College Instructor Looking for New Course of Action

Regina Lark is a roads scholar. She racks up 350 miles on Southland highways each week, traveling to and from teaching jobs at Pasadena City College, Glendale Community College and USC.

Lark’s cross-town schlep is wearisome, as is her hectic teaching schedule--five courses every semester. And because she’s a part-time lecturer, the 41-year-old Canoga Park resident doesn’t get the perks sometimes taken for granted by full-time peers on track for tenure: health and retirement benefits, a private office, relative job security and a sense of community.

“I really want to be at a place where I can educate and inform and have the freedom to be who I am,” Lark said. “Teaching is my passion--it’s what I do best. . . . But I’m frustrated by the lack of tenure-track positions available.”

Lark received her doctorate in history and a certificate in gender studies from USC in August. But she’s been applying for full-time positions at West Coast universities since 1998--to no avail. And though the higher-education job market has improved, it’s still discouragingly competitive. An advertisement for a full-time professorship can generate 400 responses, experts say.

To compound Lark’s employment challenges, she’ll soon have to begin paying back $52,000 in student loans. To meet her $530-a-month payments, Lark said she may have to shoulder even more teaching assignments or consider employment opportunities outside academia.

Lark wants to know whether a woman groomed to be a faculty member of a doctorate-granting university can successfully transition into the private sector. Would her academic skills impress corporate employers?

“I’ve been in academia so long, I don’t know what’s outside of it,” Lark said.

For help, Lark consulted Jane Celwyn, director of career services at Barnard College in New York. She told Celwyn she’d like to somehow incorporate her biggest interests--feminism, politics and gay/lesbian issues--into a vocation. She also wants to restrict her job search to the West Coast, “because this is where my base of support and love is,” Lark said. Lastly, Lark wants a sense of community and financial security. Her current teaching endeavors, which garner her about $35,000 annually, don’t provide these.

Celwyn first assured Lark that her situation is not at all unusual. “I know that 1 1/2 years of looking for a tenure-track position must seem like an eternity, but in the scheme of things, it’s not that long,” Celwyn said.

Then Celwyn, along with other higher-education experts, offered Lark these suggestions:

* Beef up your qualifications. If Lark wants to land a full-time position at a university, she shouldn’t abandon the dream, Celwyn said. But she’ll need to set herself apart from the applicant pack, among whom are “fresh PhDs with cutting-edge training,” said David Leary, dean of arts and sciences at University of Richmond in Virginia.

In recent years, university employers have increased their expectations for potential new hires. They’re demanding more teaching experience and publication successes. They’re also recruiting faculty from other schools for positions that previously went to new doctoral graduates.

“The bar is being raised,” said Robin Wagner, associate director for graduate services at the University of Chicago. “Even PhDs getting out of the top programs in the country don’t have the best jobs open to them anymore.”

Despite Lark’s heavy teaching schedule, she should try to add more scholarly achievements to her curriculum vitae. These can include published articles in refereed journals, presentations at national conferences and book reviews in academic publications. Landing a book contract for her dissertation, “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages Between Japanese Women and American GIs, 1945-1959,” would further bolster Lark’s chances of nabbing a tenure-track job, experts say.

Additionally, Lark can demonstrate her teaching skills to prospective employers by inviting them to observe her classes and showing them her student evaluations.

Perhaps Lark’s best option may be to seek a full-time position at a community college. Unlike four-year institutions, which demand rigorous scholarship credits from professors-to-be, community colleges look for instructors with great teaching skills and who are likely to make contributions as faculty members, said Randal Lawson, vice president of academic affairs at Santa Monica College.

Because hiring qualifications for educators at community colleges and four-year institutions are so different, Lark may have to decide which college market best suits her, then focus her efforts on building the skills--either research or teaching--that it demands.

* Consider other educational job opportunities. A growing number of for-profit education companies are recruiting people with doctorates in humanities, said Peter Stokes of Eduventures.com, a Boston-based market research firm for the education industry. These employers include test-prep companies, textbook and software publishers and Internet portals such as Britannica.com and Discovery Channel Online, all of which can benefit from doctoral graduates’ knowledge and research skills.

Companies that offer online courses and distance learning also hire people with Lark’s educational background to design and teach classes to the public.

Lark’s expertise in history and gender studies may prove valuable to advocacy groups, political organizations, local historical societies and museums, experts say. And if she has an entrepreneurial flair, she may be able to utilize her educational training to form a company.

That’s what Emory University graduate Paula Washington did. After earning her doctorate in women’s studies, Washington launched Womentor Group in Atlanta to provide consulting, seminars and speakers, and mentoring on women’s leadership issues. She also set up a Web site (https://www.womentor.com) and wrote “The Womentor Guide: Leadership for the New Millennium” (Sage Creek Press, 1999).

* Build consulting experience. Lark discussed with Celwyn the possibility of starting an education-related consulting practice, but experts say this is a hard path to follow. Getting authorization to consult at K-12 schools can be extremely difficult, said Connecticut-based consultant Peter Block, author of “Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used” (Jossey-Bass, 1999).

And although many colleges and universities have faculty development centers where trainers help instructors improve their teaching skills, these departments are almost always staffed by existing full-time faculty familiar with their schools’ culture and needs, said James Eisen, president of the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, or POD Network, and director of the Center for Teaching Enhancement at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The few external consultants hired by academic institutions for such training tend to carry a “prestige factor”--they have published influential textbooks on training and development or have grant-funded activities related to the field, Eisen said.

Should Lark still wish to explore this pursuit, Block suggested that she focus her consulting efforts on the community college system, which would be more receptive to her services. He also recommended that she develop a specialization and make educators aware of it by giving talks at conferences.

An immediate step Lark can take is to join training-related organizations such as the POD Network. Doing so would enable her to network with established pros in the field, give her early knowledge of job openings and enable her to keep up with developments in the field, said James Tarbox, president-elect of American Society for Training and Development.

She also can join one of the more than 80 training-related e-mail discussion groups on the Internet, known as “listservs.” Two popular ones are TRDEV-L at https://train.ed.psu.edu/trdev-l and the POD Network listserv at https://www.podnetwork.org/elec/maillist.html.

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Shop Talk does not appear today.

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Time for a Change

* Name: Regina Lark

* Occupation: Adjunct professor

* Desired occupation: Tenure-track professor

* Quote: “I thought my years of teaching experience and position as assistant director of [USC’s] Center for Feminist Research would put me at the top [for a full-time faculty job]. But I’ve been trying for 1 1/2 years.”

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Counselor’s Recommendations

* Consider using scholarship skills outside academia.

* Develop educational consulting expertise.

* Find an institution, perhaps a community college, that will value her teaching background.

* Enhance academic qualifications to improve chances of gaining tenured position.

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Meet the Coach

Jane Celwyn is the director of career services for Barnard College in New York.