FIRST PERSON

Ceding Control

A professor accustomed to going about her own business finds herself suddenly responsible for others

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By PAULA M. KREBS

As a tenured professor at a liberal-arts college, I am used to working on my own. I design my own courses; I don't have to conform to any set syllabi in my department. Likewise I do my own grading — no huge classes, so no teaching assistants.

How would I adjust to ceding some of that control and running a monthlong grant-financed summer institute?

The summer institute would mean depending on faculty members from many other institutions, folks I didn't know, on a project about which I cared deeply. So I was nervous. I wanted to run this project myself, but I wasn't quite arrogant enough to think I could.

Here's how I got myself into this anomalous position: The summer institute grew out of the work of a national organization, in this case, the Association of Departments of English, an arm of the Modern Language Association. A four-member committee had studied the problem of the pipeline to the doctorate in English: Minority students were underrepresented in the ranks of undergraduate English majors, but they were even more underrepresented in doctoral programs. How could we encourage more students of color to pursue the Ph.D. in English? The ADE committee, of which I was a member, decided that a monthlong summer institute would be a good first step, and I ended up writing the grant proposal.

When we designed the Summer Institute for Literary and Cultural Studies (see http://www.wheatoncollege.edu/silcs), we knew we wanted to give students a rigorous curriculum in literary and cultural theory. We also wanted to give them writing-intensive work that would help them prepare a powerful writing sample to accompany their graduate-school applications.

We wanted to acquaint students with the application process and with the various elements of higher education to which they would not naturally be privy: the tenure system, how academic conferences work, what professional associations do.

It would be a big job, and designing the institute had to be the work of a big committee. Putting aside my autonomous-faculty ego and carrying out the plans of a really smart committee proved to be the best contribution I could have made to the project.

The four of us on the ADE committee, all current or former English-department chairs, knew we didn't have all the expertise we needed.

We decided to create a steering committee. Since I was the person who wrote the grant and would be its director, I began to invite others to join the committee. Once I had secured a planning grant, I arranged for a short (two-night) summer retreat for the steering committee to design the institute. That was where I really learned what the director's role entailed. I put together a packet of readings for the committee, found a nice place for the retreat, scheduled our days tightly but left some time for relaxing, and, above all, made sure we'd have good food (The Chronicle, May 30).

Assembling people who had ideas about the project had been easy. The hard part was actually letting them pursue their ideas and not mine. As we decided how much of the institute would be devoted to classroom instruction, how many visits to other campuses we would make, and what our deadlines would be, I had to step back and become just another member of the committee.

After the retreat, the head of the steering committee and I met with academics on other campuses who had organized summer institutes. We took what we learned back to my campus and started the planning in earnest. As I prepared the schedule, gathered the applications, lined up the dozen or so guest lecturers, and made arrangements for the visiting faculty members, I realized that I had never before been so professionally dependent on other people.

I wasn't even on the admissions subcommittee, so I wouldn't be deciding which students got to attend the institute. Essential decisions were being made either by consensus or by subcommittee — not by the director. I knew that was the right process, but it still felt odd.

Perhaps the most significant difference between my regular faculty work and the director's work was the fact that I had never before had a dedicated, full-time staff member to help me. Even as a department chair, I hadn't had my own secretary but instead shared one with three other departments.

Suddenly I had an assistant, and I understood how people whom I had always thought so efficient actually got their work done. They had staffs.

As it became apparent that the young woman I had hired was a pearl beyond price, I saw how horribly wrong things could have gone had I hired someone who could not work independently or be relied on to do a job she was asked to do. I understood that her work made me look good.

Chairs of large departments at good-size institutions no doubt already know that feeling, but for a small-college faculty member, it was new. And fabulous.

I soon realized that I was also going to depend significantly on the faculty member who would be doing the teaching during the institute. What if she wasn't as good as I thought she was? The entire institute would be a bust. But, of course, the steering committee had made a wise choice. The teaching was brilliant, the curriculum was exactly right for what the students needed, and the dedicated faculty member brought them further than they ever thought they could come in a month.

It might sound foolish to people who run colleges or organize conferences, but to a faculty member used to going about her own business — oblivious to the folks who make her job easy (registrars, housekeeping, buildings and grounds workers, student-life staff members) — suddenly being responsible for every detail of daily life for students, faculty members, and visitors in a monthlong program was a shock to the system. What I now realize is that nothing about directing this summer institute seemed to be faculty work, yet it all had to be done by a faculty member. The director had to understand faculty work — classroom issues, student problems, graduate-school expectations, the profession as a whole.

All the work of the institute was collaborative in a way I had never before experienced. I learned to bow more to others' judgment and got used to depending on other people more than I ever had before in my professional life. And I liked it.

I still value my autonomy in the classroom and elsewhere. But I think I have a much better grip on how truly collaborative the educational enterprise is. And that's bound to be good for me, as a faculty member, to remember.

Paula M. Krebs is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and editor of Academe, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of University Professors.