I have been thinking a lot about our faculty as we celebrate promotion, tenure and our annual awards for teaching, service, and scholarly and creative activity \u2013 key responsibilities for a university professor. As we approach spring, I receive peer reviewed faculty files with recommendations for promotion and tenure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each of those three areas involve an incredible amount of\nwork. Teaching alone takes enormous amounts of time. In addition to all the\ntraditional work \u2013 creating lectures and tests, reading and grading papers and old-school\nthings like that \u2013 there is finding and developing opportunities for service learning\nprojects, creating, managing and monitoring online courses, finding and\nlearning how to use constantly evolving software tools, integrating video into\nlesson plans and the Cloud into course management, and a whole host of other\ndigital developments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scholarly activity is hours and hours of research and then\nmore research, and then synthesizing it all, writing up findings and conclusions,\noften writing a lot of it over again, and then getting it published. Acts of\nliterary or artistic creation involve the same kind of amazing dedication, purpose\nand resolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The service component encompasses all the things faculty do\nto serve the campus and the community outside the classroom: volunteering for community\nand campus activities; serving as officers in professional associations; taking\non roles for hiring committees, policy committees, emergency planning task\nforces, academic boards and so many other similar tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our faculty do all of these things day after day, and the\npromotion and tenure files document all of them. It is truly remarkable. I am in\nawe at the resolve and stamina represented in all those impressive files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An exchange I had with one of our English faculty, Cathy\nAdams, on the challenges of publishing is a perfect illustration of how\nimportant it is to remain positive and persistent. She wrote in part:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe writer\u2019s life is one of rejection like no other. On average, I\u2019m lucky to get five short stories published each year. This is out of a pool of about 20 stories that I circulate to publishers. At any given time my short stories are sitting on the desks of publishers all over the globe. \u2026 This calculates to something like 400 rejections and five acceptances each year. It\u2019s actually a little worse than that because out of that 400, some never bother to reject my story at all. They simply never respond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cImagine that for every 405 men or\nwomen you asked out on a date, 400 rejected you. And what about the ones who\nnever respond but simply ignore you altogether? How long would you bother to\nstay in the dating game if those were your odds? Apply this level of rejection\nto a job search, or to the submission of an academic paper to a conference, or\na proposal for a project. Being rejected 400 times would eventually numb a\nperson to ever trying again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe irony of my writing statistics is\nthat my acceptances are actually high in relation to the quality and quantity\nof publishers to which I submit my stories. For me, getting five short stories\npublished in a year is a great achievement. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI admit that some days I get tired and I ask myself why I keep trying. It would be so easy to just stop at rejection 200 or 300, but I\u2019ve been writing for 25 years and one of the things I\u2019ve learned is that persistence is at least as important as talent. I\u2019ve met a lot of creative and smart people who say they are \u201cthinking of writing a story,\u201d but they never get around to doing it. Twenty-five years ago I was one of those people, but my life was changed by a writer named Judith Ortiz Cofer. \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOne day I was invited to a luncheon to\ncelebrate a student who had won a writing competition, and Cofer was the guest\nspeaker. I was fortunate to be seated next to her, and I made the mistake of\nsaying, \u2018I\u2019d love to write a book one day, but I\u2019m just too busy.\u2019 Cofer put\ndown her fork, looked me directly in the eye and said, \u2018Well, when you want to\nwrite a book, you will.\u2019 I felt as if I\u2019d been slapped. How dare she say that\nto me? She had no idea how busy I was. I had diapers to change, laundry to do, and\nmeals to cook, all on top of a full-time job. My mind reeled at the insult. But\nas the days passed I couldn\u2019t forget what she\u2019d said. \u2018When you want to write it, you will.\u2019 <\/em>I knew what she meant. We\nfind the time to do what we want to do and everything else just slides by. Soon\nI was getting up at 5:00 AM and writing until my son woke up. On the weekends I\nwould often write half the night. Within a year, I finished that book I was too\nbusy to write, and I\u2019ve never stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So as we celebrate our\nfaculty at the end of this academic year, I marvel as they meet the challenge\nof attaining excellence in teaching; as they juggle busy schedules to be\nengaged members of our community and campus in a myriad of roles; and as they\npersist and thrive in their creativity and scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am so very impressed by and grateful for the wonderful level of their achievements. What an honor it is for me to recognize our faculty every year for their many successes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tisa Mason is president of Fort Hays State University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been thinking a lot about our faculty as we celebrate promotion, tenure and our annual awards for teaching, service, and scholarly and creative… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12323,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-life","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tigermedianet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Mason-Tisa-040A6662.jpg?fit=750%2C1050&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45573,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45572\/revisions\/45573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}