Meet Abe Sensei

Well the semester has ended and I'm finally getting around to all those tasks I put aside until I had more time. But that actually isn't the reason it's taken me this long to make a post about the new Japanese teacher. There are numerous restrictions on revealing information about an ongoing job search until it is complete, so I wasn't able to say anything until a final decision was made. There's good reason for this, I suppose. If we don't get our first choice, for example, we want to make an offer to the second person on the list but don't necessarily want them to know they weren't our top candidate in the first place. Of course, if you've been following this blog for long, you know that I'm pretty big on transparency, but I guess I understand the need to be tactful. Still, it feels like waiting so long has the potential to give false hope to candidates who have already been eliminated. At the same time, I wouldn't want any candidates to find out they didn't get the job from this blog before they'd been informed officially. And in fact, I found during the interview process that many of the candidates actually did locate this blog, along with my course websites, syllabi, etc. in the course of their preparation. For some candidates, this worked as an advantage in that they knew my teaching philosophy and style already and could play this up in the interview. For some, though, they took it a bit too far and it was clear that many of them were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear rather than what they really felt. Among the ten candidates we interviewed there were some good candidates, some bad candidates, and a few who really stood out. I'm happy to say that one of our top choices accepted the position and next year Sayaka Abe will be joining our department. (and I hope nobody reading this site needs to be told this, but Abe is a Japanese name (あべ) and is thus NOT pronounced like "Honest Abe" but rather like "Baa" in Pig Latin. i.e. Ah-bay)

Abe Sensei has a PhD in linguistics and is currently teaching in a one-year visiting position at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She will be handling all three sections of first year Japanese for the 2009-10 academic year, which means that most of you who are already studying here won't have her as a teacher but I'm sure you will feel her presence. Unfortunately, teaching first-year Japanese doesn't exactly take full advantage of her specialization in linguistics, but I am hopeful that we'll be able to use her experience to expand our program sometime after the first year, if she stays on. Perhaps adding an additional course in her area of expertise (phonology? sociolinguistics? etc.?) for upper level Japanese students in her second year might be a possibility. I'm not sure how likely that is at this point, but both the chair of MLL and I are both very excited about the possibility of that happening... of course there are always limitations on our freedom to act. And as usual, I am getting ahead of myself even assuming that there will be a second year...

The position for which she has been hired is that of a visitor, which means that her official contract is for one year but that she has the option of renewing for up to a total of three years. Ideally, if both she and we are happy with the situation, it would be great if she were here for the full three years. I can tell you from personal experience, though, that there are advantages and disadvantages to being in a multi-year visiting position such as this one. For the two years prior to coming to GVSU, I was a visiting assistant professor at Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, VA. Like the position here, it was a visiting position with the possibility of renewing each year but with a set maximum number of years (five years max in my case). It was a bit of a mixed blessing, in that I could be assured of having a job for the next year so I didn't need to knock myself out applying to other jobs I didn't really want, but at the same time I knew it wasn't permanent so I did have to stay on the job market in the hopes of finding a tenure-track position. What does tenure-track mean? Well, it basically means an ongoing position requiring tenure review after a certain number of years (typically six) after which the job becomes more or less "permanent." So it's like being in limbo, teaching a regular assistant professor course-load, assured of having a job the next year, but unable to think of yourself as permanent. I couldn't really settle down, buy a house, or fully become part of the community because I didn't really know if I'd still be there the next year. It may be even worse in Abe Sensei's case, since she won't even be teaching what she does best: linguistics. At least in my former position, I had the freedom to teach a balance of language and literature. There is one possible advantage here at Grand Valley that I did not have, however; there was never a possibility of my staying on at Washington and Lee permanently.

Now here I'm really going out on a limb in talking about this, since we can't promise anything to anyone at this point... but as you know I like transparency. And if Abe Sensei were to read this (as she almost certainly will, since I'm going to tell her about this blog in the next e-mail I send her), she will have to interpret it as my hopeful speculation rather than any kind of "plan." As I've mentioned before, in another two years we (that is, the chair of MLL and I) are planning to propose a second tenure-track position in Japanese. We will probably have need of a third person to teach a course or two before then, but hopefully by that time the enrollments in both old and new courses will be strong enough to warrant both a tenure-track position and another full-time visitor. I had originally envisioned this being a modern literature position, to complement my pre-modern literature specialization, but now I am thinking more about making it linguistics-oriented. After all, I can teach (and have taught... and WANT to teach) modern literature, but I couldn't teach a linguistics course for the life of me. When and if that happens, we will have to run a formal search for the position, of course, but Abe Sensei would be welcome to apply for it. And although we certainly can't say she'd have the "inside track," a proven record teaching our students well is a HUGE plus. So, that's a lot of "ifs" -- IF she signs on for another year, and IF she doesn't get a tenure-track offer elsewhere, and IF she likes us and we like her, and IF we get the position approved, and IF we make it linguistics oriented, then maybe... just maybe... Of course, you see why I'm not making any promises. There are just too many factors to seriously consider anything at this point. But these days I tend to see everything in terms of how it fulfills my goal of building the Japanese program, and for that we need the kind of stability you can't build on the backs of visitors. And unlike many of the candidates we had for this position (many of whom did not have a PhD and were solely language instructors), Abe Sensei at least has the potential to be a solid part of the department.

Boy, that was a lot of speculation for one post. It's the kind of thing one used to say in private behind closed doors rather than leaving a paper trail... or posting in a public place accessible by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Oops.