My English department voted to support my application for tenure and promotion last week. That ought to be good news -- some of the best news I've ever heard. Instead, I find myself poring over the latest job ads and refreshing my CV.
I haven't heard much in the way of congratulations since the decision was made. When I pass colleagues in the hallways, they grimace sympathetically and say, "How are you doing?," as though I've been diagnosed with something contagious.
It turns out that, as is the case for so many others in my department and in academe in general, my tenure and promotion victory was far from a landslide. While just one holdout voted against granting me tenure, the vote was 11 to 7 for promoting me to associate professor.
A couple of days ago, a senior colleague I like very much came to my office to congratulate me and ended up explaining why she split her vote -- voting for my tenure but against my promotion.
My first article didn't really count, she said, because it came out a year and a half after I arrived on the campus. It was obviously based upon previous research, she said. Well, yes, it was a heavily revised dissertation chapter. My other articles didn't count, she said, because they haven't appeared in print yet. Although our dean does not differentiate between articles that have been accepted for publication and ones already in print, my colleague does. Well, OK.
The conversation went on in that vein, making it clear that in the interpretive framework under which this colleague operates, I have no publications at all. None that "count," anyway.
Perhaps, she offered helpfully, one of the two articles I now have under consideration at scholarly journals will be accepted in the next few weeks, adding more to my dossier before the university tenure committee takes up my case. Of course, if one of those articles did get accepted, they still wouldn't count, according to her way of thinking, because they would not yet be in print.
The conversation was disconcerting, especially in light of the fact that the campus tenure and promotion committee will soon meet to determine my fate with only weak departmental support to bolster my application.
Now I am searching through job ads and having those hollow-feeling conversations with my husband about places he would be willing to live, should the situation worsen.
I wonder, too, whether the best-case scenario here is any good at all. If the committee and the dean and all of the others in the line of approvals deem my work worthy, then I will still be working among seven colleagues who disagree.
My tenure story is the all-too-familiar tale of the assistant professor hired to start a new program. That program becomes wildly successful, beyond anyone's predictions. Someone has to administer the needs of the program, so the new assistant professor (aka me) handles it. As the program grows, she handles more of its administration. She and another new hire in her field handle the details together, working in remarkable agreement and cooperation.
The program is a runaway success, drawing in half of the majors in the department. The assistant professor, however, is taking it for the team. Every year her evaluations admonish her to do more research and less service, but no one steps up to help with the increasingly crippling service load.
Finally, after four years, the two assistant professors make a major public cry for help, and the department grants both of them release time from teaching a course in exchange for running the program.
By then, though, it is too late to help, if "in print" is the only designation of publication that counts. Our hero, though, gets an article out the door and accepted every year thereafter, believing the institutional rhetoric about flexibility of research requirements in special circumstances. Certainly, these are special circumstances.
I've joked since the day I arrived on the campus that the university would one day say to me, "Thanks for the great program! Good luck finding that new job." And now a good number of my colleagues are, in effect, saying just that.
It's an academic cliché: the assistant professor who compromises her own research -- and thus, her chances for job security and advancement -- for the sake of program administration or other service obligations. Those service obligations weigh heavily in the critical first few years of a tenure-track job, when a neophyte faculty member ought to be establishing and carrying out a research agenda. Instead, she is drafting proposals for new courses and for more resources, advising new majors in the program, auditing degree requirements, culling applications, and interviewing lecturers.
The special danger of the situation is that while her research agenda gathers dust, she is making enemies as a frazzled program administrator. She has to make reports in department meetings; she is called upon to speak to all manner of issues of department governance. She and the program she represents get too much attention, too many resources.
During the very years in which a new faculty member should be quietly taking in the institutional culture and doing research, the program administrator has nowhere to hide. Colleagues, quite naturally, get nervous and feel threatened.
A trusted senior colleague mentioned "envy" as a potential factor in some of the seven votes against my promotion -- envy at the attention, the perceived advantage of representing the now-giant program.
I do not know whether that is actually the case, but I am astounded that anyone could feel jealous of my situation. I have always envied my colleagues who determine their own priorities and whose primary concern is their own careers. I would have loved even a single semester along the way that did not feature a swirling maelstrom of controversy over some program-related issue.
What gets lost in all of this is that I love my work, my university, my students, and even some of my colleagues. My teaching record is strong; I have even won our department's teaching award. I am very proud of the program I have helped to put in place here. I know that I have given something enduring and positive to the university and to its students.
The service work I have done is significant -- almost ridiculously so, compared to what has been done by other assistant professors at my institution -- but it has never garnered anything but trouble from many of my colleagues. I'm not sure why they are complaining. I can't help but think that all of the resources the program has brought to our department are an advantage for all of us: more upper-division courses in all areas, more money for travel and special projects, more power on campus.
But now I wait, using my time to send out a few sets of application materials. It's not the best time of year for a job search, but it's the only way I can sleep at night. I don't want to leave. I don't want to move my family across the country and start over. But like countless other assistant professors before me, I walked right into the service trap.
