A bit of cultural theory—in story form...
When I came up for tenure, the final step in the long process was my meeting with a committee of senior administrators and tenured professors for a...well...chat. As I walked from my department building toward the administration building, I wondered what this chat would be all about. What might it involve? What were they going to ask me? For weeks this committee had reviewed all of my candidate materials—a ton of stuff having to do with my job performance over the past several years teaching at the college. What more did they need to know to make their big decision: To tenure or not to tenure?
I was more curious than nervous.
The meeting was in a darkened room around a heavy wooden table with thick carpeting underfoot. Administrator chic. The college President and Provost were there along with six senior professors from various departments around campus. As soon as they asked me their first question, I knew immediately what kind of meeting this was. What situation I was in. Before replying to the question, I commented to the group as a bit of an ice-breaker:
“Oh, I get it now. Walking over here, I wasn’t really sure what I was walking into. You know, what kind of meeting this was going to be. But now I see that this is basically a job interview.”
Not that long ago, during my frenetic academic-job-hunting days, I’d been through what seemed like several thousand of these things. The scars were still fresh. But I was happy to understand, at least, that I was performing now in a very familiar gladiatorial pit.
Until a very kind and accomplished History professor corrected me:
“No, Kirk,” he smiled, a little impishly, “this is THE job interview.”
We all laughed—but I sure appreciated the added information. The chat went fine.
So what is this tenure thing? And what did I need to do to get it?
So many things...
In this post, I just want to set the academic stage for you. Give you an idea of what the professor hamster wheel is all about. Name the players involved in the academic game and sketch out for you the dimensions of the professorial playing field. Before exploring the significance of something, you need to get acquainted with its context. Otherwise, you’re spinning your intellectual wheels. (For example, I never hurl students headlong into reading Paradise Lost without first prepping them with a thorough informational session on Milton’s fascinating life and turbulent times. Along with pointless, that would just be cruel.)
So this post will be context. The next post will be potential meanings and consequences—the customary “So what?” theorizing business that is the bread-and-butter of Rant Against the Regime. One vital bit of context to give you up front, though, is this:
The principle purpose of granting tenure is to safeguard academic freedom. Academic freedom, briefly defined, is a professor’s freedom to express ideas without the risk of official interference or professional penalty.
Keep this context in mind as you read.
Telling this bit of cultural story
First of all, tenure does not mean “ten year.” Lots of people seem to think so. And while it can seem like a decade trying to win it, academic tenure is similar, I imagine, to being made partner at a law firm. Or maybe becoming a “made man” in the Mafia. After a lengthy and arduous trial period, you’re finally fully initiated. You’ve jumped through all the hoops set before you. You’re on the inside now. Hired for life. And, in theory, the only way you can lose your job is to do something really stupid. Like hit on a student or embezzle funds or plagiarize your research.
And even then your being dismissed is by no means a sure thing. Old Boys, after all, network for a reason...
Second of all, not all college teachers even get a shot at coming up for tenure. In fact, these days, fewer and fewer are granted the privilege of suffering through the harrowing tenure process. You have to get yourself hired into a “tenure-track” position before all the blood, sweat, and tears can begin. Until then, you’re stuck in a college teaching situation that involves—on top of the blood, sweat, and tears—sheer frustration, extreme exploitation, and constant humiliation.
By the way, colleges and universities are always looking to hire teachers into these non-tenure-track jobs. So send in those curricula vitae...
Because, third of all, what you need to know most about academia is that, at its core, it is a hierarchical maze experience. For those foolish/naïve/idealistic/dedicated/lucky enough to step into the game, there are pitfalls, tormenters, and blind alleyways aplenty. I’ll outline the hierarchy first. Then we’ll trace the uncertain steps of the supplicant navigating the labyrinth.
Adjunct Faculty, Visiting Faculty, Instructor, Lecturer, Dogsbody, Whatever: Various names are given to non-tenure-track college teachers. The names try to sound important. But they’re all understood to be pejorative. Wannabes or rejects, basically. Youngsters trying to break into the biz or oldsters spit out by it. The gig is awful. Low pay (and I mean low.) No benefits. Too many classes to teach. Too many students packed into each class. No time to do any of your own research and try to get published (that is, if you’re a wannabe looking to land a tenure-track job). No support from the college (like travel money to professional conferences, a computer, even an office). No standing, no say, no respect in whatever department you’re teaching in (just don’t bother going to department meetings...if you’re even allowed in). Sometimes forced to piece together jobs at two or three colleges at once (if you’re within driving distance).
At the start of my academic career, I spent two wannabe years as an Instructor at a big state university. Those were two years of mad scramble. Teaching load out the wazoo. Desperately trying to eke out research time. Applying nation-wide to any tenure-track job that moved...
Assistant Professor: This is the title given to those fortunate few who land a tenure-track position. (As you can imagine, the competition is fierce; for one job, a college might get as many as 500 applications.) An Assistant Professor, then, is someone who has yet to earn tenure, but who is on the shining pathway toward that Promised Land. As we’ll see below, there are hundreds of ways to fuck things up as you go. But at least you’ve got a shot. As an Assistant Professor, you need to work like hell to excel at all measures set for your performance—but you also need to be politically savvy as hell to survive the personalities and in-fighting of your department as well as weather the callous neglect of your bottom-line-fixated administration.
Have fun!
Associate Professor: This is the title given to those fortunate few who are granted tenure. Being an Associate Professor can prove to be a bit of a career danger zone. This is where the notorious “dead wood” of college teachers hang out. After the maelstrom of the tenure pursuit, some folks just say, “Screw it. I’m not doing that shit anymore.” If you’re at a small college, where teaching is the emphasis, that means you don’t do a lick of research and publishing for the rest of your life. If you’re at a big university, where research is emphasized, you mail in your teaching from here on in. Honestly, such do-nothing professors are more urban legend than reality. An anti-intellectual stereotype. (Although such types do indeed exist, often accumulating in a single department as faculty have a bad habit of socially reproducing themselves.) In my experience, most people who have fire-in-the-belly enough to win tenure tend to keep that fire going after tenure. Corny as it sounds, it’s our intellectual mission and a simple point of pride.
Full Professor: This is the title given to those even more fortunate few who jump through some more hoops to rise to a level above that of Associate Professor. Full Professors are meant to be the wise elders (or scarred veterans) on campus who dominate at faculty meetings, guide their departments to greatness, and offer sage counsel to the administration. (That History professor I mentioned above fit this bill.) Some Full Professors are and some aren’t. Some stay current in their disciplines and can relate well to younger faculty and to students. Some turn into dinosaurs. Like everything, it’s a mixed bag.
Thus are the players in the academic hierarchy—and everyone must be very mindful of one’s place in this pecking order. Not only does the Academy tend to be a pompously traditional place, but your comfort and security within it can hinge on not pissing off, too terribly, your betters.
Now onto the academic maze that awaits the questing hero—a trial by combat involving a three-legged stool: Teaching; Scholarship; Service. Those seeking tenure must prove their mettle in each of these academic arenas.
Service: This is the least important of the three job requirements expected of the Assistant Professor. By “service,” what is meant is service to the college in the form of being on various committees, both at the departmental and the campus-wide level. Such committee work might be a textbook-selection committee or a student-welfare committee or it might involve being an advisor to a sorority or fraternity or participating in first-year student orientation programing. There’s no dearth of “service opportunities” for faculty on a college campus. Think of it as unpaid labor that comes out of your hide. And, while no one ever got tenure based on a sterling record of Service alone, you most certainly can get dinged for not doing enough Service. So choose wisely. I’d say about 10% of your tenure decision will be based on your service to the college. At the very most 15%.
Scholarship: Depending on what kind of school you’re at, this requirement will either be all-important or very-ish important. As noted above, if you’re at a big research university, your record of scholarly achievement—i.e. publications—will be the deciding factor in your getting tenure or not. Even if you’re a less-than-marginal teacher (hey, that’s what Teaching Assistants are for) and even if you haven’t bothered overly much with your service obligations (hey, let the wannabe Adjuncts do the grunt-work), if you’re cranking out kick-ass journal articles and have a well-reviewed book by the time you come up for tenure, well, you’ll be invited to join the club. Otherwise, get lost. Go waste your life teaching classes at some Podunk small college somewhere. (Yep, you get the drift. Faculty at big universities and faculty at small colleges tend to revile one another.) At a research university, maybe 80-90% of your tenure decision will be based on your research.
If, on the other hand, you’re working at a small college where your ability as a teacher will be the most important factor in getting tenure, how significant your record of scholarship will be in the tenure decision can vary a great deal. A really good and high-ranking small college will want its faculty to be teacher-scholars. That is, the best teaching is done by experts who are current and active in their specialty fields. And while a book may not be expected of you at tenure time, several articles published in high-quality academic journals certainly will be as well as evidence of active participation in your discipline—such as conference papers presented and membership in scholarly organizations. A not-so good or lower-ranking small college, however, likely won’t care so much (or at all) about scholarship. Maybe present a paper or two at an academic conference or publish a book review or an encyclopedia entry on something-or-other. Quality won’t matter. Just a little scholarly window-dressing will do. But at a good small college, maybe 30-40% of your tenure decision will be based on your research.
Teaching: Again, depending on the type of school you’re at, this job requirement will be either fairly-kinda important or the be-all and end-all of your academic existence. If the latter, you better be damned good at it. The course- and instructor-evaluations your students turn in at the end of each semester about you and your teaching will be picked over scrupulously by your tenured faculty colleagues for the slightest perceived weakness. As an Assistant Professor, you’ll likely be teaching students at all levels—from first-year introductory courses to sophomore-level survey courses to upper-level major courses populated mainly by juniors and seniors. So you’d better be able to engage students—meaningfully—at all of these levels. From jittery first-years out of their depth to General Education cruisers being forced to take your class to majors in your department who want to go on to graduate school. You must please all of the students all of the time.
If you’ve ever taught anything, you know how it can be a tense business. Standing in front of a room full of people expecting to be simultaneously informed and entertained takes some getting used to. When those people are youngsters whose hormones are raging and whose brains have yet to finish wiring themselves, well, almost anything can happen. And never forget: your professional wellbeing, your very livelihood and possibly the financial security of your family, depends on your being not just adequate, but “exceeding expectations” (to use the language of official academic assessments). So you have to design and execute, over the course of the semester, a great course syllabus. You need incessantly to prepare so you can always stay one step ahead of things. Each class you have to go into SHOWTIME mode and keep them cognitively rolling in the aisles. You have to grade their papers with kindness and care—but also with real and clearly stated academic standards in mind. You need to hold individual conferences with your students and likely have, on top of that, anywhere from 10 to 30 student advisees to guide through their curriculum.
My own approach to the challenge of teaching is to engineer an active classroom. While it’s certainly less time-consuming for a professor to lecture at the class, I know as a student I found that, for the most part, profoundly boring—and disappointing. We could have been doing so much more. So I endeavor to teach how I wish I’d been taught. I want to hear what the students think about the material and why. Simply hearing students echo back to me whatever I tell them about something is an awful waste of time. I look to involve students in learning with and from one another, using small-group work or a pair-and-share exploration of a reading assignment or reading and commenting on one another’s writing. Most of all, it’s imperative that I instruct and steep students in the practices of 1) critical thinking and evaluation, 2) formulating their own informed opinions on things, and 3) being able to state those opinions lucidly and construct a compelling line of argument featuring convincing pieces of evidence that demonstrate your points.
All of that’s a lot of work to teach.
Or you can just lecture at them and hope for the best. I’d say that, at a high-quality small college, anywhere from 60-70% of the tenure decision will be based on how well you teach.
If I had to guess hard numbers for each leg of the academic stool at a small college, I’d say: Service 10%, Scholarship 30%, Teaching 60%. Give or take. At a big research university, I’d venture: Service 1% (being generous), Scholarship 90%, Teaching 9%. Institutional priorities vary a lot from school to school.
So what?
As I said at the start of this post, I’m not going to offer the usual “So what?” deliberations at its end. All that brainy theory stuff will fill up the next post. There’s a lot to get into. In the meantime, as a bit of homework, you might mull over this pair of stimulating questions:
If awarding tenure is intended to bestow academic freedom on faculty, does it? More to the point, can it, really?
Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.
Whew!