Denied tenure, she opens fire
February 13th, 2010 by Alan
Three killed during a professors’ staff meeting! By a female shooter! Who was denied tenure! Despite significant accomplishments!
I can’t believe it’s taken this long. Of course, academics are a passive lot, and over the years they’ve just sucked it up as the tenure system has piled humiliations upon abuses, ever since the academic job market began drying up in the 70s. Before then, you could get tenure, as one senior colleague recalled, “just by asking.”
Job market dead
That stopped quite suddenly. The Baby Boomers passed through college, and America didn’t need so many professors. The job market has been shrinking ever since. Harper’s reports that tenure-track positions in language and literature are down 37% this year — and 51% since 2001.
It is the tenure system, the damned tenure system that clogs the job market and makes a bad situation worse. In organizations of every kind, an incompetent can be fired, dead wood can be “packaged out” via a parachute of some kind. Even the CEO can be fired.
In like Flynn
But professors are different. Tenure — guaranteed job security — was supposed to protect professors from being fired for being controversial. What a joke. Nowadays profs are anything but, hewing to the same diversity/multiculturalism party line espoused by corporations and the government, only with stricter speech codes. Controversial would be marching in the streets to end this horrendous deficit, these obscene wars. Even Mayor Daley, whose father’s police “preserved disorder” by clubbing antiwar protestors, was heard to make antiwar statements and wonder about the absence of protestors. But profs don’t march anymore. They have tenure.
And what one must go through to get it — or be denied it. The rules are as follows: you get six years, if you’re lucky, to amass enough original published research, patents, or the like, to place you among the leading luminaries in the field, or at least at the periphery. A book or two helps. Give and write lots of papers. In the humanities, this is an incentive to produce drivel about drivel, ad infinitum. Student evaluations only muddy the water: since the same teacher can be rated anywhere from abysmal to inspirational by the same class, the data can be used to support any decision that’s already been made.
At the end of six years, a tenure decision: either you’re in, or you get one more year to prove yourself, then it’s out. The evaluation of your accomplishments is purely subjective. Who can say when the body of original work is “enough”? Only the oracles on the Tenure and Promotion Committee, all tenured themselves.
So the people empowered to change the system are in charge of the system. Doesn’t bode well.
Before the tenure battle
Prior to the six years, you must have a PhD. In addition to all the course work and exams (and language requirements), you must write a dissertation. This can be a soul-deadening and, in some cases, a life-threatening experience. Yes, people have killed themselves over their dissertations, so high was the bar, so demeaning and demanding was their faculty advisor, so unyielding their committee. It began to seem as if they’d never finish the damn thing, and they felt worthless, thanks to the unceasing humiliation of their so-called mentors (I’m talking 85% — some are good).
Fired
My own advisor “fired” me after he found I was using up-to-date field methods instead of the ones he used in the 1930s. Fortunately, intervention by the Chairman (at my instigation) got me back on track, and I did, finally, finish, to my everlasting joy and sense of closure.
But then there’s the tenure hurdle. Denied it — for what are quite arbitrary reasons (I would have thought her being a woman would have helped) — one can go stark raving mad and start shooting. Think of it: Your nose has been held relentlessly to the grindstone for as long as it takes to get an MD, but unlike the doctor, you are guaranteed nothing, and may find yourself unemployed, for no good reason. I remember the day I got the word. It felt like a psychological disembowelment. Or maybe a castration. I thought I had done the right things, but the bar had suddenly been raised very high, even at the second-rate university where I was employed.
Reset
I was lucky — and determined not to let these people decide the course of my life (as I recall, there was an assistant professorship opening in Manhattan — Kansas). I reset my life compass, found a new career that not only paid better but actually offered better job security, as long as you perform. But I can still close my eyes and recall myself in the Chairman’s office being told I wouldn’t make the cut. After all that work. Shooting sounds like an understandable response. Illegal, wrong, counterproductive — but entirely understandable.
At last, after countless professors — who didn’t get government subsidies for not professoring, the way farmers to do for not farming — had humbly swallowed their fate, one decided to hit back.
So you can’t be a professor without tenure? What about teaching high school? You won’t be rich, but you won’t be too poor either.
People are so arrogant and full of feelings of entitlement, that they forget any morality; it’s all about them in their minds, then it’s gime gime gime.
There is no respect for life in a heart full of selfisheness, rage, and revenge. While injustice is hard to bear, it’s even harder when you realize that it’s you that has done the unjust deed.
Better to suffer a wrong than to perpetuate it.
The career is not worth someone’s life.
Yes, tenure is manure, and no career should be guaranteed. independent of performance. But no job is worth a person’s life, much less three.
Nobody is entitled to be a professor, but humans (and even some higher primates) have a sense of fairness, perhaps unjustified, but it’s there.
Working your butt off for all those years, playing by (what you thought were) the rules, then having the rug pulled out from under you…well, if you ever had it happen to you, you know how hard it is to cope with.
When that process is accompanied by years of jerking around and humiliation, and one has no way to cope with the accumulating rage, a violent outcome, for some, is almost inevitable.
To grow up is to understand the randomness of life and to take the disappointments in stride.
Tenured academics are unique in their formally guaranteed job security. Union members think they have it just because there’s a contratct, but they don’t. I remember workers parading outside the GM building in Detroit wearing T-shirts that said “A job is a right.” No, it’s not.
Teaching high school is a very diffferent careeer path, the main differences being that you don’t have to do any research to get tenure, but you have to take education courses to get the job (professors don’t).
Shalom,
Alan
Sad, what Alan says, but largely true. I was denied tenure and also landed on my feet, though I wound up in other teaching situations. I would recommend community college teaching, though you’re not going to get the pick of the students, and you’ll often have to compromise somewhat with the professional standards you developed as a graduate student. However, the salary is as livable as a four-year college prof’s salary, the “tenure” requirements are more reasonable, and there is much less subjectivity about your original contribution to a specialized academic field. Publication is not the issue: successful teaching is (that’s where the subjectivity can creep in, of course). I once heard a statistic to the effect that 90% of the meaningful publication in humanities areas is done by about 15% of the professors. That means about 85% are doing somewhat pointless publication–i.e., so specialized that only the twenty to forty other people in the field even care about it, much less read it. I’m not surprised. Their four-year institutions require it. And all four year institutions seem to consider themselves obligated to produce research in abundance, regardless of the importance of the research. Apart from my not getting tenure, it was disillusioning to see how much academic writing is done, and how little of it was of any use or interest, even in my own field. It was recommended to me by a senior colleague that I cement my position in the department (i.e., make myself irreplaceable at the same second-rate institution Alan refers to) by making myself an expert in “stylistics.” I did a little reading in the area and knew immediately that I could not stomach a lifetime of it. I left, chagrined at not getting tenure (yes, the standards did change mid-course) but later thankful at having been set free from that institution for a much more self-determined life.
Good to hear from someone who’s been through it (coincidentally, with me). In the 70s and 80s so many people were tossed out of academia and had to make a career change that a book, “Corporate PhD,” was written about those who made the jump.
It turns out that academic, even humanities skills are somewhat useful in a business setting. I actually employed stylistics in speechwriting, to make the speech sound like the speaker.
Career dislocation is a kick in the crotch, no question. But it’s also a test of your adaptability (put on a coat and tie and be in the office beofre 9:00 every day, just like the rest of the adult world) and ability to transfer your skills.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.