The 30 essays in Presumed Incompetent expose a nasty truth about Academia: it is not above the realities of everyday American life. It, in fact, reproduces and reinforces society’s inequalities, stereotypes, and hierarchies within its own walls.

That academic women, especially academic women of color, are often presumed incompetent, is probably not surprising to most. The virtue of this book is that it enables the reader to see that these experiences are not individual experiences nor are they the result of individual flaws. Keeping this insight in mind, these essays become more than just “stories” or anecdotes. They point to the larger structural and cultural forces within Academia that make the experience of being presumed incompetent for women of color far too common.

The book is a collection of various types of essays: scholarly literature reviews of the experiences of women of color, personal narratives, and interviews. The content is divided into five parts: “General Campus Climate”, “Faculty/Student Relationships”, “Networks of Allies”, “Social Class in Academia” and “Tenure and Promotion”.  As one can tell readily from the themes, the book isn’t directed at students, nor is it meant primarily for use in a classroom (although there are several chapters that would be a good fit in courses that cover race, class, gender and sexuality issues). The book’s primary audience is faculty and administrators. It not only highlights the cultural and structural obstacles facing women of color in Academia, but proposes strategies and recommendations aimed at faculty and administrators. Several essays do this effectively, but Niemann’s concluding essay provides a particularly valuable summary of strategies and advice.

Several themes cut across the five sections of the book.  One is the discussion of stereotypes and identity work.  For instance, African American women may be seen as “mammies” and expected to be nurturing and caring and when they are not, they face anger and disappointment from students and colleagues (see Douglas’ and Wilson’s essays). Another example is Lugo-Lugo’s chapter, which discusses the stereotypes of the “hot Latina” and how they play out for her in the classroom where she must negotiate her identity as a Latina and a professor.

Lugo-Lugo also touches upon a second, though sometimes less explicit, theme of this book: the corporatization of higher education.  There are several layers to this phenomenon that affect women of color disproportionately. For one, contingent labor now makes up the vast majority of faculty positions in this country.  White women and women of color are disproportionately represented in these contingent ranks. Women of color only make up 7.5% of all full-time faculty positions in Academia (pg. 449). Given this reality, the presumption of incompetence gets reinforced and magnified for women of color. But there is another aspect of corporatization that is considered in the essays in this book. These are the essays that discuss student evaluations of teaching.  Because students increasingly come to the classroom with a consumerist mentality, they feel entitled to a certain experience, a certain grade, a certain “kind” of teacher. Lazos’ chapter, in particular, is a must-read for anybody who wishes to understand the factors that impact students’ evaluations of their professors. Departments chairs and members of committees on tenure and promotion will also find this chapter useful since they are responsible for evaluating a faculty member’s teaching effectiveness and student evaluations are a primary source of that information.

The importance of mentoring is also underscored in many of the essays in this volume as they highlight the need for good mentorship not just in graduate school but throughout the various stages of an academic career. The essay “Lessons From a Portrait: Keep Calm and Carry On,” by Adrien Wing, discusses the need to have a variety of mentors across racial, gender and institutional lines. Wing reminds the reader that she “never put all my eggs in one basket. If one mentor did not work out, that was fine because there were others” (p. 366).

There is one recurring piece of advice in this collection that worries me: many authors exhort women of color to simply do better and do more than what is expected of them.  This includes doing “more than the minimum”, teaching “on a grand scale” (p. 362, 363).  This lesson, which may seem productive from an individual’s perspective, does nothing to address the deeper problem of why women of color feel the need to do this in the first place. It poses a very personal solution to a problem that the editors and authors themselves have identified as a structural issue.

That critique aside, Presumed Incompetent offers valuable lessons and advice for just about everyone in Academia, from contingent faculty, post-docs, and tenured and tenure-track faculty, to administrators and search committees. It is up to us to heed that advice if we hope to erase the dangerous and erroneous belief in academic women’s incompetence.

Most universities use student evaluation forms as a means of measuring student satisfaction and teaching effectiveness of the instructors. What many do not know is that most instructors have a like and dislike relationship with the official student evaluations. For contingent faculty, the evaluations are crucial to keeping their jobs. The evaluations are an easy means for a department to let you go, noting, “Well, your student evaluation numbers are really low.” Furthermore, we all know that there is such a large pool of adjunct faculty ready to get a class or pick up an additional class in the quest to attempt to make ends meet. This is an important issue and I recall feeling that the student evaluations gave me that opportunity where I had to prove that the department made a good choice in offering me some courses, when I worked part-time at two to three college campuses or departments.

Anecdotally, I have heard from many faculty that they never read their student evaluations and others note that they wait until the end of the year to review them. I scan the statistics at the term’s end or the end of the year. If I have time, I might read the qualitative comments. You see, I get the statistics emailed to me, but I have to request to get access to the folder of qualitative comments, which means that I do not look at them often. When I started a new team-taught course, I read the qualitative evaluations immediately to assess what the students were thinking. But, usually I review the qualitative comments as I prepare my dossier for a review or some other official process. And, I usually dread reading them, as the one negative comment will stay with me for the next hour or day.

As part of a recent nomination for a Teaching Award, I had to update my teaching dossier, and I just reviewed 18 months of statistics and qualitative comments and I have to say that my relationship with the student evaluations has changed. I cannot even believe that I am typing this, but I found that the both the statistics and qualitative comments tells me exactly what I already knew: I am an effective instructor. From the qualitative comments, I read that some students really like me and a few students do not like me or the assignments. Some comments brought tears to my eyes: students deciding to major based on my course or that my help in office hours made them not drop out of the program or university. I read that I was making a difference in and outside of the classroom—that I should have clones; it was a validating experience to read pages of these comments. Sure, some noted that I require too much reading or writing and I always expect some to make those comments. The statistics also noted that across the board 82-100% of my students enjoy the courses, assignments, my availability, and the overall course. Those are statistics that I can happily live with and add to this the great, hilarious or constructive comments and I feel satisfied with my teaching.

Now, we all are aware of the websites that comment about instructors and I will not name them. Those websites really find the fans and haters making comments and possibly doling out a chili pepper to an instructor.  I do not visit those sites anymore, but going forward, I will make a point of asking for my qualitative comments the same day that I get my statistics.

Decades of research in higher education has sought to understand why students come to STEM fields and why they leave. This has been especially true for women in science degree programs. Efforts such as Sue Rosser’s 1990 Female Friendly Science sought to re-organize science and engineering programs and change teaching practices to attract and retain female students. Drawing on insights from women’s studies and cultural studies, she proposed that they put greater emphasis on cooperative work and practical applications and broaden curricula to include more opportunities to explore the history and culture of science. Decades later, there are still significant gaps in women’s participation and persistence, especially in physics and physics-related engineering disciplines such as mechanical and electrical, despite efforts to overcome preparation deficits, provide role models and mentoring, and build communities for women in sciences.

Accordingly, we must acknowledge this is a more complex problem. There are tangled webs of expectations that influence all students’ experiences in science degree programs. When students arrive on those very first days, they bring with them expectations of post-secondary science education handed down from their families and teachers, in addition to their own. They also run headlong into what their professors, lab instructors and peers expect of them. And sometimes the results are disheartening and hard to navigate.

The programs themselves sometimes create expectations for who students should be.  Lars Ulriksen from the University of Copenhagen has described this as ‘the implied student,’ inspired by the literary concept of the implied reader. This is a way of thinking about all of the assumptions that are embedded in any text about what the reader would and should think and feel. It describes what a reader must bring with them to the text to make sense of it. Analogically, the implied student is seen in the set of expectations placed on students by every element of their degree program, from the course outlines to teaching practices to what the professors, instructors, and peers say and do. All of these paint a picture for students of whether their science program is really for someone like them. And it’s here where many female students encounter difficulties in meeting the expectations.  Karen Tonso’s 2006 ethnography of undergraduate engineers, for example, illustrates several incidents where students struggle with the strongly masculine expectations associated with the implied student in their program.

In order to understand the challenges faced by women in science, I’ve followed the lead of others like Tonso and Heidi Carlone and thought of these expectations as part of an identity process. As students progress in their science studies, part of the learning process is developing an identity within a scientific community. This means seeing yourself as belonging in the community and, through your actions and abilities, receiving that same recognition from others.For example, Carlone and Johnson (2007) worked with 15 successful women of colour in science, meeting them first during their undergraduate studies and following up six years later when most had moved on to graduate studies or medical school. The ease or difficulty of that path from undergraduate studies to graduation and beyond was largely influenced by how much recognition they received from others, such as professors and peers, about meeting the expectations of being a science student. Those who held strong science identities received heartfelt and positive support and feedback from mentors and senior scientists. In contrast, there was another group of women who began their undergraduate studies with interest and motivation in science but became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated. Despite being strong students, their rocky experiences were reflected in the feedback they received from supervisors and professors suggesting that they shouldn’t be there or were not the right kind of science students.

Taking a similar approach, I had the opportunity to work with colleagues who had led the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project, where they surveyed college students nationally about their high school science experiences as well as their attitudes towards science in higher education. We looked in particular at students’ physics identities. Two of the main components were how strongly they felt they met the expectations of physics and how much recognition they received from others about meeting those expectations. Those with well-developed physics identities, and who had received important positive recognition, were at least three times more likely to want to pursue a physics degree. And what was single most important predictor of how strongly students held a physics identity? Their gender. Even when high school experiences, GPAs, and career orientations were taken into account, male students had significantly stronger identities, meaning that they saw themselves meeting the expectations of physics better and received more recognition from teacher, parents and peers. This is despite ongoing research showing that male and female students are not very different in the raw skills that they bring to physics programs (e.g.,Hyde & Linn, 2006). As Tonso’s engineering students found, gender expectations related to masculinity and femininity can’t be ignored when we think about what pushes and pulls students in and out of science degree programs.

These kinds of studies show that the constraints felt by female STEM students, and all students, go far beyond academic preparation and ability.  It’s sometimes hard to imagine how expectations like these that come not just from curricula and tests but from every interaction that students have with their professors and their peers can be changed. There are definitely no easy solutions, but it’s important to start thinking about things this way. For example, how can mentorship and development programs not only provide role models and skills but also help students navigate these expectations? How can program leaders and professors begin to ask if there is room to change the implied student that incoming registrants encounter? The first step, at least, is always asking the question.

Marie-Claire Shanahan is an Associate Professor of Science Education & Science Communication at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. When not writing at her blog, Boundary Vision, or hanging out with her students, Marie-Claire is a regular guest host on the science radio program Skeptically Speaking. She also writes about two of her favourite things, science and music, as DJ at the online science pub The Finch & Pea, where she squeezes in as much Canadian independent music as she thinks she can get away with. She tweets as @mcshanahan, can be found on Google+, and reached at mcshanahan at gmail.com.

On a recent trip to the UK, I visited a friend who works at the University of Birmingham. She took me on a tour of its really quite beautiful campus, ending at the Muirhead Tower, a brutalist monstrosity built in 1971. Its recent renovation has smoothed over some of the worst features of the original design, including the shards of concrete which had begun to fall off its exterior.

For such an unpleasant building, it has an unusually significant literary pedigree: as a plaque on a nearby building commemorates, it is one of the key sites in David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975). The first in a trilogy of consistently popular campus novels set in the fictional University of Rummidge, a barely-disguised version of Birmingham, the novel describes what happens when two lecturers in English literature, one British and the other American, take up visiting positions at each other’s universities. Hilarity and profundity ensue.

It’s in the Arts Building – the Muirhead Tower, in other words – that the American academic Morris Zapp, who usually lectures at Plotinus University (the novel’s take on UC Berkeley), discovers and is fascinated by the Paternoster, a kind of ever-scrolling, open-faced lift or elevator between floors of a building:

Morris … loved the Paternoster. … he…found it a profoundly poetic machine, especially if one stayed on for the round trip, disappearing into darkness at the top and bottom and rising or dropping into the light again, perpetual motion readily symbolising all systems and cosmologies based on the principle of eternal recurrence, vegetation myths, death and rebirth archetypes, cyclic theories of history, metempsychosis and Northrop Frye’s theory of literary modes.

Zapp’s ability to move from mode of transport – the lift – to a rumination on life, death, and literary theory is echoed in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), when a discussion between Jack Gladney and Murray J. Siskind moves from Elvis to Hitler, and then death. Indeed, a Paternoster also appears in AS Byatt’s Possession (1990), another campus novel, where it’s used to underscore the differences between two academics: poised, precise, and successful Maude who steps easily on to its steps, and shambling, struggling Roland, who almost falls off it.

I thought a great deal about these and other campus novels as I visited several universities during my stay. What struck me forcibly was the creeping managerialism in so many of these institutions. At one, someone mused about the ‘career management strategies’ of young academics. I have never – and hope never to have – a ‘career management strategy’. I have a fairly good idea of how I would like my career to progress, but I’m not going to try to predict what I’ll be researching in ten or twenty years time.

Much has been written about the implications of this managerialism for academic research and teaching. As universities have come under increasing pressure to demonstrate the ‘value’ (whatever we may mean by that) of their teaching and research, so lecturers have had to account for their time more carefully, plan their research often to a ludicrous degree (how many of us apply for funding only after we’ve finished the research project?), collect and respond to student feedback, and do ever-increasing amounts of administrative tasks. Every good academic in my acquaintance – who publishes, teaches, and does administrative work – is chronically over-worked, and seems to be in battle with a fundamentally unfair system.

I had coffee with a friend who had worked ten hours that day, and was about to put in another two. A friend’s research unit was threatened with closure unless he could raise enough funding – the amount unspecified by management – to prove its value to his university. Another friend was told to ignore her students if she ever wanted to be promoted. The members of an acquaintance’s lab competed to be the researcher who sacrificed the most weekends for work. And on and on and on.

Changing Places and White Noise satirise the kind of fairly pointless research that academics in retreat from the world occasionally produce. I am not about to call for a return of the Paternoster – I am not so starry-eyed as to appeal to a return to the academia of the 1970s and early 1980s – but what these novels, including Possession, remind us, is that academia used to be humane, that it was an environment that allowed academics the freedom and the time to pursue research and to teach, without falling into bed at 1am and being in the office six hours later. And without having negotiate a system which seems to be designed to never allow us to win. Academia was a space in which the apparently inefficient and – indeed – dangerous Paternoster could inspire a train of thought in a lecturer in English Literature. It was a place that was conducive to playful thinking. I am not sure that the managed, efficient, corporatised university of the future will be a space for similar contemplation.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

Whenever I teach an introductory lesson on “gender” in my first-year international affairs and international relations classes, I find myself prefacing my explanation of “feminism” with the familiar “Feminism is not about man-hating. Feminists are concerned with both men and women,” in order to fend off the usual hostile responses from both male and female students. However, it doesn’t wipe the smirk off many of student’s faces in the classroom; I still find myself feeling defensive and exasperated, particularly when combating the well-worn tropes against women in the military, gender quotas in electoral processes, or the idea that women aren’t fit to lead countries because of, well, emotions.

Studies of university students in the US (such as Zucker 2004) reveal that, while female students may espouse or support feminist ideals, they are cautious to refer to themselves as “feminists.” I’m not entirely surprised by this, as the term “feminism” has been treated as a dirty word or a “radical” identification by the American media.  I also have plenty of conservative students, but their discomfort with the word “feminist” seems to stem from a deep-seated belief that saying the word itself is the gateway drug to accepting liberal ideals with reckless abandon; I’m most concerned with the knee-jerk negative response to the word feminist among otherwise liberal (particularly women) students..

Recently a conversation with my brother got me thinking about the term in a different way. My brother, also a social scientist who’s pursuing his PhD, replied to a comment I made about gender inequalities in academia with “there’s no room in my academia for sexism.” That’s nice, I replied, but far from the reality of the situation–I jokingly quipped, “of course you think that; you’re a man.”

No, he replied, you’ve got it wrong. The word “feminist,” he argued, is itself sexist, and further divides women from men, which is counter to what you’re trying to achieve. Given that I know that my brother really does believe that women are equal to men, I decided to think carefully about his point.

Is the word “feminist”—with its root in “feminine” (or rather, the French féminisme)—a sexist term? I considered other “isms” that reflect exclusions: racism, classism, ageism, and ableism (and the list does go on…). Does feminism fit into these categories?

All of the “isms” mentioned here (e.g. racism) are based on subordination and domination. One who is a “racist” believes that his or her race is superior to another, and generally social systems and culture support that belief—as such, one does not need to be “racist” to live in a racist society. Indeed, one may live one’s entire life benefitting from such a society without ever having professed any racist belief at all. The same goes for class: while one might never personally think that the poor are somehow inferior, one may still benefit from a society where such class divisions are deemed normal or even necessary.

So, can feminism be exclusionary or represent a relationship of domination/subordination? Discussions about binaries aside, I don’t think so. For my brother, the crux of his argument rested on the intrinsic belief that the sexes are equal, and to make distinctions of inequality with words like “feminism” creates an inequality through the term’s (perceived) suggestion of exclusion (that is, an exclusion of men). But once one takes the domination/subordination tack, we can see that feminism, as a word, seeks to lift the “feminine” out of the subordinate position, and perhaps to unhinge the binary altogether. As bell hooks reminds us in “Feminism is for Everybody” (2000), men are harmed by patriarchy as much as women; feminism celebrates the liberation of men as well as women.

What we finally came to—and the point where I think most students get stuck—is that sticky question of “equality” and what that means. How do we decide when we are equal? My final argument to my brother: “well, we can all be equally shat upon.” Nobody wants that. What we do want is justice—and that, I think, is the meaning behind “feminism” and the identification as a “feminist”: if the meaning of “feminism” includes an understanding of justice, the subordinate position is denied, as is the dominant one (Sen 1999).

So, rather than approach the subject of gender with the negative “feminism doesn’t mean the exclusion of men,” I think I will begin my classes with this: “feminism is the demand for justice for everyone.” Perhaps that is an “ism” that will be less frightening.

I am not one of those people who looks down on technology in general, or the internet in particular, because of what it has taken away from us, like enjoying nature, being with family and friends, and reading actual books. I still try to do these “natural” things (as opposed to the artificial cyber world) that are part of life, but I must admit that I love technology. I acknowledge that using technologies has now become an essential part of life as well.

I got my first computer in 1997 when I was a senior at the University. Previously, I was truly afraid of computers; I thought I would do something wrong and crash them. I bought the computer because I had to write a Graduation Project (a sort of thesis) to graduate from college, and I needed a PC to write it. Soon after I bought my computer, I also subscribed to a dial-up connection to get on the internet. During the same time period, I was getting ready to compete in Concours Pictet (a simulation and  pleadings contest in international humanitarian law) to be held in Malta and I spent my first days on the internet chatting with people in a chatroom called Pentagon on Geocities about different things I was reading on international humanitarian law.  I also had to get the internet to do better research on my graduation project. My acquaintance with the cyber world was based on academic grounds and motivations.

Today I live in the cyber world on a part-time basis, and I think it has brought  many good things to my life. Yes, of course it takes a lot of my time; however, I feel that if it were not for the internet, I would never be able to keep myself up to date with the current issues in the world (which is vital for me, given the fact that I work in the field of International relations), and also maintain my international friendships and networks, and that alone is enough for me to like this technology. Of course there is still the “conventional” me inside as well, as I was not born into the world of technology. I still prefer to read things from a printed, hard-copy version rather than from the page of a screen.  Or when I email, I still write long and structured, mostly letter-like emails, but I think that strikes quite a good balance.

The internet provides me good opportunities to improve myself in my own profession.  Not only I read the news in several different languages from different parts of the world, but I also watch videos and documentaries that add to my knowledge of the issues I am interested in. Internet and electronic databases provide good resources for my research and my teaching as well. I try to improve my foreign languages through online language learning websites.

As for the many tools on the internet to keep contact with people, I use my Gmail and its chat features for instant messaging, I use Skype for conference calls and my Facebook account the most. Although I firstly and mostly used Facebook to find old friends and catch up with them, now, more and more, I use it for learning new things as well. For example, ever since I started teaching Science, Technology and International Relations, I have been exploring pages on basic science and sharing those with friends, which must kind of look awkward on the page of a social scientist. Facebook also allows me to follow trends, looking at what people post and what the community pages I like, and  post as well. I do the same when I read newspapers online, because I not only read the news but also the comments made about the news, which reflects at least a part of the public opinion on a topic.

Of course, ever since I started writing with UVenus 3 years ago (wow, it has been 3 years!!!), I also use the internet to share my academic experiences with a wider audience. The blogging experience has made me think more about my experiences in academia, because now I have to write about them. It also has allowed me to read extensively about the experiences of other people.

Last November, I was elected as the President of the European Peace Research Association (EuPRA) during the general conference of International Peace Research Association (IPRA). My first task as EuPRA President will be to establish a credible website for the organization. This will be my next challenge on the internet as an academic.

This January, my University hosted a group of Monash University students from Malaysia on nine-day, non-credit study tour. Eighteen months of logistical preparation, including securing permission from University authorities, preparing University facilities and recruiting student guides, preceded this visit. While we are not strangers to international exchanges, this marks the first time we are doing institutional hosting of this scale. This event follows other initiatives like the Balik (Returning)-Scientist, Visiting Professor and other recruitment schemes directed at attracting Ph.D. holders from abroad to join our faculty in Iloilo. Even our academic journals are getting a much needed title and editorial board revamp with the conscious inclusion of foreign scholars.

“Internationalization” is the new buzzword as our University strategizes to catch up from its 200th place rank (out of 300) among educational institutions in Asia. We are hopeful that by increasing international linkages, we can reach light year speed and engender better performance from the faculty in terms of publication and other academic metrics. It is a tough gamble knowing the tight fiscal predicaments of foreign donors and the moral imperative of  balanced (rather than lopsided and patronizing) engagements. The push to “democratize” linkages also means bringing my University outside its traditional fisheries and coastal resource moorings that initially grew out of graduate school networks (since mostly Fisheries colleagues obtained graduate degrees abroad and therefore had the contacts). Today, my unit rivals the Fisheries College for its cosmopolitan feel. A third of my Division’s (social sciences)  faculty received advanced degrees from American, Canadian and Japanese universities (including 4 Fulbright grantees).

But to be more international carries its own perils. At a recent conference, a colleague revealed we fell victim to a broker of shady Chinese colleagues with dubious intent: they  primarily want us to be a feeder English language training school. An MOU was already drafted when their faulty credentials were discovered. Parallel proposals for a more robust faculty exchange (lectures and research) with Korean Universities were met with skepticism because of concerns about their English language skills. Because of our June to March academic calendar,  it is difficult to enter into a credit-earning scheme for foreign undergraduate students in the region who are on September to June mode. A host of infrastructure-related dearths, such as lack of housing and broadband Internet for on-campus computing services are also impeding us. Should international partnerships be expanded beyond traditional “rich” enclaves (i.e. Japan or Canada) to have a more Asian or South-to-South focus, such as the current one with a Fisheries school in Liberia?

The Philippines will be part of the ASEAN Free Trade Area by 2014; the race is on to harmonize educational systems and standards across the region. My University’s own policy emphasis on internationalization parallels the controversial K-12 push at the elementary and secondary levels. Down the free-market road for education, we will compete with better placed institutions in Hong Kong, Thailand and Indonesia for the best faculty and students.

I am not one of those globalism pessimists. I am a firm believer of the enriching power of diversity in academic provenance, the “leavening” effect of exposure to international academic trends, and the equalizing potential in open and free markets for tertiary education. The first order of business is to shift our mindset: it is NOT enough to be among the top three schools in the Philippines; regional ranking matters.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

In comparison with business and political leaders, leaders in academia appear different (and I use mostly the Swedish/European case as example for my ideas). At least in Swedish universities, academic leadership is collegial and limited in time.

Collegial leadership means that the administrative responsibilities are taken over by one member of the faculty at a time, who becomes a sort of “primus inter pares”. This has consequences for the job criteria: not only must the proposed leader demonstrate managerial capacities (flexible, adaptable, strategic and most of all effective), but she or he must also be a resourceful scholar with a good publication record and deserving academic performance. One obvious problem is that there is no transfer of merits between research and administration. A very good researcher does not automatically make a good academic leader. But since the principle of collegiality must be enforced, the academic performance criterion must be always included, despite its probable lack of relevance, for the sake of legitimacy in the eyes of the other members of the faculty.

The second feature that is particular to the academic leadership is its time-restricted mandate. None of the positions in the administrative hierarchy is permanent; after usually two mandates, the chair/dean/president returns to her/his original position as university teacher. This poses a challenge typical for all limited positions, namely the difficulty of formulating and implementing long-term goals and far reaching transformations.

Moreover, in combination with the collegial idea, the fact that the administrative mandate is time-limited makes highly unlikely the inclination for dealing with deep-seated problems within the institution as well as long-term change. No one would like to take some unpopular decisions during one’s administrative mandate knowing that someday, sooner or later, they will return and be depending on coworkers’ support and collegiality.

A final component of the academic leadership conundrum is the normative component of the academic culture. Traditionally, a “good academic” is a person whose merits fall primarily in the scientific/research areas. Innovative research resulting in new knowledge is the apogee of academic achievement. Taking on an administrative duty means reducing the time left for research; thus administration and leadership are valued not as high as scientific achievements. Because of the necessity of collegial leadership most Swedish academics accept the leadership role, but often their perception of it is that of a “necessary evil”. They see themselves primarily as scholars who temporarily fulfill an administrative role, as persons who have a leadership position, but who are not academic leaders (Rowley & Sherman, 2003).

So, what is your opinion? Who makes a good academic leader? Is it better to be led by “one of us”, who takes by rotation the steering wheel of the institution or better to have a professional manager? Does it make a difference if we think about the chair of a department or the dean of a faculty? And what are the reasons that motivate you to seek positions of academic leadership.

As I drove home from work a few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast episode of Writer’s Voice where the show’s producer Drew Adamek interviewed Junot Diaz. The focus of the interview was Diaz’s latest book, This Is How You Lose Her, and his process of writing the book. Anyone who knows me knows I am a big fan of Junot Diaz, and I recently finished This Is How You Lose Her. I also enjoy reading and hearing about the writing process of others, not just because of my job but because you can tell so much about a writer by how they approach their writing, and this particular podcast episode did not disappoint in that regard.

When Adamek asked Díaz about a comment he made regarding his writing process, Junot responds candidly:

“I guess I’m not one of these happily industrious writers who’s always writing and producing books all the time. I’m always working but I’m not always producing…I’ve had a lot of difficulties with my work …I’m one of those unfortunate souls who happens to be good at something they find incredibly difficult…and I think that could be a problem. I think many of us think that we can only be good at things we find easy….I continue to find my work and my writing a great challenge….It’s your persistence that defines you and not what you produce.”

When I heard this, my heart expanded with joy. The fact that Díaz, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, described his writing process as difficult disrupts the common notion that writing comes easily to good writers. Oftentimes we focus on tips or strategies, but it can be even more useful to hear how other writers struggle.

Listening to this podcast made me think of how valuable it would be if there were frank conversations about the writing process with Ph.D. students, with graduate students, with junior faculty–and I only mention those because these are the groups I encounter in my job on a regular basis. It could also be useful for undergraduates. Some writing instructors have talked about the importance of writing with your students, or talking about yourself as a writer; I wonder if I have read in my research on graduate student writers that no one knows how to write a dissertation until they’ve written one, but we can still share that experience with other writers that we advise, keeping in mind that everyone’s process is different.

However, the biggest takeaway from this snippet of the podcast episode for me was the statement that writing is hard. Yup, it is. It’s one of the reasons why The Thesis Whisperer, Pat Thompson and I advocate for writing on a regular basis, if not every day. A Pulitzer Prize winner has trouble with writing–why wouldn’t I? This is a tough pill to swallow, I admit, especially when students have deadlines (I’m thinking especially of Ph.D. candidates who have dissertations to write and who have to balance research, writing, thinking, and reading with other responsibilities in their lives). Junot Diaz reminds me that good writing takes time, an idea that isn’t too popular in the academic culture of publish and perish. (In August of 2012, professor Imani Perry wrote a piece about the pros of taking your time with your writing, but hers is an exception.) This makes me wonder: how can we balance the amount of time that polished, good writing takes with the requirements of the academic life? On the flipside: how long is too long?

For me, writing has always come naturally. Putting my words down on paper feels like the right thing to do when something is on my mind. The fact that I do it regularly makes ideas come a little easier. But  had forgotten that big point that Diaz made in his podcast: writing is difficult. I had confused the amount of writing I do with ease. The truth is, some ideas need to marinate, need to be teased out, need to be carved out of stone and polished. But I like that Diaz adds that it’s persistence that makes him a writer.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed