Sending Our Students Out Into The Academy

John Walkup
Electrical Engineering (Emeritus)
Texas Tech University

Where to send our Ph.D. students when they leave the “academic nest” is a challenge.

Recommending that they accept a job at university A, B, or C is a matter for prayer, wise counsel from fellow believers, plus a fair amount of due diligence both by us and our students.

I vividly recall my own job search while finishing my Ph.D. at Stanford. I started by striking out with most of the West Coast universities I wrote to! This was after asking the Lord to show my wife and me where He wanted us to serve.

Wasting My Life

Three weeks later, I responded to a hand-written note deposited in my mailbox one afternoon by the department chairman at Texas Tech University. The rest, as they say, is history.

Before taking the position, one of my Stanford professors asked me if Tech was one of the top 20 EE departments in the nation. When I told him that I thought it had potential, he commented that working at such an unknown institution would be wasting my life.

In the ensuing years I discovered that God really did know what was best. My students and I were able to produce high quality research by working closely with a team of professors, several of which were fellow believers.  Some of my students went on to academic positions at universities more prestigious than my own.

I worked at a university where I could enjoy both a distinguished career and some balance in my life. I had time to be with my family and to have a ministry on campus and in my church.  Several times I turned down offers of full professorships at more prestigious universities because either it would have been bad timing for one of our children or I knew that realistically I would not have been able to take my team of researchers with me.

Pressures On The Academic Ladder

Over the years I have had many opportunities to observe the differences in the pressure levels at various places on the academic ladder. I experienced this in my own career, but it is even more apparent now I work with professors at universities in the San Francisco Bay area as a faculty representative with CLM.

Frankly, at the top 10 to 20 universities, the pressure to produce considerable quantities of top quality research (and, in many fields, the extramural funding required to finance that research) can be incredible. Some of these pressures can make one’s years in graduate school look like child’s play.

I share these things because I firmly believe that there are some distorted theories circulating out there as to where we should be sending our Ph.D. graduates.  Many times in my career I saw that if I was willing to put Christ first and really seek Him, the “other things” in life were taken care of, just as the Bible says.   Like all of God’s other promises, that’s one we can “take to the bank”!

My suggested summer reading list:

1. Schaefer, Henry F. “Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence” [The Apollos Trust]

2. C.P. Snow, “The Masters”  [House of Stratus] — One of his best; relates to ego clashes and politics in the English university.

3. John Piper, “Don’t Waste Your Life” [Crossway Books]

 
©    2007  John Walkup  Used by permission of Faculty Commons

The Price of Excellence

John Walkup
Emeritus-Electrical Engineering, Texas Tech
Faculty Representative, Faculty Commons

One of the comments I frequently hear, especially at the elite research universities, is that to have a good Christian witness to colleagues, our performance, and particularly our research, has to be very, very excellent!

We are to do our work “heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men” (Colossians 3:23, NASB). Our colleagues know if we are turning out inferior quality research (or students). Clearly, that type of record quickly leads to a poor professional reputation….and most likely a poor witness too.

How Do  We Define It?

My concern here runs to how one defines excellence. If it means one’s research output has to exceed that of all of one’s colleagues (i.e. more quantity than others as well as high quality) then I have some concerns based on God’s call to have right priorities.

Surely, if our actions transmit the message that our careers mean everything to us, will our colleagues believe us when we tell them that we meant to say that knowing Christ was really our top priority?

As a professor I wanted to do high quality research. Since I frequently teamed with one or two believing colleagues, quality was important to all of us. We all had families, however, and wanted to spend time with them. Thus we frequently made a choice to pursue quality over quantity in our research output.

Colleagues frequently gossip and always know who in the department has the most research grants or contracts, the most students, etc. Should we be deterred from our focus on quality knowing that they may be gossiping about us too?

Some of my Christian friends and colleagues excelled in their teaching and, because such excellent teaching was their top priority, published less research. In some instances they were not promoted to full professor in their departments. Were their witnesses for our Lord diminished by that lack of that recognition? I don’t think I can make that judgment.

Wanting To Be Number 1

A friend at Stanford University, Professor Richard Bube, once pointed out that the price of wanting to be “Number 1” in one’s career, may well result in negative results in other areas of life (e.g. one’s health, marriage, relationship with God).

I’ve personally known professors (Christians included) who have experienced the breakups of their marriages at least in part due to workaholic habits. Can any academic recognition adequately compensate for the feeling that you’ve sabotaged your marriage and your relationship with your children for the sake of recognition in your career?

I always knew that no matter how well known I might be as an academic, I was always going to be my three daughters’ dad, and my wife’s husband, and that their evaluations of my performance in fulfilling those roles were probably loosely correlated, at best, with my job performance as a professor.

Ultimately, as believers, it’s Christ’s “well done” that we want to hear, and our adequacy to “measure up” should come from our dependence on the Lord, not from our personal ambition or pride.

As Paul said in I Corinthians 1:31 “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord” (NASB).

© 2007 John Walkup Used by permission of Faculty Commons

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