By Al Auster
I recently received tenure. While that's hardly unusual in academe, what is unusual is that it was my fourth attempt. Well, technically it was my fifth, but who's counting? So I would call my story a case of either heroic persistence or epic tunnel vision. You be the judge.
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What is clear to me is that sometimes persistence pays off. (Also, it doesn't hurt to have support in high places.) In addition, I believe you should never allow a negative tenure decision to affect your self-worth. (I always felt that the institutions that had turned me down had made a terrible mistake.)
But most of all, if your dream is to teach at a university, as mine was, then, unless circumstances absolutely dictate otherwise, you should follow that dream. As Emily Dickinson wrote, "Hope is a strange invention, a Patent of the Heart in unremitting action, yet never wearing out."
My mother's colleague who was marched off of campus after having delivered death threats to me when I was 13 subsequently had a stellar and tenured career somewhere else. So Auster may be right that persistence will win in the end. But I don't know if in all cases that's a good thing.
ReplyDeleteDid you bounce around, leaving before tenure review each time? Were you denied tenure four times? Did this all happen at the same place? What's your discipline?
ReplyDeleteIn my neck of the academic woods, it's rare to get denied tenure and then to be able to move anywhere.
@Stella
ReplyDeleteReally? I've heard of heaps of people who have missed tenure at one place and then got it somewhere else, including people I know personally.
In my discipline there are universities, especially the Ivy League and some other highly-ranked schools, that are well-known for hiring multiple tenure-track Assistant Profs, and then giving tenure only to one or two of them. The ones who don't make tenure are often excellent candidates, and end up getting perfectly good t-t or tenured jobs elsewhere.
My own dissertation adviser missed out on tenure at an Ivy League University in the 1970s, but went on to have a stellar career at two separate R1 universities.
I also have two friends who, in the last few years, were denied tenure (one at Prestigious Private University and the other at Huge Top-Tier State U) but still found jobs and are now in tenured positions at very good schools.
I probably should have faceted my response more. I was denied tenure myself and then got another job--but I didn't really tell my new school I was denied tenure. I didn't lie. When they asked why I was leaving I cited certain true reasons about the tenure situation at my old university, but didn't extrapolate on my own situation. I think it's fair to say I misled them. It's also fair to say I was denied tenure unfairly and have done a bang-up job at my current university since the Clinton administration.
ReplyDeleteIvies don't really count--Harvard doesn't intend to give anyone it hires at asst. prof level tenure, anyway. I guess what I'm talking about in lateral moves--can an English prof. not get tenure for cause (supposedly) at one university and then all of a sudden move to another? Sure. If that person being denied tenure is at a teaching university and is a bad teacher--but has been publishing books with Cambridge UP, sure. Or someone denied tenure for not publishing enough going to a teaching university.
But if you're an English prof at an R-1, denied tenure because you didn't produce much, and don't seem likely to, can you get another tenure-track position at an R-1? Snowball in hell, unless the person was railroaded unfairly (which does happen, as I know). And being denied tenure anywhere is something that must be finessed with the new university, because the new uni has to figure out whether that person was railroaded unfairly, and that takes effort and is stressful, especially when there are other blemish-free candidates waiting around.
I'd have no trouble hiring someone at our teaching university who had been denied at an R-1, if it was obvious that they were good teachers and that their preoccupation with teaching over research had cost them their jobs. But if they've still got that R-1 mentality and feel cheated and bitter because they haven't fulfilled their potential (which is equally likely), then they can find themselves another school.
I second the idea that the Ivies don't count. In my observations at two of them, I'd say that their assistant professor jobs are tenure track mostly in the sense that they lead fairly reliably to eventual tenure somewhere else.
ReplyDeleteI can think of one person who was denied tenure at a university (whether R1 or R2, I'm not sure), mostly because of a lack of research (financial concerns had forced her to finish the too-short grad program from which we both graduated in the prescribed time, which meant her dissertation was thin and her other publications nonexistent), spent a year at a community college, then was hired and eventually tenured by a public SLAC. So it does happen. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that I know some other people who, like Stella, don't advertise their somewhat circuitous paths to tenure.
But, although this guy is, at least, honest about the amount of luck and old-boy-style networking involved (if he were female, I bet he'd still be contingent somewhere), I still think his final "stick to it" message is a bit dangerous in the current climate. The other message you could take from his story is "always have a non-academic plan B"; that strikes me as a smarter one. If it ends up leading, as it did for him, back to academia, great; if not, at least you have a job.