Navigating Culture Shock - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education

5/5/2014 Navigating Culture Shock - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/article/Navigating-Culture-Shock/146365/ 1/13

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Faculty

May 5, 2014

Navigating Culture ShockPh.D. students at Stanford learn about faculty life at San JoseState U., a campus quite unlike their own

By Audrey Williams JuneSan Jose, Calif.

an Jose State University’s densely built urban campus is the

kind of regional public university that educates millions of

Americans.

Its enrollment of 31,000 includes many first-generation students,

parents, transfer students, and those who juggle coursework with

jobs. There is a gritty feel to some parts of the campus’s 19 square

blocks, especially in places with aging buildings and outdated

classrooms. Recent budget cuts have taken a toll, forcing professors

to teach larger classes and, at one point, go a few years without

raises.

San Jose State is also the kind of university where new Ph.D.'s often

find themselves teaching, and the environment and workload can

be unfamiliar. For those who trained at elite research universities,

the jobs look very different from their professors’. Being a professor

here means more teaching and committee work, finding resources

on tight budgets, and getting by with less help with grading and in

the lab.

Just 20 miles away, Stanford University’s doctoral students are

training in a different world. The Stanford campus, nicknamed "the

Farm," sprawls across 8,180 meticulously landscaped acres. Nearly

all of the students live on the campus, and each year transfer

students make up only a smattering of the entire student body. The

$18.7-billion endowment dwarfs San Jose's of $100-million.

A group of Ph.D. students from Stanford is learning how to navigate

the cultural divide between the two types of institutions as well as

the transition from graduate student to faculty member. As part of a

http://chronicle.com/section/Faculty/7/

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program jointly run by San Jose State and Stanford, participants

have made regular trips to San Jose State to see firsthand how

faculty members handle workloads that include teaching, research,

and service at a college where research isn't the primary focus. The

goal of the program, called Preparing Future Professors, is to give

the graduate students an inside look at how a faculty job is

experienced on a campus that is far different from their own—

particularly as the market for tenure-track jobs remains tight in

many fields.

The Stanford students, some of whom also attended top research

universities as undergraduates, are assigned faculty mentors at San

Jose who talk frankly about how their work environment differs

from what Stanford graduate students are used to. The mentors

serve as guides to help the students overcome the culture shock

that can result from being trained in one type of academic setting

and beginning a career in a different one.

"When they graduate, this is the kind of job that they can probably

expect," says Adrienne L. Eastwood, an associate professor of

English and comparative literature at San Jose, who is a mentor in

the program. "It’s very important for students not to get

gobsmacked when they go on an interview and someone says, ‘How

would you handle our four-four teaching load?’ They should

understand what they’re getting into."

any recent Stanford Ph.D.'s have landed tenure-track jobs

at regional public institutions, including Coastal Carolina

University and Southern Illinois University. They work at other

kinds of institutions, too, from small liberal-arts colleges, like

William Jewell College, to large public research universities, like the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Carolyn MacDonald is one of the Stanford Ph.D. students who

participated in this year's program.

Her first impression of San Jose State was its liveliness compared

with Stanford's bucolic setting. The urban campus’s borders bleed

into the city, most notably at the corner that is home to the library.

Built in partnership with the city, the library also serves the general



public and is a meeting place for the university's student break-

dance club.

"The campus is much smaller than ours, but there’s always

students around," says Ms. MacDonald, a fifth-year student in the

classics at Stanford. "People sitting on benches, talking with each

other—there’s just a lot of energy."

She was paired with Matthew J. Spangler, an associate professor in

the department of communication-studies. His office betrays one

difference between San Jose State and Stanford: He shares it with

another faculty member, an unlikely arrangement at Stanford.

Another big difference is course load. Most professors at San Jose

State teach three or four courses per semester, compared with as

few as two for Stanford professors’. Mr. Spangler teaches two

courses per semester only because he is the department’s

graduate-program coordinator.

At San Jose State, professors also sometimes need to scrape

together funds. Mr. Spangler told Ms. MacDonald about how he

has built a theater program with limited dollars from the university,

applying for federal grants to fill the gaps.

Ms. MacDonald, after some weeks in the program, realized that at

San Jose and places like it, it would be a challenge for her to carve

out teaching and research opportunities in her field. There isn’t a

classics department at San Jose.

"I wonder about the place of the pure humanities here," she told

her Stanford peers at a weekly practicum that is part of the

program.

The time she spent with students in Mr. Spangler's performance-

studies class, however, reminded her of how much she likes

teaching. "After the first class, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that's a

pretty noisy classroom,’" Ms. MacDonald says. "But they're

engaged, they're actively discussing poetry. It was a great reminder

that I'm most energized when I'm in the classroom."

Ms. MacDonald, who plans to go on the academic job market next



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year, says she would be "absolutely happy" if she ended up at a

place like San Jose State.

ennifer Summit, a professor of English at Stanford, came up

with the idea for the three-month program two years ago, after

talking with San Jose’s president, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, at a

conference. She asked him what Stanford should be doing to

prepare its graduate students to teach at a place like San Jose.

He suggested she start a program, which she developed during a

year as a fellow of the American Council on Education. Mr.

Qayoumi saw it as a way to groom future faculty members for

institutions like his, while giving participants a "glimpse into our

ecosystem here," he says.

The program started in 2012-13; this academic year, its second,

students had to compete for spots. Eight people out of an applicant

pool of 24 made the cut.

While the program is small, and is open only to advanced graduate

students in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences, it stands

out for providing elite research university students with extended,

close-up exposure to the professoriate, and for the kinds of

experiences they can have with faculty members on the San Jose

State campus. Similar programs, initially sponsored by the Council

of Graduate Schools and the Association of American Colleges and

Universities, exist at numerous colleges. But those programs, and

their offshoots, include few institutions like Stanford and

sometimes offer students limited exposure to what being a

professor is like.

Stanford holds a dinner for new participants, their mentors, and

program supporters to set the stage for the program, says Ms.

Summit, who will leave Stanford soon to become dean of

undergraduate studies at San Francisco State University. The

students then shadow their mentors during the semester as they

prepare for classes, teach, hold office hours, and attend Faculty

Senate and committee meetings. Another dinner took place last

week to mark the end of the current session.



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To build on what they learn at San Jose State, the students attend a

weekly practicum at Stanford run by Richard M. Reis, a part-time

consulting professor of engineering there. During the sessions, they

talk about their time spent with the mentors. Mr. Reis and guest

speakers also cover such topics as how to put together an

application package, survive an on-campus visit, and design a new

course.

"The students are deeply impressed by what can actually be done in

an environment like San Jose State—and that’s good for them to

see," Mr. Reis says.

ne day in late February, Esra Burak, a Ph.D. student in

sociology at Stanford, settled into a seat among roughly

three dozen or so students in her mentor’s "Sociology Capstone"

course. It is in classrooms like this one where the differences

between the student populations here and at Stanford are most

stark.

Three students stood before the class for a presentation, but one of

them had to leave after completing his part. He is in the military

and had to go to a training exercise with his unit.

Later in the session, the San Jose State students talked about

interviews they were assigned to conduct with their parents. One

student said her father had told her that when she was born, he gave

up college so he could earn money to support her. Another

student’s mother used the Job Corps, a federal vocational-training

program, to advance her career in the utilities industry. Another

talked about her father, a high-school dropout who went on to earn

a GED in his early 30s before becoming a mechanic.

"Being a faculty member here is hard work, but not in the obvious

way," says her mentor, Preston O. Rudy, an assistant professor of

sociology. "There are problems students have that move into your

classroom and into your office. We have students who are deployed

to Afghanistan or students flying to Mexico to go to a

grandmother’s funeral. So many of them have more than one job;

some have children.



"At our institution they’re not just students. They have a whole

other life."

The chance to see the differences at an institution that serves a

student body like San Jose State’s was one reason Ms. Burak

applied for the mentorship program. "Preston does a good job of

meeting the students where they are," says Ms. Burak, who earned

her undergraduate degree at Cornell University. "I’m just taking

everything in. I think everything I’ve seen or heard will help me."

She will start work this fall as an assistant professor at Lingnan

University, a public liberal-arts institution in Hong Kong, where

her husband works in business.

Shawn Burns, a seventh-year Ph.D. student in philosophy who

expects to finish in June, has been struck by the conversations he

overhears when he eats in San Jose’s student union. Students, he

says, often talk about money woes and the work they do to pay bills.

"I never hear that talk among students at Stanford," he says.

"They're generally not working one or two or three jobs to pay

tuition."

Unlike some of his Stanford peers in the program, the realities

faced by those San Jose students are not foreign to Mr. Burns. He

attended community college for six years while working, in part, to

put his wife through law school, then went on to the University of

California at San Diego, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. "I was

a commuter myself," he says, "so I remember what that was like."

While sitting in on a class in Latin American philosophy at San Jose,

Mr. Burns noticed that students were all taking notes with pen and

paper. At Stanford, students take notes on their laptops, he says. He

is thinking about what he would need to do if he were to teach

students like this.

"I would make sure resources are available in hard copy," he says.

"And you're not going to make students pay $200 for textbooks at

San Jose State. You're going to find another way."

entors in the program say they try to pass along the kind of wisdom



Mthat they wish they had received. Lawrence Quill, an

associate professor of political science, shared his syllabus

with his mentee, Robert Barlow, and talked about his

teaching load: four courses per semester. (This semester he added a

fifth class, in independent study.) Mr. Quill has about 30 students

per course, which prompted Mr. Barlow to ask about his teaching

assistants.

"I told him they don’t exist, and you have to do the grading

yourself," says Mr. Quill, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of

Essex, a public research university in Britain. "He was taken aback

by that. You have to get past the shock of having to do quite a lot

with no additional support."

Professors in the hard sciences at San Jose State can't count on

large amounts of start-up money to get their laboratories under

way. Robert Rawle, a chemistry Ph.D. student at Stanford, learned

from his mentor what it had been like to proceed without that kind

of cash. Lionel E. Cheruzel, an assistant professor of inorganic and

bioinorganic chemistry, came to San Jose State in 2009 after

completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of

Technology.

"I remember I was going to wash some test tubes and someone at

Caltech said, ‘What are you doing?’ " Mr. Cheruzel recalls. " ‘Just

get some new ones.’ "

When it came to his own lab, Mr. Cheruzel didn't hesitate to take

advantage of an unexpected opportunity to acquire more materials

—free. Roche, a pharmaceutical company, shut down a nearby

research facility, and he picked up some lab equipment and

supplies the company was giving away to scientists and educators

several years ago.

"You have to work with what you have," he says.

Mr. Cheruzel has wondered whether sharing some of his

experiences with Mr. Rawle was "the right thing to do. You don’t

want to discourage people, but I do want to say, ‘this is what it

takes.’"



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Mr. Rawle, a graduate of Pomona College, wants to work at an

institution that emphasizes teaching undergraduates and doing

research with them. He appreciates Mr. Cheruzel’s candor. "You

can either bemoan your situation or be like Lionel and just make it

work," he says.

The other Stanford doctoral candidates in the sciences who

participated in the joint program—Robert Furrow and Rachel

Egger, both in biology—say they now see research in a new light,

thanks to faculty members at San Jose State.

Ms. Egger says at one time she never would have considered

employment at a master’s institution like San Jose State. She

couldn't imagine how faculty members at such institutions could

maintain their research agenda.

As a graduate of a research university, the University of Wisconsin

at Madison, "I was very interested in seeing what it looks like to be a

faculty member at a different type of institution," Ms. Egger says.

In the lab of her mentor, Miri VanHoven, an assistant professor of

biological sciences, Ms. Egger learned that researchers at San Jose

State face challenges different from those at Stanford. A team of

undergraduates works part time in the lab—not graduate students

like herself, who can put in longer hours. Ms. VanHoven simply

chooses projects that allow her to make the best use of the

assistance she has. "There’s just a different level of planning

involved to make it happen," Ms. Egger says.

But she also found herself reassured by Ms. VanHoven. The San

Jose State professor has conducted "high-caliber research and

published in very good journals," Ms. Egger says. "I’ve seen now

that it can be done."

kepticism goes both ways between institutional divides. Being

from a place like Stanford can be a disadvantage when

applying for a job at a place like San Jose State. Applicants from

elite institutions an make a search committee wary, Ms. Summit

says.

"The fear is that they’re not going to have the exposure to the kind



of students that SJSU serves," she acknowledges. "People think

they’ll be unhappy and they’ll leave as soon as they can."

But participants who list the program on their CVs can send a

positive signal, says Amy Strage, one of the joint program's co-

directors and interim director of the Center for Faculty

Development at San Jose State. "It can be reassuring for a search

committee to see," she says.

Allen Frost, a sixth-year Ph.D. student in English at Stanford, is

hoping that’s the case. He is already thinking about how to best

present on paper his commitment to a campus like San Jose State.

"I wanted to be exposed to teaching contexts that we don’t have at

Stanford," says Mr. Frost, who once taught at a public high school

in Pennsylvania. "I’m doing a lot to position myself as someone

who cares about teaching. Being committed to the students is what

I want to do."

Mr. Frost, whose undergraduate degree is from Swarthmore

College, says he knew San Jose State would be different—not as

posh and more diverse, for starters. And his mentor, Ms. Eastwood,

has provided both a heads-up about the reality and tips for how to

keep that reality from hindering his success. For example, she

warned, Wi-Fi is spotty on the campus, and committee work

schedules tend to be heavy, as hers is. To get her research done, she

crams a lot of the work into the summer months.

But Mr. Frost, who has lectured a few times for Ms. Eastwood

during the program, says he has come to see that Stanford and San

Jose State are alike at the core.

"It’s just as intellectually demanding as teaching at a place like

Stanford might be," he says. "The students there are just as witty

and interested in the material as students are here. They're really

invested in their education."



Correction (5/5/2014, 11:55 a.m.): The original version of this article

misnamed a regional public university that has employed a

Stanford graduate. It is Southern Illinois University, not the

University of Southern Illinois. The text has been corrected.

Correction (5/5/2014, 1:05 p.m.): The chart originally mislabeled the

percentage of San Jose State's freshmen eligible for Pell Grants as

the university's percentage of Pell Grant recipients. In addition, the

note on the chart included two errors: The endowment numbers

are for summer 2013, not June 30, 2013, and the figures for Pell

Grants are for fall 2012, not summer 2013. The chart has been

updated to reflect these corrections.

18 Comments The Chronicle of Higher Education Login



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• Reply •

Guest • 16 hours ago

Even the names are unfamiliar apparently....Southern Illinois University is athing. University of Southern Illinois is not.

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• Reply •

Guest #153a.2 • 15 hours ago Guest

SIUC, the main campus of SIU, is also a research institution, actually.The teaching load would not be 4-4, but probably 2-2 or 3-3, dependingon the program. They would also likely have a buyout program if youget grants for your research.

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• Reply •

jffoster • 7 hours ago Guest

"...a thing." ?????????

• Reply •

zacharysmith • 16 hours ago

The problem in my experience is not culture shock it is that many of the newlyminted PhDs are so narrowly trained as to be useless in anything other than an"elite" research university.

22

• Reply •

csgirl • 15 hours ago

Stanford PhDs, slumming it. 26

• Reply •

TheJonesest • 15 hours ago

"When they graduate, this is the kind of job that they can probably expect'''Sure, if they're one of the 1 in 200 PhDs that become TT professors. SJ State?That's the *best* scenerio, even for a Stanford grad. How about CC prof?Multi-year post-doc/VAP/adjunct?

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• Reply •

recalcitrant • 15 hours ago

"I remember I was going to wash some test tubes and someone at Caltechsaid, ‘What are you doing?’ " Mr. Cheruzel recalls. " ‘Just get some new ones.’ " Situations like this provide wonderful ammunition for the folks who want to takeshots at waste in higher ed, and to be honest I cannot really think of effectivearguements against this type of examples.

11

• Reply •

ebennett64 • 14 hours ago

If Stanford is preparing them to teach at public colleges, my PhD from a publicuniversity is preparing me for what, exactly? I can't teach in public highschools. I don't have the credential. Oh, right, I'm one of the 70%, the adjunctswho teach the majority of college courses in the nation. I just calculated mypension from my teaching. After 4 months of waiting, from the pension service,I found out it's three dollars a day! No typos there!

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• Reply •

fly_on_the_wall • 13 hours ago ebennett64

The truth is, even those of us with degrees from elite programs oftenfind ourselves in precisely the same circumstances as yours. SeeTheJonesest above.

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pommette • 12 hours ago

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The disparity in endowments is especially sobering, considering that that's onlyone piece of the huge financial gap between the two schools. In addition topreparing academia's 1% for slumming it, I sure hope Stanford paid thementors and the hosting institution handsomely for their time - more thanhandsomely in fact! I realize this is where dialog has to start, but surely thelessons have to be something more than accepting that life in publicinstitutions is harder. Where is a sense of questioning and trying to remedy theprofound inequality that increasingly destroys US society.Are Stanfordstudents learning to challenge injustice of an entire system?

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• Reply •

061150 • 12 hours ago pommette

IMO that comment is projecting frustration with the increasing influenceof the 1% (a frustration which I share) into an arena where it's notappropriate. I don't see the point in challenging the "injustice of an entiresystem." There are different institutions at different income levels withdifferent financial structures. It is what it is, and I don't see anythingreally unfair about it. Stanford is a private institution and entitled toconduct their business the way they see fit. More power to them. SanJose State is a different institution and it deals with fiscal reality as itmust. This does not constitute "injustice of an entire system."

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• Reply •

mindwithaview • 12 hours ago

This is actually a pretty important article, especially for those who get degreesat top ranked institutions who then face a dismal job market. The worstsituation is getting a job at a low ranked department that is in transition fromprimarily teaching to emphasizing research in order to rise in the rankings. Theold guard resent the newbies who come in with low teaching loads and start upfunds because they think it is unfair. They are used to a system where the newhires are given the lowest and worst of everything and work their way up. Butthe new guard thinks of new hires like sports teams do--you hire the best andput them into play (in their labs) so they can be productive. The acrimony thatcan arise from that kind of culture clash can be devastating to new hires,particularly if the new guard gets tired of fighting the old guard and simplyleaves.

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• Reply •

maugham1 • 8 hours ago

Programs like this are sorely needed in my opinion. I've been involved in lots ofsearches over the years at the regional comprehensives where I've beenemployed and I can't tell you how many candidates from tier 1 institutionsdidn't make the cut for the positions for which we were hiring. As qualified andcommitted as they were, in the end they were largely ignorant of our realities -4:4 teaching load, no research money, tiny library, and no TAs - and thus werenot a good fit. The more you know about different kinds of positions, the betteryou will be able to market yourself. Plus you can ease the culture shockmentioned in the article and hopefully avoid at least one facet of career relatedunhappiness.

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• Reply •

akprof • 7 hours ago

This is a GREAT idea!! Which nursing PhD programs would do somethingsimilar.

Angela Vietto • 6 hours ago

Nice program. Now we just need (1) all PhD-granting institutions to start similarprograms, (2) research professors to educate themselves about other types ofinstitutions in order to provide realistic mentoring in the absence of suchprograms, and (3) graduate program directors to make it clear to PhDapplicants at the beginning of their training that this is the kind of job they canexpect.

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expect. 1

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nontraditional001 • 6 hours ago

The depths a Stanford grad must sink to for employment exemplifies thehorrible job market. Grads from state don't stand a chance.

• Reply •

Gloria Monti • 5 hours ago

stanford and san jose state? try yale and cal state fullerton.

• Reply •

22250099 • an hour ago

Wouldn't it be nice if just one of the profs at Stanford had formerly taught atSan Jose State? It seems odd to me that none of the professors at thegraduate school actually have the real world experience that the graduatestudents need. The nuances cannot necessarily be well taught in a few fieldtrips. Some of us down here in the trenches are actually very well publishedtoo.

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Navigating Culture Shock - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education