Ken Wolter/Shutterstock
Most PhD students entering the academic job market attend graduate programs focused on training the next generation of scholars. Consequently, your faculty mentors may have overtly or subtly discouraged you from pursuing careers at liberal arts colleges, regional public institutions, or community colleges whose teaching missions are different from — but not lesser than — institutions that prioritize research.
To counter these biases, we wrote this series to give graduate students a fuller picture of the nature and value of faculty work at one type of institution where we have extensive experience: small liberal arts colleges. This career trajectory is not a mere consolation prize only to be considered after striking out at a large doctoral-granting institution (also known as an R1 institution). Through this series, we hope to give you a broader understanding and the practical tools to determine if a career at a liberal arts college might be for you.
Often, the applicants we see for faculty positions who are open-minded about careers in small colleges may have only a partial understanding of the characteristics that make our institutions distinct: a commitment to teaching undergraduates, mentorship, collegiality, and active faculty governance.
Here are five signs that you might enjoy a personally and professionally fulfilling role at a small liberal arts college.
1. You Do Not Find R1 Life Energizing
The latter stages of a doctoral program often provide valuable perspectives about the kinds of research and professional work that excite you. Pay attention to signs that you might be well-suited to a small college. For example, maybe you are ready to move on to new questions and lines of inquiry and wonder if the world really needs a book-length treatment of your dissertation topic. Maybe you’ve noticed that what drives your accomplished faculty mentors at an R1 and makes them happy isn’t appealing to you. And maybe, as you experience the reality of the academic job market, you feel a growing desire to to help students find multiple career pathways.
2. Getting Teaching and Research in Balance
If the publish or perish mentality that remains common in research-intensive universities doesn’t feel like your cup of tea, you might feel more at home at a liberal arts college, where faculty can make more room for the joys of teaching. Do you enjoy selecting readings, designing assignments, and developing course themes and goals, including those pitched at beginners? Do you get excited seeing undergraduates improve as readers, writers, and thinkers? Do you love the daily “live show” your classroom becomes? Are you energized by conversations with peers about teaching?
Research will be a part of your workload and tenure review at a teaching institution – just a comparatively smaller part. It may also have a different focus informed by the teaching mission. For example, many teaching institutions also value the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), a rigorous investigation of how students learn as a legitimate focus of scholarly inquiry. SoTL often involves collaboration with students and colleagues. At institutions that prioritize teaching, SoTL can be a very effective way to maintain a research agenda alongside a demanding teaching load. We’ll say more about this in the fourth piece in this series.
3. You Are Most Excited To Help Students Discover the Paths Open to Them
Liberal arts colleges believe their primary purpose is to produce good citizens. We help students get excited about questions and problems relevant to them and gain the confidence to make connections across different disciplines. Small college faculty members find deep satisfaction helping students find their own professional and personal life paths.
We find advising and mentoring students to be the most rewarding work in academia. What kind of life do they want to live, and what skills and talents do they have to draw on? What ability can you see and encourage in them that they do not yet see in themselves? How can you help them embrace their broad interests, passions, and identities?
4. You Sense You Have the Potential To Be a Transformative Teacher and Leader
For many tenure-track faculty members, their first job in academia may be their one and only job. At a small college, your job can grow with you as your skills and interests evolve over the decades and as new needs arise on your campus.
Because liberal arts colleges are naturally multi- and interdisciplinary, they afford many rewarding teaching collaborations, such as team-teaching courses, developing discipline-spanning core curriculum seminars, or leading experiential off-campus programs. You will also have the opportunity to chair your department, direct a center or program, or lead a consequential task force.
These new creative outlets will allow you to exercise your influence to support faculty, staff, and students. This is not to say that such opportunities do not exist at large research universities, only that the scale of small colleges makes it more likely you will encounter an opportunity that plays to your strengths and interests. In fact, small colleges are hungry for the transformational leader you have the potential of becoming.
5. Listen to Your Inner Voice
As you consider your next steps, pay attention to your inner voice. If you feel like R1 life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, don’t think something is wrong with you. You may just be in the wrong place for you. The things that give you energy shouldn’t be guilty pleasures – they should be the focus of your intellectual life. If you are energized by the prospect of helping a diverse student body discover the excitement of a liberal education, what they are capable of, and who they want to be in the world, and if you want to be a part of a community where you can evolve over the course of your career, give small liberal arts colleges a close look. We’d love to have you as a colleague.
Be sure to watch for the rest of this series where we help you understand what kinds of new colleagues small colleges are looking for and outline practical advice for developing application letters and preparing for interviews.
