Question (from "Barton"): I am on the tenure track at a small college where a student filed a complaint against me full of false accusations. If I file a defamation suit against the student, would that be held against me by a tenure committee?
Question (from "Gretchen"): I just passed (barely) my third-year review, so my job is secure for the next couple of years, until the tenure vote. I discovered that two malicious colleagues campaigned against me, and I think it's because they don't like my subject area. I know I have the teaching record and publications to get tenure when I come up, so what can I do to get revenge against them?
Question (from "Coriolanus"): Don't you think we should do away with the whole tenure drama? I worked with some colleagues at Big Kazoo U whose bootlicking hypocritical stances just turned me away from teaching. There is so little grace and dignity left in the process when colleagues are ready to sell their souls for advancement. Talk about academic honesty. And these are the very people who can't stop whining about the greedy corporate CEO's. The university milieu is so full of false pretenses (from the hiring process to tenure) that I wonder how some have survived it for more than 10 years.
Answer: Ms. Mentor's three letter writers have something in common besides their bitterness. Their epistles were written last year — before the financial meltdown, before the foreclosures, before the furloughs and layoffs and hiring freezes. The letters were written in a spirit of (relative) optimism: The writers thought their jobs were safe. But now, with budget crises everywhere, untenured faculty members imagine themselves desperately clinging to the side of a boat in icy waters.
If they want their jobs to survive, they have to be the kind of people who'll be hauled back onto the ship. They must make themselves loved, wanted, and cherished, and Ms. Mentor knows that many Bartons and Gretchens won't want to do so. "I have my rights, and I need my good name!" and "They threw dirt on my heart, and I'll get back at them!" are common human reactions.
But can you pay your bills?
Ms. Mentor, a realist in terrible times, points out that tenure is officially awarded for excellence in teaching, research, and service. But collegiality (whether "they" like you) counts just as much. Do they want you on their ship for another 30 years, cheerfully pitching in to furl the sails and swab the deck? Or do your colleagues already avoid you as a sour, combative personality — someone who'll waste department energy on vendettas? Someone who'll embarrass the institution with frivolous lawsuits over matters that become moot once a semester is over? (Ms. Mentor notes that you never really win a defamation suit, since you have to publicize the accusation. A headline like "Prof Denies Multiple Orgies" will make you memorable, but not in a good way. Ignore, and forget.)
Your colleagues won't keep you if they don't like you. If you love your subject, and love to teach and write about it, you must be kind and ingratiating to your colleagues. Ask their advice (nothing is more flattering). If you think they don't respect your subject area, invite them to lunch and explain how it fits with theirs. Offer to give a departmental talk on your subject. Go to department social events, smile, and make small talk. Bring cookies. Add value.
You may be cast aside anyway. In budget crunches ("financial exigency"), even tenured positions can be casualties. But you will have good recommendations for future jobs, in academe or the real world. You will have some way to pay the rent, and some way to use your years of training and the richness of your knowledge.
Alternatively, you can continue to fight for what you see as justice. You can use your research and teaching time to plot revenge or foment mutinies. Or you can jump ship.
Coriolanus has apparently done that. If he is sincere and not merely posturing, he needn't ever again poke his toes into the slippery, hypocritical pools of academe. Ms. Mentor thinks his complaints are highly overwrought, though probably entertaining and comforting late at night in one's cups. But they are ultimately, well, unfair.
Tenure protects against sharks. With tenure, universities get to nurture and keep experienced and accomplished teachers and scholars. Tenured professors have a safe haven for controversial ideas in their classrooms: They can talk about sex and Islam, atheism and capitalism. Once they're not worried about annual evaluations (as adjuncts are), tenured professors can undertake long-term projects for the greater common good: cures for diseases, understandings of historical causes, lexicons of dying languages. Tenure lets you follow your curiosity.
But Coriolanus seems to imply that tenure will also make you rich — and Ms. Mentor can't let her flock get that impression.
The highest-paid academic employees, a handful of football coaches, do earn several million dollars a year — but those are pathetically low salaries compared with corporate leaders. (A 2008 article in The Wall Street Journal reports that Ford's CEO has earned about $50-million since 2006.) Football coaches do not have extravagant golden parachutes; their performance evaluations are very public. They can be harangued by irate fans, booed on national television, and hanged in effigy. If their team loses, they get unceremoniously dumped.
Coaches also rarely have tenure — something beleaguered Barton and grim Gretchen can still pursue, if they choose. They can decide to remain self-righteous, railing with Coriolanus about hypocrisy. Or they can choose to be pleasant ("sell out," some might say), and swim to the big boat or ivory tower. Once they have tenure, they can share and pursue the knowledge that's engaged them for 10 or 20 years (if it hasn't, they needn't stay). They can contribute to education, to the future of America, and to its comeback under a new and vigorous president who writes and reads books.
In fact, Barack Obama was a popular law professor, a thoughtful and engaging teacher, for a dozen years at the University of Chicago. He avoided combative lunches with other faculty members, ran for political office, lost to an opponent who called him an "egghead" — and then turned down a chance for tenure (see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/politics/30law.html). He had other ships to sail, other fish to fry. Did he read Ms. Mentor and benefit from her perfect wisdom?
She likes to think so.
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Question: A colleague always feels the need to hug me, and kiss me on the cheek. That makes me uncomfortable, as I'm an introvert. But she also supports me in department meetings, and I'm not tenured. (We're both women, if that matters.) Will I be considered rude and hopelessly uncouth and ungrateful if I push her away and insist on a handshake?
Answer: Probably.
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Sage Readers: Ms. Mentor grieves for disappointed job seekers in this terrible year.
As always, she welcomes rants, comments, and queries, as well as success stories. She would like her flock to be wise, winning, and gainfully employed.
