I just got off the phone with a friend/colleague at a university on the West Coast. (I’ll try to stay purposefully vague about things, which will include avoiding gendered pronouns.)
The person, a rigorous scholar in the social sciences, is frantically trying to get a dossier completed for a pending promotion review, which explains why I would get a buzz at 8:45 in the morning, Philadelphia time. Said friend/colleague was pulling an all-nighter.
This colleague was freaking out about the tenure process, and our conversation went something like this:
ME: Hey, it has been a long time. How are things?
THEM: I’m going crazy over here.
ME: Why? What’s up?
THEM: This tenure thing. They are trying to make me go insane.
ME: All the material you have to assemble?
THEM: No. Well, yeah. But not just that. There is all this voting about the process. Everyone is constantly voting on whether my file should move to the next phase. All these hurdles. Voting, voting, voting. And I’ve caught myself interpreting every small exchange with my colleagues as an indication of how they might stand on my case, on how they might be voting. Ugh! And every once in a while I get a strange look or comment that nearly drives me over the cliff. It has gotten to the point where I wish I could just avoid any contact with ANYBODY until the process is done. How did you cope? Any tips?
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any tips. At least nothing that I thought would really help. I was lucky enough to be on leave when I first went up for tenure, which meant that I could mostly avoid the kind of “promotion paranoia” that my friend was describing.
I always tell people that one of the benefits of going to Columbia University in the mid-1990s was that you were exposed to some very high-profile tenure denials. There was one in Comparative Literature that I remember. And even in my own department, Anthropology.
Those decisions made some of my fellow graduate students completely terrified of the tenure process, which was so secretive and seemingly capricious. But for other students, those same decisions were potentially liberating. That’s because we thought of them (fairly or not) as little more than “political” decisons, either with the capital “P” of ideological differences (people who just don’t like your theoretical endgame) or the small “p” of pettier interpersonal differences (people who just don’t like you).
Either way, it seemed to instruct us that we had better do what we really enjoyed (as fledgling scholars), because there would never be a foolproof way to game the tenure process, to predetermine the outcome in any particular case. So, we didn’t want to get stuck doing a research project for years and years simply (or mostly) because we thought it might land us a good job on the road to tenure.
But do folks have other ways of coping with this promotion paranoia that they would recommend? If so, I’ll pass them on.
5 Responses to Promotion Paranoia
snwiedmann - September 23, 2009 at 7:08 am
This probably won’t be any comfort to the suffering junior faculty member at the West Coast university, but things are different at smaller schools. If you want the prestige (and pay and bennies) that come with tenure at Big Name University, expect to pay the price. If you desire a more civilized and humane process, with regular classroom contact with undergraduate students, more than enough committee work, and very reasonable publication requirements, consider smaller, less-prestigious (hardly anyone knows our name) schools. You’re right, of course. I will never earn the salary of my Big School counterparts. Here, we don’t even get sabbaticals. But we like one another, we like coming to work, and we actually have time for friends and families. Please, my younger colleagues, stop the whining. Everything comes with a price. If you aren’t willing to pay it, buy into something else.
microfante - September 23, 2009 at 9:55 am
The problem is not that everything comes at a price, but that the price keeps going up (very often) without notice. It is like surrendering your credit card, getting your account wiped out, and then being told that it is not enough; and you do not get your money back. So, please, my older colleague at the hardly-anyone-knows-our-name school, stop the Schadenfreude.
copesan - September 23, 2009 at 10:10 am
Since when was it whining to demand civility and manners? The job process is rude and inhumane at best when its not cruel and uncivilized; the tenure process as well.
rejani - September 23, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Dear Professor Jackson:I think that the “madness” of the tenure and promotion process is intensified when said faculty member is a person of color because typically they would not be part of or privy to the informal network where the real decisions are made. Typically they would be functioning in an entirely different social network, and then end up being penalized for it in the formal process. Whereas the person who is an integral part of the social network gets tenured and advanced through the ranks at the expense of the faculty member of color. Often the formal process is simply window dressing to reinforce the “informal” process of evaluation for promotion and tenure. This is a process where persons whom the faculty member of color has maybe chosen to “befriend or kowtow to” gets their one or two shots at exacting revenge. They get to reveal their really biased attitude towards that faculty member of color because the whole process is confidential. Academics are famous for sliding the dagger in your back and then going to lunch with you. There excuse is that is how the game is played, but where I come from we see it as cowardice; an inate inability to look a person inthe eyes and let them know that you have a problem with them. At any rate waiting three to five years for when that person of color comes up for tenure and promotion to exact your “pound of flesh” is simply petty. Maybe they don’t play basketball or tennis with you because you are just a lousy athlete. If this is the case they shouldn’t be compelled to allow you to score.
jeancadet - September 27, 2009 at 11:27 am
The situations that Rejani describes are very prevalent in American Universities because of long standing policies of exclusion. I also think that they continue to exist because many of the so-called faculty members of color appear to be suffeeing from a certain degree of “cowardice” a la Holder. So, in a way, although the members of the accepted social network might be suffering from petty interpersonal and ethnic differences, it is clear that they are not being held responsible for their bad behaviors through a number of mechanisms.