The Challenge of the Mid-Career Faculty Member

On Being Trapped in Liberal Arts Institutions

When I wrote my piece last Monday on the program reductions at Seattle Pacific, I included a footnote about those faculty members who were neither new nor near retirement. I wrote:

I wish I had addressed this subgroup more directly in my book. It is one of the great scandals of Christian higher education. Given the teaching loads and limited support for scholarship, it doesn’t take long for a faculty member to only be employable at other Christian institutions. All the talk of mission fit and shared ministry falls by the wayside when options become limited.

Having had a week to think about this and reading the comments readers left, I decided it was worth examining this problem in its own newsletter.

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I started my teaching career in Fall 1981. I had completed my coursework in May, our daughter was born, and I had successfully defended my dissertation proposal but hadn’t done the research yet. I had gotten a surprise offer to teach at Olivet Nazarene even though I wasn’t on the job market. I was ABD, but I took the job.

Between having a full teaching load (I got one January off) and a denominational research project that landed in my lap, I didn’t defend the dissertation until 1986. Shortly after my major professor Ray said, “John, you have roughly two years to apply for positions in research institutions should you so desire.”

He knew that I was committed to teaching in Christian universities. But he was identifying a reality in the job market. Other institutions would read my vita and assume that I had taken the job at ONU as a stopgap until the real opportunity arose. But the clock was running. If my vita hadn’t flourished after a couple of years, then clearly I was there by choice. I did test the waters but not seriously.

A couple of years later, there was a denomination-wide conference on higher education (I believe it was the next to the last one ever held). I was in a session on the importance of scholarship headed by a couple of administrators from other Nazarene schools. They were well-meaning and meant to be encouraging. At some point I raised my hand (I’m not bashful). I pointed out that I had a faculty colleague who was a slumlord in his spare time — a benevolent slumlord, but still. What he did in his spare time and the research I did in mine were seen as equivalent choices from the perspective of the institution.

I was involved in Promotion and Tenure decisions for the last 30 plus years of my career. I saw lots of Christian university professor portfolios. Many had great research experiences from before they joined the school and some conference presentations after. It demonstrated a broad commitment to scholarship in one’s field using the revised Boyer perspective. And it was enough — as long as you stayed in the institution.

So you get promoted in rank and find yourself a mid-career full professor. And then the latest round of “academic prioritization” kills your program. What do you do?

Your vita reflects your commitment to Christian liberal arts teaching over research (unless you were lucky enough to be in a field where collaboration with a research lab is feasible). When you go to conferences, you see grad students making presentations and describing how that piece will soon be published in a professional journal.

The new institution with the job opening can hire these grad students for much cheaper than they can hire you, that is if they ignore the gaps in your vita. You may be able to move laterally to another Christian liberal arts institution at least until they start their next round of prioritization.

Even if another position shows promise, you are faced with the challenges of relocating. Spouse’s job, kid’s schools, friendship patterns, and church connections are all disruptions. Serving five different institutions over my career, I know this far too well.

I have friends who left academe to practice law or teach high school or work in a technical college. They were tired of the hassles or their positions were eliminated and this was a good way of protecting the family environment as much as possible.

Even if your position isn’t “under review” through the prioritization process and you’re just upset to see friends and colleagues treated so badly, thinking about leaving is daunting for all the reasons I describe above. When I was leaving Olivet for Sterling in 1990, the president told me that he thought it was good to “bloom where you are planted”. He said that if I spent thirty-plus years in the institution, I could have had a role similar to two senior faculty. One of these had quit caring about institutional dynamics years before and the other was the greatest curmudgeon I’ve ever met. Sad to say, those are generally the two primary pathways for the professor who decides to stick it out. (It made leaving easier.)

This image is my first attempt at an AI assisted picture. I gave instructions for “professor in a jail cell”. I don’t know why it assumed the lab coat.

For far too many mid-career professors, this picture is closer to reality than we’d care to admit. I’ve heard professors say that they will adopt a strategy of “keeping my head down and focusing on my classes”. I get that; although minding my own business was never my strong suit. But I wonder how much psychic cost that approach demands.

Here’s the thing: In four decades in Christian liberal arts institutions, I never heard a senior administrator acknowledge that this was problematic, much less make plans to address it. I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t sufficiently attuned to the prospect in my administrative days.

What I can say is that higher ed institutions that pride themselves on “community” and “family” have never faced the reality of the trapped faculty member. If schools are going to keep cutting liberal arts programs to pursue the next hot new thing, that has to change.