Insider Perspectives by Turning Points

GATEWAY STUDY OF

LEADERSHIP

TURNING

POINTS

SCHOOL OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Insider Perspectives

Turning Points The Turning Points book series is a product of the School of Social Sciences’ Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) at Rice University. Each year GSL Fellows conduct interviews with faculty from a different school and feature select excerpts in five areas. The books in Seres IV (2014-2015) are dedicated to the Rice University School of Humanities and are grouped as follows: Choosing Academia Insider Perspectives Teaching & Research Maintaining Inspiration Future of the Humanities Previous Turning Points series: Series I (2011-12)– Rice University School of Social Sciences Series II (2012-2013)– Rice University School of Natural Sciences Series III (2013-2014) - Rice University School of Engineering Copyright 2015 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu.

Rice University School of Social Sciences

Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS

{series IV | 2014 - 2015} Humanities

Insider Perspectives

Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.

GATEWAY DIRECTOR

Ipek Martinez GATEWAY ADMINISTRATOR

Alex Wyatt TURNING POINTS DIRECTOR

Mary Charlotte Carroll EDITORS

Amber Lo, Matthew McGee, Sevita Rama COPY EDITOR

Emma Hurt COVER DESIGNER

Cindy Thaung

GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP CO-DIRECTORS

Nitin Agrawal, Cathy Hu, Tanya Rajan GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP SENIOR FELLOWS

Mary Charlotte Carroll, Sai Chilikapati, Giray Ozseker, Andrew Ta GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP FELLOWS

Thomas Bennett, Adam Cleland, Hanna Downing, Bradley Hamilton, Aaron Huang, Elisabeth Kalomeris, Amber Lo, Matthew McGee, Neeti Mehta, Kevin Pang, Sevita Rama, Rebecca Satterfield, Tejaswi Veerati, Bridget Youngs

REFLECTIONS ON: INSIDER PERSPECTIVES Ask anyone to describe academia, and you are likely to hear the echoing phrase “ivory tower” alongside an image of colossal bookshelves, ivy-covered walls, and a tendency towards Harris Tweed. For students whose contact with their professors outside of class extends only to brief questions during office hours, this image may not be far off the mark. This year, the Gateway Study of Leadership interview team, composed of 21 students across different disciplines, met with more than 50 faculty from the Rice University School of Humanities to delve deeper into the true workings of academia and get insider perspectives from professors themselves. Highlights from these sessions are printed in the Turning Points series—now in its fourth year of publication—which showcases themes that professors tended to gravitate towards. In this book, professors give readers a precious glimpse into their own experiences in academia, from finding motivation through students and colleagues to the incredible pressure, anxiety, and reward that comes from dedicating one’s life to teaching and research. - Mary Charlotte Carroll, Turning Points Director

CONTENTS

Alexander Byrd, Ph.D. Fully-Baked Ideas

2. Fay Yarbrough, Ph.D. 3 Secrets to Success 3.

José Aranda, Jr., Ph.D. Learning in the Moment

Meng Yeh, Ph.D. Beyond the Weather & Food

Meng Yeh, Ph.D. Teaching is Learning

Suzana Bloem, B.A. Creating Constantly

Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. You Can’t Stop Living

8. 9. 10.

Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. Enable Decision Making

Claire Fanger, Ph.D. The Thrill of Discovery

George Sher, Ph.D. Funneled Into It

11.

Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. Taking Things Personally

12. Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. 23 Is that Creativity? 13.

Deborah Harter, Ph.D. The Non-Scholarly Audience

14.

Uwe Steiner, Ph.D. Academic Business Card

About the Contributors 29 Acknowledgements 33

TURNING POINTS ONE

Fully-Baked Ideas Alexander Byrd, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History, Rice University

I like being criticized, and I like engaging in criticism that makes something better. I enjoy the rough and tumble of people saying, “That doesn’t make any sense,” “That’s silly,” “That’s stupid,” “You’re not being clear,” “You should do it this way.” I like that part of the work. I’ve tried to be criticized and get as much criticism as necessary—well, as much as possible. The best part, I think, about being a professor, is having friends who take your ideas so seriously that they’re not willing to let you carry on with half-baked ideas. Like they won’t eat your food and say, “Mmm, this is so good.” They’ll eat it and say, “This ain’t done; this ain’t close to done!”

TURNING POINTS TWO

Secrets to Success Fay Yarbrough, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History, Rice University

One of the things that I say to people when they talk about going to graduate school is that for something like history, because it is so solitary in a lot of ways, you have to want to do it because you want to do it. I think the biggest factor in terms of people finishing the Ph.D., and I would guess that this is true in a lot of disciplines, is not just being the smartest, or having the most interesting idea, it’s deciding you’re going to do it. You need a level of perseverance and some self-discipline. If you don’t provide yourself structure you can just flounder away a lot of days not getting anything done. One of the things that I say to the graduate students is that you have to find a topic that you are really interested in, because that’s going to have to motivate you for a really long time. I think in terms of finishing graduate school myself, it 3

was that I just love history; I love all kinds of history. What I initially went to graduate school for was to write about African American women during the Civil War. There’s not a lot of literature about that. Eventually I will return to that first topic. As I’ve said, it’s that you have to find something that you are really interested in that’s really going to motivate you to want to know more and to actually do the work. You also need to have the kind of personality to ensure you’re going to do it.

TURNING POINTS THREE

Learning in the Moment JosĂŠ Aranda, Jr., Ph.D. Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Rice University

I like the idea of a classroom. I like the fact that the classroom is something you can make anything out of with the participation of students. I often will tell students that the most important thing about the course is the classroom. Classroom participation is key to whatever we discover along the way. I think of it as a kind of an elegant, Socratic method of asking questions and students answering or being asked more questions. The classroom is a magical space where things happen that I think will happen but then the unexpected happens. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really just the act of learning in the moment that makes a course, not studying alone in your room, not through a paper, but together.

TURNING POINTS FOUR

Beyond the Weather & Food Meng Yeh, Ph.D. Senior Lecturer, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University

The Center for Languages is trying to make language learning about articulating not just the weather or ordering food. We want the language to prepare students for critical thinking. In a 101 classroom they can only say a few words, a few sentences, so how do they practice critical thinking, right? But we think we should and can do that from the outset. We should also bring the student to look at the language itself, which goes back to the linguistic field that I have been in for a long time. For example, when I teach Chinese, I teach how Chinese works, how the language works in a 101 class. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do the dialogue from the textbook, because the dialogue from the textbook is very rigid, and usually itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not how people talk. A says something and B says something and A says 7

something and B says something. People do not talk that way; people respond to each other. We want at first to do a lot of this natural spoken language, this authentic material, and even for 101 students, you can start very simple conversations. For example, you can compare the natural conversation with the textbook to see what they hear and find the differences. When they are doing this thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s already helping to develop critical thinking and analytical skills. The whole Center wants to really build studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; intercultural communication competence, and that competence is not just about food and weather. First we want to use authentic material, and second we want the language classes to have the components of critical thinking that will help studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; analytical skills.

TURNING POINTS FIVE

Teaching is Learning Meng Yeh, Ph.D. Senior Lecturer, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University

We should all keep learning. I think that a lot of people, not just teachers, stop learning. When you stop learning then you don’t ask questions. When you don’t have questions you don’t grow. You think, “Oh I know everything!” and become very complacent. If you don’t grow but the society grows, then you are behind. To be very good in your field I think that you should be humble and keep learning. Pause for a while, take a look to see what others are really saying, and then say this doesn’t work. Don’t be too arrogant. Actually, there is a saying in Chinese that teaching and learning grow together. While you’re teaching you’re also learning something. And when you learn something you can learn from teaching. They are hand in hand and go together.

TURNING POINTS SIX

Creating Constantly Suzana Bloem, B.A. Senior Lecturer, Center for Lanuages and Intercultural Communication, Rice University

I have taught using the same book for fifteen years, but I have never taught the class the same way. Why? Because the landscape changes, the scenery changes. The scenery is the students. So, this year I have these faces with these personalities. Next year, none of them are there. Sometimes you have something like my Spanish group. I always prayed that people would look in to see what was happening, because if you heard it from the outside you would think, “They have a party everyday here?!” We laughed, and we laughed loud, and I was always reining them in because if you let go of the ropes you can lose the class. Sometimes you get a quiet group of people, and the book is the same, the syllabus may look exactly the same with different dates, but you don’t do the same 11

thing. Some groups love to sing, some groups do not open their mouth. You have to be creative. You can’t look at the class the same way when the class is not the same. Each group of people commands what you do in there. My God, if you don’t create constantly, you’re a dead body, and you’ll kill the class.

TURNING POINTS SEVEN

You Can’t Stop Living Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. Samuel G. McCann Professor of History, Rice University

I suspect it’s the same in every discipline, but in history you go through several years of just reading. You’re by yourself. So, when I have graduate students, and it’s clear they can’t sit down and read and be by themselves I say, “Hey, look, even if you love this stuff, you’re going to go crazy!” How do you do it? One, you focus on limited goals —what are you going to get done in this week— and you make sure that those are doable goals, because if you don’t feel like you’re getting anything done, eventually you’ll quit doing it. Second, you always keep an eye on the bigger goal, the larger goal, which for me was not necessarily getting a job. I think when people are writing history to get a job, or doing any discipline because they want to get a job, they are not going to have good luck on the market. Your bigger goal is to complete a project and think a problem 13

through. Mediating between these will help you survive the next week and not go down into graduate student depression while remembering to keep your eye on the main aim so you’re not off on some weird tangent. It’s really hard to put those two together. That involves constant management, and also you can’t stop living the stuff. Some days, if you get two hours of good work done, it’s good. Some days, it’ll be 12 hours, but you have to give yourself leeway. If it’s not working, do something else and don’t feel guilty, but every week something has to be done. There’s a lot of self-discipline that occurs in academia as opposed to other kinds of jobs. That’s why we have a tenure system, for example. The idea is people will have internalized this discipline. Not everyone does, but I think by and large, most do. They have internalized the discipline, and they think they need to be doing something all the time and understand how to balance these short-term and long-term goals without being monitored.

TURNING POINTS EIGHT

Enable Decision Making Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. Samuel G. McCann Professor of History, Rice University

I don’t think official leaders are necessarily the ones who take the lead. They’re often following even though they think they’re leading. To take the lead in academia or in the classroom means not to tell people where to go but to figure out how to pose the right questions and push the students to see for themselves why it matters. A leader—as we say in German, the führer—doesn’t necessarily make a decision but enables decisions. I think that’s key in my field. If we had a figure in German history trying to tell people what to do, that person would be laughed out of the room.

TURNING POINTS NINE

The Thrill of Discovery Claire Fanger, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Religion, Rice University

What drives me forward is just simply the thrill of discovering things, of finding stuff out. I suppose we all have, or at least those of us that wind up going to graduate school and wind up in an academic career, we have some enduring sense of intellectual quest. So, it’s more than just love; it’s really wanting to know stuff that I don’t know yet, wanting to know stuff that’s generally unknown, wanting to put it together, wanting to be, I suppose you could say, a broker for a certain type of information and knowledge, wanting to pass on what excites me, among other things. Also it’s the pioneering lore of that uncharted territory, really. When you’re in an archive that has Medieval materials, you’re in a place where you could easily call up a book that hasn’t been read in hundreds of years. I describe it in my forthcoming book as being at the edge of the knowledge world, because you’re in a place where 17

youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got access to a whole bunch of information (if you have the right language skills) that no one else knows. You may be the person to put something together for the very first time that will tell us things about our history that we actually donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know at all. So, that part of it is really exciting to me. I love working in archives. I love opening those dusty old parchment books and looking at those pages with words that maybe nobodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really read.

TURNING POINTS TEN

Funneled Into It George Sher, Ph.D. Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Philosophy, Rice University

What I learned in high school was that there’s the sciences, and there’s literature, and there’s a few other things. But it wasn’t until I got to college that I saw the range of things that one could do. That was my first exposure to philosophy, and there wasn’t any great epiphany; it’s just that I liked it, turned out to be good at it, and just kind of got funneled towards it. If you want to go into philosophy there’s a series of steps. First, you’re an undergraduate, and you say, this is neat, maybe I’ll do it in graduate school or at least see whether that’s what I want to do. And next you get accepted to a decent graduate school. You go there, and it turns out you can do it and you get the right sort of feedback. Then you’re a few years in and realize you’ve been funneled into it.

You could I suppose claw your way out if it’s really not working or if you don’t have success, but once you step into the graduate program you are preprofessional because that’s what philosophers do, that’s the way to make a living in this. And of course, it gets more interesting and more fun. First you read these things and you don’t know what to make of them, and then all of a sudden you’ve got this background of knowledge and so it all starts to make sense, then you learn more things and that’s just really fun.

TURNING POINTS ELEVEN

Taking Things Personally Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Rice University

I produced a book of photographs on high school football as a kind of a social ritual in Texas back in the early 1980s. The book had very good reviews, but someone here — not one of the photography critics, but rather a local priest said to someone else in my presence, “Who’s going to photograph your wedding?” She gave the name and he said, “Well, it’s a good thing it’s not him,” pointing at me, “because he’d make you look as silly as he made those high school football players look.” That was very hurtful. I didn’t know I made them look silly. I thought it looked very interesting and yeah, there’s some fun in his remarks, but it was this feeling that if they’re critical of your work, they’re critical of you. And this is true of the arts in general.

It’s not like I sell insurance. If I sell insurance and I have a bad year, I just had a bad year: I didn’t sell enough insurance. But, whether you’re a painter or a photographer or a writer, the art comes from you, it is an expression of you, and it’s very deeply personal. So if somebody is critical of it, particularly in a personal way, they’re being critical of you, not just your work. When he said, “You make those people look silly,” he was saying I’m someone who is morally unconcerned with how I make people look - it’s hurtful.

TURNING POINTS TWELVE

Is that Creativity? Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Rice University

Creativity takes so many different forms. I will say this: I’ve never really thought of myself as a creative person, in the sense of having some big imagination and ability to manipulate materials and innovate routinely. What a lot of people think of as creative work, be it a beautifully produced exhibition of photographs or a very interesting book of photographs or a great motion picture, I’m convinced more often than not comes from someone’s passionate engagement with the subject or the theme of the work. If you really find a subject or an idea to be deeply fascinating and engaging, and you have the energy and the determination to stay with it and the curiosity to play with it, the result will be interesting and compelling. Now, where did the creativity 23

come in? I swear I don’t know, exactly. What I do know is the main thing I have to do with anything, in any subject I’m engaged with, is to allow lots of time to play with it. I have to not give up when I get frustrated with some aspect of it, I just have to keep working it. If you keep working it, it will work. A perfect example is editing photographs. A huge part of what some people would say is creativity in photography is how you select from what you do. If I go out and I photograph in a given week, I come back with hundreds of pictures. Editing ten of them, in my experience, can’t be done immediately. It can only be done over a period of time. Consideration, re-consideration, and giving the pictures time to the point where they feel like they edit themselves is necessary — you can’t rush it. Now is that creativity? I don’t know. But I know that’s a huge part of doing interesting, unique, engaging work in photography.

TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN

The Non-Scholarly Audience Deborah Harter, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Classical and European Studies, Rice University

The classroom is the place where students enter and read a great poem by Baudelaire or Hugo and come away not just having understood the extraordinary fact that those two writers thought and wrote, but also leave better able to read any text in the world. Part of what I teach is simply the love of paying attention to the words on the page and finding two’s and putting them together. What I always hope is to produce students who come away loving literature, loving to read. They will be able to go the movies and see all kinds of exciting things in the films that the person next to them hasn’t noticed. Or do online dating and read someone’s profile with much greater subtlety than someone else! It’s a shame that academia has the tendency to speak too much to the scholarly audience, because we have a lot to say to the non-scholarly audience as well. 25

TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN

Academic Business Card Uwe Steiner, Ph.D. Professor of German Studies, Rice University

If you have published something, this is like your business card, and people are aware of what you are doing. It’s like the German poet, Goethe, who wrote a book which was a bestseller in the eighteenth century,

The Sufferings of Young Werther. Everything he did was always measured up against this first success. They said, “Well, this is a nice novel he wrote there, but it’s not like the first one.” He couldn’t escape this reputation, and on a very small scale this is the same with your own publications. You are the guy who published a book on a certain topic, and that’s what your colleagues in the profession remember you by.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS José F. Aranda, Jr., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of English and an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rice University. His research areas and specialties include the study of nineteenth century/contemporary Chino literature and early American literature. Dr. Aranda received his B.A. from Yale University in 1984, his M.A. from Brown University in 1988, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1995. Suzana Bloem is a sixteenth-year Portuguese Lecturer in the Center for Language and Intercultural Communication at Rice University. She is originally from São Paulo and loves teaching her high-caliber students. She has a degree in English and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from Pontificia Universidade Católica in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. Alexander Byrd, Ph.D. has taught at Rice University since 1998, specializing in Afro America with a focus on black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. More recently, he has examined the process of school desegregation and neighborhood change in the urban South. He earned his B.A. from Rice University in 1990, later receiving his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2001. He is currently Wiess College Master. Peter Caldwell, Ph.D. is the Samuel G. McCann Professor of History at Rice University. His work has focused on the meanings of democracy and constitutionalism in Germany’s first republic, conservatism and state theory, legal theory and the welfare state, and the economics and law of planning under state socialism. He is presently working on a project linking the development of political thought and culture in West Germany to the real and perceived crises of the welfare state. Dr. Caldwell

received his B.A. from New York University in 1987, his M.A from Cornell University in 1990, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1993. Claire Fanger, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Rice University. Her research is focused on the understandings and practices of Latin Christianity in the later Middle Ages. This includes the intellectual history of magic, medieval cosmology and epistemology, dreams and visions, occult traditions early and late, and representations of human models of access to the divine. Dr. Fanger received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1994. Deborah Harter, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and European Studies in the School of Humanities at Rice University. Dr. Harter received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1973, her M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. George Sher, Ph.D. received his undergraduate degree from Brandeis University in 1964, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972. His research interests are moral psychology, political philosophy, and connections between the two. Uwe Steiner, Ph.D. is the Chair of the Department of German Studies at Rice University. Trained in the German university system, his teaching encompasses German literature and culture from the seventeenth century to the present. He was an Assistant Professor at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, a Fellow at the Research Center European Enlightenment in Potsdam, Germany, a Visiting Scholar at the Zentrum f端r Literaturund Kulturforschung, Berlin, Germany, and he held two Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professorships in the United States. He has published extensively on eighteenth- and twentieth-century German and European Literature.

Geoffrey Winningham, M.S. earned his undergraduate degree in English from Rice and his graduate degree in photography from the Institute of Design at Illinois Insttiute of Technology. He has taught photography at Rice since 1969. Mr. Winningham is best known for his seven books and three documentary films relating to Texas and Mexican culture. His photographs have been widely exhibited and collected by major museums throughout the U.S. and Mexico. His work in photography and filmmaking supported by numerous fellowships and awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and 5 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Fay Yarbrough, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at Rice University. Her areas of interest are African American History, American Indian History, and Southern History. Her current research project focuses on the role of Choctaw Indians in the American Civil War. Dr. Yarbrough received her M.A. from Emory University in 2000 and her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2003. Meng Yeh, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer of Chinese at Rice University. Her areas of interest are language acquisition, theoretical linguistics, as well as language pedagogy. She has worked on improving Chinese curriculum and programs in schools and universities. She received her B.A. from Tamkang University in Taiwan and her M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. In 1993, Dr. Meng Yeh received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Rice University School of Humanities faculty and Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway for making this project possible by sharing career experiences and opinions with the Gateway Study of Leadership fellows through one-on-one interviews. Much appreciation goes to Dean of Social Sciences Lyn Ragsdale for her ongoing support and encouragement, and Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan for his counsel and guidance this year. Our heartfelt gratitude to the Gateway Associates and supporters of the Gateway programs for making projects like this possible. Many thanks also to the 2014-15 Turning Points team, as well as to current and past Gateway Study of Leadership directors and fellows for their tremendous amount of time and effort to move this project forward with enthusiasm, care and excellence to a new level each year.

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