Fear not, student body. Yak away about your professors’ in-class jokes and the long list of things you’d rather do than sit through one more lab. Your instructors aren’t going to downvote your posts — they probably won’t read them. When I asked some of the youngest faculty on campus if they frequented Yik Yak, the most common response I received was “What?”
Economics professor Paul Novosad, 37, seems to be the one students might need to worry about. He has the app downloaded on his phone, although he admits he doesn’t post much and only has a Yakarma of 111.
Philosophy professor James Moor, who has been at the College since 1972, also put many of the younger faculty to shame — at least he’s heard of the app, even if he’s never checked out the College’s Yak scene.
Although the College’s young professionals may not completely familiar with social media habits of today’s college-aged kids, they are still young people, and they still have social lives.
Yet Hanover is not a town built for young professionals. It’s a town built for college students and families.
Mathematics professor John Voight, 37, called the College a “cascade of awesomeness.” Yet downtown Hanover, while quaint and picturesque, doesn’t necessarily offer a wide array of things to do on a weekend night. The small community and limited nightlife make it difficult for many younger professors to find a way to spend their time outside of work.
“I don’t have a social life here,” he said. “I don’t even know how to go about making one.”
This lack of a social life, however, isn’t for lack of wanting one. Even for professors who may be more interested in a more involved social life in Hanover, the small population makes it difficult.
“You want to go out,” Voight said. “You want to have a critical mass of people around.”
Younger faculty with spouses and children whom I interviewed said they couldn’t imagine dating here. It’s not the ideal place to be single, as the pool of potential suitors is so small and places to meet people so scarce. All the faculty I interviewed noted that married people have it easier here — it’s easier to take advantage of Hanover’s social scene with a spouse in tow.
Still, being single makes it a lot easier to uproot your life and move to middle-of-nowhere New Hampshire. Spouses might have a hard time tracking down Upper Valley jobs, particularly if their career path don’t align with higher education. Novosad’s wife works in Boston, and he said that one would be more likely to follow a partner out of Hanover than into it.
“A lot of young professors I know have most of their lives elsewhere,” he said.
This statement was largely held true through my interviews, though not always with partners that live in a different city. Music professor William Cheng, 29, likes the intimate, small town of Hanover, but ultimately cited having “a partner and a house and an English bulldog and two cats” as what helps him feel so settled.
Novosad noted that young professors who have children have very different experiences than those who don’t.
“I don’t have any spare time other than with my kids,” he said.
Young faculty who are also parents, then, may not have as strong of a desire to carve out their own social space in Hanover because the town is a fantastic place to raise a family.
“When you come here as a family, it feels pretty natural. There’s a lot of other kid stuff going on,” Italian professor Laurence Hooper, 33, said.
Linguistics professor Laura McPherson, 29, who called being a young academic in Hanover “tricky,” also commented on the perceived ease of settling in with a family — Hanover, she said, really caters to students and families.
Voight, who doesn’t have children, said he spends a lot of time outside of the Upper Valley.
That’s not to say that single, childless faculty have nowhere to go and no one to talk to. Some young faculty help each other through the transition into small-town life.
McPherson said she has found a tight-knit social network of young professors — finding one’s place here, she said, can be “really fun.”
Other faculty stressed the ease of making a quick, close group of friends. Hooper was hired with two other faculty in his department the same year, and said that the “shared experience” of his incoming class of faculty has made the transition easier.
Moor, who has been here for more than 40 years, shared similar experiences from the opposite end of the spectrum. He said that the College’s small departments engender close faculty relationships. Age doesn’t necessarily play a role in creating friendships or conversation as much as area of interest.
If the dating pool is small, it seems the friendship pool isn’t much larger — there simply aren’t enough people in each department to make cliques, he said. Where age does play a role, Moor said, was in the stresses of getting tenure. Often times, young faculty prioritize securing tenure.
And the pressure is definitely on. As Hooper puts it, the youngest professors on campus may have “made the mistake... of graduating in 2009” — right at the onset of the economic downturn. Indeed, tenure-track positions are not easy to come by, and for some of the freshest faces on campus, Hanover’s nightlife wasn’t on the top of their criteria for taking the job. Our faculty were frequently the lucky ones in their graduating cohort, and the promise of a job at the College was simply too luring to resist for many.
“I didn’t have a choice. That being said, it was my top choice,” Novosad said.
McPherson, who just received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles last years, calls her current position her “dream job.”
“In terms of career fit it was perfect,” she said.
It may be just because they were sitting down with a student, but the professors I interviewed said they were delighted by the advantages their age brought to their teaching.
Computer science professor Xia Zhou, 31, said she likes being around young students who make her feel young.
“Sometimes, I can learn from them as well,” she said.
Cheng commented on the “interesting interplay between learning from [his] students and teaching them.”
Last term, he taught a seminar on video game music and felt that he was in a unique position to relate with them. Yet being young enough to relate to students has its downsides.
Cheng said that fellow faculty, administrators and students have all mistaken him for a student.
“Basically, everyone assumes that I’m a student,” he said.
“And it’s not because I dress poorly,” he added.
He’s not the only one, though. Hooper said he doesn’t wear apparel with university logos because he gets carded when he does. McPherson, on the other hand, is now offended when she isn’t asked for her ID. She’s lucky, though — she’s more often mistaken for a graduate student than an undergraduate.
Voight was mistaken for a senior when a prospective student’s parent asked for directions, and Zhou was asked what her major was at the computer science open house she was attending as a faculty member.
These funny — if slightly annoying interactions — are a small price to pay for the opportunities Hanover and the College provide faculty.
“The College is pretty magical,” Voight said.
