The Thriving Professor

A Guide to a Career in Universities and Colleges

Martin H Krieger

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813237520
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

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In this book, Martin Krieger provides a detailed and practical guide for readers who wish to become more effective scholars, teachers, and administrators. The Thriving Professor dispenses usable insights that smooth the passages through promotion and tenure, and enable the scholar to write and publish more effectively as well as to avoid traps along the way.

This work is helpful to those manoeuvring through academic difficulties. It offers essential advice to professors at every stage in their careers to move forward, and takes much of the myth out of the academic life. The Thriving Professor is the friendly mentor everyone wishes for. Krieger says out loud what others hint at, and is non-judgmental.

--> Sample Chapter(s)
Using The Thriving Professor
Chapter 1: Staying Alive --> Contents:

• Preface
• Using The Thriving Professor
• Surviving and Thriving:
  • Staying Alive
  • Ethos and Teaching
  • Seminars and Talks
  • The Work
  • Reliability
  • Leaving
• Teaching, Thinking, Writing:
  • Teaching
  • Understanding
  • Writing and Publishing
  • Quality and Judgment
• Academic Leadership:
  • The CV and Grants
  • Your Faculty
  • Deans and Provosts
  • Tenure and Promotion
  • Full Professorship
• Pathology:
  • Plagiarism
  • Begging
  • Pathology
• Appendices:
  • About the Author
  • Thinking for a Living
• Notes
• Index

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--> Readership: Graduate students, faculty as teachers and researchers, and chairs and deans interested in securing their academic growth and the strength of their institution. -->
Scholarship;Writing;Publication;Research;Tenure;Professor;Promotion;University Excellence;Grants and Fellowships;Academic Administration;Teaching;Public Speaking;Academic Misconduct;Writer's Block0 Key Features:

• The book offers practical advice to professors at each stage in their careers

Part I
Surviving and Thriving

Chapter 1

Staying Alive

Becoming academic roadkill or a victim is an accident only from the point of view of the roadkill. They were crushed much as by a juggernaut, with no warning or help. But to the outsider, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time: they put themselves at risk, they saw the headlights, and it seemed they believed they could escape being flattened.

We try to set some background and context for what you will find further on. First of all, you need not stay collapsed if you are run over by a truck. Your mistakes may lead you in directions you find attractive and productive. And even if you are not supposed to do research, there is still a big scholarly life for you.

1.01 Focusing your research: memos, advice, and work — even in tragedy, illness, and crisis

If you write yourself a memo, say every six months, to describe what work you are doing and where you think you might be going — say in the next two years — you will find that it helps to focus your work. The memo need not be long, surely no more than a single-spaced page. It could be a list.

If there is someone whom you trust and believe is reasonably sensible, even wise, share that memo and see what they say. Indicate its tentativeness. For you are not asking for criticism of your work, you are seeking suggestions for a better path.

And of course, you need to work. Probably five to seven days a week. Take a break when you cannot think critically, and make time for vacations with family or friends.

Do not let anything get in your way. Death of family or friends, chronic or serious illness, disappointments, bad news — perhaps you should stop for a while. But in general, work is healing — and you need not do it all day. An hour or two, snatched from the chaos around you, might be calming and good for you, no matter how bad things be. In better times you will work longer hours.

If you have too many overlapping tasks, writing say two books at the same time, you might alternate, but for most of us one-at-a-time is likely better. So keep a notebook where you write down stuff relevant to the other tasks, or perhaps just annotate a draft.

If you are feeling ill, depressed, wasting away, see your physician as soon as possible. Take your medications, practice your regimen, keep your appointments. Then, back to your projects.

Do not let mechanical stuff get in your way — committees, teaching in so far as it is more of the same, cleaning out your office or garage. Surely, they need to be done but a bout of work before attending to those tasks is likely to be good for your soul.

Finally, People are More Important than just about Anything.⁸ Here is the advice that Eddie Mastrewski, butcher and master killer, provides to his charge in the Butcher’s Boy novels by Thomas Perry:⁹

We do this for a living. It’s not some kind of contest. We can’t go around getting into gunfights.

Each time it’s a contest and if you don’t come in first place every time you’re dead.

Our work is what we do for a living. It’s not a game, and we cannot afford to be diverted from our work. At the same time, the work is within a contested terrain, the scholarly world, in which our originality and priority matters enormously.

1.02 Tragedy and being “research productive”

When tragedy strikes, what is most important is to care for yourself, and if nearby others can care a bit for you, ask.

A friend described her situation:

I am living my life post-mortem, and that I’m supposed to fit in the clothes and shoes, eat the food, live the life, of a person who is now dead, as if I am an imposter unable to connect with a person whose place I have taken.

The description is poignant and concrete. She is eloquent in talking about herself, with genuine literary and psychological insight. It may be useful to try writing a diary or a memo about how you feel, if only to write such wonderful prose.

People are always saying something like: just snap out of it, you will get over it, get down to working — you will be fine. They do not acknowledge tragedy and wounds that will not heal — the wounds are chronic although you do learn to live with them and go on, eventually.

I do believe it is good to read, to think, to write oneself notes about what is on your mind, future projects, etc. But real work demands a level of presence that may not be available. In a culture of “research productive faculty,” there is insufficient room for tragedy, or for that matter for thinking that takes time.

1.03 Intelligent but not brilliant. I do not know. I was wrong. I am so sorry. I need help.

In scholarly work, we depend on well-trained reasonably-intelligent people to advance the field and fill in its lacunae. Some people make major advances, sometimes by chance or good fortune, sometimes by their extraordinary imagination and persistence, and sometimes because what would appear to be an interesting but not spectacular piece of work (to all, including the author) turns out to have much wider implications than originally imagined.

Say that you felt that you were as “a very intelligent man [or woman] who is not really brilliant.” The problem arises only when you think you are brilliant, and all you are is very intelligent. “Very intelligent” is all you need, plus good work habits, diligence, and persistence. Do not worry if you are not spectacular — it does not matter.

The four statements in the heading are a quotation from Louise Penny’s The Long Way Home,¹⁰ taught by the master detective to initiands as ways of approaching the tasks at hand when things might go awry.

1.04 Contributions to scholarship, visibility, salience, citations

You want your work to be seen by others, to be used in furthering their work, and to take up space in the scholarly realm. You do not want just another publication. You want your work to be seen, published in a journal of some repute. You want others to note your name in a Table of Contents and turn to that page, especially if the title is also informative. You do not need to produce work that is insignificant or weak — it takes just as long to do a good paper as a weak one.

If you find that you are not one of the strongest scholars in your field, and by definition most of us will so find ourselves, you want to do the best work you can, find a niche where your contribution is useful and valued, and go to work. Ours is a collective enterprise, and fields move forward through a wide range of contributions.

Your work must be substantial, and you must present it so that its strengths are evident, and you take responsibility for its weaknesses or limits. In general, most papers should represent about a person-year of work, and if there are five authors it is unlikely that you can do the paper in one-fifth the time. If you have a large project, you may want to publish several papers out of it, but each should be substantial. And having papers appear in different, but strong, venues will make it likely someone interested will find out about the work. Of course, present the work ahead of time at meetings, and if you are more established you have the chance to talk about the work at various departments and so get useful criticism before you do a final draft. But early on in your career perhaps this is less likely.

If the title of the scholarly paper gives away your main point, so much the better. George Akerlof’s “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”¹¹ gives it all away once you discover it is about used car markets and sales persons and asymmetric information in economic markets. The title is cute, but since it is essentially the takeaway, that is OK. Most of us do not have so useful a citrus fruit in our lives.

Better informative, than cute and obscure. A typical mistaken title might be, “Whose Ox is Gored: A Study in Academic Committee Meetings,” when a better title is, “Passive-Aggressive Behavior in University Committee Meetings.”

You want to think in terms of contributions to scholarship, rather than numbers of articles or pages. The latter matter, surely, but in the end, it is the contributions that make a difference. Cumulative contributions are usually needed, since no one is likely to follow up on your work at first.

1.05 Making your work stand up to criticism

You want to write in such a way that in twenty years, if you were to look back at what you wrote, you will feel that you did a good job then, even if you have subsequently discovered improvements or errors. You want to tell yourself something to the effect that you are surprised that you had been able to do that then: I knew that then? (Surely, in retrospect there will be passages you are embarrassed about, as well. Even whole articles.)

The secret is to write carefully, to say just what you know to be the case, to separate out speculation, and to make your arguments clear and cogent.

1.06 Contribution, numbers, statistics

Citation numbers are not statistics, as that term is used technically. And there are curious manipulations as well as misleading claims, at least often enough so that one has to be quite skeptical. Rather, ask: What is the contribution? What is the quality? Did they do the work?

Numbers in promotion packets may be helpful, but they are easily manipulated. In general, very low or very high numbers are indicative, but they ought to be treated with suspicion, to be checked against other evidence.

Probably no more than a third of reference letters are really helpful.

In general, what matters in the end is your contribution to scholarship. That is a substantive notion, and letters of reference and your personal statement should indicate that. Numbers of publications, venues, citations are only secondary, but they are useful indicators and consistency checks.

As for numbers and rankings, it would be useful to have the most elementary of measures of uncertainty attached to them. The numbers we get from citation sources are claimed to be complete samples, but in fact they are likely polluted with junk. What should be the errors assigned to these numbers?

If you are using numbers, and almost all citation “statistics” are just numbers, comparisons with a relevant cohort are useful. Be sure the numbers are not stuffed: do most of the citations come from when someone was a postdoc with a famous scholar — so that you compare your candidate with someone elsewhere with terrific numbers, but in fact the high-number scholar’s number come from that postdoc period?

Also, do the numbers accord with what you know of the contribution?

1.07 Do not become academic roadkill (& how to pick yourself up off the road)

1. Again, as in the Preface: a truck is coming, and you better not say, what truck? Trucks are real and if they are coming, you had better get out of the way. Otherwise you will become academic roadkill.

Publish that book or get that grant or have N papers out and seen. You had better do it. You do not want to say to yourself, Smith did half a book and it was in draft, and he was promoted. Your advocates might say this, too. But most others will think to themselves, Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Then they will get the broom and dustpan to clean up the road.

Maybe Smith had other virtues, maybe they made a mistake. But you are likely to be academic roadkill, be a splat on the ground, unless you do what you must. You are lucky to have seen the oncoming truck.

2. As in Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban:

Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too nea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Using The Thriving Professor
• Part I Surviving and Thriving
• Part II Teaching, Thinking, Writing
• Part III Academic Leadership
• Part IV Pathology
• Appendix A About the Author
• Appendix B Thinking for a Living
• Notes
• Index