Is working in a traditional department preferable?

[hazeus]

Say working in English, rather than East Asian Studies or Women's Studies? I'm not on the tenure track yet but I'd imagine the latter have more issues with funding, institutional support, student enrollment, school/departmental politics, overall being taken seriously by faculty from core departments?

This is of course case specific but I'm interested in people's experiences in this matter

[Hibush]

Say working in English, rather than East Asian Studies or Women's Studies? I'm not on the tenure track yet but I'd imagine the latter have more issues with funding, institutional support, student enrollment, school/departmental politics, overall being taken seriously by faculty from core departments?

This is of course case specific but I'm interested in people's experiences in this matter

To have access to good resources through the respect that your department gets, it is better to be in a strong department than a weak one. Which departments are stronger depends so much on chance during recent decades that it is hard to generalize. If a department is consistently hiring new faculty in what appear to be strategic areas, then they are likely to be strong in other regards as well.

If you want to join a strong department (guessing at your motive here), the best bet is to be the kind of scholar that those strong departments are hiring in strategic areas.

There is an opinion column in yesterday's CHE where a new English professor finds that even in a faculty position she has to be broader than her subspecialty. She is even asked to stretch beyond her specialty ('Modernism") and that expectation appears to come as something of a surprise. That seems like a case of someone expecting to have a very narrow "department" within a general department. But that situation probably only occurs at the biggest research schools.

To use the English example but extrapolating from my field: A strong department at a more typical school would want to hire someone who would be comfortable discussing how the literature of their specialty era relates to that or other eras, and how the themes and techniques of those areas are applied in contemporary composition (as expressed in student essays or their reddit posts). That kind of flexibility and continuous learning even among the super specialized researchers marks many strong departments.

[ergative]

Preferable in what way? Certainly in terms of (internal sources of) funding, institutional support, and student enrollment a large traditional department may well have an advantage. But above a minimum level of sufficiency, increasing those benefits may be much less important that culture and collegiality, and I suspect that a small, specialized department will have a better chance of forming something really good than a larger, more generic one. Of course, a smaller, specialized department also is more susceptible to falling into toxic rancor. Small groups are much more susceptible to extreme values than large groups*. But for that same reason, in a small department problematic things can change around with much less inertia than a large one. My department is not tiny but not huge (about 15 faculty), and I think

In my head, the distribution of department goodness is something like a t-distribution. The larger and more traditional a department is, the less likely it is to be either awesome or terrible. But the smaller and quirkier a department is, the fatter the tails of the distribution: could be awesome, could be horrible.

*In a stats class, the professor illustrated this by showing us rates of colon cancer by county throughout the US. At first we saw the highest rates on a heat map, and observed that they were in rural, low-population areas. We started discussing possible reasons--less access to health care, lower income, worse insurance coverage, etc.---and then she smirked and showed us the lowest rates on a heat map, and the distribution was identical. Lower-population counties can have eight times the national average rates of colon cancer with just a handful of unlucky people, and they can have one eight the rate with just an extra handful of lucky people, because the small population makes it easy for trivial changes in absolute numbers to shift around per capita rates a ton.

[marshwiggle]

Say working in English, rather than East Asian Studies or Women's Studies? I'm not on the tenure track yet but I'd imagine the latter have more issues with funding, institutional support, student enrollment, school/departmental politics, overall being taken seriously by faculty from core departments?

This is of course case specific but I'm interested in people's experiences in this matter

The enrollment issues are what I'd worry about the most. The more"trendy" an area is, the more likely it is that in  a decade it may be out of fashion and have to shut down.

[Caracal]

Say working in English, rather than East Asian Studies or Women's Studies? I'm not on the tenure track yet but I'd imagine the latter have more issues with funding, institutional support, student enrollment, school/departmental politics, overall being taken seriously by faculty from core departments?

This is of course case specific but I'm interested in people's experiences in this matter

The enrollment issues are what I'd worry about the most. The more"trendy" an area is, the more likely it is that in  a decade it may be out of fashion and have to shut down.

I wouldn't describe women's studies as some recent trendy thing. Other sorts of geographic area studies have a pretty long history. Speaking only from observation, the things you may want to pay attention to are the size of the department and how many core, as opposed to associated faculty there are.

[Stockmann]

A bigger department is forced by sheer size to be more professional than a small one, where personal relationships and cliques are more likely to dominate - and can thus turn toxic pretty bad pretty fast. Also, I'd be very wary of a small department that isn't new-ish - it hasn't grown for a reason, whether that's lack of institutional support, inability to get much traction with students, or infighting. I very strongly advice anyone considering a small department to look into why it hasn't grown, and the older it is, the more of a red flag that is.

[Caracal]

A bigger department is forced by sheer size to be more professional than a small one, where personal relationships and cliques are more likely to dominate - and can thus turn toxic pretty bad pretty fast. Also, I'd be very wary of a small department that isn't new-ish - it hasn't grown for a reason, whether that's lack of institutional support, inability to get much traction with students, or infighting. I very strongly advice anyone considering a small department to look into why it hasn't grown, and the older it is, the more of a red flag that is.

I man it sort of depends on the size of the school no? If you're a SLAC, you're going to have lots of departments with only four faculty members.

[LibbyG]

In my regional public, I see people moving from traditional departments (say Geography) into an interdisciplinary one (say Environmental Studies) when they've been around a while, taught a few cross-listed courses, maybe chaired a department or directed a program. But I've never seen the reverse; such as an historian in an area studies department moving into the history department.

So that may be a point in favor of targeting disciplinary departments in the job search.

[polly_mer]

A bigger department is forced by sheer size to be more professional than a small one, where personal relationships and cliques are more likely to dominate - and can thus turn toxic pretty bad pretty fast. Also, I'd be very wary of a small department that isn't new-ish - it hasn't grown for a reason, whether that's lack of institutional support, inability to get much traction with students, or infighting. I very strongly advice anyone considering a small department to look into why it hasn't grown, and the older it is, the more of a red flag that is.

I man it sort of depends on the size of the school no? If you're a SLAC, you're going to have lots of departments with only four faculty members.

Those schools with lots of departments with only four faculty members are the schools at the highest risk of closing in the near future.  As Stockmann wrote, it's a red flag that the departments haven't grown.  One Department of Humanities and Something Else (or catchy title like Center for Humanistic Inquiry) with twenty full-time faculty, a few visitors, and a couple adjuncts is probably in much better shape at a small college than a smattering of humanities and whatever else departments each with 2-5 faculty members.

If nothing else, the bureaucratic overhead inefficiencies in having all those tiny departments instead of one to three larger groups is not a positive in terms of a well-run institution.

When the school only has 40 full-time faculty, it's stupid to have 9-11 separate departments each with their own chair.

[spork]

^ I'm seeing this play out right now with a potential search to replace a retiree. Four-person Department A wants to replace the retiree with someone who teaches the retiree's courses, when those courses could be taught by people in four-person Department B, which has even fewer majors than Department A. Meanwhile Department A really needs a person who can teach courses not taught by any of the other full-time personnel.

A job is a job if you're a doctoral student, but if you have any choice in the matter, stay away from small-enrollment institutions with endowments under a billion dollars.

[Hibush]

^ I'm seeing this play out right now with a potential search to replace a retiree. Four-person Department A wants to replace the retiree with someone who teaches the retiree's courses, when those courses could be taught by people in four-person Department B, which has even fewer majors than Department A. Meanwhile Department A really needs a person who can teach courses not taught by any of the other full-time personnel.

A job is a job if you're a doctoral student, but if you have any choice in the matter, stay away from small-enrollment institutions with endowments under a billion dollars.

In my context, a four-person department either started from nothing within a year, or will be gone within a year.  (Most new departments result from reorganization, so they would have 15 to 25 faculty at the outset).

[polly_mer]

^ I'm seeing this play out right now with a potential search to replace a retiree. Four-person Department A wants to replace the retiree with someone who teaches the retiree's courses, when those courses could be taught by people in four-person Department B, which has even fewer majors than Department A. Meanwhile Department A really needs a person who can teach courses not taught by any of the other full-time personnel.

A job is a job if you're a doctoral student, but if you have any choice in the matter, stay away from small-enrollment institutions with endowments under a billion dollars.

In my context, a four-person department either started from nothing within a year, or will be gone within a year.  (Most new departments result from reorganization, so they would have 15 to 25 faculty at the outset).

Most new PhD graduates will have not come up through institutions that have a total of 25-50 full-time faculty for the entire institution.  Thus, the fragility of the college as a whole isn't on their radar.

I keep thinking of the faculty that are so happy to get any TT job, and then the college closes.

Jamie Bolker, an assistant professor of composition at MacMurray, tweeted about the college's closure. She joined the faculty in November. She has not been told yet whether she and other faculty will receive severance pay.

"They told me in the interview that the school had financial problems but I had no idea the true magnitude, even after doing some research," she wrote in an email. "I probably wouldn't have even applied for the job had I known I would be working there for only five months before they closed."

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/02/two-small-colleges-winding-down-operations-coronavirus-impact-looms-over-higher-ed

[Aster]

A bigger department is forced by sheer size to be more professional than a small one, where personal relationships and cliques are more likely to dominate - and can thus turn toxic pretty bad pretty fast. Also, I'd be very wary of a small department that isn't new-ish - it hasn't grown for a reason, whether that's lack of institutional support, inability to get much traction with students, or infighting. I very strongly advice anyone considering a small department to look into why it hasn't grown, and the older it is, the more of a red flag that is.

This. +1.

[hazeus]

^ I'm seeing this play out right now with a potential search to replace a retiree. Four-person Department A wants to replace the retiree with someone who teaches the retiree's courses, when those courses could be taught by people in four-person Department B, which has even fewer majors than Department A. Meanwhile Department A really needs a person who can teach courses not taught by any of the other full-time personnel.

A job is a job if you're a doctoral student, but if you have any choice in the matter, stay away from small-enrollment institutions with endowments under a billion dollars.

In my context, a four-person department either started from nothing within a year, or will be gone within a year.  (Most new departments result from reorganization, so they would have 15 to 25 faculty at the outset).

Most new PhD graduates will have not come up through institutions that have a total of 25-50 full-time faculty for the entire institution.  Thus, the fragility of the college as a whole isn't on their radar.

I keep thinking of the faculty that are so happy to get any TT job, and then the college closes.

Jamie Bolker, an assistant professor of composition at MacMurray, tweeted about the college's closure. She joined the faculty in November. She has not been told yet whether she and other faculty will receive severance pay.

"They told me in the interview that the school had financial problems but I had no idea the true magnitude, even after doing some research," she wrote in an email. "I probably wouldn't have even applied for the job had I known I would be working there for only five months before they closed."

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/02/two-small-colleges-winding-down-operations-coronavirus-impact-looms-over-higher-ed

Can't imagine how she must feel. Back to the drawing board.

[Ruralguy]

I don't think you can just go by having a 1 billion dollar endowment. But then again, if you have as low as 200 million, and that has to "feed" 1000 students or more, then there is going to be strain, especially if there is very little "indirect" coming from grants, and some, but not enough, gift money. You can sort of go by endowment per student, but that would seemingly put Sweet Briar in great shape! So, you need to know more than just one or two data points. Also, time derivatives of the quantities are fairly important.