A "Service" Department?

When I came to my first-ever department meeting as a professor back in 2017, we had a three-hour conversation about our department's mission. What was it that united us in our disparate branches of "English"? How should we be selling ourselves? It was tense at times, an awkward way of being introduced to new colleagues.

This year our department has a "mission statement task force." What is it that unites us in our disparate branches of "English"? How should we be selling ourselves? So yeah, we've made a lot of progress in the last six years.

At a recent department meeting, we were contemplating what kind of position we should hire for in a possible tenure-track literature line. People were getting excited about one idea, pointing this person could teach classes in our new gen ed program and that otherwise had an appeal across majors. A member of the department objected: where we just becoming a "service" department then? What kind of upper-level majors-focused classes would this person be offering?

A service department is a university department that instead of existing to serve a set of people majoring in it, serves majors in other departments. Say you work in a languages department, but your school offers no language degrees and yet every undergraduate has to take two French classes. You are a service department. Many people like to fret about becoming one; when we recently revised our gen ed, for example, some other departments actually objected to more courses in their department being built into the new requirements because then they would become service departments.

I teach seven classes per year. Every single one of them is a gen end.

At this department meeting, I went around the room and counted. There were about twenty-six professors present. Sixteen of them are, like me, full-time NTT faculty. Most of us teach seven sections of AWR; a couple do fifty-fifty mixes of AWR and creative writing. The remaining ten tenure-track faculty teach three AWR and three non-AWR courses per year.

By what metric are we not already a service department? A majority of the faculty teach gen eds a majority of the time.

Is this a problem? Well, maybe. As someone who teaches all gen eds it hard for me to get worked up about it. So what if someone else in the department isn't teaching classes on George Eliot to majors? I'll never get to do it anyway. As long as the university needs AWR courses, the university will need me regardless of how many majors we have.

And yet... though I knew what the job entailed when I took it, I don't think anyone goes into a literature Ph.D. because their dream is to teach gen ed composition forever. Which is to say, I think we might be a service department already by any meaningful metric, but can't I teach an occasional non-AWR course? So far I've gotten to do this once out of forty-two courses taught. I occasionally think that getting to teach majors even just once every few years would significantly improve my job satisfaction.

So I guess what I'm saying is that though I really like my colleagues and think we are very well supported as far as NTT AWR faculty go, it's hard for me to invest in an aspect of the department where it feels like the department is not investing in me. If the department doesn't want to be a service department, maybe it shouldn't be made up of people who entirely teach service courses.