The second important aspect of collegiality is goodness of fit. How do my skills, areas of expertise, philosophy of teaching and learning, and personality fit into ACU and into my department? And how do ACU’s mission and approach to education suit my values and my life?
By training, my teaching fields are modern British and European history, with secondary specializations in Asian and world history. This allows me to cover a number of courses that have to be taught in History and Global Studies: Civilization II, World History survey, Modern Britain/Empire, History of Asia (now Mongols, Poppies and Satyagraha), Nineteenth-Century Europe, and Recent Europe (Europe in Crisis since 1918). If I did not teach them, many of these courses would not be taught at all, since no one else in our department is trained as a Europeanist. Due to needs within my department, I’ve also cultivated teaching interests in early modern Europe (Renaissance and Reformation) and in ancient and medieval civilizations. Even though I have no graduate training in Civ I, it is actually one of my favorite courses to teach! I have also picked up the Methods and Historiography courses as needed and enjoy both of those classes very much.
Beyond the department, my background in Asian history, philosophy, and religion has come in particularly handy for teaching Core. While many of the 120 and 210 faculty felt quite at sea when asked to talk about Hindu or Confucian theories of human nature and community, I happily felt quite comfortable and was able to do a good job with that material and to share some of my resources with other faculty.
My philosophy of teaching and of the integration of faith and learning are also, I believe, well suited to ACU’s mission to educate students to think critically, globally, and missionally. My own research background in the history of Christian missions, my multiple experiences living, studying, and researching abroad, and my great enjoyment of and interest in college students all help me contribute to the work that we do here.
From my perspective, one of the primary reasons ACU is such a great fit for me and my family is the university’s commitment to respecting “the faculty member’s need to balance professional, spiritual, family, and private life,” (from the faculty handbook section on tenure and promotion). I know from speaking to colleagues at other universities that there are few academic institutions that place such an emphasis on this balance. And of course, ACU is not always perfect in carrying out this commitment, but overall, I have been very impressed and grateful to find that ACU administrators and faculty are very understanding of my family’s needs and schedule and will do all they can to support me and Jeremy in our efforts to care for our child while working as full-time faculty.
In my department in particular, my chairs Dr. Tracy Shilcutt and Dr. Ron Morgan have been endlessly flexible and supportive in carving out maternity leave time with minimum difficulty for myself, scheduling study abroad plans around the growth of our family, and arranging my teaching schedule so that I can be at home with my son while my husband is teaching, and vice versa. In Jeremy’s Department of Language and Literature, Dr. Cole Bennet has done the same. This accommodation and collaboration by our chairs in our two departments has allowed Jeremy and me to set up our teaching schedules so that one parent can always be at home while the other is teaching. I teach mornings; he teaches afternoons, and our chairs make sure that this schedule happens for us every semester! It is such a privilege and a relief to be able to choose to both stay at home with my child and work full time. Effectively, I get to be a history professor and a stay-at-home mom. I cannot imagine that this degree of accommodation and support for two faculty members in different departments would occur at any other institution. And I cannot say how grateful I am to my colleagues and administrators who make this happen for us. Because my journey as new faculty member has coincided with my experience of becoming a mother and learning to parent, this particular aspect of ACU has been probably the single most crucial for me during my first five years here. When people from elsewhere say, “Why would you want to live in Abilene?”, it’s this family support and scheduling flexibility that I tell them about.
I also really appreciate that my values and priorities as a teacher and scholar align, for the most part, with what my colleagues find important. In this, it’s helpful for me to compare ACU’s institutional culture and expectations for faculty to the two other universities I’ve been a part of: Harding University, where I did my undergraduate work, and Florida State University, where I received my graduate training. Harding emphasized teaching at the expense of faculty scholarship. From what I have observed, there are very few opportunities or inducements for faculty there to remain current in their fields, present at conferences, or publish. For me as a student, this meant that I had some excellent teachers and small class sizes, as well as wonderful mentoring relationships. But it also hurt me when it came time to apply to graduate school, because few of my professors had any scholarly connections that could help me, and there was no formal assistance in place at all for students interested in graduate school. I came away feeling that, while a strong commitment teaching is vital to making a good university education, faculty who are no longer engaged in their scholarly communities cannot teach up to their full potential, and certainly are not able to serve students well who want to continue on.
At Florida State, on the other hand, faculty had a significantly reduced teaching load–usually two courses a semester for three semesters, then the fourth semester off for research–but were expected to meet a “book plus one” requirement to receive tenure–that is, one book published by one of a list of approved presses and a second project in the works. Thus I watched my own advisor be denied tenure when he applied for it in his sixth year of teaching because his book, though contracted with a major university press and already in galley proofs, was not actually in his hand when he went before the T and P committee there. This seemed completely unreasonable to me. I genuinely believe that FSU saw my professor as expendable in the existing market; if he left because he was denied tenure, they would just have hired another British historian at the entry level and been able to pay that person an assistant professor’s salary for six more years. So Florida State’s approach to teaching vs. research also seemed wrong.
ACU is not perfect in this area, either, but I do believe ACU strikes a far better balance than either Harding or Florida State. Here, we focus on teaching and serving our students first, but we understand that in order to teach and mentor effectively, and to continue to grow ourselves, we have to stay engaged in our disciplines. I admire that commitment to both teaching and research, and I want to live up to it.
I also deeply value ACU’s mission to integrate faith and learning in a way that promotes academic rigor and intellectual honesty. We teach Jesus here, but I never feel that colleagues or administrators expect me to say anything I don’t really believe, or to pretend that I don’t experience spiritual highs and lows in my own life. I so appreciate the opportunity to teach from faith in a way that is authentic and honest, and I believe that the students perceive the difference between surface-level hallelujahs and thoughtful engagement with ideas and events and writings through the lens of faith. It’s wonderful to be able to work somewhere where I am encouraged to think, and to teach, in this nuanced way.
So, I am very happy to be here and hope to spend many years participating in the unique community of faith and mind that is ACU.
If you haven’t already taken a look at it and would like to, you can navigate to my curriculum vita here, or by clicking the CV link at the top of the page.