The Only Good Professor Is A Dead Professor: Or, Is The Decline Of Academic Labor A Health Risk?

When was the last time you stopped grading, writing, reading or writing up committee reports and went to the gym?  In "Performance Pressure," published this week in the Canadian academic journal Academic Matters, Megan A. Kirk and Ryan E. Rhodes are betting you didn't do it lately.  In "Performance Pressure" they argue that assistant professors are particularly at risk. "Being a professor is a profession that has been shown to have the longest work hours, heaviest work demands, highest psychological stress, and lowest occupational energy expenditure compared to other professional occupations," they write. Hence, among all professional workers, new faculty are most likely to become mentally run-down and unhealthy for lack of exercise:

For many, the allure of becoming a professor is the promise of a career that involves freedom of choice, national funding, opportunities for promotion, secured tenure-track advancement, and a flexible work schedule. It is no secret, however, that the path to becoming an established professor requires years of grueling, all-consuming service to prove oneself as worthy.

Assistant professors, those who have recently entered the academic profession, aim to reach tenure by spending countless hours teaching, marking, grant writing, publishing, reading, analyzing, recruiting, and presenting. Most of these “rookies” are also juggling relationships, families, and other personal goals. The reward is that once tenure status is granted, life as a professor can be absolutely wonderful. Or so we think. What if the pressure, expectations, and stress endured while trying to obtain a tenure-track position had devastating consequences on your long-term physical and emotional health?

In a sample of 267 assistant professors who had been hired in the last five years, Kirk and Rhodes found that only 30.7% were meeting a minimum level of physical activity necessary to maintain good adult health.  This compares to 50% of young Canadian professionals who are meeting this basic standard.  "The declining trend in physical activity was not independent of certain socio-demographic profiles," they note.  "Those who indicated they were married, and worked 70-plus hours of work per week reported sharper decreases in physical activity across the transition compared to those who were single and working fewer than 70 hours." Having children was also a co-factor, which will not surprise those of you out there who are parents.

One recent preoccupation of this blog and a great many other publications has been the great difficulties of life as an adjunct or contract faculty member.  But here's a question:  although there are tremendous differences in salary, security and work conditions between ladder track faculty and others, are labor conditions that have marginalized some also putting increasing pressure on those who seem to be succeeding in this narrowing labor market?  One of the things we all know implicitly is that the tremendous pressure to achieve tenure occurs in part because to not get tenure has a great likelihood of being a career-ending moment.  That is a psychological stressor, including an inducement to work harder -- even at things that will never be noticed in a review.  One thing I have suspected for a while is that there is simply more work to do than there was twenty years ago, even putting aside raised expectations for scholarly production in the social sciences and the humanities.  Colleges and universities are accepting more students; many of the students we accept are more difficult to teach for a variety of reasons; the increased demand for measurable outcomes; and the drop in full-time teaching staff who can be expected to undertake and be responsible for these tasks makes them more time-consuming.

Give Me A T For Texas: Tuesday Tenure Report

Another take on the path towards tenure

Where, oh where, has the Radical been?  Well, many places, but the most recent impediment to posting has been the end of honors thesis season, which requires time-consuming, line-by-line scrutiny of all outgoing chapters.  But by today, the little birds will have flown the coop once and for all and I am once again left to my feckless ways.  A good scrounge through my Google reader shows that others have been busy out there, however, so with out further ado:

Just in Case You Were Curious:  According to the campus newspaper, the Trinitonian, Trinity University of San Antonio Texas is making the institutional case for tenure.  In an article that does a good job of explaining to students what tenure is and how faculty achieve it, Michael Fischer, vice president of Academic Affairs, “There are very good historical reasons for tenure and particularly in this political environment, there is even a greater reason for tenure, because tenure allows academics to say things that are unpopular,” Ahlburg said. “Without the protection of tenure, it would most likely lead to their removal, and that could be at a state institution by shutting off funds.”  John Huston, chair of the economics department, argues in the same piece that tenure has other advantages for a teaching institution. “There are great advantages of having your faculty tied to your institution," he says; "So that their interests are aligned more with the institution’s interests.  I know that I am going to be at Trinity for a large chunk of my career, so I have Trinity’s interests at heart and I think that’s a real plus of the tenure system.”

Other college administrators might want to take a page out of Trinity's book.  My faith in the electorate's ability to reason is currently at an all-time low.  But perhaps if colleges, universities and public school systems went on the offense and explained what tenure actually does, and why the ideal, mobile workforce that neoliberal and conservative policy makers imagine is not good for education it might make blowhards pols like Chris Christie and Scott Walker look like the anti-labor, anti-education governors that they are?

Update on DePaul University Tenure Bias Case:  Back in February, I reported on the personnel troubles at DePaul University in Chicago, where 22 white faculty were awarded tenure last year and all six scholars of color were denied tenure.  Those denied tenure, and a large number of their supporters on the faculty (who I'm guessing are white, if these numbers represent a trend) say there is a pattern of discrimination, and lawsuits have been filed.  Philosophy prof Namita Goswami got the AAUP involved (excellent move, in my experience) and a summary of their summary of the case follows:

Goswami, who has a PhD from Emory University, was hired by the DePaul philosophy department in 2003 to teach "critical race and feminist theory." Between then and now she's published numerous journal articles, written a book that's under contract with SUNY Press, and won DePaul's highest teaching honor, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award, along with two competitive research fellowships. In spite of all that, somewhere along the way, the philosophy department decided she wasn't such a good fit.

Two years ago an ad hoc committee of the department made an attempt to get her terminated before her probationary appointment was even over. Among their complaints, according to the AAUP report: she didn't attend enough department events during a one academic year, "has interests other than continental philosophy"—notably, women's studies, which is integral to what she was hired to teach—and isn't fluent in German, though she speaks five other languages.

According to the AAUP report, written by Saint Xavier University history professor Peter N. Kirstein, this ad hoc committee essentially sought to "cashier Dr. Goswami for engaging in research that a majority find objectionable: Mainly doing her job as a scholar in postcolonial theory, critical race and feminist theory, and linking them to the discipline of philosophy." The AAUP concluded that Goswami was "excelling," and that her academic freedom had been violated by her department, in which "there appears to be a club-like atmosphere and a narrow perception of the discipline."

I've seen this story over and over again.  It is the fundamental flaw of top-down diversity polices by administrations who refuse to also reform the tenure process.  Departments that have historically failed to see the value in new scholarship are given all kinds of enlightenment points for hiring candidates that meet university criteria for diversity, but are then given a free hand to harass and dump them according to internal "standards" that have been left undisturbed.  Someone could do the profession a great service by providing the comparative tenure data on this across institutions.

It's Only Good If You Can Get It:  In Discover magazine, science blogger "Julianne" recently posted  "How To Get Tenure At Almost Every Other Research University," a response to her colleague "Sean"'s  "How To Get Tenure At A Major University."  Sean's piece includes helpful hints under subheadings like "Be a productive genius" ($hit!  That's where I went wrong!)  As Julianne writes,

Personally, I found Sean’s advice really really dispiriting, and it probably would have freaked me out to read it as a postdoc. And yet, I find myself with “tenure at a major research university” without ever having lost sleep to fears about achieving seemingly impossible standards. I worked steadily, but not insanely. I had a couple of kids. I “dabbled” in other research areas, some of which turned into major research areas down the road. And it worked out (although, it likely wouldn’t have “worked out” if I was at Chicago or Caltech).

Julianne's advice follows more along the lines of demonstrating that you have "traction," as she calls it, which is imprecise but I think some of the best advice I have heard in any field.  What she means by this is:  have a research program, do it well, demonstrate that you are moving forward in a substantive way.  Every once in a while, she suggests, it isn't such a bad idea to take a risk. While establishing a whole parallel track that isn't likely to pay off in any discernible way, a risk could amplify the direction you are already taking. "A colleague and I have had many discussions about the fact that, because we were more than willing to leave academia, we were more willing to take risks," Julianne writes. " These risks paid off in more interesting research than the path we were headed down as young postdocs."

You Might Not Want To Try This At Home:  Techdirt reports that Michel Aaij of the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery added his Wikipedia entries to his tenure dossier and they were a hit.  Aaij has apparently been doing some on the ground work to persuade his colleagues that on-line media represents important scholarly contributions, and voila, they became believers.  "It certainly would be nice if the overly broad anti-Wikipedia bias in academia was starting to fade," Techdirt notes. "Of course, it's important to point out that it wasn't just Wikipedia edits on his application [for tenure], but either way, it appears that his colleagues are gaining increasing respect for work done on Wikipedia in addition to traditional journals."

One caveat:  I love Wikipedia, but it isn't a journal.  Adjust your vita accordingly.

And now, to start your day on a happy note, in honor of Trinity College, here is 1976 concert footage of Lynyrd Skynyrd doing an old Jimmie Rodgers standard ("woman made a fool out of me.")

To Reform Tenure, Consider Breaking Confidentiality: A Novel Approach

Following our discovery that Brown University is proposing to extend the tenure clock for probationary faculty to eight years, we learn that the University of Michigan is considering a similar move.  The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs (SACUA) is, according to the Michigan Daily,  considering extending the maximum probationary period.  Currently it is eight years, and SACUA is proposing an optional ten year clock.  Additional items on the table included weighting the decision more heavily towards faculty evaluations of the candidate.

In a proposal that appears, on the face of it, to be driven by concerns in the sciences and at the medical school, Professor of Statistics Ed Rothman told the Daily that:

this is only a short-term solution to a larger, long-term problem — ill-defined standards for obtaining tenure. Rothman said externally generated standards, like publishing requirements for faculty members, diminish quality of work. He said tenure should be determined by internally generated standards like peer reviews of faculty members’ performances.

“Long-term, I think what we need to do is come up with a standard that we have control over,” Rothman said.

He added that since faculty members have no control over fluctuations in the economy, tenure shouldn’t be determined by economically-driven factors such as obtaining research grants or publishing materials.

One similarity with Brown's approach to tenure reform seems to be recognizing the effect of the economy on the traditional markers that signal professional achievement.  Racking up numbers -- grants, books and articles -- are virtually the only indication untenured faculty have that they are making material progress towards a positive tenure vote.  We urge them to think this way, in part because publishing demonstrates a broader recognition that this person's work is significant to others outside our own little world.

One problem with this, however, is that numbers only provide the frame for a decision, whereas probationary faculty tend to think it is the whole ball of wax. In tenure decisions, no one talks about numbers for more than a second or two.  It is what people think of the quality of the work that is crucial.  Very often other things matter too:  did this person write a prize-winning book, but do so at the expense of showing up for class irregularly and unprepared?  Ideally, a tenure decision not only grants a guaranteed seat at the scholarly table for past achievement, but also recognizes that there will be future promise that justifies that person's employment over three decades or so.  In other words, in any field, tenure is an opportunity, not a reward.  It grants access to important and increasingly scarce resources:  a positive tenure vote is a vote of confidence that this person is going to use this opportunity well over the course of a career.

In this sense, an extended clock recognizes that not all people can demonstrate their promise adequately in the same time frame, and that life circumstances can intervene to prevent that. In this sense, the Michigan and Brown reforms should be applauded.  But I wonder if giving departmental faculty more power over tenure is, in the absence of other reforms, a truly benign development.  Depending on the dynamic of the individual department, it does not necessarily mean that those with the best knowledge in the candidates field of study will actually have the most influence over the decision.  In fact, it is not unknown for faculty who are hostile to particular fields and specialties within the department, or who associate certain methods and subject matters with political positions to which they are hostile, will acquire more influence than they have already without any guarantee that the decision will be more fair.

What seems to me to be a a genuinely useful direction for tenure reform -- one that would make these other reforms more meaningful -- would be to dismantle the sacred cow of confidentiality.  It is an ancient belief that secrecy in these procedures makes honest evaluations more likely, but we know that this is not true.  Mean people write mean letters about good people; generous people write "do no harm" letters about mediocre scholarship that allows a department to tenure for its own reasons and not have to overcome a bad letter in the process.  Myself, I never write a tenure letter that expresses criticisms in a tone I could not imagine the candidate reading, and I never say anything in a meeting that I don't imagine the candidate hearing.  Indeed, even in the case of a positive decision, leaks in the meeting develop almost immediately, metastasizing into gossip about who voted in which way and why.

So, why are tenure procedures confidential?  To protect the university from legal action, that's why.  A secondary concern is that the faculty making the decision would prefer to have some control over their own images, prefer not to be known for taking negative stances on a case even if they believe they have voted correctly, and are fully capable of re-crafting their own positions following a negative decision to distance themselves from the damage.  Doing someone dirty in a confidential atmosphere, even if what you are saying is true and supported by evidence, permits faculty to control the process in a way that may do structural damage to the community in the long run.

Therefore, in my view, any real tenure reform has to address the problem of high-stakes evaluations that are done in private.  Secrecy actually permits institutional inequality to thrive, because no one ever "sees" it; alternatively, it allows a larger, skeptical public to believe that a negative tenure decision might be an outcome of prejudice when in fact it has resulted from an honest evaluation of the case.  Breaking confidentiality not only forces people to explain why they believe what they believe, it also creates a far more textured picture than probationary faculty currently have of why some people are tenured and some people are not.All of these things are bad for faculty morale over the long term, and they are bad for how a larger public views the tenure system. 

• Making all materials in a tenure case available to the candidate. 
• Allowing the candidate to respond to questions about hir scholarship that have arisen in the letters and in the departmental discussion.
• Making minority and majority opinions on each case available in some kind of public document.
• Allowing all departmental faculty who have voted in the case to identify themselves to the candidate and explain why they voted the way they did.

Breaking confidentiality would have a generative role in positive tenure cases too, since positive decisions are sometimes weighted down with the baggage of negative votes that have been successfully overcome.  These negative votes not infrequently arise from critiques that, although they were not sustained by the majority decision, should not be allowed to disappear either.  Candidates inevitably hear rumors about them, but are justified in not taking them seriously because they are conveyed (often inaccurately) by their "friends" and have been articulated by "enemies." Flaws in scholarship that are not fatal at the level of the monograph might have serious ramifications down the road if they are not addressed, while originality and risk-taking that has been deliberately muted in pre-tenure scholarship so as not to offend could be usefully cultivated in the post-tenure years.

Will there be a "Wikitenure" scandal down the road?  My guess is yes.  But let's think about the possibility of breaking confidentiality in a more positive light.  What could openness in tenure decisions, that made them more like evaluations done in non-scholarly fields, do to improve the process?  How could it educate young scholars better to what we expect of them, and how they will be asked to function as senior members of the faculty?  How might those who perceive personnel cases as part of an ongoing, factional struggle within departments be marginalized in favor of those who want to see departments grow in a healthy way? Could that intervene in decades-long grudge matches that create a toxicity for the newly tenured to manage?

And might it make probationary faculty feel, even when they are disappointed in a decision, that they had an opportunity to be heard in the process of deciding their own futures?

Department of High Standards: "And The Winnah Is......"

This is a tenure clock.

Give me just a little more time/And our love will surely grow:  The Brown Daily Herald reports another reason to take a job at this trendy Ivy, other than the school colors and the terrific little Italian food shops:  you get eight years for tenure instead of the canonical seven.  The legislation is not yet final, since the faculty "has yet to vote on the wording of the amendments" (so it could take....a...while....) However, the extended tenure clock recognizes that publishing is a little more difficult in the current environment and grants more competitive.  Other reforms of the tenure process up in Providence include things that I won't even mention because they mean nothing to the rest of us, but apparently they are a big deal at Brown and claims are being made that tenure procedures are now "more transparent."  Somehow I doubt this, but I'm sure the Faculty Executive Committee (FEC) means well and has labored hard.

There are, of course, doubters.  As one former Zenith colleague used to point out dourly when we considered changing one departmental rule or another, "Things could get worse, you know."  In the case of Brown, theories abound that either a) Higher rates of tenure will demonstrate hte senior faculty's expertise in picking new people well; or b) Higher rates of tenure will make it look like senior faculty have gone soft in the head and are keeping anyone who can get paper stapled between two boards in eight years.  One concern is that candidates for tenure can choose three referees out of eight, thus introducing the possibility that promotions will will be skewed by people who will drive down the quality of the Brown faculty with their dotty, biased, candidate-centric opinions. 

Jerome Sanes, professor of neuroscience and chair of the Tenure, Promotions and Appointments Committee, said that although he approved of many of the changes, he wished the administration had more input on the final list of references.


"I think that — and this was my opinion — it was of some importance to have the administration involved in the selection of the letters that are being requested," Sanes said.

Well, everyone's got an opinion.  And tenure-track faculty?  Don't waste that extra year, you hear me?


Outstanding explanations for the lack of racial diversity in academia:  Speaking of transparency, I guess DePaul University just can't catch a break in its own effort to maintain high standards.  Diverse Issues in Higher Education reports that the school that fired Norman Finkelstein in 2007 because Harvard's Alan Dershowitz wrote an unsolicited letter condemning Finkelstein's work on the Palestinian question, has another little tenure problem.  According to reporter B. Denise Hawkins, "The university is now facing claims of racism and racial bias after it denied tenure to six professors — two Blacks, two Asian-Americans and two Latinos — but accepted all of the White tenure applicants."  Members of the faculty are demanding an internal investigation of two of the cases which, without some serious push back from the AAUP, is going to get exactly nowhere if DePaul is like other universities I am familiar with.

A nasty business, isn't?  Thinking about some issues closer to home than that (why is it that when disproportionate numbers of faculty of color stumble on the road to tenure the idea of institutional racism seems inconceivable?) I tried to look up the comparative rates of tenure for white faculty and faculty of color.  It's not so easy, and I can't come up with any figures for Latino/a faculty at all because there are so few that no one is tracking them. I did find this article in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which reports recent figures showing that only 5.4% of full-time faculty in higher ed are black.  This number is, sadly, inflated by the fact that at Historically Black Colleges (HBCs), over 60% of the faculty are black.  But dig this:

Black progress in faculty posts is even more disappointing when we look at numbers and percentages of tenured faculty. In 2007 there were 13,338 blacks holding a tenured faculty post at degree-granting educational institutions in the United States. They made up 4.6 percent of all tenured faculty. Thirty-five percent of all black full-time faculty members in 2007 held tenure. For all white full-time faculty members, 44.6 percent were tenured.

According to one illustration, with the current rate of progress, black faculty should make up 14% of full time faculty in higher ed by the year 2150.  Does that make you feel better?

A second study also shows that claims by some ideologues that white men are the objects of new prejudice in the academic hiring process have no basis in fact.  As I suspected, such claims seem to be arising from the fact that white men are being treated exactly like everyone else, since employment outcomes for different groups disaggregated by race and gender differ by only a couple percentage points. This equality looks good for racial diversity on campus, however, only if you clump all self-identified non-white men and women in groups labeled "of color." According to Diversity Web, if colleges and universities are doing a poor job of tenuring faculty "of color," they are doing an even worse job of diversifying candidate pools, even though they nearly all say they are EEOC employers. "Claims that faculty of color are in great demand and subject to bidding wars are greatly exaggerated," Debra Humphreys reports, in a study sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

• Only 11 percent of scholars of color were actively sought after by several institutions simultaneously, which means 89 percent of scholars of color were not the subject of competitive bidding wars.

• Twenty-four percent of white men, 27 percent of white women, 26 percent of men of color, and 25 percent of women of color were among those in the study who had the most job options, which suggests a nearly even distribution of access between men and women and across race, again undercutting contentions that people of color (and especially women of color) are advantaged on the job market.

• Contradicting the notion that campuses are so focused on diversifying faculty that heterosexual white males have no chance, white men in the study had a variety of experiences, from the 20 percent who did not receive regular faculty appointments to the 24 percent who had a favorable result in the labor market.

I understand that the professional associations are reeling from the decades-long bad job market, but why are they not getting involved in these questions and setting standards for what constitutes a fair tenure review process?  It's time to stop worrying about throwing the baby out with the bath water and make it possible for talented young people to continue working as intellectuals even -- and especially -- after they make their elders anxious.

It's A Poor Sort Of Memory That Only Works Backwards; Or, New (Old) Thoughts About Tenure

Alice Ad-dressing the White Queen.

`You're wrong there, at any rate,' said the Queen: `were you ever punished?'

`Only for faults,' said Alice.

`And you were all the better for it, I know!' the Queen said triumphantly.

`Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: `that makes all the difference.'

`But if you hadn't done them,' the Queen said, `that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each `better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There) (1871)

Paul Caron over at Tax Prof Blog reports that a new study "conducted under the auspices of the American Bar Foundation with additional funding from the Law School Admission Council" finds that "the perceptions of female tenured faculty members and tenured faculty of color" about the granting of tenure in law schools "differ significantly" from the perceptions "of their white male counterparts. Both female professors and professors of color perceived the tenure process as less fair and more difficult than did male or white professors. Female professors of color had the most negative perceptions [.]" 
  
Quelle surprise.  Try doing this study in the humanities and social sciences, why don't you?

It is interesting how we can know these things and then continue on as if we did not know these things.  I have to wonder whether any empirical study is capable of altering the ingrained practices that produce the "perceptions" described above (many of us would substitute the word "reality" here, but never mind.)  For different reasons, depending on our position in the hierarchy of academic bodies, like Alice's White Queen, we who are tenured have become adept at managing impossible information.  While one commenter on Caron's post is amazed that you would survey a group of people who have succeeded in a gate keeping process about the fairness of the gate keeping, I would argue that part of what is interesting about the study is that people who have succeeded don't always see their own success at achieving tenure as an unqualified vote of confidence for their intellectual work.  Indeed, the difficulty of evaluation and promotion, the rude inquiries that are often made about women and scholars of color during tenure procedures and the public undermining of the intellectual authority of these scholars even in successful promotion cases, is often stunning.  It is equally stunning to me how eager one's colleagues are to relieve white men from the burdens of such scrutiny.  A variety of what might be considered flaws and procedural bloopers that require lengthy revisiting for women and scholars of color are simply dismissed as irrelevant for white men.  Connections of the candidate to prominent people in hir field that are serving as tenure referees are seen as proof of a white man's prestige (correct).  But in the case of (wo)men of color, such referees are often dismissed because they are perceived as lacking objectivity (they are often perceived as lacking status in the field as well), and new ones must be found, even if those new referees are further from the field of specialization. And scholars in queer studies?  Fugedaboudit.

Here's another piece of unofficial data for you:  the number of women, and people of color who, denied tenure in one place, go on to a better job elsewhere.  Not always true, but boy, would I like to see the numbers on it.  A common assumption about failed promotion cases is that the person's career as a scholar is brought to an abrupt end by denial, and that is true in too many cases.  However, very often it is not true, and that is where follow up of failed tenure cases might be worthy of investigation. At one prestigious SLAC I know well, two tenure cases involving individuals in the group under scrutiny were differently fumbled in the not so recent past, and both individuals almost immediately went on to tenured positions at prestigious R-I universities.  You would think that would count as some kind of data, wouldn't you? Or that it might trigger some kind of public recognition at the tenure-denying institution that what is being smugly articulated as high standards could be, just perhaps, something else.

`That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' [the White Queen] said to Alice with a smile. `Now you understand the way things happen here.'

`But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.

`Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. `What would be the good of having it all over again?'

Don't Shoot! A Meditation on Civility

The sensationalism of the Amy Bishop tenure case, in which a University of Alabama biologist shot numerous colleagues in the head after her failed appeal, has us all unnerved and fascinated. Of course, the news reports that are piecing together a portrait of a sociopath, a ticking time bomb who happened to have become a university professor, have already helped us build distance between "us" and "her." The Bishop story, which is being reported over at University Diaries in press clippings and terse, incisive commentary (that makes you think Margaret Soltan really could produce the thriller or mystery we all long to write) is, however, countered by the more prosaic and recognizable case of Bill Reader, a journalism professor at Ohio University. Reader seemed to be on track for tenure and now -- isn't exactly. Why? There are allegations that, although he is not a sociopath, he may be a garden variety bastard (or not) who is being portrayed as a sociopath by colleagues who voted against his tenure.

Hence, the Reader case raises a set of more serious issues for all of us, in my view.

According to Inside Higher Ed, prior to his tenure case, Reader "had received nothing but glowing annual evaluations with no mention of untoward behavior in his file." But when the case was reported out of the Journalism School, with a positive but very split vote, three female faculty members who voted against the case filed harassment charges against him, citing threats allegedly made by Reader that were related to them by third parties. The rumour was that Reader "was 'out for revenge' against those who had opposed his bid for tenure." Subsequent to the filing of these charges, "recommendations by the journalism school's director, a college-level review committee and dean have all come out negatively."

It's always difficult to know what happened when reading public reports of these things. Apparently Reader was prone to nasty email exchanges, one of which, ignited over the failure of colleagues to sign a card for a departing colleague, was particularly unpleasant. I doubt that he was the only one who sent flaming e's, although he was in a position to know he could be harmed by such behavior and clearly failed to perceive it. But many people suffer failures of self-perception on email, as adrenaline and self-righteous wrath washes over their -- no, let's say our -- brains. Even those of us who don't have grievances filed against us have probably participated in terrible e-mail exchanges that we are embarrassed about in retrospect, whether we believe we were right or wrong at the time. Reader apparently isn't embarrassed about the greeting card incident, however, which tells you nothing about his suitability as a colleague, but a lot about what constitutes normal behavior at the Ohio State J-School. “I opted for vitriol," he states. "I have no regrets. Before my e-mail, there were few signatures; afterward, there were many.”

Really? Even now you are not ready to stand down about that stupid greeting card?

Inside Higher Ed sees this case as part of "a continuing national debate over the extent to which 'collegiality' ought to be considered in the awarding of tenure," and on the surface I suppose it is. But Reader's supporters, and presumably Reader himself (who was not informed or or able to respond to the harassment charges until several negative decisions on his case had already been made), say the tenure process has been tainted by these allegations. I tend to agree with this somewhat narrower interpretation. So does the Faculty Senate at Ohio, which has reversed the negative rulings, and sent the case forward to the next level. The attorneys standing outside their office sharpening their knives probably had nothing to do with it, although this is a situation where a little gentle advice from the AAUP can go a long way.

I don't know whether I would like Bill Reader or want to work with him, and it's difficult to tell from the few facts that can be gleaned from the IHE piece, of course. But take it from someone who has been bullied: what is wrong in that department goes beyond Bill Reader and points to a winner-take-all culture where there is more than one person with no commitment to civility. Although there are clearly people who believe they have been victimized, the search for authentic victims is likely to produce instead a vivid picture of professional relationships dominated by gossip, faction and spite, in which people who insist they are wedded to "procedure" manipulate it cruelly to get their way. It's not for nothing that novelists as different as Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, C.P. Snow and Ishmael Reed have spent anywhere from a semester to a career with us and consistently pointed out these very qualities.

Academia, one might say, is characterized by strong personalities out to win an argument, and sometimes the desire to win gets out of hand. The origins of the bad behavior at Ohio University, either Reader's abusive emails and threats over signatures on a greeting card, or individual faculty members trying to have more than one vote on a tenure case by launching an internal grievance process, might well be a departmental culture in which the need for authority and the disregard for appropriate behavior is pervasive at all ranks. I also find it useful to remember what every child psychologist knows: that people who bully have often themselves been bullied. I once saw an older historian who was famous for hir nastiness, public temper tantrums and contempt for colleagues, treated with such contempt and rudeness (in public and for no good reason whatsoever) by hir prestigious dissertation director of three decades ago that it literally took my breath away.

This observation didn't make me like this person any better, nor did it make me more willing to be subjected to verbal abuse by others. But it did create a little window of understanding that subsequently caused me to look around the world I live in differently; to understand the ways in which we replicate the behavior of others, often unconsciously; and to place my own actions under the lens that I used to evaluate other people's behavior towards me. The lesson, in my view? We need to model judicious and civil behavior at all costs, and speak to people honestly when they breach the bounds of civility, not wait until a high stakes moment to declare them unfit for our company. We all need to insist that our authority and reputations be taken seriously by others, but not demand it by damaging them, in turn, after the fact. It is quite possible to work productively with people one neither likes or respects, and it is possible to have one's judgement not be sustained by the judgement of the majority without going nuclear: people outside the academy do it all the time.

And Here's A Little Coal In Your Christmas Stocking: Tenure Denied

The tenure cases that were submitted early in the fall are starting to come through: mostly, there will be laughter and clinking glasses. Although rates of success differ across institutions, the majority of people who come up for tenure will get it. The vast majority. Which makes it ever more painful when you, or someone you have supported, is denied. This just in from a professor of history at Wuzzup College:*

I teach at a four-year college. Yesterday I found out that my only untenured colleague was turned down for tenure by the dean. I'm spending my morning trying to figure out what to do to see if we can get this overturned. I called the one colleague I know to whom the administration sometimes listens and left a frantic message on his answering machine.

I was afraid this was going to happen. I was on the Tenure and Promotion Committee, which has been weird the last couple of years. It's like some of my colleagues all of a sudden want to raise the bar for tenure and promotion at what has always been a teaching school, thus punishing our newer colleagues who have come in during this transition. In one meeting over my colleague's tenure case, a colleague who had seemed equally disgusted by this trend last year, abruptly reversed this position and raised a question about the slow publishing pace. Since when have we been a publish or perish institution? I replied, stating quite firmly that my colleague has done everything asked of her as far as teaching and service, and that I know she is working on her scholarship, but publishing a book, given our course load, takes more than the five years allotted before tenure review. The candidate for tenure was also asked to take overloads by our department head to help out another department. I concluded by saying that I couldn't ask for a better colleague and that I was proud to have her as part of our department.

Plus, she has never received a bad annual evaluation. Plus, she is the best and smartest colleague in the world.

What should I do?

Yes, this is bad: when administrators, or a T & P, takes it into their heads to "raise standards" the first step is always to put a brake on promotions of those people who have met, but perhaps not exceeded, the old scholarly criteria, not because they were lazy but because they were doing institutional work. What is worse is that most tenured colleagues who have strenuously opposed arbitrary raising of standards capitulate to them shortly after the bar is raised (like the self-interested cowards many academics are.) They excuse this treachery by saying that either a) it was always that way; or, b) that they fear that the department as a whole will "lose credibility" because it will be perceived as not having high standards. Thus, screwing one person is articulated as in the best interests of other, unnamed people, who will follow. In my case, I was also told repeatedly that getting screwed by the new standards was good for me too, since I was being promoted to full professor and I would feel better about the delayed promotion and raise for having met a higher scholarly standard.

As usual when it comes to sending someone to the penalty box, it is women who seem to suffer disproportionately from a phenomenon we might call Horizon Creep. Women's generous capacity for doing the institutional work no one else wants to do causes them to be treated like half-wits when they come up for tenure or promotion, and this is a particular hazard during institutional Horizon Creep. Meanwhile the men and one bitchy female in European glasses (all of whom left the room while scut work was being assigned, were instead asked to serve on journal boards and edit volumes with male colleagues, and took a semester or two of baby leave which causes them to be praised as truly engaged parents) are held up as exemplars for having lifted themselves up to the "new" publishing standard with ease.

Having experienced this bullshit first hand, I feel your pain, My Dear Correspondent. My encounter with Horizon Creep is, after all, how I was transformed from a person who merely bitched in the halls to the Tenured Radical with the Barbed Wire Soul that you know and love today. But enough about me -- what should you do?

My first piece of advice is stop calling people on the phone and leaving crazed messages that you may regret and, as Joe Hill used to say, organize. You need a plan, and allies to plan with. What that plan is depends on several things.

What is your grievance procedure? And will the department join in the appeal? Any department that does not appeal denial of tenure in this economic climate is out of their minds, and I would get a copy of these regulations immediately and begin plotting this crucial step.

If you are actually serving on the T & P, you cannot be a part of this, either as a counselor or as a co-conspirator. In other words, if you have had access to confidential conversations or documents, you cannot give your friend advice based on that information, but you can point her to whoever that institution-savvy person is who would not be institutionally compromised by helping her. You are not prevented from urging your friends on, but watch out that something you are doing for your friend does not unintentionally make things worse because of advocacy on your part that breaks college regulations and/or established ethical practices about confidentiality.

Was there significant dissent at the level of the department? It sounds like there was some dissent, there and/or in the T &P, and that the Dean had something to work with in this denial. If there were a fair number of no votes at the level of the department, or in the T & P, the candidate may need to appeal individually because if you didn't have a convincing consensus for the original case, you won't have it for the appeal either.

What was said about expectations for tenure in the candidate's letter of appointment, what was said in the reviews, what is on paper in the departmental handbook, and what is explicitly laid out in the faculty handbook? All of this is critical information. That said, if scholarly pace is the issue, I would build my appeal around whether pace was ever mentioned in any contract or review document; and what the language is, precisely, in the faculty handbook regarding scholarly expectations at the time of tenure. I would then take the candidate into a back room and slap her (metaphorically) for agreeing to those teaching overloads. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If, however, the overloads were something that she was expected to do by a supervisor, that is also a crucial part of your case, and don't slap her. Point out in your appeal that she did more of what she was told she was expected to do, and now she is being held to account for something that she was not told to do, and that the college consistently undervalued in previous tenure cases. Whatever you do, do not make claims for the scholarly record that cannot be sustained under scrutiny or proven: like that she will write someday. Faculties around the country are full of people who were going to write someday, but never got around to it after tenure.

I would urge your colleague to join the AAUP and, if the appeals process does not result in overturning the case, I would grieve through the AAUP. If that doesn't work start helping her pack. Whatever you do, do not advise her to sue. This is the most destructive piece of advice a young person can receive, in my view, not because universities don't deserve to be sued, but because it is emotionally wrenching, divisive, and can be financially ruinous to your friend. Civil suits against a university for wrongful dismissal almost never succeed: juries of ordinary people start to giggle when you explain your right to guaranteed lifetime employment to them. Even when successful lawsuits often rip apart the lives of people who file them. As an aside, said person also becomes virtually unemployable as an academic.

The other thing I would advise is this: try to separate your own, entirely justifiable, sense of outrage from the actions you take and the advice you give to someone else who is hurting. Efforts for redress need to be coupled with efforts to find this person another place to work, perhaps a post-doc somewhere that will allow her to write or a visiting post at another teaching college that will give her some time to think about her long-term future. You can also help by, instead of focusing on how terribly she has been wronged by others, reminding her of all the things she has done right that will help her succeed -- if not at Wuzzup, then somewhere else. Your colleague, and you, may have to accept in the end that she was treated badly, that it can't be fixed and she needs to move on. Lay the groundwork for this even as you appeal the decision and try to keep her thinking actively about her options for employment elsewhere so that the next disappointment, should it occur, does not compound her sense of being out of control. It is a priority to figure out how to make a life, with or without Wuzzup College, and not let this event do more damage over time.

And when you are done with this, gather a group of colleagues together, form an AAUP chapter, and reform your tenure and promotion procedures so that they conform with the best practices as articulated by that organization.

Good luck.

(Some of you may have noticed that there has been a blog redesign: the truth is that I just discovered the fonts and colors widget. If you think it is too loud, just say so.)

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* I have changed a number of details to protect the innocent, but I have not altered the basic elements of the story.

Tenure, Tee-shirts and Triangulation: School Reform In The News

Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of schools in the District of Columbia, is moving to abolish tenure for teachers. Because tenure is the third rail of public education, she claims she isn't. But she is. Rhee is in charge of one of the most troubled systems in the country -- or perhaps just the most visibly troubled, since the collapse of public schools in the nation's capital are a particularly vivid barometer of the terrible state of urban public education more generally. Her current plan is to reduce the number of tenured teachers in the system by offering salary incentives for teachers to give up their tenure and simply teach well.

Rhee's approach to change doesn't help sell what is actually a sensible plan: if you have followed her career, you know that she reacts to dissent in the ranks with the polish of your average despot. Her rock 'em, sock 'em administrative style makes her a lightning rod in a world that combusts regularly over the latest plan to educate millions of children without liberating public schools from the property tax funding system that gives rich public schools to the suburban rich and poor public schools to the urban poor. Rhee is controversial, not just because of her aggressive advocacy of free-market solutions, like charter schools and for-profit providers, but because of her youth, gender and -- what few people ever comment on -- that she is a Korean-American executive officer of a black system, in a city that is funded (or not, depending on how you look at it) by a very white Congress.

So Rhee occupies the third corner of a triangulated racial relationship, and is a referee in a pseudo-colonial struggle between the Federal government and the District of Columbia. You've got to wonder why anyone would take this job. For this reason, and my ongoing interest in progressive education, I am always eager for news of her latest battle with those who failed to resist standardized testing or No Child Left Behind but do resist anything that actually might create better schools, the American Federation of Teachers.

To give some ground to her enemies, Rhee can be breathtakingly nasty. On September 8, 2008, I heard an interview with her on National Public Radio's All Things Considered in which the interviewer raised the question about whether nurturing a collaborative relationship with the teachers' union should be more of a priority than aggressive new pay policies that bypassed the union and rewarded teachers regardless of seniority. "Where has that gotten us so far?" Rhee shot back acerbically. "Being collaborative and holding hands and singing 'Kum Ba Yah?'"

But criticizing Rhee for her lack of tact and sensitivity begs the question of whether, in a failing school system, tenure should be an absolute value, even though -- importantly -- it protects teachers who are actually working for politicians. Is tenure in the secondary school system a different animal from tenure in higher education in some regards, and thus more disposable? Perhaps: the differences are certainly greater than the similarities from my perspective, particularly since, for better or for worse, it doesn't seem very difficult to get a job teaching secondary school. But there are other differences. There is no particular status to obtaining tenure as a public school teacher, as there is with a college or university job: it merely signifies that you have been judged minimally competent in the classroom and have not given the system any reason to fire you. It awards job security, and puts the teacher on a seniority ladder. That most teachers are also unionized means that the tenure system and union membership are almost coextensive with each other. And unfortunately, what this means is that wonderful, creative new schools springing up in urban school districts have to give priority in their hiring to old, tired, burned out teachers who are available because they have failed at other schools (or helped other schools fail) rather than to the energetic, young teachers who will invest in the school's success.

So why do we have tenure in secondary schools at all? Mostly, it is the legacy of Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare: it ensures that teachers are not fired for political reasons as they were in the 1950s, and well into the 1960s. But unfortunately -- assuming that people more or less doing a good job who are not controversial don't need to be protected -- tenure, at the level of secondary education, has more of a tendency to safeguard the lazy and incompetent than those advocating for radical forms of social justice. Ask Debbi Almontaser, for example. The same Randi Weingarten who has opposed Michelle Rhee's plan to overhaul the teaching staff in the D.C. schools and claimed that ending the tenure system will create "highly paid, transitory teachers who will spend much of their time looking over their shoulders at one another" is the same president of the AFT who threw tenured principal Almontaser under the bus for defending an Arab-American women's group that printed a T-shirt with the slogan "Intifada NYC."

Almontaser didn't make the T-shirt, she didn't sell it, and she didn't wear it: she merely explained publicly that intifada has a more complex history than those focused on contemporary struggles between Israel and the Palestinian resistance might be aware of. In other words, she defended the right to free speech, and as a consequence was reminded by schools chancellor Joel Klein and her union president that as a tenured principal she has no free speech. Almontaser, a rising star in the school reform movement and a skilled interfaith educator, was removed from her school, the Khalil Ghibran International Academy. She is now riding a desk down at the school board, where she does nothing every day in the company of teachers who touch children inappropriately.

So what we can conclude is that Michelle Rhee is a danger to free expression because she has questioned whether tenure is serving her school system, while Randi Weingarten and New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (who pressured Almontaser to resign from her school and was recently mentioned as a possible Secretary of Education in the Obama administration) reenforced a chilling environment in which pro-Arab speech has been effectively suppressed. Their support for tenure seems to mean that a teacher or principle has the right to be paid indefinitely after her career is destroyed for purely political reasons.

And that has nothing to do with teaching, learning or free speech, does it?

Congratulations Brian Donovan

Since the Radical is now associated in the public mind with all things tenure, I noted with pleasure last week that The Chronicle of Higher Education had linked me with this YouTube video, which is one of the most perfect visual conceits I have ever seen.

Now, I ask you -- how funny is this? Very funny. It also makes me jealous that he knows how to make a video like this and I don't. Finally, it reminds me that one of the things I love about being an academic is the wit and the high jinks. Other than professional comedians, the only group of people who are funnier are people who work in advertising.

So just in case you think the Radical has fallen into the trap common to radicals everywhere -- in other words, taking her political positions so seriously that she loses her sense of fun (North Korea is a good example of this error, as was the second incarnation of the radical feminist collective Redstockings) -- let's give a big round of applause for Brian and everyone else who made it through the tenure process this year.

And for those of you who were made to walk Spanish: take heart. Life will go on, most likely even better than before.

Department of Odd Coincidences

So after yesterday's post condemning tenure (again) I get back to work on the talk I am supposed to give on pornography (again) and I drift off onto the internet (again), clicking around to the sites listed on my sitemeter from whence people arrived at Tenured Radical. Eventually, I come up with a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about:

Pornography and Tenure.

Go ahead. Make my day!

To make a long story short, a married couple out at New Mexico State University was just denied tenure, and they are charging racial bias. What they also reveal, however, was that shortly before they were denied tenure, John -- the husband part of the married couple -- received an e-mail from an associate dean that contained a "graphic sexual image." He complained to the dean; and shortly afterwards, the chair of the couple's department decided that neither member of the couple should receive tenure (in what world does the chair make this decision all by himself?). The implication -- as both the dean and the chair have stepped aside pending an investigation -- is that the two men were in cahoots in the porn e-mail cover-up, and clumsily trying to get rid of the only other people who knew about it. Well almost the only people -- apparently someone else in the department is a witness to the harassing e-porn too. S/he will probably have to be killed, since denying people tenure clearly does not shut them up in New Mexico.

Confusing, isn't it? Almost as confusing as the most recent governor of New York, David A. Paterson, letting us know, minutes after the swearing in, that he and his wife have been having affairs (in an ungentlemanly moment, towards the end of the story, Paterson suggests that Michelle, his wife started it.) And in case you were concerned about it, he did not use campaign funds to rent hotel rooms, only the campaign credit card. And the affairs ended a year or so ago, and everything is alright now in their marriage, thank you very much.

But back to the couple who didn't get tenure in New Mexico. I have to say, I think it was clever of the dean to send the pornography to the husband, not the wife, because it means he can't be charged with sexual harassment. Unless it's gay porn, in which case the dean is way out of luck and should consider being nominated for lieutenant governor of New York, because his academic administrative career is over. And in case you think, because of my last post, that I have lost my sense of humor about tenure (I never lose my sense of humor about pornography), read the comments at the end of the CHE story. Comments, written by ordinary people like you and me who are supposed to be working on a talk or something, are often the best part of odd stories published on line. This is the one that cracked me up: a guy who calls himself Art Vandelay (perhaps because that is his name) writes,

"isn’t that the way it always goes in academe? you open your email and …there it is…porn from your dean. you know what that means: no tenure. that tragic scenario is, unfortunately, repeated hundreds of times each day."

Update: the James Sherley Tenure Case at MIT

You may recall this post that I wrote in February about James Sherley's tenure case at MIT. Since he ended his twelve day hunger strike in February Sherley, whose research is on adult stem cells, has continued his activism. He has acquired at least one ally, Frank L. Douglas, executive director of the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation, who resigned a few weeks ago to protest MIT's failure to reconsider the Sherley decision. I believe that Sherley has been on hunger strike at least one other time this year, and he has been holding daily vigils in front of the administration building.

The current struggle, as you can read in a Boston magazine article written by John Wolfson and e-mailed to me by an editor, Jamie Bellevance, is that MIT considers the case closed and wants Sherley to leave the campus. Sherley does not consider the case closed and does not plan to leave campus, at least of his own volition: you can read about it here. If you are hungry to see a great deal more documentation and news coverage, you can go to a pro-Sherley web page. The page also invites us to "PLEASE JOIN James Sherley EACH DAY AT NOON AT MIT 77 MASS. AVE. TO 'SAY NO TO JUNE 30' AND SAY YES TO FAIR INCLUSION AT MIT!" So if you really have strong feelings for Professor Sherley, and wish to help him retain his office, and you live in the Boston area, do so. Anyone who goes, pro or con, is invited to report back to the Radical: I would be happy to consider posting your report as a news item. Truly partisan, and of course civil, remarks belong in the coments section.

I have deliberately not called friends at MIT and Harvard to ask them what they think about this because I don't want to develop an opinion about something I can't know much about. I suspect that Professor Sherley and I may have a great many intellectual disagreements, the central one being his insistence that life begins at conception, which causes him to oppose the use of fetal stem cell lines. As a pro-choice feminist, I disagree profoundly with this as an ethical and as a factual position; however, I am persuaded by Sherley's insistence that his views on the sanctity of human life may well be part of what is actually at stake in his belief that he was persistently marginalized and his work misrepresented prior to having been fired. I say "actually" because I don't think MIT has admitted that this was an issue, but it is certainly believable. What is a philosophical and political difference in my world is a question of fact and a politicizing difference in Sherley's world, and one that puts him in a position to be seriously critical of a majority view at MIT and probably the major thinkers in his field. And what Sherley is arguing about the significance of his views on life to the tenure case I also find believable -- that although a white man would have been permitted the luxury of iconoclasm, perhaps even praised for his courage, a black man whose views are consistent with evangelical conservatism was not.

As I noted earlier, although I don't know whether this was the central issue in the Sherley case, I do not find this argument inconceivable as some people clearly do. I don't. Nor do I find it inconceivable that as Sherley struggled unsuccessfully for resources and for the respect of his colleagues that angry, sarcastic or aggressive behavior that would have been seen as a reasonable response in a white man was seen as uncollegial in a black man and became an excuse to further marginalize him.

Part of what I find intriguing about this case is Sherley's refusal to acknowledge that the process is complete, even though MIT keeps telling him that it is. Of course, I have personal reasons for being interested in this approach: during the Unfortunate Events, both allies and -- shall we say others? -- continued to invoke "the process" as if what I was undergoing was knowable and rational, when in fact it was not. And the purported rationality of the process was an illusion that was, and is, integral to why tenure and promotion processes are so often profoundly screwed up. As I now understand, with distance, many of my colleagues did not perceive the way my case was manipulated at various stages because manipulating how the case is presented -- benignly and maliciously -- is foundational to the "process." Furthermore, promotion and tenure processes -- and here I completely get what Sherley is saying -- are designed to take little or no account of the events and/or conditions of labor that actually occurred before the promotion dossier was assembled and presented. The person who teaches eighty students a term is expected to meet the same scholarly "standard" as the person who teaches twenty students. The person who enjoys the full support of powerful colleagues, and is given discretionary opportunities to publish, sets the "standard" for scholars in marginalized fields, who are criticized and often demoralized by that criticism and by being assigned to low-status work. The allies of marginalized scholars are also not only in the minority but are often themselves seen as a detriment to the candidate because of their own difficult promotion processes, and the scorn to which they have been persistently subjected. The notion of a "standard" -- a word that plays the same obscuring function as the "process" -- also does not take account of what is always at stake in a tenure case, which is that, at various stages, many cases turn on the judgement of individuals who are not in the least independent or objective, who have genuine likes and dislikes that they activate in the language of the "process," and who are often because of their own intellectual preferences or prejudices, unable to perceive the worth of scholarship to an audience of scholars unlike themselves.

We all have likes and dislikes, and the fact is that it is possible for some people to vote positively for someone they dislike or disagree with, and it is impossible for others to bring themselves to vote positively for such a person. It is also possible for people who are prone to the unethical exercise of their own influence to overcome their prejudices in relation to some candidates, but not in relation to others. Has James Sherley been misjudged? I don't know, and none of us not acquainted with this case can know for certain: I have never known someone turned down for tenure or promotion who did not feel deeply wronged and who did not have allies who mirrored the outrage that accompanies feeling wronged. But a contested tenure case brings these questions about how we judge scholars and scholarship to the forefront. If we could own them, as a community, it would be a basis for thinking about how to reform the tenure process itself, or whether in fact, it is reformable.

Zenith Confidential

Well, I have my nerve, don't I? Spreading Zenith's secrets all over the internet?

No, no, no. I am not telling more tales today. What I do want to discuss is Confidentiality. This is a talismanic phrase at Zenith, and it is part of what is at stake in unexpected publicity (internal to Zenith) about this blog, publicity that has led to recent reflections, retrenching and readjustment. Central questions have been: Do students in class have the right to think that the classroom is a confidential space, thus allowing them to speak at will without the fear that they might be misperceived? And -- my topic today -- Are the workings of a university better kept confidential, to the point where critiques of the tenure system immediately create the impression of spilling the beans, regardless of whether specific beans about specific meetings have actually been spilt?

The primal scene looks like this: there are certain kinds of meetings that you are in as an academic - usually, but not always, involving personnel cases -- where the practice is to warn everyone at the beginning that nothing said in the room will be repeated to anyone who is not already at the meeting. Usually rank serves as a boundary for confidentiality, but not always. Hiring meetings, which include the untenured, are usually presumed to be confidential as well. The logic for this is that it could cause emotional harm to the candidate to hear negative things about hirself, and that people ought to be able to express themselves freely in a personnel meeting without being concerned that their relationship with the candidate and other untenured people will be compromised. The relationships of the people in the room, of course, are fair game, but that is another matter. What is also left ambiguous is this: when there is a tenure case during a semester when a tenured person is on leave, is that person entitled to information about the case anyway because of rank, and because they are part of the ongoing work of the department?

Interestingly, concerns about confidentiality are also reflected in the political sphere. If you go to a modern Presidential archive, you will see that all kinds of memos to the Commander in Chief have been prudently removed, so that future Presidential advisors will feel free to give honest, open advice. To wit:

"From: Nanny Dick
To: POTUS

Those federal prosecutors not doing our bidding have got to go. Pronto. Don't tell that I said this or I will never give you advice again."

You get the picture?

This degree of confidentiality is impossible to achieve in the academy, in part because there is no threat of being hauled in front of a grand jury and in part because *most* academics are constitutionally unable to keep their mouths shut, particularly when they are angry about something or feel that an injustice has been done. Some people would say, "Oh Radical, it's just your sleazy friends." But that isn't true. There is one central location at Zenith that is a hotbed of faculty gossip, to the point that if you want a secret "leaked," most people know the go-to guys and gals who will get it out. And there are people who deliberately leak information who are also among the most censorious when others leak information. Again, the comparison to the political sphere is relevant.

Nanny Dick to Scooter: "Boy, if everyone knew Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, Joseph Wilson wouldn't look like such a big deal. I HOPE THE PRESS DOESN'T FIND OUT."

Later, Scooter to Judith Miller, New York Times: "Valerie Plame is a CIA agent."

Judith: "Really? Valerie Plame is a CIA agent?"

Scooter (shocked): "Gee, I didn't know that. That's classified information, and you probably shouldn't use it in a story. Keep the WMD's in Baghdad under your hat too."

Judith: "Really? There are WMD's in Baghdad?"

Now I will tell you right off the bat that one of the concerns expressed to me about this here blog was that I had let slip things about tenure cases that I not oughta hadda done. This is not the case, in fact, for reasons explained in the previous post, although I did write about my responses to certain outcomes in certain cases, that is true. And I apologize to anyone who thought sie was reading about hirself. I won't pursue this for fear of rubbing salt in it, but actually -- if everyone had the information about their own tenure cases that I would argue they are entitled to, this would not have been an issue, since it would have been clear who and what was actually being written about (me.) But this did get me to thinking about who confidentiality actually serves, in tenure and promotion cases in particular.

Guess who? You can't? It serves the institution and the people who are already tenured, not the tenure candidate at all. "I am shocked -- shocked! that there is gambling in this establishment," you cry in surprise and pain. Let me explain.

As I noted above, it is an established protocol that nothing said in the meeting should be repeated outside the meeting (this is true at all levels, from the department to the T & P) and that "breaking confidentiality" is considered to be one of the more serious breaches of the rules one can commit at any institution of higher learning. In fact, it is not a rule at all at Zenith, although people say it is; it is nothing but a gentleman's agreement, and there is nothing in the faculty handbook that mandates confidentiality -- I know because I *just checked.* Of course, since our university governance documents are on the internet and can be altered without telling anyone, I'm sure such a rule will magically appear minutes after this post goes up, but whatever.

At my institution at least, tenure regulations guarantee anonymity to referees, which means they are the only players entitled to confidentiality. But this anonymity is immediately breached by the review process. Everyone in the department knows their names (they picked them, after all); everyone on the T & P knows them; at least half a dozen administrators can identify them; and they are revealed to everyone attending the Big Meeting, where personnel decisions are reviewed and ratified. So right away, depending on the size of the department, we are talking about between 30 and 50 people (roughly 12% to 20% of the whole faculty, and 25% to 40% of the tenured faculty) who know who they are. Even the candidate knows a couple of them, because sie has the chance to name up to three.

OK, now that we have established that confidentiality is not a rule at all, it is a practice, and that referees are not anonymous, what next? Well, let's start with whether it means that if guaranteed that their identities will not be revealed to the tenure candidate, will referees really give you an unvarnished opinion of the publications in question?

The answer is yes and no, depending on the person. And having seen many tenure letters (OK -- I'm not saying in whose case, or when -- hell, maybe I found 'em in the trash at Potemkin U. when only a wee Radical) I can say firmly and truly that there are very few of our colleagues anywhere in the English-speaking world (not to mention several other languages) who are willing to write candidly critical letters. Perhaps this is for fear of law suits, and perhaps it stems from a genuine concern for the candidate, and not wanting to play a definitive role in the life of someone they don't know. Perhaps it is that slightly sleazy feeling writing a bad tenure letter must give a soul, much like the one that you get when you realize that you just spilled the beans to someone who Doesn't Want To Know That Thing, e.g. that someone's second wife is his former student, or that so-and-so is a lesbian.

Decent people cloud negative critiques in obfuscation, so that departments can have the ammo if they need it as part of a more pervasive critique of the candidate, or choose to ignore the critique if they want to make an argument to retain hir. And many referees who write positive letters out themselves in the next year or so at a conference ("Congratulations! You *know* I wrote for you!"), or are outed accidentally-on-purpose by someone who sat on the case, so that a letter for a grant can be obtained from a Famous Person. To wit:

Senior colleague: "Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Fabulous could produce a good letter for you pretty fast." (wink, wink.)

Newly promoted colleague: (thought bubble appears) "Aha."

OK. So we have established that referees are not really the beneficiaries of confidentiality either. So what is confidential? How the tenure decision is actually made.

That's right, fans of the Radical. Go back to this post and ask yourself: why are untenured people always asking us how many of this and that they need to have in a tenure dossier? Because it is the only information that is available to them, outside of two or three pages of rules in the faculty and/or department handbook. Because of confidentiality, why people do or do not get tenure is not public knowledge. And what outsiders to the process suspect is true -- decision-making in tenure cases is incredibly erratic, between departments, within departments and from year to year. I will not pursue this, for obvious reasons, but people who have sat on tenure cases will -- if they are being honest -- recognize this as A Fact. So by not allowing the untenured to see tenure cases -- heck, we could let them see the successful ones -- we reinforce their paranoia by mystifying the process. We also protect ourselves, and the institution, from litigation, by obfuscating how and why decisions are made. Thus making no "standard" for tenure apparent to anyone, much less ourselves.

Try this: ask anyone at your institution what their standard for tenure is, and see if they give a thoughtful answer. See if you can give a thoughtful answer that is not limited to empty words and phrases like "excellence" and "high standards" (how excellent? How high?) If you can, leave a comment.

In short, the problems attendant to confidentiality:

1. People can cast a vote in either direction for any reason they choose, including ignorance, fear, lack of preparation, disinterest, friendship, animus, a prejudice against the field-- and there is no accountability. And they can walk right in the next week and do it again. Why? Because they are tenured, no one can tell them not to, and anyone in the room who might believe that justice was not done is not allowed to say so in any venue that is not already part of the system.

2. The idea that tenure is a conspiracy easily takes hold among untenured faculty because -- well, an entirely secret procedure that no one explains and the practices of which are defended fanatically but are also impossible to articulate except to a group of elite insiders looks like, um, a conspiracy.

3. Even when you think the outcome is just, if it is an unhappy one, there is no explaining it to other untenured people, either for their edification in making their own professional decisions or just helping them feel better. Conversely, you can't take a great tenure case and show untenured people why it is great and how they might prepare a similar case.

4. Newly tenured people vote on tenure cases without knowing anything about process, custom or previous standards because they have no experience except the trauma of having been the object of scrutiny and secrecy in a tenure case. And if any reader comes from a university where newly tenured people are instructed in these practices, please comment about them below.

5. Confidentiality makes it impossible to counteract gossip. Gossip becomes the dominant form of information because, in reality, tenure meetings leak like a sieve. People do leave the meeting and talk, and they do it out of anger, out of self-protection, out of self-congratulation, and out of (sometimes) misplaced loyalty to and affection for the tenure candidate. I have often had conversations with people, at Zenith and elsewhere, who seem to know a great deal more about their own tenure cases than a brief update from the chair would have conveyed. And sometimes -- this is the worst -- they have wrong information, because when votes are taken, they are taken by secret ballot, so if there is a mixed vote, anyone who claims to know who voted which way is talking out of their hat. But they leave the meeting and repeat their beliefs about how people voted based on their reading of the conversation that preceded the vote. I, for example, have had the experience of hearing through the grapevine that I cast a vote that I had not cast in a particular (confidential) matter. And to correct that information would be -- well, breaking confidentiality.

What confidentiality does, then, is make sure that all untenured people are as off balance as they can possibly be for seven years, and that the tenure process itself is sufficiently mysterious that tenured people can make up their minds on a case-by-case basis without telling younger people why they do what they do. And if we were to reform -- rather than eliminate tenure, as some of my past posts have suggested -- this is where we would need to start: restoring the confidence of the untenured people in the system by making the system itself knowable.

Racism and Tenure at MIT

On Friday, James Sherley ended a twelve-day hunger strike intended not, he claims, as an attempt to reverse the negative decision in his tenure case but to highlight racism in personnel decisions at the Massachuestts Institute of Technology. This is what I know:

1. Sherley does stem cell research, but on adult, not embryonic, stem cells. Sherley believes that the latter practice is immoral, since it involves the "killing" of day-old human embryos. I use quotes around "killing" here to give a nod to the idea that not everyone (for example, me) believes that it is unethical to use human embryos in this way. According to my research Sherley believes that he was denied tenure because of public statements he made opposing colleagues' research on embryonic cells. A white member of the faculty would not have had to pass such an ideological litmus test, he charges, but he has been fired for making an ethical position known.

2. MIT says the decision has been reviewed several times since it was originally made in 2005, and there was no racism involved. I have not seen a comment on the ideological question.

3. At MIT, 4% of the tenured faculty are from minority groups. Fewer than half of all scholars reviewed for tenure are actually awarded tenure. I have not seen figures on how many members of minority groups are reviewed for or awarded tenure, but 4% of the standing faculty does seem pitiful. Not as bad as Harvard Law School, but still pitiful for a top research institution.

This is a tangled and difficult case to understand from the outside for many reasons, but I would like to start with one thing: of course there is racism at MIT. If you doubt the reasons I might assume this, read Cheryl Clarke's essay, "The Failure to Transform," in which she tackles the question of homophobia in the so-called "black community." Clarke argues that rather than deny homophobia, or resist dealing with it on the theory that racism is more important, black intellectuals and political leaders must understand that the larger homophobia of society in general is shaping to blacks' view of queers. Lessons learned from the struggle against racism can, and should be redeployed against homophobia inside and outside the "black community." Thus, the question is not, is there homophobia, or is it worse here than elsewhere, but what are we doing about it?

Regardless of his work, which may or may not be tenurable at MIT on its own merits (whatever that may mean), I do not doubt that Professor Sherley's tenure evaluation occurred in a university context that was, and is, racist. I also would not be surprised if most white people at MIT do not perceive this. Let me explain.

Racism, and the other -isms, takes many forms at institutions of higher education, one of which is to portray people who point out racism, or gender inequality, or homophobia, as crazy or just covering up for their intellectual inadequacies. Sherley probably didn't help himself much in this regard by choosing the hunger strike as a tactic, not because it is a crazy thing to do, but because it is a grave thing to do and is probably more appropriate for a situation with much higher moral stakes than a tenure case. Like trying to get American soldiers to stop waterboarding you, or freeing your nation from colonial slavery. And a tenure case at MIT, for God's Sake: how many people can get seriously committed to what goes on at one of the most elite institutions in the country, one which wouldn't hire most of us if we offered to work for free?

But here's where I would like (as a white, queer, feminist if you didn't know) to muster some sympathy for Professor Sherley, whose politics in general I would probably more or less disagree with. Racism in higher education, because it does not take the form of physical violence, and mostly does not take the form of direct name-calling, is not taken seriously at virtually every institution I know. Tell me if any of the following things that happen, or have happened, at Zenith are familiar to you:

1. Racist assumptions in judging a candidate pool. Jobs in the study of race are silently reserved for people who identify racially as part of the group under study (this is also true for the study of sexuality and gender.) White people are usually not considered for these jobs, and (white) people often complain loudly about this. But here's the racism: people of color working on people of color are usually eliminated from consideration from "unmarked" jobs (read: most jobs) that are really, well, for white people studying white things. Thus, an Asian-American person working on Asian American intellectual history could be hired for an Asian American history job (a big part of which would be teaching a social history survey of the field, which would not be this person's field exactly) but not a U.S. intellectual history job, which would be unspokenly presumed to be for someone working more or less on white intellectuals like William James. Someone white or black working on W.E.B. DuBois would be seen as an African-Americanist, and someone in the hiring meeting would point out that "we already have one." This means that, for example, all Asian Americans with Ph.D.'s in history are pitted against each other for the six Asian-American history jobs posted each year.

2. A large percentage of the black students who matriculate as undergraduates are Carribbean and African, and are aggressively recruited to the university. African American students, outside of a few students most elite schoools are interested in, are not aggressively recruited -- or rather, a very small pool of students is aggressively recruited by a large number of schools. When it was suggested at Zenith that recruiting in the South might produce well-qualified black applicants (assuming that there aren't more well qualified African Americans in New York and New England, which I do not believe) the admissions office said their budget would not stretch that far.

3. Overheard at Zenith: a scholar of color with a scholarly book in press being criticized by a white colleague for articles s/he had in non-academic publications because it was evidence that s/he "wants to be one of those public intellectuals, not a real scholar." Please note that "public intellectual" is not just racially coded in this instance, but connotes "unprofessional" and "troublemaker," so it is an insinuation about racial identity, a presumed political stance and a lack of intellectual depth. All without mentioning race explicitly.

4. Encountered in a meeting: an administrator who, when I had proposed a tenure-track line in Asian American history for the fifth or sixth time, since we hire adjuncts to teach these courses and they are always full, told me that he "just wasn't convinced that Asian-American history is a mature field," and that it was "too soon to tell."

5. White colleagues who say publicly they do not believe in race as a viable category of intellectual analysis, and that to talk about race at all is "racist."

Now there are equivalent nightmare scenarios for women and queers, but I am going to stop here so that I don't lose my focus on the MIT case. And I want to be clear that I don't know whether Professor Sherley was denied tenure because of endemic racism at MIT: in every failed tenure case, there is plenty of evidence on all sides, and it is probably true -- as it is at Zenith -- that some people skate through the process because for some reason they are beloved by those in charge. And those in charge at elite institutions are invariably white men, which I have been told is not by design but merely an "accident of history." The accident in question, of course, was outright refusing to hire women and blacks for decades, rather than having to find indirect ways of keeping them off faculties.

Whatever, as Extravaganza would say. But there is a phenomenon I would like to draw attention to nonetheless: when I have seen a candidate hired or promoted to a lower standard than usual, it is always a white person, sometimes male and sometimes female. And when a man with more or less ordinary qualifications zips through some evaluative process like a hot knife through butter (a tenure case, a hire) that a woman, a queer or a member of a minority group would get nailed on this is called a "beloved son complex" by those of us who tend to feel resentful when we see it happen. In other words, there are some white men who see in younger white men something that reminds them of -- well, themselves at that age. And the idea that they could retire, knowing that the department, or the university, is still in the hands of young (white!) men with their values, is compelling -- so compelling that they sometimes make idiots of themselves extolling mediocre or flawed work as "brilliant!" because the author has had the gumption to resist "fashionable scholarly trends" (which means every important intellectual stride the field has made since 1968.) And to speak for those of us who watch this happening all the time-- it isn't giving up on making interesting hires that gets to you once you get used to it and realize you should just go home and do your own work. It is being in those crazy-making discussions where bad work, or boring work, is being represented as "pathbreaking!" because of the human package it comes in on.

It can be really exhausting. So I don't doubt that Professor Sherley's response to being turned down for tenure, in addition to all the ordinary pain, is refracted through a similar exhaustion. Whether he should have gotten tenure or not, I can't say. But if he were my friend, I would tell him to move on and save his career if possible, because most of us don't give a damn what's happening at MIT.

We've got too much going on in our own houses.