Confessions . . .
of a Former FIG Queen
By Pamela Johnston         Copyright © 2007 bt The Chronicle of Higher Education

T

 
 
he scene itself was unremarkable: One of my students came by during office hours to ask about the status of her grade. As is often the case when that happens, the news wasn’t good. The student began to cry, so I pulled out a box of tissues I keep in my desk drawer for just such moments. Inevitably, the student began to talk about her other problems — a complex web of academic, work, and family issues in which she found herself trapped.

Some time later, with a soggy tissue in her hand and a watery smile on her face, the student headed toward my office door. We had talked through her options, both for completing my class with a passing grade and for resolving the various crises she was facing. We had talked about setting priorities, deciding what was important right now, and what might be dealt with later, once the semester had ended.

“Thank you for listening to me blubber,” she said, sheepishly.

I shook my head. “You don’t have to thank me for doing my job,” I said. “This is what I get paid to do.”

What struck me as odd, just a few moments later, was the realization that I had once believed that wasn’t true. I had once believed that my job as a professor had more to do with writing books than with the students assigned to read them.

Doctoral students train to become professors at large research universities. Our professional models are people whose careers are built on research and productivity, not on successful interaction with students in crisis. I had spent my entire educational career at institutions like that. I didn’t know I could be any other kind of professor.

Then, for two years before I started searching for a faculty position in English, and during the year I was on the market, instead of teaching courses in my discipline, I worked as coordinator of the Freshman Interest Groups (FIGs) program at the University of Missouri at Columbia. My job, in a nutshell, was to serve as a liaison between academic affairs and student affairs, helping freshmen make the transition into academic life.

I took the job initially for a purely practical reason: better health insurance. I had a chronically ill child and an “only in case of extreme emergency” medical plan that is typical for graduate students. Finding full-time work at the university solved that problem.

But I quickly found that I loved working with students outside the classroom almost as much as I had secretly enjoyed our academic interactions. (“A lot of graduate students make the mistake of spending too much time on their teaching,” a mentor once said to me, from which I was supposed to learn that teaching was only a means to a greater end.)

Somewhere along the way, I came to be known as the FIG Queen. At this point, I can’t even remember who gave me the title; I may have come up with it myself, an ironic commentary on the lowly position I occupied in the vast hierarchy of a major research university. I do remember receiving lots and lots of email messages — from administrators, professors, parents, and students — requesting a personal audience with Her Royal Highness. The life of a FIG Queen is many things, but it is never dull.

I missed the academic rigor of teaching, though, and once I had earned my Ph.D., I made the decision to return to the classroom. That’s when I began to worry about whether I could parlay my FIG experience into the kind of expertise that would attract the interest of search committees and deans. After all, I had just spent three years working with budding scholars rather than producing my own scholarship.

Perhaps more important, I knew that I might run into trouble on the job market with some faculty members’ ideas about the kind of people who become administrators. Many faculty members had expressed surprise, even distress, at my decision to take on the FIG monarchy.

But the truth of the matter was that I felt my reign actually brought me closer to students by taking me out of the classroom. If that seems antithetical, perhaps it’s because our lives as professors are compartmentalized into classroom hours, office hours, research hours, and service hours. In that schematic, we think of the classroom as the primary site of student contact.

But a line between professors and students has to be maintained in the classroom for a number of perfectly valid reasons. I wrote about that line in a previous column, and I still believe in its importance. Outside the classroom, though, it’s easier to see students from a different perspective — as people with often difficult lives.

In one of my first job interviews, I remember telling the department chairman with whom I was having breakfast that I felt my years as the FIG queen had actually made me a better teacher. “Before I took that job,” I said, “I really don’t think I understood how complicated students’ lives can get.”

I gave him a couple of examples from just that semester: the young man who had left school for several weeks in the middle of the term because, as he later explained, “I’m the last of five kids who grew up with a single mom, and she’s having a lot of trouble adjusting to being by herself so much.” Or the girl who had arrived on the campus three months pregnant, afraid to disappoint her parents by destroying their dream of sending their only child to college.

I wasn’t surprised when my interviewer wanted to know what I meant by “better teacher.” Was I suggesting that a professor should just excuse several weeks of absences, or substantial missing work, when a student is in crisis? “If you did that,” he said, “you’d probably never see them in class again, or get any work from them at all.”

I conceded that might be true. “But I always ask whether the student needs help solving the larger problem, rather than jumping straight to the fact that it’s no longer possible to pass my class. Quite frankly, sometimes a failing grade should be the last thing on a student’s mind.”

My breakfast companion only raised his eyebrows in reply. But later that day, he prompted me to repeat my remarks to another group of potential colleagues over lunch. Something I said had registered with him, apparently. Later, when that university offered me a tenure-track job, I knew it was a place where I could be the kind of professor I wanted to be.

Surrounded now by the machinery of academe — class plans, piles of quizzes, an endless stream of grade reports — it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the students in my classrooms are more than producers of work for me to evaluate. Still, I try to remind myself that a failing grade sometimes arises not from laziness but from a situation much more complicated than I can imagine.

In my three years as the FIG Queen, I was reminded of how hard it is to be an 18-year-old college student. Not only are those students facing the uncertainty of a shapeless future they feel pressured to define, but the university itself often seems to lack structure: Even with my knowledge of the university’s many offices, I sometimes have difficulty helping students get the answers they need. And I remember how hard it was to navigate that labyrinth alone.

In the weeks after I was offered a faculty position, before I stepped down from the FIG monarchy, one of the students who had worked for me as a peer adviser came by my office with a jeweled plastic crown.

“So you’ll always remember that you’re the queen,” she said, “no matter where you go from here.”

She couldn’t have known that my reign was something I had already carried with me into every interview, the very thing that had helped me decide where to make my new professional home. ♦

Dr. Johnston is an associate professor of English studies at Texas Lutheran University, where she teaches creative writing and American literature. Her first novel Little Lost River is being published by the University of Nevada Press in March 2008, and it will be available in bookstores and on amazon.com.

Reprinted with Permission from Aug. 1, 2007 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education