The killings of three faculty members at the University of Alabama at Huntsville are not (yet) part of any trend. As several online commenters have noted, such workplace killings are still called "going postal," not "going professor."
That the deaths were at the hand of an assistant professor who had been denied promotion and tenure is coincidental but not necessarily cause-and-effect. Nevertheless, as details about the reported killer and her situation emerge, we should ask the same kinds of questions about the nature of our labor system as did the U.S. Postal Service after a number of its employees acted in a similar manner.
Such scrutiny is useful because the circumstances of promotion and tenure have changed radically in the past few decades. Existing bureaucratic machinery and "gentlemen's agreements" that support its application are creaking with age.
To begin, let me answer a question I was asked by a reporter from The Huntsville Times who is covering the story. Can denial of promotion and tenure cause the kind of rage that drives people to violence? Yes, in context and not as an excuse. The pressure to get tenure today is felt deeply for good reason. Although denial of tenure is not the end of a career, the safety net of other academic tenure-track positions is growing smaller, and the stigma of tenure denial is great.
Voluminous research has found that the quest for tenure is a significant source of stress in the lives of assistant professors. As one said, "It's like you know that on a certain date, a few years down the road, people will vote on whether you live or die."
It can certainly seem that way, and to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being executed—even if it is six years in the future. As the deadline approaches, many a probationary faculty member develops a Manichaean dichotomy about the senior professors: those for me, those against me; good versus evil. The tenure process encourages paranoia and incites obsessive suspicion.
Does that mean that the "system" is in any way at fault for a bloodletting? Absolutely not. No more than high-school shooters can justifiably blame bullying or video games when so many millions of others graduate from school with egos bruised but homicidal impulses untapped.
Insisting that the tenure system is not to blame for the Huntsville murders, however, is not the same as asserting it is without flaws. The tenure track leaks with anachronisms and contradictions for both the candidates and the tenured faculty members who oversee it:
Training. The premise of my monthly column on promotion and tenure in The Chronicle is that most disciplines do an excellent job of training their doctoral graduates to be researchers, and a reasonable job of training them to be teachers, but a spotty to indifferent job of training them to be professors. Over and over again, I have met, talked with, heard from, and read about assistant professors who may be brilliant in their subfield but are clueless about the human relations, politics, planning, bureaucratic, and time-management aspects of our profession.
Worse are the cases in which a young professor gets terrible or contradictory advice from people who don't deserve the status of "mentor" or "adviser." In one instance, a young scholar who had been denied tenure described how the committee report evaluating his scholarship had criticized several of his choices of publishing venues. Half of the committee members, however, had conveniently or intentionally forgotten that they had advised him to publish in those journals in the first place.
At the same time, one meets many assistant professors who stubbornly refuse to listen to almost any advice, however practical and useful. They don't understand that good advising is useless if they won't be good protégés.
I remember an e-mail exchange with one who said he was being "unfairly" pressured to improve his teaching. By whom? I asked. His answer: the entire P&T committee. However, he did not plan to respond by changing anything about his pedagogy, because "I don't like people telling me what to do." It didn't seem to occur to him that, a few years down the road, the same committee was indeed going to tell him what he could and couldn't do about his career.
Respect. Another issue that splinters the tenure process is generational esteem. Tenure standards everywhere—not only at elite research institutions but also at regional public universities and liberal-arts colleges—have risen in the past two decades. So have the publication demands for doctoral candidates and postdocs seeking their first tenure-track jobs.
The result is a clash of mind-sets and measurements. Many in the older generation of scholars were tenured with standards that, while not necessarily lower in quality, were lesser in terms of frequency of publication. Likewise, numerical metrics of teaching evaluation did not exist. There is widespread simmering umbrage by highly accomplished, highly specialized, and publication-intensive young scholars aimed at, as one of them put it, "old guys—who couldn't get tenure today—judging me on whether I should get tenure."
In fact, that is an apples-and-oranges contrast, sort of like insisting that the army of Norman Schwarzkopf could defeat the army of Napoleon. If the senior scholar who won tenure in the 1970s with a single published article were 27 today, maybe he would have adapted to the present and published heavily. Moreover, senior professors argue that a single seminal article of yesteryear is probably the equivalent of dozens of current "least publishable units." I would also add: You don't have to be a superior scholar to know what the CV of one looks like.
But those arguments have never resonated with any assistant professor I know. They compare the CV's side by side and wonder why people whose publishing history they don't respect are going to be determining their future. The pot of resentment bubbles all the more because the complaint is rarely spoken aloud, except via pseudonym on blogs, forums, and wikis, and when the senior scholars are out of earshot.
Work/family imbalance. Dissertations and scholarly books written in the '50s and '60s often included in the acknowledgements, "I want to thank my wife for typing up this manuscript." Today many fields have a majority of female scholars; others are approaching gender parity. Studies testify to the tension that female academics experience in balancing careers and home lives.
Janice Witherspoon Neuleib, a professor of English at Illinois State University, in an essay titled "Special Challenges Facing Women in Personnel Reviews," wrote, "The required trick [for getting tenure] which one of my young probationary friends seems to be carrying off, is to speak boldly but with reserve, walk the halls unobtrusively although she is eight months pregnant, and publish madly with a 2-year-old helping out at the computer." Those are some deft acrobatics, and many tenure-track women resent the Wallenda-like demands on them at the office and at home.
But mothers on the tenure track are not alone in those challenges. At a national panel on promotion and tenure in my field, several women talked about the strains of having and raising children while working as assistant professors. Then a chorus of "me too's" broke out from the audience: The single male scholar with two elderly parents with Alzheimer's, the childless teacher whose dogs "were just as much family" as any human, the middle-aged tenure tracker who suffered a debilitating illness.
So we have a perfect storm: a medieval system of bureaucracy, a set of rising expectations for performance and productivity, and a generation of young faculty members who fantasize about having a quasi-normal domestic life.
Economics. A commenter on a Chronicle forum learned that he would be denied tenure despite exceeding his department's promotion guidelines, getting near-unanimous support from his colleagues, and receiving universal praise from outside letters. I contacted the writer and gathered that he was the victim of surreptitious "economic denial." Administrators at his college simply did not want to have to pay for someone teaching in his area for the next 40 years. In their view, it was wiser to let the position go vacant and replace it with a hire in a "hot" subfield or, better yet, to drop the tenure-track line altogether and hire an adjunct.
In other words, we are encouraging young scholars to be narrow specialists, despite the fact that, just like in the corporate marketplace, one-trick ponies are an endangered species. Tenure committees are the perpetrators of the system even if we oppose it in principle. Tenure candidates who explore multiple research topics are perceived as "unfocused." They don't establish a "clear trajectory" or "delineate a tight subspecialization." Preach interdisciplinarity; build the silos taller.
Culpability. When someone is denied tenure, the failure is technically listed as the individual's. But the host department and the tenure system itself must bear some blame. The purpose of yearly evaluations and three-year reviews should be to give accurate and unvarnished criticism of a candidate's work. Mentoring systems should likewise closely monitor a probationary faculty member's progress (or lack thereof), which in turn should be reported to everyone on the committee and the candidate in a timely and clear manner.
Yet such safeguards and checks are only fitfully applied. On many campuses, the third-year review is cursory and mealy-mouthed. A common outcome is the "problem" candidate whom nobody wants to deal with until the tenured faculty members and chair get a chance to hide behind an anonymous vote. I heard one lawyer practically boast that suing universities was often made ridiculously easy because year after year, fearful, indifferent, or incompetent committees and rotating chairs provided positive evaluations for someone with whom everyone found significant fault. Then those departments voted no on tenure, and the candidate was stunned (and incensed).
Few of us are happy with such collisions of culture, economics, and expertise. A senior colleague of mine who has sat on several dozen tenure committees and written hundreds of letters of evaluation said, "No task fills me with more fear than having to judge a P&T packet." In an age of litigation and, unfortunately, of the potential, albeit rare, for violence, many of us share his feeling.
Thus we face an urgent need for the professionalization of faculty hiring and tenure committees. Academics have accepted the cult of the amateur for far too long. Read the academic-job wikis, blogs, and forums and you will find many tales of incompetent, rude, fumbling, and oblivious search committees. Promotion-and-tenure committees receive the same kinds of criticisms.
In a majority of those cases, it is ignorance that is often the cause, rather than malice. No professor would argue that you can haphazardly stumble into becoming a good researcher; most would not say that teaching just comes naturally without any planning or preparation. But we are expected to become excellent and efficient at hiring and promoting, as if by osmosis or luck. Usually a committee chair will merely advise the other members to peruse the department's promotion guidelines or the university's human-resources protocols. When faculty members serve on committees that hold so much sway over young scholars' careers, is it too much to expect that they be properly trained for the task?
Some people will react to failure by causing mayhem. That Amy Bishop was an assistant professor may have affected only the location of the crime, the timing, and the identity of the victims—not its commission.
But that doesn't mean we can declare promotion and tenure to be a healthy institution. It needs collaborative, detailed, nuanced, and sensitive exploration and reinvention. Those of us who purport to be its guardians should lead the way.
Comments
1. snwiedmann - February 18, 2010 at 07:26 am
I have no argument with the article. I do wonder, however, to what extent the oversupply of job-seeking Ph.D.'s adds to the sense that tenure-denial is a death sentence. My own discipline (philosophy) has been aware for at least 10+ years that we were getting close to having twice as many Philosophy Ph.D.'s looking for jobs as there were jobs available. Yet very few graduate programs seem to have reduced admissions. Jus something to think about, perhaps.
2. teddysmom - February 18, 2010 at 07:32 am
Really thoughtful and well-stated.
3. dperlmutter - February 18, 2010 at 09:33 am
Snwiedmann: Absolutely right. I was talking in this piece about (a) systemic factors--ones that were common even before the jobs collapse of recent years and (b) ones that directly resulted in tenured-probationary tensions. The Apocalypto makes it all worse, indeed.
Teddysmom: Thanks!
Usc157: I'm sorry to say I have heard stories like that too many times. The games people play with other people's lives! Bravo for enduring.
4. haroldfs - February 18, 2010 at 10:58 am
I was awarded tenure back in the early 1970s but certainly not on the basis of a record with "one published article." My year of getting tenure was the worst year of my life, and I wouldn't have survived it without intense psychological counseling. I watched other people around me crash and burn (but at least they did not go out and shoot people) when they were denied tenure.
Providing counseling for people would be a definite improvement.
5. tw1815 - February 18, 2010 at 11:35 am
An eye for an eye. If a dept head and a few politicians vote against a deserved faculty member not to give tenure, then this deserved faculty have the right to do whatever she/he thinks right for her/his situation. If you think mathematically, the two opposite extremes are running one for reward and the other for power respectively. Subjective judgment must not receive supreme power to decide who can or cannot get tenure. The mechanism of the game is like how organized crime takes place. In this case, the chair/politician who creates a group with a few faculty members and takes vote - as long as they have higher number of votes, they just got the authority to turn down a deserved scholar's tenure. Tenure must not be in the hands of members of organized crime in universities. Unless the tenure system is abolished, many tenured faculty will continue to be asshole and arrogant with students and regularly cancel classes.
6. scholaris - February 18, 2010 at 02:05 pm
Very good analysis (as all of Perlmutter's columns are). I would like to highlight "When faculty members serve on committees that hold so much sway over young scholars' careers, is it too much to expect that they be properly trained for the task?", and I would like to add the accountability issue--that which tenure committees, anonymous faculty colleagues, and department chairs have none. Anonymity is one thing, accountability for your actions and reasoning is another. The guidelines in practice are hardly a safety net for an unfairly treated junior faculty member--be it through malicious or careless acts. I heard of someone who in the appeal process saw how faculty and chairs were able to get away with repeatedly violating written guidelines (and this was at a top national R1).
7. alleyoxenfree - February 18, 2010 at 06:40 pm
Lack of accountability by higher ups, and a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a few are keys elements, as is the problem Perlmutter notes with changing standards and a lack of coherent messages. We "preach interdisciplinarity" but "built the silos taller" right from hire, then wash people out on standards that changed last year with a new president or new provost and the people we hired because they had a single specialty are expected to instantly become adaptive and flexible enough to switch to another field entirely. Though nothing excuses Bishop's actions, there are many forms of violence and the consequences of other forms are real.
8. annabean - February 18, 2010 at 09:48 pm
Thank you, Dr. Perlmutter, for your clearly rendered anaylsis. May the points you raise be considered by those who are able to change the ill-fated direction of tenure, especially on our private college campuses. I personally have known several junior faculty who have chosen to end their own lives after being denied tenure. Yes, there were mental health issues beforehand, but being tenure track did nothing to allay these junior faculty members fears of not being "good enough." The compounded effect was too much for them, and would be for many.
When I heard about this horrible incident, my first thought was "there by grace go I." Whatever it was in the past, the tenure process in many colleges has become a dehumanizing mechanism, spurred on by administrators who have never stood in front of a classroom and faculty who care little to do so. I only survived tenure denial and its subsequent emotional tidal wave by my own strength of self and knowing that my children needed me. I am sorry whatever was good in her life was not enough for Amy Bishop Anderson to overcome being overwhelmed by the awareness that she was not "good enough." Many good people have now suffered irreparable loss.
9. amnirov - February 19, 2010 at 05:44 am
The thing is, folks, whereas there is zero percent chance that Norman Schwarzkopf's army and Napoleon's would ever meet on the same battlefield, there are plenty of 1970s era scholars still kicking around, and the argument that a single published article from that bell-bottomed yesterday is somehow superior to an article published today is asinine. Would that make a single article published on transmission of light through the aether worth the equivalent of 20 published books on physics? Nonsense. The standards have changed dramatically, and contemporary academic endeavor is at least the equal of disco-era scholarship. The only people judging tenure cases should be those who have met the *same* standards as the candidates.
10. jffoster - February 19, 2010 at 07:55 am
Anmirov, do you also believe that the only flag officers who should be allowed to command a carrier task force are those who have flown in combat the same aircraft that the current junior and middle grade flight officers fly?
Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded at Midway and he wasn;t even a pilot at all.
I understand the goal of your proposal, but it is not practicable nor I think even desireable. You build the strength of an organization or unit by hiring better people than you are -- or were at the time.
11. trendisnotdestiny - February 19, 2010 at 09:59 am
This is my contentious offering, seeing that I am not enamored with jumping on the conveyor belt of "elite knowledge production" as many who may post here. So, if my resistance to pieces in this thread seems hyperbolic (my apologies).
So here goes, I find it very interesting that these divides between scholars (increased tenure requirements and pay for yourself scholarship) are occurring now. Isn't there an explanation that includes the understanding of a more intense turn to the "entrepreneurial academic"? Hmmmm, Who benefits? Who has the power to divide? Who profits from this system?
I find it ironic that at the precise time in our political and economic history where the dismantling of the social safety net has been catalyzed, the academic world has been more worried about their own individual and small turf war concerns at the expense of missing how larger systems can exploit and divide ...
Isn't it our job to translate what is occurring out in the world to help people make sense of their lives? Or are we dependent cogs in a system that will benefit us more than most over time. So, settling on your own turf, project, or departmental need becomes the excuse...
Do we need much more evidence that the recent exploits of our banking community Where they were educated? Do we need much more evidence that insitutions of higher learning resemble multi-national corporations? Do we need much more evidence that money flows to those who play the game? And virtually no one is willing to risk themselves....
So, as a result, tenured professors' mentorship in this vein is marketed at selfish and self-indulgent while the ambititious pre-tenured professors have been viewed to be resentful and out for themselves (buying into the dialogues of rigor, evidence based research, and do what you have to do to get in the system)....
In my opinion, most of these interactions have been engineered and divide groups of scholars who should be working together but are subject to the types of economic divisions that reinforce competition, rivalry and compartmentalization; not unlike what so many other professions are experiecing presently...
ABD 123
12. amnirov - February 19, 2010 at 11:26 am
jffoster: do you think that the generals in charge of the western front during WWI were even remotely competent? Which do you think contributed more to Patton's success in tank warfare a) his knowledge of the saber or b) his early adoption of the theories and practice of mechanized warfare?
13. smilenwave - February 19, 2010 at 01:43 pm
5. haroldfs - February 18, 2010 at 10:58 am wrote:
I was awarded tenure back in the early 1970s but certainly not on the basis of a record with "one published article." My year of getting tenure was the worst year of my life, and I wouldn't have survived it without intense psychological counseling. I watched other people around me crash and burn (but at least they did not go out and shoot people) when they were denied tenure.
Providing counseling for people would be a definite improvement.
***
If the answer is to provide (more) psychological counseling, then the system has failed.
14. scientistmom - February 19, 2010 at 06:07 pm
I am up for tenure this year, so I am probably too stressed out to be coherent!
I think there is something to be said for how different publishing practices are today compared to thirty years ago. I am told to publish in top journals, but this is advice from fellow scientists who published in top journals with an amount of data that wouldn't be enough for a low ranked journal today. Publications need more work and substance.
More worriesome for me is that people still have this idea that to get tenure in science you should have at least 2 RO1 grants. At the moment, it is difficult to get even one in this climate, but tenure committees aren't flexible enough to incorporate current climates in their decisions.
I'm doing my best, but I worry it won't be good enough. And if I don't get tenure, I'll pout, then I will call all my current colleagues, thank them for all their help, and ask for advice and help with the next step.
It is a big deal, but it isn't *that* big a deal. I am a smart person and I can find something else to do that will make me happy if I have to.
15. dperlmutter - February 19, 2010 at 08:46 pm
Amnirov: You obviously don't read enough alternative history scifi. Try some Harry Turtledove. It may improve your sense of proportion.
16. jffoster - February 20, 2010 at 12:21 am
In 13, Anmirov in apparent attempted response to my qustion in 11, starts with this:
"...do you think that the generals in charge of the western front during WWI were even remotely competent? "
What this has to do with the topic or with my example question I cannot guess. (But actually, a number of the German generals on the Western Front in WW I were competent.)
He then asks,
"Which do you think contributed more to Patton's success in tank warfare a) his knowledge of the saber or b) his early adoption of the theories and practice of mechanized warfare?"
I can see some tangental relevance here, in the context of the earlier exchange. But the analogy is tenuous. Patton used his armor in much the same way that the horse cavalry was used by people like JEB Stuart, Wade Hampton, Fitzhugh Lee, Turner Ashby, and the like. But actually Patton was probably better at fencing than he was at driving a tank and he had to command people who were actually better at driving a tank than he was. And RADM Raymond Spruance had to command pilots into action at Midway when he himself was not a pilot. Hell, he wasnt even a carrier admiral. But Halsey recommended him, Nimitz appointed him, and all Americans can be eternally grateful.
The point is that you cannot as a practicable matter require that "The only people judging tenure cases should be those who have met the *same* standards as the candidates." as quoth Anmirov in (10).
Although Anmirov has 'same' in set offs, so we might actually find some agreement room in there somewhere. As I said before, I appreciate the considerations which I believe motivated his proposing that.
17. friendly_neighbor - February 20, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Recently I have heard a tenured faculty member commenting negatively on my research. I have five articles published in peer-reviewed publications in the last four years. She co-edited, in the 1980s, two volumes (one of them the proceedings of a conference, eighty pages long) and none in the field she is tenured in and teaching in now. How am I supposed to feel?
18. foxygatorfan - February 20, 2010 at 03:13 pm
I was hired by one dean to Direct the growing Child Development Center at a University and teach one course(the enrollment was 108 children, a job in and of itself). Four years later a new Dean was hired who wanted me to direct the center and teach three classes. Thus when I went up for tenure I didn't have enough publications and my post as director of the Child Development Center was considered "service." I had no recourse really.
Now I teach in the public schools, make alot more money, don't feel as competitive or stressed and no longer define my self esteem by whether or not I got tenure. I have much more positive, coopreative interaction with others.
However I can see that many times the process is so changeable and so unfair that if a person who is already a little emotionally unstable it could throw them over the edge. The only difference with the Huntsville case is the person acted out her rage rather than just feeling it.
19. engedprof - February 20, 2010 at 09:15 pm
Foxygatorfan 's circumstances are quite similar to mine and countless others. My "service" was not voulntary nor optional. However, if I respectfully told my dean or chair that I need to get more focused on my research, I was threatened. Most times, the threats were overt. "Do this or your tenure is for sure compromised." This happened so often and the tasks were large and time consuming. My colleagues see my lack of productivity (3/3 teaching load, one book, 3 peer-reviewed articles)as my own fault. You see, when they are approached for a duty, they outright and vigorously refuse. They cannot and will never believe that I am unable to do the same. Ironically, many of these faculty have not published in years.
We discussed the matter with our chair and asked if he could assist in the delegation of the tasks. The response we got was that setting up a workshop or doing X is really not all that big of a deal. "It's just one more small thing. Why can't you get this done?" The chair chuckles and says we "worry too much." There is always the qualifier, "the provost, the dean, the graduate school" wants the work done so do it.
At this point, all of those tasks were completely overlooked in our tenure cases. We (us untenured folks in our review year) have been warned that we didn't use our time wisely and that we invested in the wrong type of work. Tenured faculty have made it a point to tell us that service doesn't get tenure so too bad for us.
PRC boards don't want to hear this stuff. No matter if they know these things happen, they ignore it. They look for research and they quantify it.
I think that is a reasonable approach to look for publications in tenure files. The problem is that careers are ruined out in the open with no one held accountable. If publication is what counts then provide the time and space for that to get done. It would be difficult to question the PRC's negative decision if all conditions were equal and the research just wasn't produced.
20. lemontree - February 21, 2010 at 11:58 am
I am on tenure-track in the hard sciences. I have three federally funded grants and teach 2-3 classes a semester and sit on several committees. I barely have time to publish and know that I am behind. I have absolutely NO social life of any sort, and am isolated with the exception of the *younger* junior faculty from science who meet weekly for lunch. No outside life.
Weekly I have *tenured, older* faculty come into my office or lab and tell me that I am not doing well. Two of these faculty members have NEVER had a federally funded research grant or any grant in their careers and they have published FEWER first-authored articles than I have. They teach one or two classes a year.
...and these are the people that are deciding my tenure.
Would I destroy people's lives over the decision, absolutely not. But look at who has the ability to destroy mine.... *faculty* who would not measure up by today's standards.
One of my professors in grad school used to tell me NIH would knock on faculty doors to apply for funding and that paylines were 20-30%. Today, paylines are 4-10% and no-one is knocking at our doors asking us to apply for funding.
Futhermore, the idea that "likability" is important is ridiculous. I don't like one of my coworkers. We are nothing alike, but I RESPECT his work and his effort. Just because I can't chat with him in the hallway about the weather, does not mean he should be denied tenure because he is not "liked."
As a junior faculty, I find it frustrating that a decision as important is tenure is made by people who were *tenured* long ago. The times they are a changing....
21. textual - February 21, 2010 at 01:09 pm
I concur with trendisnotdestiny. The backdrop (context) of this situation is to be found in the commodification of higer ed.
22. dgodwin - February 21, 2010 at 03:24 pm
I think this is an interesting article that makes some valid points. I think we can all agree that the tenure process needs to be more transparent and administrators need to be mindful of the emotional toll it takes on those who subject themselves to it.
However, let's not lose sight of the fact that there are a mix of personalities in academia just as there are in all other walks of life. The stress created by tenure and denial of tenure are certainly factors, but individual responses to this stress and propensity for violence and criminality can't be explained away by a flawed system.
I think scientistmom has the appropriate perspective and it's one I adopted when my stress level was skyrocketing. I continually told myself "I am more than my job", and I got through it. I did receive promotion and tenure, but I'm certain it would have been okay if the result had been different. If you are not "more than your job", become more.
23. anotherprof - February 21, 2010 at 03:55 pm
Check
24. anotherprof - February 21, 2010 at 05:51 pm
I am going through the appeal process for tenure now - but there is just collusion at all levels. I have been ganged-up on and bullied from the time I started. Apparently several people did not like that I was hired and they spread their discontent. I have had resources taken from me; my office burglarized; and forced to file false report by my chair. The dean said "your word, against his." Yet she went along with the senior faculty that hated me and wrote lies in her letter to the provost. The provost who was hired to do a hatchet job (for six months) concurred; the president concurred. But I continue to do what's right.
25. harry - February 22, 2010 at 12:16 pm
What would this column look like--and what would its advice be (along with those of the various commenters)--if it focused more on the type institutions where the vast percentage of American faculty are employed?
I'm thinking of heavily teaching-oriented institutions, places where the research expectations, while often growing, are also still muted, at least comparatively to what's being stressed here.
In such institutions teaching, collegiality, and service are actually profoundly important, especially in times of limited budgets. (I know, I was at just such an institution before moving to my current state R1.) Perlmutter's advice here about eschewing "silos" for possessing and pursuing a variety of job-related competencies is spot on. What made my former university distinct was that such expectations were built into the hiring process--we simply didn't pursue candidates to didn't evidence demonstrable abilities to do a wide range of work while still being specialists.
Perhaps that's another point of disjuncture, namely a failure of hiring committees to focus more precisely--to be more honest about precisely what our institution demands. For example, should we ever get the chance here in the humanities to hire again (ha!) I will insist that our search committee query every semi-finalist about how he or she might pursue not only publication but also grants. That doesn't necessarily mean that the candidate has to have already secured grants, but if they can't speak to that element of the job I suspect, quite frankly, we can find other similarly qualified candidates who can.
26. wvcurmudgeon - February 22, 2010 at 02:50 pm
I have tenure at a small state institution. Tenure does put peopel through the ringer. The requirements are purposefully vague. Interesting thought that faculty are required to make grading clear to their students, however the administration needs to use the same clarity in judging faculty for tenure. That way there would not be as many faculty members needing psychological counselling.
The others were right that enourmous burdons are places on younger faculty. And they do not count for much, they can only hurt you. And they are probably set up with that in mind.
27. loweredexpectations - February 23, 2010 at 11:09 am
The many sad, even tragic, experiences shared above demonstrate to me that the whole tenure system is increasingly a "set-up." Colleges and universities really don't want to grant tenure anymore, for reasons we all know--it's expensive, it limits the institution's ability to be "nimble" and get rid of programs that aren't "financially viable" (problematic term, that one), it gives faculty an iota of "power". . . . So, the trick of course is to raise the bar so ridiculously high that almost no one can qualify. The super-human might get tenure, and the insitution can say it still has a tenure system, but in reality, the tenure system is in name, not in practice; it's a token system. Is it worth it, for a $50K/year job? More and more of us think not, especially when more viable and even lucrative--not to mention more humane--opportunities exist outside of academe. The whole system seems to be collapsing.