Kannan’s long road to current role of full-fledged professor
completed his first year of full professorship at Utah State University.
Kannan, born and raised in London, came to the United States to go to graduate school at Indiana University in 1985, where he earned his MBA. He said he then went on to get his doctorate degree at Michigan State University.
Kannan said that though he completed his undergraduate work in London, he wanted to come to the United States to continue his education. He said he had visited the United States quite a few times when he was younger and he enjoyed the summer temperatures.
“I was usually here in the summer when it was nice and warm and sunny,” Kannan said. “In England, it’s never all that warm and hardly ever sunny.”
Weather aside, Kannan said he knew he wanted come here and get his MBA.
“I just felt back then that in terms of my ability to get ahead, to be able to control my own future, I had more opportunity,” Kannan said.
One of the challenges Kannan said he faced near the end of completing his master’s degree is the same challenge many foreign students face: being able to stay.
“I had the wrong type of visa; I was a student. I didn’t have the right to stay,” Kannan said. “When I was getting done with my master’s, it was challenging since I had a limited financial resources. I didn’t really have the time or the money to go [and find a job].”
Even though Kannan said he had the education needed for a job, he said employers would not consider him for a job because he did not have a green card. That’s when he said he followed the advice of a professor at Indiana University.
“He said, ‘Go do a Ph.D. you’ll be more fulfilled. It will be more challenging,’ Kannan said. “So I said, ‘OK, why not?'”
Five days after Kannan completed his doctorate degree, he said he married Karin Dejonge, who was also working on her Ph.D., and whom he had known for more than six years.
“A week later, we bought a house together,” he said. “All in the space of 10 days. I defended on the 19th, turned in the final work on the 20th, I got married on the 24th and I think I signed the papers on the house about the 30th.”
After completing his doctorate, Kannan said he was able to get a job at a university because the school felt that he was the best candidate for the job and took the necessary steps make it so he could work in the United States.
“It was a long process,” Kannan said. “It took 10 years after I first came to the U.S. – after two graduate degrees that I finally had a green card – and said, hey, I can stay.”
While teaching at a university in Virginia, where he was already tenured, Kannan said he was not happy and considered leaving higher education. He decided to try one more department before giving up, and that is when he said he came to USU.
Kannan said he was attracted to USU because he enjoyed the small campus town environment. He said he was also looking for a place where he could raise his two children and where is wife could also teach. Having lived in the Shenandoah Valley, he said he was looking at geography.
“We wanted to come to a place that was at least as pretty. We had no desire to move to a place that was big urban jungle,” Kannan said.
After visiting the campus in 2000 and talking with people in the business department, Kannan said he made the move to Utah and was honored as a full professor in April 2005.
Kannan said when someone decides to join the faculty, particularly if they have a Ph.D., they join as an assistant professor. In most schools, he said there is a six-year probationary period where the person must demonstrate through their teaching, research and service activities whether or not they have what it takes to have a permanent job at the university.
“After six years, you basically put together a packet of your accomplishments,” he said.
At USU, there is a committee that evaluates these packets, which can be quite thick – filled with research, published papers, teaching materials and evaluations. He said the committee then sends a summary to faculty at other universities to see if what the candidate has done is deserving of a promotion.
If approved, it then goes to the dean, who decides if they want to support the person for tenure or not, Kannan said.
The university then does the same thing and after all this, he said a person is then made an associate professor.
Kannan said the promotion process does not stop there. Associate professors then continue to work hard to go through the same processes to be promoted again. Kannan said this process usually takes about 10 years.
“It’s not an easy process,” Kannan said. “It takes time. You have to put a lot of packets together.”
During their first year of being a professor, Kannan said they are called inaugural professors to denote the accomplishment.
Next spring, Kannan will be taking a sabbatical and traveling to India with his family as part of a fellowship to serve as an professor and ambassador at Lucknow University.
-ashleykarras@cc.usu.edu