4.1 Holistic Perspective

You have your research and formal service within the department, faculty, and institution. You have your teaching obligations. These are all fine, but is it enough? What are you doing, what could you be doing to actually make the institution better? This is the bit about giving forward and contributing to the academic community in which you find yourself.

At the end of your career, what can you say about your time as an academic? What have you done to improve the lot of students beyond your own students and classes? What have you done to improve the fabric of the institution? Making it better for others? How did you choose to spend your time? Has everything been about pub counts and promotion criteria, or have you contributed to making the institution actually better? Will you be able to point to things and say 'I helped improve...'.

Over the years we have often heard 'just don't have the time' as an excuse for not doing anything beyond the minimum required. But, is this true? Not in all cases, but in many, tasks grow to fill the time and many of our tasks as academics are not efficient nor effective. There is lots of make busy time, questionable meetings, activities that give the appearance of work being done, but the return on investment is not that great. Have you ever wondered the ROI on a meeting where you have 6-8 highly paid individuals; how effective and efficient is the meeting, is the agenda worth having a meeting for? Do you actually know what an efficient and effective meeting feels like, how to run one? How to participate in one? In effective and efficient meetings, people come prepared, keep focus, sidebar things, and task activities. Meetings are not to actual problem solve in the weeds with 6-8 or more in attendance. Rarely is something done well in such a situation. So, before saying 'don't have time', are you being effective and efficient? Or, are you just doing busy work?

All of our academic activity can add up to a full day of things done, but did the things need to be done, time well spent, and we should be held accountable for a work day; 6.5 hours of work on average, value added work at that. If you do not feel like working on research, there is teaching or service. We are paid to deliver value, and as a professional, we should have some reasonable expectations of efficiency and effectiveness within the profession. And, if we are efficient and effective, there will be time to do things outside of the normal teaching, service, and research activities.

General thoughts...

• Some activities will be transient without a permanent mark on-campus, but that is ok. You are making a difference in the moment. For example, working with student clubs is an ongoing situation with different students cycling in and out.
• During your career, it is not reasonable to constantly help or contribute on institutional topics, but it should be possible to volunteer on, or initiate a few things that will potentially improve the institution. Perhaps something every three to five years? Can you say after being an instructor for perhaps three decades that you done something more than the bare minimum or just what you have been asked to do to satisfy yearly service requirements? Not just your own labs and research groups, but what you have done for others, with others?
• There are likely opportunities for how to help students transition from high school, deal with the challenges of becoming a professional student, learning how to learn at the university level.

• It is possible to mentor students, perhaps in a different department. Create a relationship in first year, work with the student through graduation. Remember that mentoring is not the same as counselling, advising, supervising, or coaching. These are all different types of interactions and each has a different objective, scope, and appropriate methods.
• It is good to mentor a colleague, be their teaching buddy; preferrably from a different department.
• Your research specialty might be useful in various ways to create or enhance existing situations in the department or faculty.
• You can help with student clubs beyond nominal advising? Help the students learn how to organize, run events, and such.
• Can your skills and expertise help various units on campus? Can you help improve the student experience for those living in residence? Look around, there are lots of things happening on campus. What else can you do to improve the student, staff, or instructor experiences?
• You can help with community outreach to high schools, community groups; leveraging your passion, skills and knowledge to better integrate the institution into the community.
• Ramsden (1987) discusses a holistic perspective for academics to consider when teaching (e.g., not just the content, but also knowing how students learn), and this view can be extended to beyond the classroom, beyond the course.

Further reading

• Ramsden, P. (1987). Improving teaching and learning in higher education: The case for a relational perspective, Studies in Higher Education, 12, 3, pp. 275-286.