Over the course of this series on the tenure process, several readers have written to me, either claiming to be Allison Porchnik, or insisting that they know who she is. They were all wrong.
Allison Porchnik is a pseudonym for the now-tenured professor whose promotion case has been the subject of these columns. She is real, but I have blurred her identity, and there is no point in revealing it now. The fact that so many readers thought I was writing either about them or about someone they knew proves that writing about tenure strikes a nerve. They say time dulls pain, but I never forgot what going through tenure was like. Others obviously feel the same way.
A number of readers have offered critiques and correctives to my tenure essays. I rarely reply to individual correspondents. Too many people see a reply as an invitation to go on at length about the injustices of the system. I do take reader comments seriously, though, and I want to use this last column in my series to discuss some of the letters I've gotten, and to talk about life after tenure.
One reader, who confesses to following my columns "with great interest," chides me for ignoring "the possibility of malfeasance." Citing a case where a department chairman allegedly falsified a tenure file, he complains, "You write as if the process is always honest."
The tenure process is only as honest as the people involved: the candidate, the administrators, the committees, the referees, the appeals committees. If they do their job, the outcome should be valid. But there are safeguards against malfeasance, and remedies to correct it. At my institution, if someone involved in the process has an ax to grind, there are enough sets of eyes looking at the case to reveal any prejudice and correct its effect.
I don't think that I could single-handedly sabotage a promotion even if I wanted to: At least half a dozen department members read and correct the tenure papers that I prepare. In addition, department heads who put together sloppy or biased files hear about it in no uncertain terms from the dean's office. Finally, there's the appeal system. And the courts. I grant that sometimes the people involved in academic life may not be honest, but so far as my experience goes, the process of promotion is an honest one.
Another reader reports that his chairman supported a case that the department's promotion committee had unanimously rejected. Such committee recommendations are typically advisory, not binding, but most heads I know accept them. It's one thing to go against a majority vote that is close, if you have good reason to think it is misguided. But ignoring a strong departmental vote without an adequate explanation not only angers the department, it also courts reversal by the dean or provost.
In these columns I have written about tenure cases where I was involved. But as these readers make clear, not all tenure cases proceed like the ones I know personally.
For example, a colleague in the sciences -- let's call her Eliza Bennett -- complained that nothing I wrote resonated with her. Bennett found most of her own promotion process opaque. Her assistant-professor years didn't prepare her for the tenure review, and she had no idea what was happening to her, when it was happening, or why it was happening.
If Bennett's promotion had gone without a hitch, that might not have been so bad. Unfortunately, she had problems. Her department supported her promotion unanimously, but her school just as unanimously rejected her tenure. That rejection was affirmed by the college.
When Bennett appealed, the dean sought a second set of external reviews, which proved inconclusive. The dean then set up an independent tenure committee, which sent for a third set of letters. Bennett feared that each new set of letters would weaken her case: These late reviewers had to know that her promotion was in trouble, and that, in turn, had to affect their evaluations.
Anticipating the worst, Bennett sought legal advice, only to find that no lawyer in her state knew anything about tenure rights, though they did know how to charge $100 an hour to tell her this. In the end, Bennett didn't need the lawyers. She got tenure, not a terminal contract.
Despite this success, Bennett feels let down by the system. She insists that once her case left the department, her future depended not on disciplinary experts who could understand her work, but on people outside her field, people who she thinks could judge only the appropriateness of the process, not the quality of her work.
I pointed out to Bennett that nonexperts are always judging our work: Her scientific papers were judged not only by peer reviewers, but also by editors who might not know her subfield well at all, but who made the final decision to accept or reject her work. Her grant applications were vetted not just by specialist panels but by administrators who knew nothing about the organism in which she specialized.
I told her that in promotions, campuswide review committees routinely defer to the experts in the discipline for the ultimate determination of the value of a candidate's research. It was scientists from her school, after all, and not historians or linguists, who denied her tenure.
Eliza Bennett has been an associate professor for several years, but her life after tenure was affected by her close call. When it looked like Bennett was going to be let go, her lab emptied out as graduate students sought other advisers. Bennett got a new set of graduate students the following year, but it took them a while to get their experiments going, and when her grant money came up for renewal there was little in the way of results to show. This didn't make the granting agencies feel generous.
Yes, Eliza Bennett has her job, but she remains hurt, angry, and bitter, and she thinks her next promotion will be delayed because her cliffhanger promotion slowed her productivity. She worries that when she does go up for that next promotion to full professor, the 16 senior scientists who reviewed her will have told their colleagues about her first difficult promotion.
Even when tenure goes well, the up-or-out experience definitely colors the quality of life after tenure. Although at my institution, as at many others, tenure review is designed to be a fair assessment of job performance, I have found it a rite of passage fraught with trauma, and I suspect that few people go through tenure unscathed.
I know many academics who still feel that their promotion was alienating, that they were ill prepared for what would happen. And many still gripe about one or another perceived slight, injustice, or insult when people who had been their colleagues and friends for six years got together to judge them in secret.
Even when tenure is not traumatic, there can be a significant post-tenure letdown.
For one thing, tenure comes with no recognition ceremony, except maybe a party. My own tenure was certified with a terse mimeographed letter from the university trustees. Now promotees get something more official, like a certificate, together with congratulatory letters from the dean and the provost.
Of course we endure the initiation rite because tenure gives us job security. Once I got tenure, my alternate career, sweeping out a bookstore, was no longer on the front burner. The job that I took seven years earlier as a stopgap while I figured out my options -- the same job that seemed about to be taken away from me, leaving me no options at all -- was suddenly mine for life.
With tenure, however, comes the realization that the long struggle isn't over, it's just beginning. Tenure is no sinecure, despite what its critics in state government might think. There is more writing to do than ever, another promotion to earn, and even less time to do research than before, as new associate professors are welcomed to a lifetime of committee work.
Even the sabbatical after a tenure decision provides not a chance to rest, but a reminder to work harder than ever as your institution sends you the message, "Great job, but what have you done for us lately?" When that happens, a life contract can suddenly seem like a life sentence.
It's great not to have to read the job ads every week, but what tenure really does for me is protect my academic freedom. I've never been radically political either on campus or in print, but when I talk and write about my subject, the English language, I take some stands that anger people, like opposing increased emphasis on grammar in the schools or supporting the rights of linguistic minorities.
I have even gotten hate mail -- the creepy, unsigned kind that says, "You shouldn't be allowed in a classroom" -- for approving the grammatical extremism of ending sentences with prepositions. If tenure lets me do that without worrying what administrators or legislators are going to say, then the tenure process, and the psychological roller coaster it sometimes makes us ride, is worth the trouble.
