I'm an associate professor in a prestigious humanities department at a prestigious research university. I received tenure at an enviably early age.
Everyone should have my problems, I recognize that. And I'm not telling you about them to whine or complain. I'm telling you about them as a warning about the dangers of organizing an academic career too ruthlessly around immediate, short-term success.
When I got my job, I was determined to make the most of the enormous plum that had fallen in my lap. I recognized that maniacal focus was a sine qua non for anyone working toward tenure at a major university these days. So I worked hard. I edited several books and wrote many book chapters, numerous peer-reviewed articles, several lengthy review essays, and innumerable book reviews. I was active in my field at conferences, received good-to-excellent teaching evaluations, and accepted whatever service came along.
My only anxiety was books. In my department, the requirements for tenure are vague but large. (I've learned that the vaguer the requirements, the higher they actually are.) My best bet for tenure seemed to be publication of a book "beyond the dissertation."
Now some might make the case that the transformation of a dissertation into an actual book, published by a university press, should meet the requirement. (And after having accomplished such a transformation, I would be inclined to agree with them.) But anyone making that argument would find the promotion-and-tenure committee at my university distinctly unmoved. So, fair or not, the basic standard for tenure on my campus is two books.
Just what counts as the second book is a bit amorphous. Some people actually manage to hand in a published book. Some are able to hand in proof pages or the final manuscript, which they can say, with relief, is now "in production." Some have a contract and a substantial amount of the manuscript produced. I fell in that last category.
So, to review my record: many articles, a published book with a university press, and another one under contract, "substantially completed."
I got tenure, of course. I mean, who would have turned me down? I am a tenure success, and mine is the model of a successful academic career.
Except there are some kinks in the story.
I thought I was focused. But I was focused on getting tenure -- not on becoming a good scholar. I was strategically focused on careerism -- not on having a career.
I had been trained since graduate school -- maybe even since my undergraduate years, when I saw my adviser get tenure -- to imagine that it was the golden apple, the summum bonum of my career. Tenure was the academic version of what marriage is in so many novels: the closing event in the story.
Except it's not. Life goes on, and if you get tenure in your mid-30s, you have roughly five or six times as many years ahead of you as you have just spent getting tenure (assuming that it took six years). You reach that finish line, only to realize that it is only the end of the warm-up lap for a much longer race.
Of course, after tenure, there are no pressing external assessments of the same sort. But in essence, a career is still a struggle. It's a contest between the constraints of ordinary human life and the desire to have contributed in some important way to the set of conversations that compose your field.
In all the mentoring I had in graduate school, no one talked to me about the idea of a career. Or if they did, I heard only the part about getting tenure. Because of that, in part, I made mistakes when it came time to produce my second book -- mistakes that were no one's fault but my own, but that I might have been able to avoid had I received some sage advice early on.
Everyone knows that your dissertation -- and then your first book -- shouldn't be your magnum opus. Of course that's hard to accept. The magnitude of the project -- the first of its size that you have attempted -- seems to require grandiose delusions just to get it finished.
But guided by firm advisers, and under the growing recognition of time pressures and a need to just get the damn thing done, you can learn to live with a less-than-epochal dissertation. And, in the eagerness to get it published and the labor of transforming it into a book, illusions of grandeur tend to get pushed to the side.
But with your second book, all of those repressed ambitions come back, and this time without the whip-cracking guidance of an adviser or the time constraints of a dissertation. Instead, all you have to fall back on is your own self-control. And not many of us are really very good at that, are we?
Once my first book was published, I went back to the editor I had worked with at my press and proposed a large project. I had been thinking about my research and thought I saw in it a three-volume work. A three-volume work! From an assistant professor? What, exactly, had I been thinking? What I meant was I had three interlocking volumes, each making coherent and stand-alone arguments, but each part of a larger whole.
Obviously, the publisher saw a one-time author with severe logorrhea problems. Remaining calm, as you are supposed to do with maniacs, wild animals, and car-accident victims, my editor replied that such a proposition was not really viable at his press at present, and perhaps if I could I see my way clear to making all three arguments in a single volume, he might be willing to consider it.
Here I made another mistake. Instead of smiling and agreeing in vague terms -- and going away to think about it -- I felt a need, based on what I felt to be the pressures of tenure requirements, to agree to compress three arguments into one. I might have reconsidered later, but the truth is that once that path was set for me, I had my second book -- the crucial step toward tenure -- locked up. Nothing was going to take that away from me, least of all my own hesitancy about whether I was up to the task. Of course I was up to it, I told myself. To get tenure I would do whatever it took.
In a way I was up to it: I typed, I revised, I got it published. But the final product of the book was pretty flimsy. The nature of the project demanded that I articulate views about matters I had never really thought through before, and that made for a number of hasty, sloppy, impressionistic, and spotty arguments.
What I should have done was simply give my press the "first volume," and never mention the idea of the three-volume work again. If it were possible to produce all three volumes as separate books, fine; I could have mentioned in the third book that the three had been conceived as a set. Or more likely, I would have subtly changed the works in the meantime, as I learned more, and so by the time I wrote the third one (if I ever did), I would not still conceive of them as an integral whole.
My failing was one of ambition. I was overambitious: seeking to offer a discipline-changing book too early in my career. And I wasn't ambitious enough: not realizing that I would have to live with the consequences of such hubris for the rest of my academic life, with all that I wrote thereafter colored by the mark of that rather adolescent self-indulgence.
No one ought to have saved me at that point in my career. As an established scholar, with one book under my belt, I should have known better myself. And maybe I would have if someone had asked me in graduate school, "Now what about a career beyond tenure?" But no one ever asked me that.
In training graduate students, it's always good to get them thinking about their careers, especially about how to get hired and how to get tenured. But all of us should also dedicate some small but significant portion of our thinking to the whole breadth of our careers and what it means to have a rich academic life. The fact that we don't is understandable, given the challenges of finding a tenure-track job at all. But understanding our failure to do so doesn't amount to excusing it.
"How can I get hired?" and "How can I get tenure?" are important questions. But so is "How can I contribute 10, 20, and 30 years after I get tenure?"
