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Drifting Away from Research

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By Paula Krebs

After every research sabbatical, almost inevitably I realize I've blown it: Wasted it on an article for a collection that would never get published. Threw it away on research that ended up too similar to someone else's. Spent too much of it recuperating and not enough of it writing. To top it off, I've usually gone into debt by continuing a full-pay lifestyle on a three-quarters-pay salary.

But this research sabbatical will be different: I know from the start that I've blown it.

I seem to have made a conscious decision to that effect. The plan for my research semester has now taken shape, and it involves chucking all that I've been looking forward to: trips to the archives, library time, hours for writing. Instead, I've decided to take on the job of editing Academe, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of University Professors. So I can pretty much kiss my research plans goodbye.

My stint as editor will last a few years, or longer, if I like it. When my sabbatical is over, my college has agreed to give me release time from teaching to do the editing work, so it won't cost me much. Not much, that is, beyond all of the energy that I have been able to conserve for my research over the years.

For the past few years I've been doing increasing amounts of administrative work and, oddly enough, enjoying it. I've just stepped down after a rewarding six years as chairwoman of my English department. I've gotten involved in the national organization for English-department administrators, the Association of Departments of English, which is part of the Modern Language Association. After my department, and my college, had some success in hiring minority faculty members, I began to be asked to do some national consulting on that and other issues.

Nevertheless, through the years, I've always had my research to hang onto, to remind me that I'm a scholar. I've always done just enough to keep myself from sinking totally into administration, just enough to maintain that scholar-teacher identity that I shaped in graduate school.

Scholarship has fed my teaching, moving my classes in new directions and pushing my best students into exciting research projects of their own. I love the conferences, meeting up with fellow Victorianists, talking about research and about teaching this stuff that we enjoy so much.

In six years at the helm of my department, I have continually comforted myself with the idea that once my term ended, I would get back to my research full time, back to what brought me into this field in the first place. Sabbaticals are the payback, right? The payback for giving more than 100 percent in the years leading up to them.

But this sabbatical will be spent learning the ropes of my new job, traveling to Washington to meet association staff members, drumming up articles for future issues of the magazine, making valuable contacts. I'll reserve some time for my research, but the book project I had begun has now become an article, and the edition on which I'm working may take a bit longer than I thought it would.

What allowed me to think about sidelining my research in this way, I suppose, was a funny shift that happened during my time as department chairwoman.

Instead of counting my success in terms of lines on the vita or good course evaluations, I started to look for my rewards in terms of institutional change and, occasionally, in terms of change beyond the institutional level.

I began to get interested in national academic organizations; I visited many other campuses; I presented on panels with folks from all kinds of institutions; and I developed delusions of grandeur. The people who were able to change things at a national level, I noticed, had institutional homes not unlike mine. They simply chose not to limit their work to their own campuses (although they all seemed to be forces to be reckoned with at their home institutions as well).

So I started thinking about ways that I could have an impact at the national level from my own home base at a liberal-arts college. That kind of thinking led me to the AAUP position that I've just accepted.

And while it was it leading me there, it was leading me away from my research. Away from the book project on which I'd been scraping along while heading the department. Away from plans for research trips to England and conferences at which I'd catch up with my graduate-school buddies, whose research had been proceeding apace while I had been filling out annual reviews, running search committees, and mediating among grumpy department members.

Am I saying goodbye to my research forever, or putting it on hold for a few more years? Neither, I hope. I have to maintain an identity as a scholar, at least for the sake of my teaching. Maybe the occasional article will fill the need. Maybe I don't need a book project, lots of trans-Atlantic travel, and research grants. After all, the more time passes since I last got a grant, the less likely I am ever to get another.

Career decisions involve giving up possibilities. I can research and write. Or I can network and lobby and help advance a national higher-education agenda in which I believe. I can focus on Victorian poetry, or on Wheaton College, or on academic freedom in our scary times.

I've seen friends choose among those options, and most have been content with the choices they've made. It's a rare academic who does the same job throughout her career. Even if we stay at the same institution, we have to reorient our priorities continually, changing the percentages of time that are devoted to research, teaching, and administration -- not to mention family and friends.

I guess I am a bit wistful about the research. It's hard, hard work that pushed me intellectually in ways that I cherish. But I'm excited about working for the AAUP as well. This new work will challenge me to put my money where my left-wing academic mouth has been -- to work directly to affect the national climate of hostility to the values that brought me to teaching as a profession.

Choosing this new job is a midcareer shift I wouldn't have anticipated a few years ago, when getting the second book out was, of course, the next thing to do. But careers change. Goals change. I think the research will still be there, waiting for me, when I get back. If I get back.