Departments of One

Graduate school prepared me for a world that didn’t exist. It prepared me to be a very specialized political theorist in a poli sci department of at least a couple dozen people. I have never worked in that world, other than as a teaching assistant.

Instead, I’ve spent most of my career in places where the poli sci department was either one person or two. In one case—DeVry—even that didn’t exist. I was the only one who taught poli sci, but I also had to teach courses in history, law, speech and English to hit a full-time load. (My weirdly accurate title was “assistant/associate professor of general education.”) As a department of one, or part of one, specialization really wasn’t an option. The course offerings reinforced that.

Being a department of one had its perks. Nobody argued with my choice of textbooks, for instance, and nobody argued over who got to teach the one section of American Government. But it was a lonely professional existence in many ways. I envied the folks over in English who had colleagues with similar backgrounds and interests. They could talk shop, share in-jokes and help each other improve. I could participate in that for my usual section of composition, but I was on my own for almost everything else. (The exception was a team-taught course in which I paired up with an American studies Ph.D. from Yale. In retrospect, I’m amazed that we got away with that for as long as we did.) I could see how it would become isolating.

Departments of one are much more common than we were led to believe in grad school. As many colleges have downsized their faculty ranks in the wake of enrollment and tuition shortfalls, I’d bet they’re becoming even more common. As an industry, though, we don’t talk about them much.

If graduate programs acknowledged the reality of departments of one, they’d probably work differently. They’d have to focus a bit more on breadth as opposed to depth, and they’d have to include some basics of department management. They’d also put considerably more focus on teaching.

Professional development is the tough nut to crack. As an isolated practitioner with a heavy teaching load, it can be easy to fall out of touch with a field. And many smaller tuition-driven colleges don’t pony up much for conference travel anymore, if they ever did.

Wise and worldly readers who are departments of one: How do you keep in touch with your field? Do you have people to talk to about teaching? And other than hiring colleagues, is there something the institution could do to make it less isolating?