Reflecting

Now that I've been able to reflect on the interview, I'm not sure what I think.  My emotions ran the gamut both while I was at SLAC and while I traveled back to CU Land last Friday (a massive windstorm on the east coast of the U.S. kept delaying my flight, which meant I didn't get home till about 1:30 am).  Here is about how it all went down.

Wednesday evening: arrive in SLAC town, met at airport by head of department.  She took me to dinner and then to my B&B, which was literally across the street from the school.  She was lovely to talk to.  She was disarmingly honest, and she kept, it seems to me, feeding me answers to questions she seemed to know I would be asked on Thursday.  On more than one occasion she said, "Oh, that's great.  Be sure to say that to X tomorrow" or "I totally understand what you mean, but do not say that to Y tomorrow."  It was strange to say the least.  It was after 10 by the time I got to the B&B, and I was exhausted.  Still I stayed up a bit to do some quick research on the 8 or so people I met with on Thursday.  I didn't sleep that well, as I tend to not sleep well in strange places.

Thursday morning: breakfast on my own at the B&B.  One of the department members met me and escorted me to the college where I met with people in half hour intervals from 8:30 to 11:30.  It was exhausting, but in many ways it was fun.  It was nice to be able to talk about my teaching, to explain what I do, and why I think it is successful.  There is a fairly significant online teaching component to this job as they are a really small school (under 800 students attend classes on the main campus) and are trying to grow their online offerings (about 2,200 students take classes online, so it is a large program).  I have some experience in this and currently utilize online resources a lot in my classes.  I had some ideas that impressed them.  I'm becoming increasingly interested in digital humanities, so this is cool to me.  After my third (or so) meeting I was feeling sort of jazzed.  I was excited.  I was thinking, "Maybe this would be a good place for Archer, me, and the boys."  Then I met with a biology professor who is the outside person on the hiring committee.  He was great, very interested and interesting, and he was the first person to directly answer my questions about tenure requirements.  Up until the point, everyone had carefully skirted the issue (including the Dean of the School of the Arts).  He told me that he secured tenure after 8 years at the college with a stellar teaching record (I looked it up; it is, indeed, stellar) and 2 peer reviewed publications.  I experienced something completely unexpected.  My heart sank a little.  I immediately thought, "Two publications?  Seriously?  That's it?  That is what you produced in 8 years? You're a scientist!  How is that possible?" I'm not sure what i thought I would feel when I learned the tenure requirements, but I didn't expect to be disappointed that one can secure tenure with so few publications.  I began to realize that I would have very little time to do my own work.  I then met with some students, taught a class (that seemed to go well) met with the president of the college (a very, very odd meeting, indeed), and gave a talk, which I'm quite certain that most of the people in the audience didn't understand.  One of the history professors who attended, however, asked some very insightful questions, and I began to think, "Ok, maybe there is something more here."  Then the chair drove me back to my B&B where I relaxed for a while.  Then another committee member took me to dinner and a lovely restaurant with live music.  Both she and the chair were wonderful, and they are both people I could see being friends with as well as people I could see mentoring me a bit.  After dinner, I called Archer and then went to bed.

Friday morning: breakfast on my own.  I had a lovely conversation with the owner of the B&B about the town.  I had some time before the chair came to drive me to the airport, so I walked around on my own.  The town was lovely.  Really.  It is about 25,000 people, and it's primary income is tourism.  They've taken great care to restore the 19th-century buildings.  There is a growing arts and music scene.  I spent some time looking in the window of a real estate office and learned that Archer and I could by a recently renovated Arts and Crafts style house in the downtown with a yard for about $160,000, give or take.  It reminded me a lot of parts of Cambridge, MA.  I began thinking, "Are we small town people?"

Saturday morning: Archer and I talked a lot.  If I got an offer from this school and they were able to offer him a t-t position, would we take it?  I don't know.  In some ways, we'd be giving up a lot.  No grad students, no research money, lots of teaching for a lot less money.  In some ways we'd be gaining a lot.  Closer to family and friends, a small town lifestyle, less stress on us because the demands of the job are less (at least in terms of publication).

Here is where it gets tricky for me.  I could see us living in this place for a long time without a problem.  I don't know if I see either one of us being happy professionally for the long term.  I will admit that I've gotten spoiled first at Southwest University and now at CU.  I haven't taught composition in a long time (one of the things I was cautioned not to say), and while I don't mind teaching it (in fact, I do actually like teaching it) I don't know if I'm ready to go back to teaching basic grammar (yes, many of the students are accepted on a provisional basis and score lower than 450 on the verbal portion of the SAT.  On Wednesday night, the chair told me that she had given a lecture that afternoon on how to correct comma splices and that half of her class didn't know what a comma splice was.).  Since getting the news from CU, I've started to give myself the time to write a bit and to brainstorm ideas for new projects, and I've surprised myself how many ideas I have.  I can't complete most of the projects at this SLAC.  Several of the projects require travel to archives all over the country.  I wouldn't be able to fund that myself, and SLAC doesn't have the money to fund such projects.

So where does that leave us?  It seems very likely we'll stay in CU Land, and for the first time since we moved here, the thought of making this place our home makes me really happy.