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.