The Daily Princetonian
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Monday april 29, 2013
Practitioners more prevalent in Wilson School, Lewis Center, engineering FACULTY Continued from page 1
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the case of practitioners from New York or Philadelphia, the Wilson School offers to pay for rental car services. In either case, if they teach at night, they can book a hotel room, all on the Wilson School’s tab. In the liberal arts setting of the University, practitioners are in the minority but are more prevalent at departments like the Wilson School, the Lewis Center for the Arts and specific programs like journalism or creative writing, according to several sources interviewed. These instructors defy the standard model of the research-oriented professor. Hiring a practitioner Hiring a practitioner is both similar to and different from hiring a tenure-track professor. On the one hand, a department within the University might reach out to specific practitioners or put an advertisement in news outlets that report on higher education, Dean of the Wilson School Cecilia Rouse said. But in some cases the practitioners themselves might reach out to the departments with a particular idea for a class. Barbara Bodine, a former ambassador to the Republic of Yemen and the “diplomatin-residence” at the Wilson School according to the University directory, said former Dean of the Wilson School Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 called her one day and asked her if she would teach a course on the war in Iraq. On the other hand, JeanChristophe de Swaan, a lecturer in the economics department and a principal at Cornwall Capital, a multistrategy hedge fund based in New York, said he crafted a class and taught it for a semester at Yale University before he “proactively reached out to
the chairman in the Bendheim Center [for Finance]” to teach the same class at Princeton. Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said the hiring of all practitioner professors, just as with all tenure-track professors, is spearheaded by individual departments. In the end, only the finalists for a professorial post must be approved by his office before being appointed. According to Dobkin, a large portion of the practitioner professors are concentrated in the Wilson School, the Lewis Center for the Arts and the engineering school because they are “designed to bring in practitioners.” While on campus, practitioners do not have to do research as part of their contract — their salary is just for teaching in the classroom, Dobkin said. He added that, though the salaries of professors on campus are all over the map, nonacademic professors are paid less than academic professors on average. But P. Adams Sitney, one of four tenured professors in Visual Arts of the Lewis Center for the Arts and a longtime member of the faculty, estimated that practitioner visitors — at least in the arts — get paid more than the permanent faculty. The reason, according to Sitney, is to entice the visitors to come to the University, since their basic expenses will be paid for and they will know that they would not lose any money by taking time off their usual routines to teach. When it comes to finalizing contracts of visiting practitioner professors on campus, many professors do not know how long they will be staying since their contracts are mostly in one-year increments. “We’re very mindful for a full-time appointment that we don’t want to appoint a practitioner full-time for the long term because then they
stop being a practitioner,” Dobkin said. “So we don’t appoint these people to tenuretrack positions because the feeling is that doesn’t make sense.” But the uncertain future for many practitioners makes it difficult to make long-term plans. Ricardo Luna, a former Peruvian ambassador to the United States, United Kingdom and the United Nations and a visiting lecturer in the Wilson School and the Program in Latin American Studies, said it is hard to plan ahead when a practitioner is only at the University for a short time and is never sure whether his or her contract will be renewed for the next year. Luna came to teach last spring and was invited to return this spring, an offer he accepted.
“I can’t teach them history if I’m not actively doing history myself.” Anthony Grafton professor of history “You can’t properly start or finish a research project that you might be interested in,” Luna said. “Had I known that I was going to be invited this spring when I was at the beginning of my teaching experience last spring at Princeton, then I would have been able to organize a research project that I’ve been working on for a couple of years in a different way.” He added that it is difficult to displace family when future plans are unknown. When considering whether or not to bring a practitioner to the University, a department also has to have reason
to believe that the practitioner would be effective in the classroom. “Many people who are fantastic practitioners are not necessarily born to be in the classroom, and we want to make sure that our students really are exposed to and have the best classroom experience,” Rouse said. A complement to academics The large number of practitioners in the Wilson School is a result of that added perspective and experience that practitioners bring to the classroom, Rouse said. She added that the School has found that practitioners work well with the School’s policy task forces, through which students write their junior papers. “We are a policy school, and we recognize that these practitioners may bring insight into policymaking that academic faculty may not have,” Rouse said. “They complement our academics very nicely.” This benefit is not unique to the Wilson School, though. Sitney said students can benefit from the teachings of a practitioner professor in the arts because he or she likely has the experience and success that many students aspire to have. Additionally, practitioner professors can give students in the Lewis Center a sense of what the art world is actually like. According to Sitney, students are “sickeningly supportive” of each other at the University, which strongly contrasts to the art world outside of the University where artists can be quite critical. “It takes one out of the self-congratulatory, mutually supportive zone of highly privileged adolescence,” Sitney said. Professors who have also developed a professional life might also be able to help mentor students in finding possible career opportunities. “I offer myself as a resource to help students think about what they want to do after school,” de Swaan said. “I don’t necessarily try to act as a connector, but I do spend a lot of my time mentoring students both regarding their time at Princeton and how they think about what they might do after Princeton.” Rouse said that having the services of practitioner professors has “particularly been a very fruitful collaboration for us” since practitioners have those connections and
unique real-world experiences. Different perspectives Practitioners bring handson experience to the classroom, but this experience may also be sometimes at odds with what is regularly offered by their tenured counterparts. Amon said he has experienced moments at the University when he has heard a discussion on specific issues for which his perspective has been different because he has done work in the field or he has seen how similar decisions have been made. “It’s not to say that my perspective is the right perspective, but I have a different one mostly because of the experience that I have,” Amon said. Meanwhile, Bodine said her experience with diplomacy adds credibility to her teaching. “Yes, I think [my experience] does make what I’m saying far more credible because I’ve been there and done that,” Bodine said regarding her experience as an ambassador. Not all practitioners think their real-world experience makes the knowledge they share more credible, including Tracy Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and assistant professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts. “At the end of the [poetry workshopping] process, it’s really not democratic,” Smith said. “My opinion is my opinion, and if it’s valuable to you and the production of your poem then it is, but if it isn’t, then it just basically isn’t. I like to believe that, as I’ve been doing this for longer than my students, I have a little bit more access to different models that can be helpful to them and I’ve thought about my values as a writer, but they are values that are subjective.” Ed Zschau ’61, a visiting lecturer and professor in electrical engineering and the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, said he believes that credibility in the classroom does not come from professional experience and that all members of the faculty have similar experience. “When you look at it from the standpoint of the subject matter, there are a lot of people on the faculty that bring to the classroom practical experience about the course material that they’re offering,” Zschau said. “You typically think of them as academics,
but their academic work often is applied and they make a difference in that way.” Anthony Grafton, a professor of history who has been at the University for close to four decades, agreed and said that professors are also practitioners in their own way. “I can’t teach them history if I’m not actively doing history myself,” Grafton said. “History is not like some bunch of disconnected facts. It’s a way of thinking physically, it’s a way of teaching people to look at the evidence and see what the evidence lets you say, what it doesn’t let you say, and if I’m not doing that myself in my work then I have no right to be trying to teach really bright students.” Grafton is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian. Likewise, Sitney said a tenured faculty member in the arts is also a practitioner of “great repute” in the arts. He added that the kind of people who work in the Lewis Center “don’t waste their time getting Ph.D.s,” so all tenured professors are, in essence, practitioners. Campus engagement Practitioners have said that they too benefit from being involved with the University community, be it with students or with colleagues. “It’s not just the contact with the students which is the most stimulating part, but it is also the contact with other professors who are tenured academics who deal with issues and subjects and areas with which I am interested in,” Luna said. “It is the university atmosphere which is also stimulating.” Smith agreed that having so many productive colleagues at the University serves as a “motivating factor” for publishing work. She added that working for a university that allows for a flexible schedule is beneficial for practitioners as well. “Those years when I wasn’t teaching, when I was trying to hold down regular jobs, I didn’t find that I had an adequate sense of time and space and calm within which to produce. Somehow I did, but there was a sense of anxiety,” Smith said. “For many people, the stability of a teaching position, which gives you nine months of working a few days a week and nice long vacations to really focus on projects, really makes a lot of sense.” While on campus, all practitioner professors interviewed said they found that their work with students on campus benefitted their professional work just as much as their other career influences their teaching. “I think of them as almost both full-time jobs, and I balance them because they’re very synergistic,” de Swaan said. “There’s a lot of what I do in the classroom that is relevant to what I do for my fund, and I actually learn a lot from the interaction with my students.” However, holding more than one job also brings inevitable compromises. “As a visiting lecturer, professor, there are limits to how much you can engage, and you’re not quite a part of what all the faculty are doing or part of the department in the same way,” Amon explained.
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