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How to Target Liberal Arts Colleges
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| As compared to research
universities, liberal arts colleges offer young professors
more opportunity to focus on teaching, often in smaller, more
interdisciplinary classrooms. However, they present challenges
to job candidates, particularly to those from large research
universities like Michigan who may or may not be familiar
with their institutional culture, goals, and priorities. The
following is a summary of advice on this topic given by Professor
Sonya Rose (History, Sociology) at the Academic Job Search
Symposium held on September 22, 2000. You should check it
with members of your own department to confirm its applicability
to your discipline.
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General advice |
| Find out everything you
can about the college. This can be good advice for interviewing
at research universities, but it is even more important for
liberal arts colleges. Using their catalog and website, figure
out who their faculty is as well as what kind of student body
the college has (where their students come from geographically
and where they tend to go professionally after leaving the college).
Try to determine how much the college emphasizes interdisciplinarity,
because at small colleges your colleagues are not just faculty
within your own department, but also those in other departments.
At the interview, you will want to be able to indicate the
breadth of your education, which suggests both your ability
to interact productively with the broader community of faculty
and your ability to contribute to general education, the main
focus of most small colleges. Your campus interview may well
include meeting the dean of the college, and his or her concerns
will definitely center on how the breadth of your education
allows you to make a contribution to the school.
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Liberal arts colleges are
looking for: |
| someone who has a lot
of teaching experience and teaches well. If you’ve had
teaching experience, you should be prepared to furnish the department
with syllabi as well as teaching evaluations. If you’ve
ever received a teaching award, be sure to highlight that on
your CV as it is a great advantage. They will want to know what
you would want to teach and you should have prepared an answer,
preferably one which combines your abilities with the needs
of the department.
However, increasingly liberal arts colleges are also interested
in someone who can do research and publish. You won’t
be expected to publish as much as if you were at a research
institution, but you will be expected to publish and to do
it well.
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The Job Talk |
| Some colleges will ask
you to teach a demonstration class. Sometimes you will be asked
to give a lecture to another professor’s class. The department
will tell you if this will be required.
Even if you are not teaching a demonstration class, the job
talk will often include undergraduates. Your talk will be
based on your dissertation (or your most recent work), and
your challenge is to make it accessible to everyone in the
audience. You want to engage your potential colleagues in
the intellectual problems you are dealing with but you also
need to make it interesting and accessible to the undergraduates
as well. This is an opportunity for the department to see
not only the quality of your research but also your ability
to communicate it (i.e., teach it) to a mixed audience.
You can find the full transcript of Professor Rose's remarks
here. For further
information, you might look at Are
you interested in applying for a position in psychology at
a small liberal arts institution? (by a professor at Skidmore
College).
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PhDs and the Academic Job Search
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