Why I moved from UVA to UIUC
During the dry years of this blog I engaged in various activities. Too many too list here. One of those was moving from UVA to UIUC; a few recent conversations have led me to think that writing more about that would be of interest.
I received my Ph.D. in CS from UVA in 2013. At that time I was unsure what kind of faculty job I wanted: teaching-track or tenure-track. It appeared to me that the simplest way to try one and leave the option open for the other was to take a 1-year teaching-track job at UVA; if I didn’t like it I could then pitch it as a temporary test at the end of my Ph.D. In hindsight I don’t think I was entirely correct about that, but that was my impression at the time. In either case, the expected flexibility proved moot because within days of starting in as teaching faculty I realized I loved it and never wanted to switch to the tenure track.
Tenure-track faculty are supposed to be topic specialists but work generalists. They teach, research, mentor other researchers, seek grants, manage budgets and employees and equipment, organize conferences, write papers, and lead the university. Universities generally also allow specialized faculty roles: some who just teach, others who just do research, and so on. Generally these specialized roles come in two flavors: those who are asked to do one thing almost only, such as research scientists who are asked to perform research or lecturers who are asked to teach classes; and those who are asked to add to that one thing some of the other work of tenure-track faculty, such as teaching professors who teach and help lead the department. The lines here are all quite fuzzy; you might find a tenured faculty member who has chosen to stop engaging in half of the typical tenure-track work or a specialized faculty member who does all the kinds of things a tenure-track faculty member does.
Different disciplines think differently about specialized faculty. Some treat them like hired help with no voice or rights; others like full colleagues. This varies also from university to university and sometimes by particular specialization track.
In CS, teaching faculty are common and important. Every CS department I know of that has at least ten faculty and awards Ph.D. degrees has at least a few teaching faculty, and having them be 10–30% of the total faculty body and responsible for teaching a majority of undergraduate student credit hours is common. Qualified CS teaching faculty are rare, with many fewer on the job market each year than there are job openings for them, which has helped teaching faculty in CS gain policy support for full-colleague status in many CS departments.
I worked at UVA for nine years. I loved it. I had great colleagues, great students, and many friends. I was treated well, both on paper and in practice. They wanted me to stay, and offered me more to remain. Yet, I still moved. Why?
The reasons are manifold. A few follow.
When I took the job it was a one-year contract, and I fully expected to stay only one year. In academia the usual rule is get a Ph.D. at one institution and then become faculty at a different institution. During my first year I applied to five jobs, turned one down before I got an offer and got offers from three of the other four. But a friend in Charlottesville was entering an extended rough patch and I wanted to stay to support them, and I got a longer offer at UVA, so I stayed. But in my mind it was still a short-term stay: just until my friend was in a better place.
Two years later my friend was in a better place and I was ready to move, but I had a few things going I didn’t want to abandon half-done. I was part-way through working on a major revision to UVA’s policies for specialized faculty and wanted to see them through. I was working with a few other teaching faculty to re-design the CS curriculum and that was exciting and fun and worth continuing. So I decided to stay for a few more years.
Two more years in, UVA now had some of the best teaching-track faculty policies I knew of and the curriculum redesign was getting to the most exciting parts of implementing new courses. Our teaching faculty group was growing rapidly and life was generally quite exciting. I still watched the job postings, as my initial thought that UVA was a temporary home had never left, but it was very rare to see a job that could be compared at all favorably to the one I had. I started to think in terms of staying at UVA long term as no other job seemed able to compete, but I also had a feeling of giving up on an earlier plan when thinking that.
Two more years and all of that had changed. Policies like those I’d helped craft at UVA started being introduced at other schools. The curriculum redesign was past the fun part of making new courses and into the less exciting part of rolling them out. The UVA CS teaching faculty were now a large and experienced group that could handle whatever was thrown at them; I felt less guilty about leaving them. I was again thinking in terms of my original intent of moving on, not from any discontent but just because that was always the plan.
Then came the COVID-19 lockdown and everything went on hold for a bit, but when it lifted I found a job and took it, fulfilling my original intent eight years later than I’d originally expected.
Charlottesville Virginia, where UVA is located, is beautiful. Rolling hills, streams, flowers, woodlands, easy access to the Shenandoah forest. I loved it.
But it’s not very practical. The same landscape that makes it beautiful also limits its growth; housing prices were high and traffic much less pleasant than you’d expect from a town of its size. The political battle between beauty and function sometimes caused bad feelings and often resulted in compromises that I found worse than either extreme would have been, like when the group that wanted a new road and the group that wanted to preserve a park compromised on a low-capacity low-speed road through a park that both failed to relieve traffic pressure and destroyed a previously-accessible bit of wilderness.
I wanted to live somewhere where I didn’t feel like I was over-paying for a house and where driving was more relaxed. Also somewhere that was, like Charlottesville, green and humid, things I love, and not too urban, something I’m not fond of.
Group size changes many things about an experience as a member of the group.
At UVA, I joined a faculty of 28, one of 6 joining with me. We all knew each other and knew that whatever the faculty did, we did. There was camaraderie, with some discord but in the family-like way where you know who the people who will disagree are before the issue is raised and all get along despite that.
When I left UVA it had a faculty of between 50 and 60. Many of the faculty had jobs in two departments, making it difficult even to count how many we were. Most of us only knew some of us and there was a sense that someone would do whatever we didn’t do. But we still had by-laws and practices that assumed consensus and getting everyone’s buy-in was the right thing to do.
At UIUC, I joined a faculty of around 115, with similar difficulty in counting as UVA. It is structured with 12 areas that each operate as little mini-faculty of 5–20 people each. The areas operate by camaraderie and consensus, like UVA did when it was smaller, but the department operates by open discussion and closed-ballot vote followed by leadership decision. Much of the small-department feel is back, with the areas I participate in knowing what they have responsibility for and working through them accordingly.
Other aspects of size also appeal to me. I enjoy classes of 30 or less, where I can get to know every student, and classes of 150 or more, where I can plan on group think and utilizing the kinds of people I know a group that large will contain. At UVA I often taught classes of 70, a number I personally found less pleasant, while at UIUC 150 is often called small
. I also appreciate the scale that allows a team of professional academic advisors, the university scale that builds suitable classrooms and facilities, and so on.
I like people. I had good friends and colleagues at UVA. I have good colleagues at UIUC who I’m making into friends. I am confident I will have good friends and colleagues wherever I go.
That said, part of the pull of UIUC in particular was that one of my close collaborators already worked here. That knowledge made leaving my many friends at UVA more palatable.
Policies matter. I spend half a decade at UVA fighting to get policies that encoded the idea that teaching-focused faculty were colleagues, not hired hands. I knew I could do that again, but I didn’t really want to. So I read the university-level policies on teaching faculty before I applied.
Policies are messy, probably worth a post in and of themselves, but at a high level I was looking for the following:
When I was on the job market in 2014 it was rare to find a teaching-track job that had policies with all three of these points. Happily, that is no longer the case.
If you’ve read much of my blog, you realize I’m a religious person. I’m not just religious in the common sense, though; I also have a pretty good working relationship with deity. So when yet-another job posting came into my feed and the Spirit told me that’s exciting
I believed said spirit, even though I didn’t yet know what it was exciting. Several more times in the next few weeks God told me it was time to go, and where to go as well. More as nudges, look at that,
you’re ready,
here’s how to write a good application,
things like that; nothing like the out-of-the-blue instruction I had when I chose my undergrad institution and major; but still, clear enough. So I went.
I’ve learned that this kind of relationship with deity confuses people. Even other faithful members of my own church. But it’s a fundamental part of how I operate; almost every major change in my life has been informed or in some cases directed by it.
I am happy I moved. I have a house that cost less than a third of what it would have in Charlottesville, a job I understand and enjoy, work colleagues who are becoming friends, and church colleagues who already are. I miss my friends in Charlottesville, I miss knowing the school inside and out, I miss the mountains and forests, but this was the right move for me.