thought there was only death moments before.

And this is my problem with our notions of “success.” It often seems to me that to be successful, in just about any career really, you have to be constantly in motion (insert any number of metaphors here: duck paddling like hell under the water, hamster on a wheel, running like a chicken with its head cut off, etc. etc.) I do not think we consider the cost of success; a cost that I would say includes missing life in the way that, if I had not stopped long enough on my hike through the Hayman forest, I would have known only bleakness. I would have missed the life that existed there.

Everything worth having involves some cost; to say that success comes at a cost is not to say, then, that success is necessarily bad. It does mean, however, that we need to be aware of that cost, we need to constantly measure it and reevaluate our success in the face of the cost. My good friend and colleague Melissa asked me to write about balancing life and career in this post, and strangely enough that is exactly what I found myself wanting to discuss in this post about “success.”

Too often I have heard in various new faculty gatherings that you have to work like crazy until you get tenure, but then it gets a little better. Seems like I heard the same thing about graduate school – you have to work like crazy until you get a job, but then it gets a little better. Well let’s see, on average graduate school can take around 7 years and it takes around 5 years to get tenure. Now I know I’m an English major, but by my count that’s 12 years of “working like crazy” to get to some point where I might not have to be so crazy. But most of the tenured professors I see still work like crazy (or they just are crazy J). And who really wants to waste 12 years of their life doing nothing but work, especially 12 years that tend to fall during what should be the best, most active, most free time of someone’s life?

The balancing act of life and work is hard enough, but within the working life of an academic we must also play the balancing act between research, teaching, and service. It would seem, then, that we would define success as someone who excels in all three and has found a way to balance all three. And I’m sure no one would disagree that such a person is successful. But I get the feeling that isn’t what we, or at least universities, mean by “success.” Tenure has come to be defined almost solely by publishing record at research institutions. And at many teaching institutions, the service requirements often prevent professors from giving adequate attention to their teaching.

It’s hard to feel successful when you are fed one line (all three of the triad described above are equally important) but when in reality you are only measured by whatever element that particular institution stresses the most. I wish that institutions would drop the façade of caring about all three and just forthrightly claim what will make you successful. How about lines like “just publish, and so long as we don’t get too many complaints from students don’t worry about your teaching,” or “don’t even think about trying to publish anything, we have way to much committee work for you,” or “we are going to need you to teach 4 classes, so when we say we are a teaching school we mean we need you to teach a lot of students, not that we value teaching over research. But I hope you don’t think you’ll have time to research, because of course you won’t.”

That may be a teensy cynical sounding, but I hope the extreme nature of such statements make my point. Clear, well-defined goals make it a lot easier to understand what counts as success in your job.

Not only do institutions need to more clearly communicate their view of success, but I think we as individuals need to be honest with ourselves about what we personally desire from our jobs as academics. Are you fulfilled by making a name for yourself through publishing in your field? Do you enjoy feeling part of a community that comes from working closely with others in committees? Do you want to work with students beyond the classroom in close mentoring relationships? Does lecturing in front of a huge crowd inspire you, or do you find small group discussions exhilarating?

And, finally, can you count the cost of each those paths? Because each one will bring a different amount of craziness and stress, and each one has losses and gains.

This post on success is going to require some follow-up posts with some more specific and practical points (or you can see this excellent post from Tonya on the possibility and merits of a true 40-hour work week for academics), so this week I just want to get you thinking about how you personally define success as an academic, what are the costs of achieving that success, and what sort of institutions will best match up with your definition of success. My own goal for this kind of reflection is to find a way to define success that includes an abundant life, the kind of life that can only find me when I'm still long enough.

Old Dogs Do Learn New Tricks

I am postponing my last reflection on my first year as a tenure-track professor in which I plan to talk about how we define success in the field of academia (or life in general). I hope to have that post ready next week. If anyone has comments they would like me to think about or address or include in my post, I'd love to hear from you. just write your suggestions and ideas in the comments to this post.

For now, I want to share a way of doing research that has really worked for me. You'd think after nearly a decade of doing this kind of work that I would have figured out an effective method of reading, taking notes, and transferring what I learn from all that into papers. But I haven't really developed a system I like, until now.

I had two weeks to research and write a conference paper, and the research involved an area I was not terribly familiar with. This required me to work my way through half a century of criticism, an impossible sounding task to me given the time constraints. For starters I followed the method my good friend Matt Mullins suggests in his post here.

Usually when I am reading a book or an article I have my computer right next to me and whenever I come across a passage I may want to quote in the future, or every time I needed to summarize the points made, or every time the reading made me think of an idea, I would stop and type it up. I thought this was the most efficient way to do it, but I began to suspect that my inability to grasp the larger picture of the article's or book's argument was due to the interrupted nature of my reading. Plus, it seemed to take me forever to get through even a short article.

So for this conference paper I have switched things up a bit. The first step was going to Target to buy a packet of those slim little tab sticky notes. I must admit this was at first slightly motivated out of a desire to be cool. Some people I highly respect and think are intelligent (and pretty cool) use them, so I thought maybe I'd become smarter by using them too. Aside from this initially vain motive, however, the tabs are saving my life for this paper.

The next step involves choosing about 3 or 4 books I plan to read that day (its summer, so I have 3-4 hours to devote to uninterrupted reading a day). I read straight through without stopping, using my tabs to indicate passages I want to return to. Either later that afternoon or the next day I devote about an hour to revisiting those books and typing up all the notes and ideas that the tabs direct me to.

I don't know how to explain it, but in 10 days I have gotten through about 2 shelves worth of books using this method. I'm sure some people can get through 10 books in a day, but for me this was record-breaking (not all English majors are fast readers. And some of us suck at scrabble by the way). And in comparing my notes from this method to the quality of notes from my old method, I do not really detect a difference.

The only thing I would like to add to this method would be to write a quick 3-4 sentence summary of the overall aims and arguments of the piece. For some reason that always takes the mental energy I just don't have when I finish reading something, but I do think it would really help capture the "big picture" when I have the whole work freshest in my mind.

So here's to learning how to do things in a new way, nearly a decade later.