This fall, for the first time in a long time, I am teaching a class taken only by first-semester, first-year students. A required general education course that includes a lot of writing. And grading. I last taught about three years ago. All in all, I have taught maybe five classes since 2010.
I moved from being a tenured full professor to a 12-month, full-time academic administrator (initially, an associate dean) in 2005, so at the end of this semester I will complete my 17th year as a full-time administrator. It is a career path I never imagined for myself as I pursued my PhD studies on early modern English literature or as I published my research on 16th-century prose fiction (especially the works of Barnaby Riche) and worked my way up through the tenure ranks. I took the administrative path because (1) I feared who would be asked to do the work if I didn’t; (2) I needed a more flexible schedule than teaching permitted in order to accommodate pregnancy and early childhood care (that is, it is easier to reschedule a meeting than a class when your toddler has yet another ear infection); and (3) the systems thinking required for academic administration turned out to be something I am good at and enjoy. I did not become an administrator to avoid classroom teaching, but I did find that once I became an administrator, it was hard to give my students, especially graduate students, the attention they deserved. So I stopped graduate-level teaching first, then I restricted myself to low-stakes undergraduate courses: reading groups for honors students and first-year orientation courses.
Why We Need to Fight for Our Students: The Example of Stephanie Land
It is a commonplace to say that our campuses need to be “student centered.” That we need to “meet students where they are” and recognize that our students are less
Constance C. Relihan
January 2, 2024
