Her Campus Logo Her Campus Logo
Culture

13 Kenyon Professors on Why They Chose Academia

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Kenyon chapter.

Lots of choices related to college are stressful–where to go, who to live with, what to major in… College is a breeding ground for stressful decisions. However, there is no choice more stressful than deciding what to do after college–questions about post-grad plans usually send college students running for the hills. Despite this, there are some select individuals who choose to melt the two together in the form of teaching college students. I decided to ask thirteen Kenyon professors why they stuck around (after years and years of schooling) to teach college students: their fascinating responses are below.

 

Carolin Hahnemann, Professor of Classics

“I never chose academia; it just, miraculously, happened. Back in Germany, becoming an academic wasn’t an option at all, partly because they have so few jobs for professors there, and partly because Classics was such a male-dominated field. (At the time, there was not one female professor of Greek in the whole country.) When I graduated from high school, I thought seriously about studying medicine, and just recently, after the earthquake in Nepal, I felt a deep regret at not having become a doctor, which perhaps would have allowed me to go there and be of use. Since then, however, I have come to realize that being a teacher at a liberal arts college fits my talents and personality infinitely better. For one, it not only allows me to interact with many people, but I generally get to know them from their most interesting side. (I am referring here to the exchanges that take place in the classroom and in conversation around campus rather than to the many administrative meetings, which are also part of the job.) While as a teacher, I may hear about a discovery a student made while studying abroad, as a doctor, I would only learn about the nasty intestinal infection someone brought back and now needs treatment for. Also, by nature I have very little patience with people’s tendency to undermine their own health and happiness. But what is a doctor to do, who sees a patient getting worse and worse because she just can’t bring herself to quit smoking or lose weight or whatever? As a college teacher, I have a better chance of getting my students to do what is ultimately to their benefit—with sticks and carrots and a whole arsenal of tricks and strategies and, most importantly, my firm belief in their potential. In short, I am glad to be an academic. I would warn away any student who is considering the same path today, though. With more than half of the workforce slaving away in adjunct positions and tenure-track appointments becoming rarer and rarer, the life of an academic of the kind that I and other faculty members at Kenyon lead, is no longer a feasible goal.”

 

Jesse Matz, Professor of English

“One reason I chose academia was that I hadn’t been well advised in college about other careers in which exciting intellectual engagement was also possible.”

 

Abbie Erler, Professor of Political Science

“For me, the choice of academia wasn’t so clear.  I was extremely shy and quiet in college and graduate school so the thought of actually getting up and speaking in front of other people, let alone trying to teach them anything, terrified me.   When I was in graduate school I thought that I would go into public policy either with a think tank or government agency.  But academia gives me the freedom to study the questions that I think are important and relevant and also removes the pressure of outside funders, donors, politicians, etc., demanding that you find results that promote their side of the issue.  I ultimately made the decision to try and get a job at a place like Kenyon after lecturing in one of my advisor’s classes.  That experience was really formative because we were covering a highly technical formal model of bureaucratic discretion and it was personally so intellectually stimulating and engaging to try to figure out how to make the material understandable (and even fun!) for the students.  And then when they actually understood what I had taught them, that got me thinking that maybe teaching was something that I should do.  I also realized that the best way to understand something yourself is to teach it to others.  So that’s a really long and rambling way to say that academia lets me spend time figuring out answers to questions that I find vitally important and it lets me share that knowledge with others and, if I’m lucky, perhaps helps them understand the world and their place in it a bit better.”

 

Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Professor of English

“Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Money bores me. Not pretty enough for politics.

All joking aside, I went into academia because I love literature and I love teaching. As with a lot of English professors, it was the love of literature that tempted me into graduate school, but I found out there that I also love going into a classroom and talking with students about what excites us about books, and that’s what the job is about on a daily basis. Many people make the mistake of thinking that because they enjoy doing something when they’re young, they’ll enjoy doing it for a living: the classic version of this is to think that because you love reading novels, you’ll love writing them. They don’t realize that writing a novel is the opposite of consuming it as a reader; everything that gives you pleasure as a reader requires excruciating work from the writer. I found out in grad school that the same thing is true about teaching. Good teaching is hard work that the teacher somehow makes look effortless, because making it look and feel like fun is how you trick students into doing the even harder work of learning. In that sense, literature and teaching are mirror images of each other: one done alone, the other in overcrowded rooms, but they’re both about the way that exciting the mind can tempt people into painful acts of self-transcendence. Every day, I get to give someone a chance to become wiser, more thoughtful, and more understanding about the world than they were when they walked into the room. How great a job is that?”

 

Wendy Singer, Professor of History

“I never really ‘chose academia.’  When I was in college at the University of Virginia, there was a very successful South Asia program and I became involved with studying about India.  Particularly, my academic advisor, an historian named Walter Hauser, was committed to the field of social history and believed that by telling the stories of the everyday lives of people in a very different place and time, one could generate a better understanding of the world, of our common humanity.  He studied about peasant movements in India in the 1930s and wrote about how people in villages mobilized against the powerful forces, I.e., their landlords, the British, and fought for social change.  I was inspired by these stories.  There was so much, I thought, we could learn from them.  

So I began digging, too.  And there were lots of steps along the way—learning language, getting grants, carrying out research, finding archives—the detective work of ferreting out sources.  I just kept going and digging and trying to find the stories of women and men, who had overcome great obstacles, even in, what seemed, the mundanity of their everyday lives.  

Of course, I had to have a job and make a living and I did other things too—worked for legal aid and a counseling service and also in retail at a shopping mall and in accounting at a hotel.  But what I wanted to do was to go deeper and deeper into uncovering histories that I felt had to be told.  

So I decided that as long as I had enough income (grants or research assistantship, or scholarships, etc.) I would keep studying this history.  I had amazing experiences in villages in India, in archives, meeting people—both in reality, who told me oral histories of the past, and virtually, in archival sources—whose voices transcended the page.

And I listened and wrote.  I was lucky that I kept getting support and finally a teaching position at Kenyon (I also taught at Sweet Briar College, briefly)  And I found that I really liked teaching, and getting to learn from students and rediscover material—through the fresh eyes of participants in my classes.  I am always excited when students challenge what I thought I knew.  

I try to take advantage of every opportunity to learn more, as well—about India, its diversity, the politics that happens there, about women’s history, and social change–and share what I learn in the classroom, in academic papers, and in the books and articles I publish. And those opportunities have taken me to Cambridge and Exeter, Hong Kong, Leiden, and Paris, as well as to places in India as diverse as Ranti village, Darbhanga town, and Delhi and Chennai.  I guess that’s what academia is—studying something deeply and then sharing that knowledge with various kinds of audiences.  But it wasn’t a choice so much as part of a path—that is ongoing.

I am typing this after a day at the British Library, where I found a rare, maybe unique, pamphlet, written in 1940, about members of the Madras City Council in the early 20th Century.  One of them, Shivshunmugan Pillai, came from a poor family and a community that had experienced great prejudice in society.  And yet he rose to become mayor of Madras.  I had been following his career and read his own words in 2012 in an archive in Chennai, India.  Now here he was in a document that made it all the way to London.  Clearly the British government of India was interested in him too. It was so exciting to ‘meet him’ again in a very different context.”

 

Andy Grace, Professor of English

“I want to work in academia so that I can talk about books and ideas with young people.  Also, I decided at some point that my goal for my working life should be to find a way to get paid to do things I would do for my own enjoyment anyway, like think about how poems, novels, and essays work.”

 

Kora Radella, Professor of Dance

“I am a lucky academic who truly loves teaching. It is a passion that I pour myself into and I am happy to be teaching at Kenyon College for my thirteenth year. Though I have taught movement to children, teenagers, and the elderly, I feel that I am able to make the most impact with college students, matching their development with my ongoing movement research and choreography. After returning from Europe, where I had a fellowship to research choreographers in Brussels and a large grant to create an evening-length work in Basel, Switzerland, I ended up in Fargo, North Dakota where my husband, Assistant Professor of Music at Kenyon, had a sabbatical replacement job. I actually enrolled in a Public Administration and Human Services program to earn what would have been my third advanced degree (Advanced Diploma from School of New Dance Development in Amsterdam, MFA in dance from U of I at Urbana-Champaign). After a year of making straight A’s and continuing my long trajectory working with the elderly, I went back to dance fully and have never stopped since. I taught dance for 4 years at Georgia College and State University as well as two semesters to dance majors at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.  I regret not applying to more tenure-track jobs early on but it is very hard for a couple to both have tenure-track positions at the same college. I continue at Kenyon College because I truly love this particular college. Teaching is a vocation that is heartfelt for me and is supported by the skills that I bring into the studio and to my dedication to teaching the students. I am also fortunate to have wonderful colleagues with whom to have a dialogue about the growth of our students and the work we are doing in the contemporary dance field, both at Kenyon and beyond.”

 

Austin Porter, Professor of Art History and American Studies

“My road to academia started during my undergraduate studies. I struggled my first two years of school and changed my major several times. Around my junior year, I had two professors that were both very inspiring. Those professors encouraged me to not only do well in class but also to visit the library and read more about topics addressed in lecture. I was suddenly incredibly eager to learn as much as I could. I started to think about graduate school but I had no idea how to actually become a professor. So I graduated and went to work. One of my first jobs put me in contact with professors and the museum world. I started asking museum professionals and professors questions about their work in an effort to better plan my own future. Later I worked in a museum, which was great but only made me want to go back to school even more. So I applied to graduate school and was assigned a teaching appointment, which was terrifying as I had never taught before. But I was really motivated and eager to do well. At the same time, I began my own research projects. That was sort of when everything started really clicking: I started inserting my own research into classes. I love working in academia because I remember how inspiring my own professors were, and I try to share my enthusiasm for the material with my students. More generally speaking, however, I also find this work to be both challenging and rewarding. It’s a great mix of research, reading, and teaching, which never really ends and is always changing. But that is what makes it so fascinating and enjoyable.”

 

Benjamin R. Locke, Professor of Music

“I’ve always loved music and was pretty talented, but some little things like maturity and self-discipline—specifically, the lack thereof—did not produce a particularly stellar undergraduate record for me.  But if anything brought me into focus, it was making music and doing it well.  I had no real plan for a career upon leaving college, so I lived at home, found a job working for the Toledo Public Library as a clerk in the Film Service.  I missed making music on a regular basis, so with the help of my immediate family I founded a community chorus and I spent all of my money on choral scores for the group.  This group gained enough notoriety that certain Toledo-area schools began to contact me about the possibility of teaching music.  I had not yet completed all the requirements for my undergraduate degree, so I resigned my position at the library and used the fifth year to complete my bachelor’s as well as to fulfill teaching certification requirements.

I taught one year of junior high and high school music, then taught an additional four years at an inner-city elementary school, an experience that I credit for making me into a much better teacher.  I continued to conduct my community choir, and in one of the later years of my tenure I had the group sponsor a tour concert by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Concert Choir.  The group was directed by Robert Fountain, a man I idolized from my time singing with him as an undergrad at Oberlin.  The concert was very successful.  The music was absolutely thrilling, but we, in turn, made a very positive impression on Mr. Fountain by virtue of the fact that we had over 600 people in the audience.  

At this juncture, I still had no thought of graduate school or college teaching.  I was married to Kay, we both had jobs that were stable and in our respective fields, and my chorale continued to receive accolades in the Toledo Blade, so we were riding high.  But Mr. Fountain sensed a feeling of stagnation and frustration in me of which I unaware.  As we said our goodbyes the next morning on the bus, he started to talk about doing something to help advance my career, had I ever thought about college teaching, etc., etc., and then closing with the remark, ‘You’ll need a doctorate.  And we have a program in Madison.’  With that, he got on the bus and left.  I was in shock.

So, the question of how I came to academia boils down to a traditional scenario, that of a mentor who recognized potential and opportunity beyond what my own experience had allowed me to see or understand.  My debt to Robert Fountain, professionally and personally, is beyond measure.  And I try my best to pay it forward every day.

I chose my passion, but as I said above, academia chose me.”

 

Wendy MacLeod, Professor of Drama

“I’m not sure whether I chose academia or whether it chose me.  When I was finishing up at Yale Drama School, I got a call from a former professor inviting me to come here for a year to teach while she was on sabbatical.   I came and I loved it, returned a few years later and then the job turned into a five-year position and then I was offered an endowed chair.   Prepping for classes is work, but I’m always grateful that I’ve been given such interesting work.  Today I got to re-read the brilliant play DINNER WITH FRIENDS by Donald Margulies.  Tomorrow I will ask my students interesting questions about it. Then I’ll watch a run-through of Sam Shepard’s FOOL FOR LOVE and tomorrow I’ll ask the actors questions about that.  That’s my job.”

 

Balinda Craig-Quijada, Professor of Dance

“My journey to academia was a bit unexpected—more in regards to timing than to thoughts of a different career- because dance and teaching go hand-in-hand. When I finished my M.F.A. I was motivated and eager to continue choreographing and making work. I first came to Kenyon as an adjunct professor, commuting to teach 1 or 2 classes while also teaching and working at O.S.U. The following year, Maggie Patton, founder of Kenyon’s dance program, went on sabbatical, and asked if I would stay to fill in as her sabbatical replacement. I was very nervous to teach full- time and develop classes that I had not yet taught. Nerves mixed with apprehension at delaying my desire to fully invest my energies into choreography, and producing my work. Respected mentors advised me that teaching full-time would be a prudent professional move that would provide opportunities down the line. I moved to Gambier and had a great year teaching, advising and choreographing at Kenyon—fully immersed in the academic community and making friends that I still have today—colleagues and former students alike. After the year, I packed up and moved to Seattle. Fast forward a few years… Needless to say, when Professor Patton retired, I applied for the job at Kenyon and started a tenure-track position in 2000. Teaching at Kenyon is very rewarding and I feel supported as an academic and as an artist. The students are truly wonderful and I feel quite fortunate to be able to devote my time to helping foster growth (my own growth as well as students)—in the classroom, in rehearsals and in long-term, life-long connections with students who I now consider to also be my friends.”

 

Margaret Yoon, Professor of English

“I LOVE LEARNING! And I love sharing what I’ve learned.  But, I also have a strong conviction that a liberal arts education is a great foundation for how one lives in the world.  Rather than seeing education as a way of training one in a particular profession, I definitely feel that an undergraduate education is about training young adults how to question the world, to understand events, and to progress into the future.  I definitely see education, particularly at the college/university level, as more than simply just acquiring knowledge.  More than that, education enables you to train and exercise your brain and be exposed to the world in an environment that allows students to test ideas and grow in very unexpected ways.  In that way, I suppose you can read my decision to become an English professor (rather than a physician, which was what I thought I was going to be!) as a way of saying that arts and culture (the humanities) contribute as much as science and technology, and are just as useful, to any society.  But, having said that, I have to say that I feel particularly fortunate that I have been able to pursue a vocation that enables me to practice what I love rather than just work at a career.”

 

Laurie Finke, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies

“I knew in 9th grade that I wanted to get a PhD and be an academic; I just didn’t know what in.  think I chose to be an academic for two reasons. The first is that I like being in school.  Since I was 5 I have not been in school.  The other was that I believed it was a profession that would allow me enough flexibility to raise children and work full time.  That turned out to be pretty true for me.”

 

Some of life’s questions are more easily answered than others, for students and professors alike. While some professors had a more clear route to academia, they all wound up exactly where they were supposed to be—teaching our favorite classes here at Kenyon. Finally, I would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who took the time to speak to me—your advice and stories are invaluable.

Image credits: Kenyon.edu

Hannah Joan

Kenyon '18

Hannah is one of the Campus Coordinators for Her Campus Kenyon. She is a Buffalo native and plant enthusiast studying English and Women's and Gender Studies as a junior at Kenyon College.