There were, of course, differences between the institutions of higher education where I taught history, communication, and sociology over the years. Two were small colleges. One, SUNY Oneonta, was a small liberal arts college with an increasing emphasis on the practical I can get a job by majoring in things like criminal studies and human services. The other, SUNY Cobleskill, was a small agriculture college and its student body reflected that reality. One had to teach very differently at these two colleges as I learned very quickly despite them being both small SUNY colleges.
Two of the institutions I taught at were universities. One, BYU, was owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. It had an honour code and a notion of in loco parentis right out of the pre WWII years and the 1950s. The other was a second or third level research university that had been turned into a university in the 1960s by Governor Rockefeller and his boys. They wanted to create a university system in New York that rivalled that of California. They never came close.
Still another institution I taught at was a polytechnic, RPI. RPI had a million dollar president and dreams of being MIT or Cal Tech, dreams that could never come to fruition given the marginalisation and small size of their liberal arts programmes and given the poor quality of their facilities (poor library, poor bookstore) compared to those two other institutions it unfortunately measured itself against.
The students at the institutions at which I taught were also somewhat different. BYU and RPI recruited students nationally and had a healthy number of very good students. That said, the best students at BYU, the best students I ever taught during my academic life, had a broader intellectual focus than students at RPI. BYU was a large multiversity with strong programmes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences while RPI was a science institute with weak humanities, arts, and social sciences, and its students were more focused on the sciences. SUNY Albany, SUNY Oneonta, and SUNY Cobleskill were state and regional institutions. Most of SUNY Albany’s, SUNY Oneonta’s, and SUNY Cobleskill’s students hailed from New York state so these higher education institutions were very much a reflection of New York. SUNY Albany, BYU, and RPI had master’s and Ph.D. programmes if on a small scale and of much less elite status than say the University of Chicago, the University of California, Davis, or MIT. None of these three were members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, the universities that produce most of the faculty in America’s research universities. MIT and Cal Tech are members of the AAU and that should tell you something important about the difference between them and SUNY Albany and RPI.
In terms of faculty, I found them much the same at all of these institutions I taught at with the caveat that those at BYU were somewhat different than those at the other schools. The BYU faculty, most of whom were LDS, skewed somewhat politically conservative even in the humanities and social sciences, the areas that skew liberal in most non-religious colleges and universities these days. Additionally, faculty at BYU had to pass their own kind of honour code test to be able to teach at the Y. This is not to say that there were not faculty at the Y who were liberal in politics; there were. Nor is it to say that BYU faculty were unproductive in scholarly terms: they were very productive across the academic board.
As for the workplaces at all the colleges they were not that different from other workplaces that I have worked in apart from the educational credentials of most of the workers in academic workplaces. There were, as there are in other sizeable workplaces, cliques, including political and ideological cliques. Some of the workers got along. Some did not. There were workers who are interested in status and power. There was Machiavellianism. There were workers who were more introverted and there were workers who were more extroverted. There were bureaucratic meetings. There were missives from on high that were suppose to be obeyed. There were occasional parties. There was plastic fantastic collegiality. There were the poorly attended graduate student gatherings to give papers at which some papers that should have been critiqued more extensively were not.
Recently, I have been thinking a bit about my time at RPI where I taught in Science and Technology Studies for five or six years if memory serves. RPI students, as I said, were generally quite good even if they were very focused rather narrowly on the sciences. In my early days at RPI I used to say that the thing that distinguished RPI students from my students at SUNY Albany was that most of my RPI students were familiar with the various iterations of Star Trek while few of my SUNYA students at the time even knew what Star Trek was.
At RPI I taught US History courses, a sociology of religion course, and I stepped in to teach a course on the war in Afghanistan after the faculty member who was supposed to teach it could not. Beyond academics I met with prospective students who were interested in history and took them on a tour of campus. I attended graduation parties. I was asked by the assistant dean to put together a curriculum for history in STS. I kept the two US history classes already on the books and wanted to add a course on the making of the modern world. There were a few grad students in the department but I never met any of them.
As a part-time faculty who was not on campus very often, only a couple of times a week in fact, I really did not get to know the faculty in Science and Technology Studies well. I met the chair, of course, Sharon Anderson-Gold, who was wonderful. It was she who gave me the opportunity to teach at RPI and she who counselled me on my academic career. I met Kate Boyer, a historical and cultural geographer, at the downtown library of SUNY Albany and was surprised to learn that she was the daughter of the noted historian Paul Boyer (author of books on the Salem witch trials and American religious apocalypticism) who I had communicated with about the Waco tragedy. She left for the University of Cardiff while I was still on the faculty. I met one of your typical high flyers, a historian of science who had dreams of holding administrative positions in the department and presumably the college if not beyond. There is, after all, money in those there administrative positions. He is no longer a faculty member in the department. I saw a couple of my colleagues on the bus occasionally and we exchanged little more than pleasantries. I briefly met the Fortun's, two on the rise cultural anthropologists who, I think, studied with hot shot cultural anthropologist Michael Fischer and like him were interested in the intersections between environmental risk and environmental disaster and science and technology studies generally They soon left for the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Irvine. And I met someone, thanks to a colleague at the University at Albany who told me about her, someone who was interested, as was I, in Mormonism.
Given our common interest in Mormonism I invited this faculty member out for lunch at Ali Baba's a wonderful Turkish restaurant near the RPI campus one day. I recall several things about this meeting. When she mentioned that she had looked at my syllabus for my Sociology of Religion class I asked her what she thought. She gave me a backhanded comment saying that it was better than previous iterations from other faculty members in the department.
After our lunch she said she would invite me to lunch or dinner either at her new digs in Massachusetts or at Ali Baba's. She never did. I suspect the reason is a remark I made about ethnocentrism. She rightly noted that Mormons are ethnocentric. I pointed out, just as rightly in response, that so are other cultural and ethnic groups, such as Jews (I think she was Jewish and so was I). Ethnocentrism you see is an inherent aspect of how most humans and most human groups construct identity. In order to become you you have to create a them and the them you often create is profane to you in some way, shape, or form. I guess I was too politically and ideological incorrect for her.
After Sharon Anderson-Gold's death a newly appointed dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and the Social Sciences from the University of Michigan, undoubtedly with visions of even higher status administrative appointments dancing in her head, redid the STS curriculum extensively creating "interdisciplinary" classes of 100 students in the process. I was moved out of my office and stuck in a faculty gathering spot in the basement resulting in fewer students coming to see me. I did teach two more classes in the department but was not offered another history or sociology class under the new regime. Some of the reason for this may have been because I opposed the curricular reforms (which were hardly new, they had been tried before including recently at the University at Albany) of the new dean arguing that before one could benefit from interdisciplinary classes until one had to learn the basics of the core disciplines of the humanities and social sciences such as history. Another reason is probably because I did not want to teach a class to 100 students at the same pay rate I was getting for teaching 40. My time at RPI thus ended without much notice, with little fanfare, and without much of a bang. Such is the life of an adjunct, the lumpen academatariat of the postmodern university.
I have not worked at RPI since. I have not even been on campus. I have no idea if the curriculum has once again been changed by a new dean who too wants to make his or her mark before he or she moves onto something bigger, better, and more remunerative. I did see that the current Science and Technology Studies webpage tries to sell itself to prospective students by saying they have small class sizes. I assume this means that the academic experiment of a new dean who wanted to make her mark with classes of 100 students or more in a college of less than 7000 students at the time has been reversed. That, in my mind, is all for the good.
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