Bucking the Trend, St. John’s U. Converts Instructors Into Tenure-Track Professors

Scholars who teach composition, a staple on the schedule of many a college freshman, often wind up stringing together a series of adjunct teaching jobs while keeping an eye out for that first step on the golden track to tenure. So it is easy to see why Roseanne Gatto marvels at her good fortune. She is not quite finished working on her dissertation but has almost finished her first year as an assistant professor of writing at St. John’s University. “This was huge for me,” says Ms. Gatto.

Another new instructor-turned-professor, Tara Roeder, adds that “to be on the tenure track and not have to have that anxiety of not knowing whether we’ll have a job or not. … Honestly, it’s so amazing.”

The two are part of a group of 20 people St. John’s hired to teach in its first-year writing program, part of the university’s Institute for Writing Studies, which opened in 2006. All of them were hired over two years as full-time instructors on one-year, renewable contracts. But in the summer of 2008, the president and the provost decided to convert the contingent positions into tenure-track jobs.

At a time when the ravaged economy has pushed many colleges to cut faculty members from the payroll, it is unusual to hear of a college converting contingent workers into potential lifetime employees. But the university’s ambition is to “have every St. John’s student recognized for their writing skills,” says the president, the Rev. Donald J. Harrington. Achieving that goal, he says, meant “we had to make a strategic priority to invest in a writing faculty above and beyond the English faculty.”

The promotions were a move to hold on to the writing specialists. (Most are Ph.D.‘s, and the rest are A.B.D., M.F.A.‘s. or professors with master’s degrees who have extensive teaching experience) And even though St. John’s officials reached this decision before the economy tanked, the university insists that its commitment to the Institute for Writing Studies and its faculty hasn’t wavered.

“We’re not cutting back,” says Julia A. Upton, the provost, who backed the creation of the institute along with Father Harrington. “We want every student coming here to have full-time professors teaching writing.”

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