I got interviewed

The Iowa Graduate College Newsletter just came out, and it includes a very short article about my decision to move to the Middle East. I don't know how to link to it (I think it is only in hard copy), so I thought I would do all three of you a huge favor by posting the whole interview that took place for the piece. It is long, but it gets out most of my early thoughts and impressions.

1)      What does it mean to you to land a faculty position in the humanities? I know these jobs are not easy to come by.

Well, I am 33 years old, I have three kids, and I believe that I am well-adjusted and relatively competent. I was going to be done with grad school, which had held me in its thrall for the last several years. There comes a point in a person’s life where he needs to feel like a professional. I had done graduate school under the tutelage of some very wonderful professors and advisors, and I had taught many different college courses and done my own research and so on, and I felt I was ready to be part of a faculty rather than a subordinate in the strange hierarchy of academia. As I was applying for and hearing back from different schools, I was feeling undervalued, as so many of us do. When I received some postdoc offers for pittance, I had to humbly accept that maybe I was not as much a professional as I thought. There were a few full-time jobs that wanted interviews and such but those usually didn’t pan out, or if they did I was being offered too little to support my growing family, and the offer from a school to teach a 4-4 load for a 21,000 dollar salary was the last straw. I decided I was going to accept the job that would treat me as a professional so I could consider myself one too. Throughout the interview process, only three schools, one being American University of Kuwait, treated me like potential faculty rather than someone who could teach their “lowly” writing classes so they didn’t have to, and that was important to me. Of those three schools, American University of Kuwait made the best offer. By the way, I am teaching some writing classes here at AUK, but those courses aren’t treated like they ought to be taught be adjuncts, postdocs, and grad students.  

So, to answer your first question, to me, landing a faculty position meant I was going to be treated with the kind of respect I think we earn by achieving a doctorate and excelling in grad school. That means I am going to treat myself with that kind of respect, which is good for my work ethic, my writing voice, and my teaching persona, among other things. Maybe I was just tired of not being invited to faculty meetings, which has now quickly turned into being tired of going to faculty meetings.

2)      Is there a story behind landing at the American University of Kuwait?

It is true that these jobs are not easy to come by, but if you are willing to go overseas and do some time helping out an international university, your options increase. From what I can tell, the schools here really need solid faculty from the States, and they pay relatively well. So there are some options for landing these if you start to market yourself outside the States.

3)      What are your early impressions of your time in Kuwait academically and socially? Any good stories that the UI folks would enjoy?

There are many good stories, but I don’t want to betray my students or the university, so perhaps I’ll just mention that placing an American-style institution, when it is not an oil business, in a context that is wholly unique from the United States is going to be tricky. Things, like laws, education, and tardiness, work differently here, and you can feel that immediately. A delightful story: everyone calls me Doctor James or Professor James. That is the standard—title and first name. I enjoy it. I feel like I should address everyone in Amish, Brother Jebediah or Brother Ahmed or something. I imagine that wouldn’t go over well here. Another anecdote: the parking lot of the university is filled with incredibly nice cars—Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Prados, and then the “lesser” makes like Mercedes and Lexus. It is amazing. On the second day of classes, I had a student—Abdullah, a wonderful student—who ran in about five minutes late and apologized profusely that he was late. He just crashed his Lexus, he had told me, but could only stay out with the person who ran into him for a few minutes because he had to get to class. I asked him what he was going to do, and he said that he would just buy a new one.

Actually, this story is a bit misleading. This is the only student I have who cared that he was coming in late.

Intellectually, Kuwait is ready, and has been ready, for an influx of great institutions of higher education. Some of the faculty here mention that most of our students (we cater to the wealthy class, as most universities here do, at the moment) are guaranteed good jobs out of college—it is really part of being a Kuwaiti citizen, and some say that this fact makes the students unmotivated and disengaged. I have, however, observed the exact opposite, at least in the humanities classes. I have noticed that because there is not a job market at stake, my students can approach learning for learning’s sake, which is the function of a liberal arts education in the first place.  They don’t have to ask why they are learning what they are learning because they already know it is not going to get them a job—they can just enjoy the process of education. That has made some my classes, particularly the literature classes, very satisfying.

Frankly, the social life here is wholly dependent on a solid expat community. From my limited vantage point, Kuwaitis don’t necessarily integrate much with expats, whether they are South Asian, Australian, British, or American, unless those expats are teachers or nannies or restaurant owners. So it has been crucial to find a good community of expats to start out here. Since we are Mormons, we have had that group to identify with, which has made all the difference. Built-in friends, whether from a church, academic community, work, kids’ school, or apartment building is pretty important. And, of course, our family has each other.

4)      What have you learned about yourself and the world from your time in the Middle East?

Don’t know that I have learned a whole lot about myself yet. I am just trying to hold on. I like Shawrma. I guess I learned that. Oh, and just because Mountain Dew is good in the States doesn’t mean it is good in the Middle East. Learned that, too.

5)      Explain the significance of receiving the Ballard Seashore Fellowship?

Winning the Ballard Seashore Fellowship was important, but I never thought about it as something I “won.” I thought about it as something that the graduate college gave me in order to make me finish my diss. So I finished. But even that wasn’t what I really used it for. The thing is, I love to teach and I would have been happy teaching my last semesters at Iowa, but I had never had a year in which I didn’t teach and I wanted to see how much work I could get done if I didn’t have to teach. Turns out that the job market took up most of that working time. With all due respect to those who bear the name Ballard and Seashore, the fellowship should be called the “Focus on the job market” fellowship, because that is what I did. And of course, writing my diss became a reprieve of sorts. So, to sum up, “winning” the Ballard Seashore was like winning the right to work 20 hours a week on job applications and materials, and 20 hours a week on writing and researching. And the rest of the time on actually raising my kids.

6)      How did you learn from being an Obermann Fellow?

Being an Obermann Fellow, and actually following up by teaching one of my courses based on a service learning plan I created during the fellowship actually opened the most doors for me than other aspect of my CV. Perhaps that suggests that I wasn’t as strong in other areas, like research, but I have had to convince myself that it is because the service learning is the thing that sets me apart and that many universities are looking for. I am still a bit skeptical about the idea of service learning and civic engagement, but just the fact that I am aware of that aspect of teaching and that I am willing to try it out was important to four of my interviews. I got asked more about the class I taught in conjunction with the Iowa Children’s Museum more than any other course or even research project I had. That all came from the execution of ideas from the Obermann Fellowship. When American University of Kuwait did their initial interview, they asked a lot about how I could implement something like that in Kuwait.

7)      How did being a TA prepare you for your current faculty position?

As for being a TA, it is currently all we’ve got as job candidates in the humanities. We need to face some facts: for the most part, we are not going to get the premier R1 jobs out of Iowa, we just aren’t, at least initially. We are better candidates at smaller teaching schools. The faculty, by and large, has not really understood that this is the case, and it has been the case for a few years. Being a TA (really a full teacher—the title of TA does everyone a disservice who organizes, prepares, and teaches their classes. The title works as a classification of employee—and salary—rather than a description of what we actually do) is, for most of us, our biggest strength to these teaching schools. That’s just the way it is for almost all of us. For me, being a TA meant that I could arrive in Kuwait one week before classes start, have no idea what I am teaching or what my books were, and start teaching with a full syllabus, plan, text, and confidence. That, to me, is the most amazing part of University of Iowa’s training, and the faculty and administration don’t realize that, I think.

8)      In 1-2 paragraphs, describe your dissertation and its importance to the general public? 

My dissertation’s importance to the general public. It is self-explanatory once I give the title. Isn’t that the case with everyone’s? No, not really. My dissertation examines the expression of religious joy in Renaissance England, and in so doing it tells the story of how the act of rejoicing through hymns, psalms, poetry, and private spiritual writing formed a new kind of expression, one that combined the ineffable sense of the sacred with a controlled loyalty to the state church. In essence, I try to show most of the unique literary expressions of joy that came from the growth of Protestant poetics. Doesn’t that sound like it affects the general public? Actually, focusing on joy in a dissertation is a relatively radical thing to do, and the dissertation itself offers a method for finding authentic joy in religious discourse, a practice that is often overlooked in academia and in religious communities as well. Looking for joy is always good—we don’t have to be surprised by joy to find it, we just have to be generous enough to allow it to appear, to allow it to be authentic. My sense is that expressions of rejoicing in Renaissance England teach us where joy is to be found, and I try to get that across.