Should you become a Christian University Professor?

Talking to my 26-year-old self

Today’s newsletter was prompted by a pair of questions posed by my friend Chris Gehrz, history professor at Bethel University in Minnesota. Writing on his Pietist Schoolman site, last week he asked: Should I think of my job as a calling? This week, he struggled with another important question: Should I encourage students to consider grad school?

I have to admit that toward the end of my teaching career, I was feeling pretty jaded. Given the never-ending cuts, the downgrading of liberal arts, and the arbitrariness of administrators, I commented to colleagues that I wasn’t sure I could recommend Christian University teaching to young colleagues.

Retirement has thankfully allowed me to regain some perspective. Writing my book has renewed my faith in the potential of the Christian university although I had enough experience to offer a more nuanced view of our profession.¹

In this week’s post, Chris summarizes the horrible statistics for those looking for teaching positions in the social sciences and humanities. Even with a PhD in hand, the competition is fierce. Not NFL fierce but enough to make life uncomfortable for a young PhD entering the job market. He summarizes the challenge:

Even back in the good old days when I was a graduate student, there were 150-200 more History PhDs issued each year than positions available. That gap was even closing early in the 21st century. But by the time of the Great Recession, it was twice as big and growing.

The number of PhDs awarded in history has dropped a bit since then, but not enough to catch up with the ongoing decline in positions — especially the increasingly scarce full-time, tenure-track jobs of the like that inspired most of us to go to grad school in the first place. Between 2020 and 2022, reports the AHA, only about 500 history professor jobs were being advertised each year, and just over half were tenure-track.

On average, each year in that period no more than 15% of new PhDs found a tenure-track position right after graduation. And that figure gets cut in half among those who earned a doctorate from a program ranked below the top 30 in the U.S. News rankings.

So whenever I meet with a student wanting to follow in the footsteps of someone like me, I do take time to summarize these numbers. It’d be irresponsible, probably unethical, not to make sure they understand just how unlikely it is that they will follow my relatively straight road from college to secure employment.

I’m more than 20 years older than Chris. While the market was a little more flexible in the early 80s, the drought had begun compared to the experience of my major professor.

Chris ended the piece on “calling” like this:

To his statement, I’d just add that teaching college where I do is a particularly good gig because I get to hang out with young adults whose open minds, idealistic ambitions, and tender hearts regularly refresh my faith, hope, and love. And whatever my concerns about my profession, an undeniably great part of my own vocation is that I still get to help my students identify and live out their own divine callings.

I just don’t want to make them think they’re wrong to expect fair compensation for important, difficult work because they love to do it.

I completely agree. I remember professors in grad school who only saw their teaching gig as the necessary evil that supported their research. I couldn’t understand it. I still remember the thrill I had when I was offered my first solo social psychology class.

These thoughts made me pretty nostalgic. I find myself wondering what I would say to that 26-year-old sociology professor launching a new career.

Me in the 1982 Olivet Nazarene yearbook

Here’s how I described getting that first job in the preface to my book.

Late in my graduate school coursework I had a great deal of angst about my professional direction. On the one hand, I had role models who were committed Christians doing important work in the sociology of religion at state schools and that seemed attractive. On the other, I saw that Christian colleges in the early 1980s could deepen their commitments to academic excellence, especially in the field of sociology. Amid my professional struggles, a professor at my wife’s alma mater, Olivet Nazarene University, had resigned and I was asked to take the position. So, the decision was made for me.

Let me be clear: I think either of those prospective paths was a legitimate avenue to pursue calling. I revisited the question about six years into my teaching career, applying for a research-oriented job that I didn’t get. But teaching (interspersed with administration) is where I wound up.

Still, I have some advice for the young guy in that yearbook picture. I hope it will be helpful for others considering the Christian university path.² So, in no particular order, here are some thoughts.

Teaching will dominate your life. It is not uncommon in smaller liberal arts institutions like Christian universities for faculty members to have 3-4 courses per semester. If you’re lucky, some will repeat so it’s not always a new prep. Still, that a lot of lecture/discussions, lots of exams to write and grade, and large numbers of students with issues to manage. That research you were interested in during grad school will be relegated to summers or Christmas break. Your scholarly work (excepting sabbaticals) will get relegated to conference presentations instead of refereed journals or books³.

Christian Community has intrinsic value. I don’t want to oversell this. There are some faculty and staff that you’ll be closer to than others. But it’s harder to find the kinds of rifts that can occur in graduate school departments with faculty members who haven’t engaged each other in decades. I had the privilege of become close friends with faculty from a variety of disciplines and felt like we were pulling together in common academic mission. There is a downside to this, of course. Not only is there the idea that faculty members can be underpaid because they believe in the university mission, as Chris observes, but that community can be distorted in ways that disallow dissent or that spiritualize legitimate differences over institutional decisions. Still, that collegiality is real and embodies the notion of a collegium more that can happen in a disciplinary department.

Take the long view. I certainly didn’t understand this at 26. When I saw something that required change within the institution, I wanted it addressed NOW. But that’s not how institutions work. You have to find the leverage points and keep pushing on them. It’s a guard against the cynicism or complacency that can trap older faculty who think they’ve seen it all before. Here’s another long-view implication. Earlier I wrote that scholarship is easily pushed to the back burner. One byproduct of this is that jumping out of the Christian university market a few years down the road becomes extremely difficult. You wind up competing with folks who are fresh out of grad school with solid publications as well as junior faculty who had lighter teaching loads and “publish or perish” pressures. I always argued that the granting of tenure wasn’t about what the faculty member had done in the first six or seven years, but a celebration of how that faculty member would advance the university mission over the course of the career.

Always see the world through your students’ eyes. This has been a major theme of both of my books. College is a huge transition for anyone, second to starting pre-school or kindergarten.⁴ This is even more true for students from protective families, who attended Christian high school, or were homeschooled. Even the most mild content in your field may be seen as uncomfortable or threatening.⁵ I have known faculty members who felt it was their job to shock students out of their parochial understandings. This betrays a misplaced focus. It’s not for the faculty member to always be right and brilliant but for the student to seriously engage and internalize the material. Understanding the student perspective can help you not freak out about their choices — they would rather hang out with friends than do their statistics homework (shocking, right?). Their various life crises — in their studies, at home, at work, in relationships, with career direction, with another class — are real and affect their learning. If we really want them to become the graduates we claim we want, we must take that seriously.

Look for opportunities to go wide. While in grad school, we learn to specialize even while taking the raft of required classes. I would have defined myself as “a social psychologist of religion focusing on conservative religion”. If I had taken the other path of my imagined future above, I would have stayed in that narrow lane with some additional departmental assignment. Instead, I had to help cover the curriculum which required me to take control of my share of classes alongside my one to two departmental colleagues. Sometimes that meant creating classes our assessment data suggested we needed even though it wasn’t anywhere in my graduate school training. In addition, there is great value in becoming involved in interdisciplinary opportunities or core curriculum classes or study abroad options. It not only introduces you to different kinds of students but it make it harder (but not impossible) to replace you in difficult financial times.

Participate in Shared Governance. In addition to the heavy course load, other things will impinge on your time. There are committees to serve on. Some are more important than others; invest in those. There are faculty meetings. Go to those having done your homework and ask the questions that will make your colleagues better. Ask (respectful) questions of administrators.⁶ Make your interest in the well-being of the institution clear. When the admissions department asks you to show prospective students around, embrace the opportunity. Yes, it’s one more time-consuming obligation. But do you really want the admissions department to be explaining the academic values of your department? Doing all this is hard. It may not feel like it’s making any difference at all. I’ve known many faculty members who have decided to just focus on their classes and avoid the rest (“it’s not in my contract”). That option fees cynicism and potential burnout.

Lean into your calling. In my chief academic officer days, I had a stock speech I would give when introducing new faculty at the start of the school year. I would reflect on the mystery of how the department was praying that they’d find the right person for their vacancy and the candidate was praying for the right school to give life to their calling — and here we all are. You have come to this institution to invest in the lives of students and to do your small part to help the institution hew closer to its professed mission. Yes, as Chris observed, you need to make sure your commitment to calling isn’t an excuse for exploitation and control.⁷ If the day comes when your sense of calling and the institution’s direction are getting too far apart, it’s okay to leave for another Christian university where you can thrive.

All in all, I’m happy with the career path I followed. I probably couldn’t articulate it 43 years ago as well as I can now. But if these thoughts are valuable for a grad student considering Christian university teaching, then just maybe they won’t rely on trial and error quite as much as I did.

1. In honor of Leap Year, I have to offer a shout-out to The Pirates of Penzance. In it, the Pirate King says “I don’t think much of our profession, but contrasted with respectability it is comparatively honest.”

2. To my faculty subscribers, please share this with your students you think fit the mold.

3. Co-authorship can help mitigate this isolation.

4. I had a whole lecture in Intro to Soc about the social lessons taught through schooling: your schedule belongs to someone else, people who aren’t your parents have authority, that authority is incumbent in the office of teacher not your feelings toward them, you learn to balance peer expectations and task orientation.

5. As much as conservative commentators/legislators worry about “divisive content” they should be focused on the nature of pedagogy. It’s not the context but how it is presented.

6. I’d recommend scheduling periodic appointments with senior administrators. It’s remarkable that faculty members complain about students not taking advantage of office hours and then never go to see adminsitrators.

7. This is why I’m opposed to the argument that Christian university faculty should consider ministers.