First Person

Argument and Optimism: The Sequel

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By George Teague

When we last left our hero (me), I had reached the public destination of tenure -- and I had experienced a more personal sense of arrival.

I had adjusted to academic culture and gradually evolved from someone leery of conflict to someone who saw argument as a positive force. I interpreted the unanimous faculty vote on my tenure case as a sign that I could argue in good faith without any colleague penalizing me for speaking my mind.

But my first column ended with my working up the nerve to make the most uncomfortable argument of all. While my college had awarded me tenure, it had not granted me promotion to associate professor.

That's a common practice at my college for newly tenured faculty members. But many colleagues I respected were pushing me to go right back up and ask for the promotion again. Only this time, they said, I would have to, yes, make a better argument.

They were referring to my self-evaluation, a document that is the cornerstone of tenure and promotion applications. In it, candidates synthesize their performance in teaching, scholarship, and service to the college.

How much weight given to each of those categories depends, of course, on the institution. Since mine is a liberal-arts college with no graduate school in my field and a heavy teaching load, my operating assumption was that if I stood out in the areas of teaching and service, and was actively pursuing my research agenda, the combination would be enough to merit promotion.

Obviously I was wrong.

But the truth is more complex: The case for promotion was there in my performance. I just hadn't made that case effectively on the page.

That doesn't mean I had written a bad self-evaluation the first time around. Since I was hired to teach journalistic and creative writing, I had crafted the document carefully. I wanted the language and tone to reflect the qualities of my own published work. One colleague told me it was the best self-evaluation he had read in his nearly two decades at the college -- making me smugly confident that all my operating assumptions had been validated.

I had made three such assumptions that seemed logical enough at the time:

• I would not overexplain the facts of my case. To do so, I thought, would insult the evaluators' intelligence. I didn't want to annoy them by creating additional verbiage for them to plow through. I would obey my instincts as both a journalist and a fiction writer, letting the facts speak for themselves. Instead of going on at length about how journalistic publications function as scholarship for people teaching journalism, I would let the readers of my self-evaluation draw that conclusion on their own. Besides, I suspected that the more I argued, the more I invited evaluators to challenge the assertion.

• The language and tone of my self-evaluation should mirror that of my journalistic and creative work. If the self-evaluation was not accessible, engaging, and at least occasionally entertaining, my evaluators might conclude that I was not as successful a journalist as I claimed. I included flourishes of humor, a symptom of a nobler motive: I felt sorry for the evaluators, bored to tears from going through all those syllabi, evaluations, conference papers, and published articles. Injecting some clarity and humor seemed like the humane thing to do.

• Credit should be given where credit was due. That meant emphasizing my belief in team efforts, refusing to exaggerate my role or downplay the contributions of my collaborators.

That approach helped me gain tenure. But when colleagues revisited my self-evaluation -- with my reapplication for promotion in mind -- they decided I had been my own worst enemy.

Part of the problem was those pesky assumptions, on which I was corrected by various colleagues:

• I did, in fact, need to explain in detail what felt like obvious implications of the facts. I had to move from simple journalistic presentation to a forceful, coherent argument. That was especially true because my form of scholarship seemed unconventional to members of the promotion and tenure committee who were in more traditional academic fields. One colleague kind enough to edit my draft pushed me hard to adopt academic lingo in my self-evaluation: My references to "interviews" I had conducted became "research," and my "road-trip manuscript" became an "unpublished book" steeped in said "research." Another project (a collaboration with students) that I had called a "magazine" also became a "book" (which actually was more accurate). I also had to aggressively recruit letters from people elsewhere in the country attesting to the importance of a national publication I had founded.

• Ignore the journalistic voice inside me. Instead of worrying about boring those poor evaluators as they read my application alone at night, I should have been envisioning them gathered in a meeting room, looking to my document for help in making an argument on my behalf. Instead of listening to the voice inside me that urged accessibility and brevity in my self-evaluation, I had to listen to the academic voice that spoke in the language of the college (however dull and repetitive it might seem to me).

• Instead of emphasizing team effort, I should stress individual accomplishment. A colleague urged me to eliminate, in a few places, the names of people who had helped me. That part of the revision I positively loathed; it ran counter not only to my self-deprecating nature, but also to the philosophy on which I live and work. For the most part, I tried to play up my role without cutting the names of others who contributed.

Then came the six-month wait between the submission of my application and the final verdict. I told myself that no matter what, I had written a much stronger self-evaluation, one that would serve me well some year, if not this one. But I also knew that arguing more effectively had not changed the facts of my case. Arguments, after all, are only as good as their premises.

Furthermore, I mused, even if the college were to promote me, I would never know if it was because of my self-evaluation or because of other circumstances.

I had done all I could do. As April turned into May, I protected myself against dashed high hopes by, well, not having any. I went to the mailbox each day expecting the worst; some days I didn't go to the mailbox at all.

On the day the letter finally arrived, I opened it on the sidewalk, thinking to get the bad news out of the way as quickly as possible. But it wasn't bad news. The letter congratulated me on my promotion.

Making the argument -- particularly in the way my college expected it to be made -- had paid off. I went upstairs less proud than grateful -- and relieved. I wasn't going to have to make that particular argument again any time soon.