A while back the Modern Language Association issued its Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, a reasoned discussion of standards and expectations of promotion in the humanities. The report examined serious questions about productivity requirements, the standing of the monograph, fewer tenure-track lines (as a percentage of hires), and the like.
The latest issue of Profession, the MLA’s annual publication on professional matters, contains nine responses to the standards/procedures issue, and each of them makes for sober reading. What they don’t discuss, however — and given the aims of the project, shouldn’t have taken the time to discuss — is the very unusual existence of tenure, its remarkable place and meaning in a professional life.
Think about just how extraordinary it sounds to people who aren’t part of the academic system. In a one-hour meeting of colleagues who’ve already survived the process, a lifetime fate is decided. A 36-year-old teacher/scholar has undergone six years of graduate school, a year (or two or three) as a lecturer or adjunct, then five-and-a-half years as a junior professor building up a teaching portfolio, delivering conference papers, issuing some quarterly publications, and, above all, securing a letter of acceptance from a decent scholarly press. And now it comes down to a few peer review reports and to what a few colleagues down the hall think of what you’ve done.
The outcome determines the rest of your life. It’s all or nothing. A paycheck to eternity or unemployment a few months later. The stakes couldn’t be higher. I know of few other career passages that involve such an extreme transition, a decisive step from insecurity to security — personal, professional, economic.
While we examine standards and procedures of tenure, then, we might also pose a basic question: Is tenure a healthy element in higher education? With so much riding on this one-time decision, does tenure make people do better work? How does the psychological toll of the process affect the intellect? And does it really preserve academic freedom?
Or, so pressurized and concentrated, does it yield perversities of behavior and thought, bizarre actions and judgments behind closed doors and in people’s heads that won’t settle until the whole system is changed?
