New Faculty: A Practical Guide for Academic Beginners

by Christopher J.;Murry John W. Lucas

Successfully launching an academic career in the challenging environment of higher education today is apt to require more explicit preparation than the informal socialization typically afforded in graduate school. As a faculty novice soon discovers, job success requires balancing multiple demands on oneâ s time and energy. New Faculty offers a useful compendium of â survivalâ advice for the faculty newcomer on a variety of tips on classroom teaching, student performance evaluation, detailed advice on grant-writing, student advising, professional service, and publishing. Beginning faculty membersâ and possibly their more experienced colleagues as wellâ will find this lively guidebook both informative and thought-provoking.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academia, Education

273 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Draws a lot on Boice, others, and doesn't always carefully cite what looks a lot like anecdotal supposition. Still, anything that seeks to smooth the way for noobs is appreciated.

[Simon]

Great book. It helped me with some teaching ideas. It also confirmed how awful it would be to be a college professor!

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, but a bit dated, guidebook to navigating the maze that is higher education.

[Michael Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

It can be difficult making the transition from graduate student to college professor, and in nearly all colleges and universities -- unless you’re one of the fortunate few to be adopted by a talented mentor -- you have to do most of it all by yourself, with only the occasional anecdotal assistance from other newbies. Even though all your more senior colleagues made the same journey from chrysalis to butterfly (or moth, in many cases), they quickly forget the tribulations of the process, and so there is little or nothing in the way of meaningful orientation offered at most schools.

I had high hopes for this not-thick volume as a useful manual to assist the newly appointed instructor, and it indeed does the service of bringing a lot of material together in one place, but a reader who has been thinking and reading about the subject for a few years will find nothing original here. All the advice on teaching methods, advising students, why and how to get yourself published, why and how to pursue grant money, and the great and foggy subject of “faculty service” has been cribbed from other (presumably more original) authors.

However, the thing I found particularly off-putting about this book is that all of it is couched in a self-conscious vocabulary and phrasing that almost serves as a model of academic-speak. And that’s not a compliment!

[Ashley Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't quite finish reading this book because it was recalled by the library, and when I was reading it, I read bits and pieces at a time. It has a lot of good information about what it means to be a new faculty member, and the concept I found most helpful in it was that each department has its own culture that a new faculty member must learn to understand and to which one must adapt. Having that explained to me has helped me to realize that in order to achieve my goals in my dept., I need to be strategic about my approach and not assume that doing things the way my grad. school dept. did them will yield the same results in my current job.

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this book were useful. I always feel these types of books need to be updated yearly as the job descriptions and ways of networking that 21st-century faculty engage in are not reflected in these books. Much of what we do as professors is constantly shifting towards digital environments, e.g., teaching online/digitally/multi-modally, networking online, publishing online, etc. I sometimes think reading professor blogs and news articles in the Chronicle yields more insight than books about how to be a professor. There are some good ones, and this book was worth a prolonged skim, which was how I read it.