Over a decade ago, after finishing teaching Robert Putnam’s classic Bowling Alone at NYU, I took my students bowling to unwind one evening and this was met with surprise and shock by a handful of department faculty members. I was told that it was a mistake to have spent time with students, for such engagement with undergraduates signaled that I was not a serious scholar. I was taken aback. I enjoyed being more than a fairly removed, anonymous, twice-a-week lecturer helping guide these students along their academic and post-collegiate professional journeys. Yet, it was clear that connecting with undergraduate students was not a real priority at NYU, at least within the politics department.
Now, I teach as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts college in New York. A significant part of the undergraduate experience at Sarah Lawrence involves close faculty work with students and helping supervise research regularly. Many liberal arts colleges promote themselves as teaching-centered, personal, and dynamic compared to a typical university experience that tends to focus more on faculty research than teaching. These significant institutional details have certainly been my experience over the years, and I have long wondered if this perception is generally correct.
