New School Year
This past week has been my first full week of teaching at Wabash. So far it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience and I enjoy my new job a lot. Many people don't know this, and I delight in telling them, but Wabash is one of two or three remaining all-male colleges in the United States. Wabash is a place where word tradition has a lot of weight, and not going coeducational has been one of their salient points. For people for whom the whole concept of tradition is an anathema, this attitude can be very alien, but I personally don't have an issue with that. Initially it was a bit weird to walk into a large classroom filled exclusively with young men, but after only a short while you stop thinking about that. Students are just students, and your primary goal as a professor is to educate them to the best of your abilities, and under those circumstances the issues of sex, race and other demographical indicators quickly fade into the background.
Besides being very much into tradition, Wabash is actually a very libertarian place. There seems to be very little micromanagement of faculty and students. This may seem contradictory, but I've come to see that traditional values and individual freedoms are not contradictory. In fact, many social attitudes surveys do have these two sets of values mapped onto different dimensions. I personally thrive in that sort of environment. I think that I am qualified and competent enough to run my classes and my work to the best of my ability, and I appreciate when I am given the freedom and the responsibility to make those professional decisions on my own. A work environment that allows its employees to act along those lines also fosters the sense of trust and ownership over the institutional goals.
The only aspect of my new job that I had some misgivings about was the half an hour daily commute. However, with some strict discipline and careful planning, the time on the road and the drive itself don't seem to be presenting too much of a burden on me. I've gotten a few books on tape, but even on days that I don't listen to them the commute seems to pass by fairly quickly.