I have a vivid memory of a faculty meeting I attended during my first month as an assistant professor. The department's promotion and tenure committee was recommending that a particular faculty member be denied tenure. Her teaching had excellent ratings from students, but, the committee argued, that was unimportant in a university.
Looking at her C.V., it seemed to me that her research program was both productive and coherent. But, in the committee's view, the books and the book chapters she'd written didn't count -- only refereed journal articles reflected "real" research. The committee chairman said he had read her refereed articles and was unimpressed, despite the glowing letters that other scholars had written about her work. His assessment was that she lacked the brilliance and stature requisite for tenure in the department. As he continued, various faculty members began to nod their heads in agreement.
For a while after being denied tenure, my colleague avoided conversation and seemed embittered. But a few months later, I passed her in the hall and noticed that she seemed quite serene. She told me that she'd recently been offered a tenure-track position at a college that emphasized teaching, her real passion. She'd have sufficient time to do the research that interested her, and her new colleagues seemed to share her values and commitment to teaching.
She had thought her entire future depended upon winning tenure. Being rejected had infuriated her and she had wondered if she would ever recover from the blow. She had never considered that a negative decision would actually lead her to new possibilities that were, in fact, far more congruent with her goals.
Everyone in academe understands the inevitability of failure. The concept itself derives from school, for what would failure be if tests had never been invented? The academic culture places foremost emphasis on measurement and comparison -- with the illusion that simply because there is a form of measurement, it must be objective.
The fact is, failure is always subjective. The tenure committee's judgments about my colleague were not objective. Of course, we could all count the number of articles she had published in refereed journals. But most experienced academicians have heard committee members argue vehemently to grant tenure to colleagues who have barely made the minimum standard. And different colleges can look at the same C.V. and view it as evidence of success or failure.
My dictionary offers several definitions of failure that essentially boil down to two: an effort or event that falls short, or a person who proves unsuccessful. We often confuse the two meanings, especially in our own failures. Rather than saying we failed to accomplish something, we judge ourselves to be failures. Most of us have learned to believe that failure is, by definition, terrible, rather than an inherent part of learning.
There is no question that you might fail if you try something new. The only question is what you will do with the experience of failure. Every setback offers an opportunity to learn -- in fact, success and failure are products of the same process.
Baseball is a wonderful example of this. How many times has Roger Clemens missed the plate? How many times has Sammy Sosa struck out? Success is impossible without having the courage to fail. Thomas Edison made thousands of failed attempts before successfully inventing the steel alkaline storage battery. He is quoted as saying, "Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results. If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." The fact is, if you never experience failure, you're probably not challenging yourself.
Nevertheless, failure is something most of us fear. It is an assault on our sense of self and instantly produces shame. In the moment of failure, the outcome seems catastrophic. Failures in academe are so public: You must continue to walk the halls, avoiding eye contact with your colleagues, after being denied tenure. Your entire graduate department is abuzz about who did, and did not, get academic jobs as you wait to be called for an interview. When your manuscript gets rejected by a journal, the reviewers generously provide you with a litany of your errors. It's hard not to feel humiliated.
Fear and panic often follow closely on the heels of shame, especially if the "failure" is a negative tenure decision. No longer have you failed at something -- at this moment you define yourself as a failure. And the more you define yourself by your work, the greater the blow to your self-esteem.
A preoccupation with assigning fault is a typical next reaction. You may seesaw between blaming yourself and blaming your chairman, institutional politics, or the biases of your colleagues. Later on, you will be able to reconsider the experience more rationally. But at this point, you're really just struggling to cope with the loss of control by trying to make sense of things, to find "good reasons" for what has happened.
As a young assistant professor sitting at the conference table, witnessing the disassembling of a colleague's career, I was flooded with my own prospects for failure. Like most academics, I had always been an outstanding student. And, although my goal of becoming a psychologist was intrinsically motivated, my ambition to become an academic was far more driven by a desire for the approval of my mentors. Of course, by the time I'd accepted a position at a university, I had convinced myself I really wanted to be there. So the visions of failure that suddenly consumed me were accompanied by panic. I couldn't fail -- that would be unbearable. What would I do then?
I had to consider that sooner than I expected. My department had a policy of providing new faculty members with a three-month evaluation. It was my bad fortune to have the chairman of the tenure committee assigned to my review. I knew my prospects were poor when he began by telling me that he had just read my dissertation, and that if he had been my adviser, I wouldn't have my degree.
As I said earlier, failure is a subjective judgment. I hadn't been fired -- in fact, my chairman wrote a glowing evaluation of my first year on the job and the university financed my grant proposal. But in my mind, I had unquestionably failed. And I was not going to wait around for the humiliation of being roasted by the entire department.
I soon found a position in a university counseling center -- for which I was much better suited and which I found far more satisfying -- but that did not protect me from feeling like I had failed in academe. It was a long time before I could see how this failure had provided me with possibilities that I might not otherwise have allowed myself. There's a Hasidic proverb that says, "When God closes a door, God opens a window." I've never once wished that the door to academe hadn't closed. Besides providing me with the opportunity to do the counseling work I truly loved, it also gave me the experience of surviving failure -- and the strength and resilience this confers.
Here are some ways to create possibility out of failure:
Express your feelings, but don't act on them right away. Immediately after a failure is not a good time to make decisions about your future. You need to mourn the loss by simply allowing your feelings without taking precipitous action.
Seek support. Shame makes us want to hide. Don't surrender to this impulse. The empathy and support of friends who have had similar experiences are invaluable aids in the healing process.
Remember your strengths. Try writing about other accomplishments in your career and about your strengths in other arenas of your life. Invite trusted friends to help you remember.
Don't overgeneralize. As terrible as failure feels, it does not make you a failure. Resist any temptation to evaluate yourself negatively in other domains of your life.
Differentiate between events and emotions. Just because it feels like a catastrophe doesn't mean it really is one. You will survive this failure. Try to remind yourself of this in moments of panic.
Use your outrage to energize you. It's natural to want to lash out at people you blame. Instead, transform your anger into determination to move forward in spite of the failure. Anger can also function as a protest against your loss of self-esteem and can help you rebuild your sense of self.
Try to learn from failure. Once your sense of self begins to rebound, you can analyze the situation more rationally. Why might this have happened? Were there flaws in your approach that you can correct? Were you politically naive? Have you chosen such a competitive field of study that you need to develop a more specialized expertise? If you decide that you made some mistakes that contributed to the outcome, don't use this awareness in a self-defeating way. Simply decide how you'd like to do things differently next time. Perhaps you were not a good fit for the position or the office environment. Perhaps, like me, you've been pursuing a course of action despite the fact that it doesn't really fit your gifts and talents. In that case, it's time to consider other options.
Recommit to your goals. If your goals remain the same, then assess the changes you need to make in your direction and strategy, and persist in your efforts. Persistence is what separates people who succeed from those who fail. Every fulfilled dream occurred because the person was dedicated to the process of working toward a goal.
Take care of your family. Whenever we are intensely emotionally affected by an event in our lives, this reverberates through our families. Try to keep your anger from spilling over onto your partner. Explain the situation to your children. Model self-acceptance -- it will help your children be more accepting of their own failures.
Rewrite the narrative. Immediately after failure, the story seems simple. You did your best work and it wasn't good enough. But remember this: It's a fact that your paper was rejected or that you didn't get tenure, but whether this was a failure is a subjective judgment. Try retelling the story including only the bare facts. Since reality is mostly invented, you might as well write a new narrative that empowers you, rather than one that's self-defeating.
My promotion and tenure reviewer said I didn't have the right stuff. I think he gave me an opportunity to pursue my true passions. What's the reality?
