One of the most challenging, time consuming, and underacknowledged parts of being a history professor is building community among majors and minors. We may dream of an exciting departmental culture for our students, and we may even advertise that history is a “fun” major with lots of events. But how to go about the actual day-to-day labor of building community among undergraduates is less clear. This labor usually falls on the shoulders of women and people of color (often junior faculty members) who already do disproportionate amounts of service and invisible advising, which underlines the importance of addressing this topic.
How can we build community in our departments without burning ourselves out, and how can we get the credit for this work as a legitimate form of service? Community building among students is not only worth the time and effort, but also—with a little finesse—can be done efficiently and leveraged strategically for tenure, promotion, and merit raises.
My Experience with Building Community
I’m a recently tenured female faculty member in the history department at the University of Richmond, a small liberal arts college with a little over 3,000 undergraduates. We have about 50 history majors and 75 minors, and those numbers are on the rise. This achievement reflects not only the fact that my colleagues are excellent teachers, but also our efforts to raise our profile on campus as an attractive major with a distinctive community for our students.
My first service obligation as a junior faculty member was to advise our department’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (PAT), the National History Honors Society. When I first became the PAT advisor, the role was mostly perfunctory. Besides inducting new members, our chapter had been inactive for a decade, and we only had about a dozen members. Amid departmental conversations about marketing and recruitment, I wondered whether we could use PAT strategically to build excitement about the major.
It was difficult at first. Our initial event—a hangout with pizza, advertised with flyers—attracted only seven or eight students, but they all had great ideas for how we could build our chapter. We started a GroupMe chat; two of the students emerged as particularly active in the GroupMe, and I asked whether they wanted to be co-presidents (a position that I created from scratch, since we had no chapter bylaws). With the help of another student whom I appointed as vice president, we kicked into high gear, made an Instagram for the history department, and got started on planning other events.
Now, two years later, we have a thriving history department community. In fact, we won the PAT Best Chapter Award last year. We’ve expanded our student executive board to six members, meaning there are many students to share the workload, and we have bylaws to ensure continuity to the next PAT advisor. Today, much of my work involves approving students’ event ideas and signing bureaucratic forms. While it took a lot of work from me to get PAT off the ground at the start, it’s now running as a well-oiled machine.
How to Build Community—Some Ideas
- Delegate to your students. You do not need to do all the work yourself. You do not need to plan every event. You do not need to order food. You do not need to set up events or clean up afterwards. You do not even need to attend every event. Students love leadership positions, and, beyond adding lines to their resumés, leadership roles are good learning experiences for them. My students work with our department’s administrative coordinator to reserve spaces for the events, order food, make flyers, set up events, and clean up afterwards. If your department doesn’t have an awesome administrative coordinator like we do, students can do this by themselves. Repeat: delegate, delegate, delegate.
- Advertise on Instagram. Find an enthusiastic sophomore or junior and have them run an Instagram account for your department. A vibrant Instagram indicates to your current students (as well as prospective majors and minors) that your department is vibrant as well. Our Instagram @urhistory__ has nearly 1,000 followers—mostly students from our university—and is widely known as one of the “best Instagrams on campus.” In addition to advertising lectures and events, showcase your students’ accomplishments. Make posts profiling individual students and professors—what they did over the summer, where they studied abroad, what their research is about, and so on. My favorite series of posts is “Professor Pet Wednesday,” which builds community in a fun way by introducing students to their professors’ cats, dogs, and houseplants.
- Host trivia nights. One of our department’s best attended events is History Trivia Night, which we host twice a semester. There is a captive audience for this: many students don’t major in history or take history classes, but nonetheless love history. We do two of these a semester, Jeopardy-style. Each time, different students create categories and questions using a blank online template. The host can be a student, but it has become a tradition for me to host. I dress up as Alex Trebek (rest in peace) with a tie and a mustache drawn on with an Expo marker. The competitive spirit, plus pizza and prizes, makes it a ton of fun. Other departments have even followed suit with their own trivia nights.
- Take your students to conferences (including the AHA). Faculty should take undergraduates seriously as scholars as early as their sophomore year. In the past two years, I have taken nearly two dozen students to five conferences, three times to the PAT regional conference and twice to the AHA. Yes, undergraduates can present their research at the AHA. They can present posters or participate in undergraduate lightning rounds. Their registration fee is only $15 each as long as there is a faculty member from their school who is registered. In both cases, I was already going to the AHA, so it was relatively easy for me to have them tag along. Presenting at the AHA is an amazing experience for our students and it looks great for our university.
- Brainstorm other events. Your students should take the lead on this, but you might have great ideas for events that students can execute. Alongside trivia nights, our department did an awesome “Careers in History” event, where we brought back several alums plus staffers from our Career Services Department. PAT has also hosted brown bag lunches, where a professor has a casual conversation with students about their research. We’ve also connected history to pop culture: we organized tickets to a local performance of the Broadway musical Les Misérables and a private screening of the movie Napoleon at a local theater. Local field trips to historical sites are also popular, as are History Study Breaks with donuts and coffee during finals week, and we’ve been thinking about hosting student debate nights and movie nights on campus.
A Serious Form of Service—How to Make the Case in Tenure and Promotion Letters, Annual/Triennial Reviews, and Beyond
- Write your tenure and promotion letters wisely, showing how your labor directly supports departmental priorities such as marketing, recruitment, and enrollment. You have the power to shape how your colleagues, tenure and promotion (T&P) committees, and deans view this sort of service. For many departments, marketing, recruitment, and enrollment are high priorities. At a time of declining enrollment and cuts to faculty lines, departments are desperate to put “butts in the seats” in classrooms, so to speak, and to retain and increase declared majors and minors. Explain that community building is crucial for staving off this decline in enrollment because it is a form of marketing, recruitment, and retention. If your department, school, and university are serious about enrollment, then they should be serious about community building.
- Quantify and provide visual evidence of your labor. In T&P letters, as well as annual or triennial reviews, enumerate your community building tasks so that your colleagues can see your results clearly. Quantify your labor. Simply writing “I advised Phi Alpha Theta” or “I helped build community in the department” isn’t enough. Instead, be precise: I took “X” number of students to this conference, hosted “X” number of events, and had “X” number of students attend trivia night. Visual evidence is useful too. If supplemental materials are permitted in your service portfolio, include a document with photos of students at events and conferences, and perhaps screenshots of your department’s Instagram, with captions.
- Explicitly state how your labor benefits students. It should go without saying that community building events benefit your students’ education, but sometimes it needs to be framed using language with broad appeal across campus. A mathematician on the T&P committee may not understand the value of a fieldtrip to a local battlefield, or an administrator might not understand why you organized free tickets for students to see a historical movie in theaters. Hammer your message home: read your university’s mission statement and explicitly tie your labor to institutional priorities so that the payoff is clear.
- Reach out to your university’s communications office. The more visible your history community is, the more your labor will be taken seriously. Communications offices need regular content for the university’s website and newsletters. They are looking for stories to publish, and they want to highlight our students’ activities and accomplishments because they make the university look good. Email the communications office directly and invite them to your event to take photos. Tag the communication office’s Instagram (or the university’s Instagram) in your posts. This is how our History Trivia Nights earned a feature story in our university’s newsletter.
- Invite the dean to your events. Get on the dean’s radar. Hosting an event? Invite the dean more than once. They might not go to History Trivia Night, but will instead attend a Careers in History event. Even if they don’t go to anything, if you email the dean about events you’re planning, the dean will know that you’re planning events; if the dean knows that you’re planning events, you’re more likely to be taken seriously. You can also tell the dean about student achievements. Did one of the students you took to a conference win the Best Paper Award? Tell the Dean! Bragging about yourself might feel weird or off-putting, but bragging about your students will hopefully bring a smile to your administrators’ faces.
Community building is not only doable, but it can be accomplished without burning out. It can also be massively rewarding—and not just in a warm and fuzzy way. You can, and should, clearly frame the legitimate service you do and advocate for the professional rewards you deserve for labor that provides tangible benefits to your students and department.
Featured Image Credit: Student leaders of University of Richmond’s Phi Alpha Theta (PAT) chapter with the author at the chapter’s induction ceremony, 2024. Photo courtesy of University of Richmond PAT.
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