Crossing the Water

I recently returned home to Sheffield from a most stimulating conference in Provo, Utah; this was SHEL 8, the eighth conference in a series of conferences founded in the United States devoted to studies in the history of the English language. There, I was able to meet old friends I had not seen for a long time and to meet new people; these included both famous and highly influential scholars and young researchers just embarking on their careers. The last SHEL conference I attended was SHEL 4, which I hosted at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in 2005, the year before I took up a chair in English language at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. My return to SHEL this year provided a timely opportunity for me to reflect on the past ten years—a period during which I have been a senior faculty member and head of a large, complex English department in two quite different universities (H[igher] E[ducation] institutions) in two different university (higher education) systems. (But I have also been a junior faculty member [an early career researcher in today’s terminology] in large English departments in different systems.) Indeed, looking over the past two sentences, I see that this experience has made me bidialectal; although we might assume that a university is a university wherever it is, the fact is that these institutions, like other institutions, create their own systems of shorthand, arcane terminology that the newcomer or the outsider must assimilate if she is to thrive in the new environment. This note, therefore, will be full of such arcane doublets and their glosses. ¹ The idea is to consider what is involved, what is necessary, and what to avoid in pursuing an academic career that entails crossing the Atlantic twice—first to the United States and then back to the United Kingdom. (I will not go into the first few ocean crossings that initiated my career, namely traveling from South Africa to Cambridge, UK, to pursue postgraduate studies, and then two years later, going back, now to the University of Cape Town, to take up my first proper job as a university lecturer.)

I first went to NAU from a university lectureship (equivalent to associate professor) in the history of the English language in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. The Cambridge setting allows academics (if they so wish) to operate according to Grice’s quantity maxim: do as much as you are required and no more. In other words, it allows scholars to do as much or as little teaching as they desire, the minimum being forty-eight lectures per academic year. (I see that I must explain immediately what a “year” means in order to understand this stricture properly; an academic year consists of three terms—Michaelmas, Lent, and Summer—the first two consisting of eight teaching weeks, the last consisting of four teaching weeks before the exam period.) There were (are) individuals who observe this maxim, but most colleagues, passionate about their subjects and about growing their programs, teach a great deal more. And so it was with my colleagues and me. We delivered lectures on diverse topics in history of the English language (HEL—as we affectionately labeled our subject) and offered supervisions (small tutorial classes) to groups of two and three students once a week for a number of colleges.

While the faculty (i.e., academic department) is responsible for scheduling and providing lectures—the basic stimulus for the student work—the colleges direct students’ programs of study, organizing small group and individual instruction, setting and grading essays, all in preparation for two key sets of examinations. The Cambridge system operates like this: students’ attainment is measured by their performance in examinations for their courses, called Triposes, which are divided into parts. The English Tripos is divided into two parts: the first part (part 1) is the examinations taken at the end of the second year, and the second part (part 2) is taken as final examinations at the end of the students’ third and final year (see http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/camdata/tripos.html). The continual (formative) assessment of student learning throughout the three years of the degree is highly effective and unparalleled preparation for the high-stakes examinations at the end, which determine the degree classification. I was a director of studies for HEL in St. Catharine’s College and taught English language and HEL in supervisions to students from numerous colleges as well as from my own. I also organized various sets of lectures to dovetail with the supervision program at faculty level, and so my colleagues and I were satisfied that we had a successful and coherent program in which we were able to offer crucial academic support to students. This system represents a combination of, on the one hand, the local, individual level of instruction where students are given enormous support and direct instruction, immediate feedback, and tutoring and on the other, an institutional-level assessment of the effectiveness of that individual instruction in the outcome—centrally administered and faculty-assessed examinations. I was fortunate to participate at both levels, seeing my students all the way through from weekly essays to final exam success.

The teaching was hectic but thoroughly engaging; my office was in the college, and I conducted all my small group teaching in my college “rooms” (i.e., office). I would walk over the River Cam to the English faculty building on West Road or to the Arts and Humanities Sidgwick site for lectures or for faculty (i.e., departmental) or subject group meetings. The vast majority of lecturers (or faculty members) in the arts and humanities at Cambridge are college (rather than university) employees, though they are affiliates of the Faculty of English. This situation calls for the constant, careful negotiation among university and college lecturers for the benefit of both undergraduate students and academic colleagues.

Postgraduate (i.e., graduate) work was a different matter. PhD students were largely left to their own devices, hoping for a proactive, interested, and professional supervisor to guide them through the daunting process of independent research to completion of a thesis. I was a member of the faculty’s postgraduate applications committee, a group responsible for reviewing PhD applications, making decisions about them, and allocating supervision duties to colleagues. I remember attending a meeting of the committee as a very new member of staff and asking whether there was any training in doctoral supervision for people like me. Apparently nobody had ever thought to ask before. There was none, and so I relied on the generosity of experienced colleagues who were willing to teach me about supervision. Nowadays, the matter of doctoral supervision in Britain is increasingly important, and practices in the arts and humanities are catching up with the rigorous and more programmatic habits established in the sciences.

I moved to NAU, in the beautiful Route 66 town of Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1996. I joined a very strong group of colleagues in the applied linguistics program within a large Department of English comprising literature, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition besides linguistics. While the bread-and-butter business for the bulk of the department consists of offering general education (liberal studies) classes in literature, language, and creative writing, the department also delivers classes dedicated to the undergraduate majors and master of arts (MA) programs. Students in the two-year MA programs are funded through teaching assistantships in the freshman/level-one composition program. The English Department was responsible for providing university entry-level academic writing classes to every entry-level student regardless of their major subject. (And the Mathematics and Statistics Department was responsible for providing essential mathematics [or numerical literacy] classes to every single entry-level student.) This part of the department’s business was crucial to the health of the postgraduate programs because the writing program was delivered principally by graduate teaching assistants. The best and brightest MA entrants were attracted by the teaching assistantships that paid their tuition fees and provided a living stipend for the two years of their degree programs. This system guaranteed that MA students received intensive teacher training at the same time as practical experience of teaching and coaching their own class of first-year students. The impact of a university writing program on the MA programs of the department is enormous. The opportunities it presents for teacher training and experience are at least as significant as the guarantee a teaching assistantship offers of full funding, and postgraduates who pass through this system go on to teach academic writing skills in postsecondary two-year and community colleges throughout the region.

I was tremendously fortunate to find in my NAU colleagues highly professional, serious linguists who are very active researchers. Working with them was a collegial, collaborative, and reciprocal experience. My teaching in the MA program consisted of general linguistics courses with a twist; I taught English grammar for teachers, a very different proposition from teaching English grammar to English students (and not a little challenging for a newcomer to applied linguistics!). I taught applied sociolinguistics, a different course from sociolinguistics. I became (for all intents and purposes) an applied linguist in order to teach highly talented postgraduates. At NAU, I only ever taught the history of the English language as a general education (liberal studies) 100-level class (“The Story of English”) to large classes of students who were taking the class for liberal studies (general education) credit, whose majors could have been anything from chemistry to forestry. I taught literary stylistics as a senior-level seminar, a final (fourth) year optional class/module for English majors, where I could include lots of hands-on research for the students as well as a great deal of writing practice. I offered an undergraduate course within my own research area or area of specialization just once: a senior seminar in eighteenth-century English prose, which turned out to be a tutorial in reading historical English texts. However, I was able to develop postgraduate courses in applied linguistics such as discourse and pragmatics, courses that necessarily drew on key areas of my research methodologies. This experience fed eventually into my research agenda and collaborative work.

The PhD program in applied linguistics at NAU introduced me properly to the world of doctoral research supervision as part of a serious professional program. I became a PhD advisor (i.e., supervisor) and learned how to mentor postgraduates and oversee their training. I learned then that while conducting a review of the relevant literature is very important in the early stages of a student’s doctoral work, a pilot project is absolutely critical to the success and completion of a PhD thesis. I have carried this lesson with me ever since, and it guarantees that students will actually complete their dissertations on time. I chaired a number of dissertation committees and feel very gratified as I continue to follow the success of a number of my former doctoral students as they grow in their own academic careers. I also learned a key lesson about the importance to doctoral training in a particular academic field of the choice of PhD topic on the one hand, and commitment to the field on the other.

The only regrettable mistake my colleagues allowed me to make was to persuade them to permit a student to present a PhD proposal that focused on my own research domain at the time, namely, the grammar of stance in eighteenth-century British English. The topic was not the problem per se; the grammar of stance is an important subject for investigation in applied linguistics. The problem was the lack of fit of the data source (eighteenth-century British English) with the professional orientation and expected career path pursued by applied linguists in the United States. The negative effects of this mismatch could have been enormous; luckily, the fact that each student has a dissertation committee means that the nature of the academic and career advice is corporate and collaborative. It quickly became evident that the proposal would not easily translate into a dissertation that would make the student a credible candidate for academic jobs in the applied linguistics world. Such a dissertation would not provide sufficient evidence of the appropriate knowledge base and experience if the student wanted a career as a professional language administrator, a curriculum designer, or an expert materials developer. Furthermore, it would not represent the right kind of research approach if the student wished to pursue an academic career in a university applied linguistics department where the dominant research questions have to do with real-world language problems, and answering them involves methods that are predominantly scientific, empirical, and quantitative. So I learned to be an effective dissertation supervisor, and I also learned that, in order to make a contribution to the department in which one works, it is not always possible to teach in one’s own research area.

I became chair (head) of the English Department at NAU, an experience that taught me about how to plan and discuss curriculum, teaching philosophy, and workload with colleagues from other subdisciplines of English. After that stint and another year and a half of being the dean of a newly founded College of Arts and Letters, I decided that it was time to go back to teaching and, more importantly, to research in my own field of expertise. This decision meant looking for the right kind of position. The opportunity presented itself in the form of a chair of English language at a large civic “Russell Group” university in the United Kingdom (see http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/home/). ² And so I crossed the Atlantic once again, to come back into the UK HE system some ten years later, specifically to the University of Sheffield, now as a chaired professor of English language.

Today the UK HE system as a whole is very different from Oxbridge on the one hand and from the US system on the other. I find that what we have is a hybrid. Many (but not yet all) British universities now work on a semester system instead of using teaching terms, and degree programs are organized in subject-specific core and optional modules. Students’ subject knowledge tends to be assessed module by module in multiple ways, as in the US system; but unlike the US system, UK universities hold examination boards at the end of each year (and often at the end of each semester) to check and confirm student attainment. The UK system has a complex set of quality control mechanisms (quality assurance) to ensure comparability across universities and disciplines; these include external examiners from peer institutions for both undergraduate programs and postgraduate taught-degree programs and periodic reviews of entire programs in addition to the usual internal university learning and teaching checks and monitors. We do not yet have a grade point average (GPA) system for reporting student attainment or the class of degree they achieve, and it is not easy for students to transfer from institution to institution. The introduction of differential tuition fees and the creation of a “pseudo-market” for undergraduate education in UK HE mean that there is considerable competition among universities for the best students. It is a pseudo-market in the sense that the government currently caps the number of undergraduate students to whom they will guarantee tuition loans, and that pool of funded students is distributed across universities according to how well the institutions themselves have marketed their programs. We anticipate further changes in the higher education landscape and different challenges for student recruitment once the government scraps the student number cap in 2015.

The ways in which postgraduate research students are trained and supervised in the United Kingdom have changed considerably. The University of Sheffield is a member of the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities, together with York and Leeds, an arrangement designed to provide doctoral training and professional development for research students whose studies are funded by the principal funding body for the arts and humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). There is new emphasis on training within the research degree for the workplace at the same time as employability has become a key indicator of the value for money of an undergraduate degree. At the same time (alas), we have not yet adopted the US system of the thesis committee. The profession has thus become increasingly complicated. So when we recruit new lecturers (i.e., assistant professors) in English language and linguistics, we now expect the best candidates to have a record of publication and some teaching experience by the time they complete their PhDs. We expect the quality of their research outputs to meet the criteria established for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), an assessment exercise overseen by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) and conducted every eight or so years. We also expect them to have some experience of engaging with the wider public and to understand the manner in which their research has an impact on the society in which they live and work.

So given the increased complexity of academics’ professional lives, it is entirely likely for academics embarking on their careers to consider pursuing opportunities overseas—for example, the United Kingdom and Europe for North Americans; North America for British and Europeans. In the very complex world of higher education, what might be considered to be important qualities to bring to those ambitions? Here are a few (connected and overlapping) ones that I have learned along the way:

Adaptability and flexibility: don’t expect the world to change to suit you; adapt to your circumstances and you will thrive.

Capacity and willingness to learn: seize the opportunity to learn from those around you rather than assume that you know everything.

Curiosity and enthusiasm for change: you’ll need these to help you cope with a new world that seems unfamiliar and aspects of it unpredictable.

Tolerance of, and interest in, other disciplines and viewpoints: you will see opportunities to develop new interests and develop collaborations instead of seeing only competition from other disciplines.

Passion for research and teaching in your field: this is at the heart of the profession. If you love research and teaching and you are willing to interpret your professional remit generously, you will be happy.