Tenure and its Denial: Facing the Winter Years and Beyond

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Tenure and Its Denial: Facing the Winter Years and Beyond Author(s): Charles J. Stivale Source: College Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 70-83Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115347Accessed: 06-04-2015 17:24 UTC

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Tenure and its Denial:

Facing the Winter Years and Beyond

Charles J. Stivale

Charles J. Stivale is distin

guished professor of French at

Wayne State University. He

has published books on Jules

Vall?s, Stendhal, Maupassant,

on Deleuze and Guattari,

Cajun music and dance, and

edited two volumes on French

pedagogical strategies for teach

ing literature (2004) and

Deleuze's Key Concepts

(2005).

There are certain images and details in

one's life that we associate with specific events, and usually, by dint of the feelings

and sensations linked to these images and

events, as Proust has recounted quite beauti

fully, they can never be erased. Many of us

recall, for example, where we were and what

we were doing when the Kennedy brothers

and Martin Luther King were shot and, more

recently, when the events of September 11,

2001, occurred. This associative principle also

operates closer to home, and usually less trag

ically, in particular personal and professional events that flash through one's experience,

leaving indelible imprints. In Profession 1997,

James C. McKelly translated some of the

images and feelings that overwhelmed his

existence when he received "the Phone Call."

Although he never stated precisely what the

message was in that call, the title of his

essay?"The Naked and the Dead:

Dispatches from the Tenure Wars"?and the



Charles J.Stivale 71

devastating impact of the call on his personal and professional life clearly communicated the unexpressed announcement of his tenure denial.

McKelly's essay appeared only shortly before a Chronicle of Higher Education

feature on "losing a tenure bid" in which Diane B. Kunz (denied tenure at

Yale in 1997) described her post-denial year there as being "airbrushed out

of a Kremlin photograph," and Rafia Zafar (denied tenure at the University of Michigan in 1996) compared this same existence succinctly: "It was like

you have leprosy" (Wilson 1998, A12-13). Much more recendy, the pseu

donymous Maria Annunziata, in the Chronicle's online Career Network, described her year following tenure denial with the succinct phrase "dead

professor walking" (2004).

Having gone through an experience similar to those of McKelly, Kunz,

Zafar, and Annunziata, I recall distinctly the indelible image of sitting in my kitchen in New Orleans with?the Letter. I had already learned my likely fate from the department chairperson four months earlier, so I had repeat

edly, obsessively, rehearsed opening that tenure denial letter during the sleep less hours of winter 1989. No imagining could deliver the tactile, physical

weight of the one-page missive, nor the nearly suspended animation of slow

ly sitting and tearing open the envelope. I deliberately flattened the Letter

onto the kitchen table, and then slid a book slowly down the letter line by

line, to read carefully the formulaic legal announcement that confirmed and

performed the department's and the university's withdrawal of institutional

support. I admit that dwelling on these feelings and images today, nearly

twenty years later, seems both wasteful in emotional energy and even shame

fully self-indulgent in view of more recent domestic and global tragedies .Yet, such feelings and the subject that caused them merit further expression and

exploration since they usually remain unspoken and constitute very real

facets of our academic profession. Indeed, as Lennard J. Davis has argued, it

really is necessary for us to "break the silence" about tenure denial in order

fully to face its consequences (1998, B 6). Hence, I return here to the "win

ter years" that so many of us have faced in order to reflect on the role that

my professional training in research and teaching played, and continues to

play, in this process.1 The topic of tenure, of its granting and its denial, and of survival beyond

both outcomes has returned in different essays at the start of the new centu

ry. Offering a series of three essays on the phases of his experience with

tenure denial, James M. Jasper points to "the stigma" of tenure denial that

"you cannot escape," no matter what one achieves subsequently. While I do

not share Jasper's bleak assessment, I do agree with him when he argues, "career crises can be an

opportunity to stop and assess what you're doing

with your life, and why" (2001c). In a complementary vein, Judith Shapiro



72 College Literature 33.2 [Spring 2006]

insists that even on the "other side of the wall" of earning tenure, pressures

that accumulated during the pre-tenure period?notably, in the tension

between family life and academic life?come to bear on an academic pro fessional in ways that he or she could not foresee, requiring a thorough assess

ment of career goals and their relation to other facets of one's life (Shapiro

2001, B8-9). Finally, in responding to reactions from readers of his essays on

the tenure process in Tlie Chronicle of Higher Education, Dennis Baron notes

with his usual acumen that "even when tenure goes well ... [it is] a rite of

passage fraught with trauma, and I suspect that few people go through tenure

unscathed" (2003, C4). Each of us must find the personal and professional coping mechanisms

that function most adequately for our needs, and the authors cited above, each in his or her own way, found and have described these admirably. In the

following remarks, I describe how facets of "work"?that is, active engage

ment primarily in scholarship and teaching?helped to pull me beyond the

dreary "winter years" into the rejuvenating "spring" with its sense of renew

al. To do so, I consider how the academic profession itself prepared me for

these events by providing me with an immense reserve of support from

which I could subsequently draw thanks to the particular orientation I

received to research, teaching, and professional life. I recall these "winter

years," of course, not in order to settle scores. In fact, having spent seven years

as department chair, I now judge myself, my comportment, and professional achievements in the late 1980s with considerable objectivity and severity.

This sober and distanced viewpoint allows me now better to consider how

the dual senses of the expression "academic profession"?at once the career

paths we pursue in academe and the implicit expression of faith that we

make in doing so?bolstered and helped me maintain a life of the mind dur

ing a period of considerable adversity While I cannot claim to have suc

ceeded entirely in avoiding what McKelly describes as the "ambulatory psy chosis" and its intoxicating "narcotic admixture of self-pity, resentment, and

vindictive moral disgust" (1997, 212), I do assert that the power he attributes

to the classroom has an even broader and more lasting impact when one con

joins research to teaching, rather than separating the two. While hardly earth

shaking, this assertion nonetheless provided me with the focus necessary to

allay any drift toward paralysis and to move me into a new phase of profes sional growth. This growth did not occur without some sacrifice, but also has

allowed me to articulate a broader, more humane understanding of these

experiences, to which I return in the concluding remarks.



Charles J. Stivale 73

Developing (in) a Career Track

The question I propose to answer is: How does one face the "winter

years" of tenure denial and somehow move beyond them? As in any life cri

sis, one responds only based on the orientation one might already have devel

oped for facing such difficult events. All that I can offer, then, is one individ

ual's mode of response, specifically how I made the shift into what I call, with

a seasonal metaphor, a "springtime" of renewal. A useful approach to trace an

answer will be, I believe, a direct engagement with the shift into a new sea

son. By this I mean the manner in which I translated the various lessons

learned at key moments during my graduate and early career into forward

movement, out of the seasonal affective disorder or tunnel of a very difficult

period and rite of passage. I thus propose to put into place a brief list of key moments and their cor

responding lessons. First came the development of a strong and unrelenting work ethic, thanks to graduate work at the Sorbonne-Paris IV and then the

University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign (UIUC) where I was fortunate to

have encountered a half dozen professors who, at different moments during

my years there, devoted time and energy to orienting my writing, thinking, and professional development. What I retained from this collaboration was

the dual commitment of these professors to teaching and, despite the often

exhausting realities of academic professional life, to critical and reflective

work as the very matter of their lives in academe. I eventually came to under

stand the work ethic as fundamentally unbalanced, i.e., skewed entirely toward work and eschewing the importance of emotional and mental reju venation gained from private life. I nonetheless took this work ethic as a fun

damental paradigm, pursuing several avenues of research before leaving grad uate school that resulted in the publication of initial articles even as I began to pursue the job-search and tenure tracks.

A second key moment and lesson occurred shortly after arriving at my first tenure-track job at Franklin & Marshall College in 1982.2 I had learned

?at the campus interview and then in greater detail after being hired?that

despite extraordinarily positive teaching evaluations, the professor I was to

replace had been denied tenure presumably for inadequate scholarship. I also

learned that he had taken this denial quite hard, and during my years at

F&M, this case made a public impact as my predecessor took quite public

legal action against the college. This tenure denial had also resulted in con

siderable familial disarray, about which I knew nothing yet upon my arrival.

So I was quite startled to read the following words, scrawled in chalk and left

behind on the blackboard in my new office: "Daddy, I love you."These four

words did more to communicate the pain and pathos of my predecessor's

experience than anything that I have heard or read about tenure since, and




they humanized this experience in a particular way that all subsequent

reports about the legal proceedings could not eliminate. I also wondered

about my predecessor's gesture of not erasing this tender message from the

board as he moved out, and I removed the words myself only with an odd

sense of trepidation and loss. The lesson here concerned the relations

between the professional and the personal, how our humanness (and

humaneness) do not cease at the walls of the academy, that is, how life can

and must go on despite institutional decisions, and how such decisions have

real consequences in our lives.

A third moment and lesson came during the first semester at F&M, as I

came to know new colleagues in different departments. One English profes sor that I met had just received tenure, and when I congratulated him on his

achievement, he could only express his dismay at this new-found status. He

then explained his sense of anticlimax, let-down, and deflation that Judith

Shapiro likens to post-partum depression (2001, B-8), and his words have

constituted a crucial reference point for my career. He said that, while

untenured, he had focused all of his research and reflection on the goal of

receiving tenure. Now that he had achieved this goal, he knew that he should

be happy, but he discovered that he really had no focus any more for his

work, and that he had even ceased to write. At that point in his life, then,

receiving tenure assured him of job security, but ironically stripped him of

any reference points for continuing scholarly work. As Baron cannily describes it, my colleague was realizing that "the long struggle isn't over, it's

just beginning," with the institution sending the inexorable message, "'Great

job, but what have you done for us lately?'" (2003, C4). While I did not fully

grasp the import of my colleague's struggle at the time, I gradually under

stood that the source of his disorientation came from the particular manner

in which he invested importance in research, i.e., solely as a means to an end

rather than as having intrinsic value in itself. As I pursued my own research

there, I realized an increasing satisfaction in the processes of pursuing schol

arship and of growth through teaching. Each of the lessons reviewed so far have a different function: whereas the

first?the work ethic?has been paradigmatic, providing the basic template that I have followed in my professional life, the second was syntagmatic, i.e., as a sign post and unforeseen indicator of crucial academic realities. The third

lesson was a mix of the two, a punctual event that gradually developed into

a better understanding of the balance needed in professional life. The fourth

lesson occurred at Tulane University, where I was hired before coming up for

tenure at F&M,3 and had a programmatic function. The key moment arose

from a query posed by a new colleague in English when I told him my two

books in progress would appear in French. "But why do you write and pub




lish in French?" he asked nonchalantly. My irritated response was that, as a

French literature scholar, why would I not publish in French? His answer, that

I dismissed at the time, returned to haunt me and, eventually, helped me to

reorient my intellectual program: by publishing almost solely in the French

language, he said, I was at once preventing my work from gaining

a wider,

Anglophone audience and thus was preventing myself from benefiting from

a more open dialogue with colleagues, especially those outside French stud

ies. What I eventually came to accept was that however linguistically and cul

turally "pure" and/or "genuine" my work written in French may have

appeared (purity and genuineness being highly suspect terms, admittedly), I

had forced my work to dwell in an unnecessary obscurity, unavailable to dia

logue except within a rarefied context, and deprived myself of important feedback on this work. This obscurity also had another, unforeseen conse

quence: to render the material written in French vulnerable to a rather nar

row framework for evaluation, particularly crucial for the tenure review

process, to which I now turn.

The Big (Not So) Easy At Tulane, I faced fewer demands in terms of advising and governance

responsibilities, but I felt increasingly pressed by the shortened tenure clock.

For I had not availed myself of a full six-year probationary period, so certain

was I that, with a shortened tenure clock, I would more quickly receive the

tenure and promotion I so richly deserved. As a result, I lost sight of the

importance of the process of scholarly and pedagogical work for its own sake, and instead, like the English department colleague at F&M, I became driven

to produce for tenure. This assessment is clear only retrospectively and, quite

ironically, I had never applied myself harder to teaching and in research. Thus, I found at Tulane what I had sought, the institutional challenge to measure

up at the "big U" after the small liberal arts college experience. In response, I went after the necessary book and article publications in a blinding rush

and, in the process, lost to some extent the joy of research and writing that I

had experienced earlier. When one manuscript project lost the support of an

editor who had previously received it favorably, I was at a loss momentarily how to recoup. Only the generous, critical close re-reading of the text and

considerable editorial advice by a mentor at another institution enabled me

eventually to revise the manuscript for publication. This and other setbacks

required that I reconceptualize my approach to writing and eventually to

think through the implications of the question posed by my colleague in

English at Tulane in undertaking new research projects. Alas, this r??valuation

arrived a bit too late for the ticking tenure clock at Tulane.




Moreover, as a product of this drive to produce for tenure, I had con

structed?quite unrealistically, but perhaps symptomatically?a vision of

tenure denial as constituting a black hole that would swallow me spiritually,

emotionally, possibly physically. This vision of an impending abyss for my career plans stood in harsh contrast to the earlier conception of teaching and

scholarship, that is, as an enlivening dual activity inspired by scholarly and

pedagogical commitment. Perhaps this change of perspective was due to the

shift from a small liberal arts college, where expectations about teaching and

scholarly production tended to be differently (and more humanely) balanced, to the large research university, where the competition for internal grants was

more intense and not too subtle hints about "producing" were more fre

quent. Perhaps, too, this change came from assessing the profession

more real

istically (some might say, more cynically), that is, my coming to acknowledge the reality of the "What have you done for us lately?" mindset in academe.

Whatever the cause, I felt compelled to adapt to the pressures of the new

institutional environment at a time when, in the cycle of my own work, I did

not feel entirely comfortable or well focused.

These difficulties were, no doubt, some factors that contributed to my

being denied tenure at Tulane in 1989, and while the actual details of the

decision's rationale are now of little importance, the timing of the early steps of the tenure review was crucial. I had made the mistake of not applying for

other positions in fall 1988, perhaps as much out of overconfidence as from

a sense of denial ("they couldn't do that to me!"). So, when I was informed

of the department's negative vote in mid-December (on my birthday, in fact), it was nearly too late to send any applications for interviews at the New

Orleans MLA convention. Although I did land two interviews there and then

two campus visits, these candidacies were hastily prepared, almost on the

rebound, and neither resulted in an offer. Yet, the matter of timing was even

more crucial in another sense, in terms of both my scholarly and indeed per sonal survival, and it was at this point, in early 1989, that I began to draw on

the aforementioned key moments and lessons in order to make an effort,

first, to move away from the virtual abyss and, then, to move forward to a

calmer and more productive

season.

Despite the conceptual difficulties I experienced in my research during the previous years and despite now reaching the edge of the "black hole," I

was still confronted with the practical demands of deadlines for abstracts for

two conferences. Was I going to succumb to this setback and let it stop me

in my tracks? Was I going to wallow in depression and be engulfed by self

pity? These were the hard questions I asked, and in retrospect, these winter

months of 1989, during which I faced these immediate practical questions and demands, were a turning point. Despite the siren's call that had me drift




ing toward the sweetly self-indulgent slope into negativity, the long practiced mantra of the work ethic helped me reject this slide by drawing on the pleas ures of research and teaching. I once expressed my mood in those weeks and

months in Clinton-speak,"It's the work, stupid!," emphasizing in this way the

joys of the scholarly process itself.

Moreover, the lessons gleaned from the conversations with my two col

leagues in English at F&M and at Tulane inspired me in the coming months

to pursue a new direction in my research, specifically to apply for a grant that

would support, on one hand, summer study in contemporary feminist criti

cism and, on the other hand, development of a course in which I would inte

grate the fruit of that summer study. The shift toward study in English-lan

guage feminist criticism helped me reorient my research as well as teaching in different ways. And these lessons fueled the initiative to develop a special session for the 1990 MLA convention as well as to develop more conference

abstracts during my final year at Tulane.

The new focus that these lessons helped me to sharpen?through the

conference abstracts, summer research grant, new course preparation, and

successful special session proposal?achieved at least two things: first, by

diverting the slide over the imagined brink toward a more productive activ

ity and outcome, I gained new confidence and hope at a time when the very bases of my professional practices had been sharply called into question. Second, the mental strength and discipline that these initiatives instilled then

propelled me forward in the following years since each of these projects resulted in publications?several journal articles in French studies, an initial

chapter of an eventual book, and editing ajournai issue in a second research

domain.Yet, I also gained immense strength from rejuvenation within a local

circle of friends in the southern Louisiana Cajun dance community. All of

these sources of strength and inspiration?drawn at once from the extra-aca

demic community and from the joy of study, research and teaching?helped me to confront the oppressive atmosphere surrounding me at the office over

the final 18 months at Tulane?my period as a "dead professor

walking"?and to move again onto the job market, nine years out of gradu ate school, with a successful outcome in fall 1990.

The Steps "Beyond"

I want to avoid the self-congratulatory mode that this outcome betokens

by assessing, in conclusion, some other lessons that I learned and sacrifices

that I made during the ten-years that culminated in tenure denial and then

employment beyond the "winter years." I see this "beyond" part to be a cau

tionary tale which shows that whatever the key moments and lessons




brought me over the years, the human dynamic has its own inexorable thrust

that may not always allow lessons learned actually to be applied.

Despite the good fortune of finding a position following tenure denial, I still had to establish myself in a new institution and successfully present

myself again for tenure. This process was completed quite expeditiously (by the end of my second year at Wayne State), but not without a price. During this preparatory period, I retained one of the lessons I had learned previous

ly: if my work-in-progress remained valid substantively, to me at least, as well

as varied in the different modes of analysis I pursued, then I need not con

cern myself with the outcome of tenure/promotion. That is, I relied on this

no doubt arguable principle?that tenure/promotion is a by-product of the

work one undertakes provided that one develops this work as thoroughly as

possible and completes this work in a timely manner for publication. Whatever its validity, this principle and practice proved operable for me, once

I moved beyond the research slump that I experienced at Tulane. However, another lesson that I thought I had learned?about the impact of professional

work on one's personal life?still seemed to escape me. For there was a

question that I should have asked myself, but did not, and could only for

mulate years later: at what point after tenure does one limit an aggressive

pursuit of achievement in research in order to focus on other, neglected facets of one's life?

In trying to answer this question, I tread a line between what I have

come to accept as the realities of academic life and how I would ideally like

this life to be transformed. In terms of the personal, I have struggled to find

the balance that allots equal emphasis to family and personal pursuits as to

professional activities, a struggle that remains ongoing. To a great extent, I

have come to understand the imbalance toward professional activities as

punctual, i.e., corresponding to the intensity required for completing partic ular projects at particular times of the year. This accommodation moves con

siderably toward a more hopeful and less anxious practice than the constant

pursuit of the next . . . call for papers, conference abstract, session deadline,

collaborative project, etc. Yet, one cannot always reject professional demands

that arise even when one knows quite well that they might threaten this rel

ative balance. Indeed, being prepared and willing to seize opportunities as

they arise is a key to success in any field.

I tread the same line between realities and ideals when I consider the

relationship of research to teaching, notably the challenges of new course

preparations and of adapting to technologically enhanced approaches. Thanks

to colleagues in the Wayne State Foreign Language Technology Center and

also to the Internet explosion, I had begun to renew my teaching focus upon arrival at the new position. While some of the best courses that I taught




occurred prior to having tenure, I always felt that somehow I was holding back. Only after being granted tenure did I feel able to devote the consider

able time and energy necessary to develop teaching tools first with

HyperCard software, then with HTML and Web-based links in support of

teaching preparations. More generally, however, my student evaluation scores

showed that only after receiving tenure was I able to relax and enjoy the

teaching experience and thereby to provide students with a more conscien

tiously focused learning environment.

Yet, I still feel the unremitting pull to keep several different research proj ects in development at once, with the attendant tension between adequate focus on other professional duties (teaching and service, including a seven

year administrative sojourn as department chair) and on personal pursuits. What I find especially perplexing is how to advise junior faculty members

given what I perceive to be the realities of academic advancement. No ideal

circumstances ever exist, any appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

Since one can never (or rarely) "do it all," priorities have to be set. In most

cases, I advise junior faculty members to sacrifice research time to prepara

tion for teaching and service only with the greatest caution and attention to

balance. Yet, I need only reflect on my own experience to know that this

advice amounts to saying, "do as I say, not as I did." One often finds it impos sible to just say no, whether to new teaching or to service assignments

(often both), especially as a junior colleague. In fact, refusal of such assign ments is done usually at one's peril, risking the perception of the most

hideous (and least documentable) of all academic character flaws, that of

"being uncollegial."

These caveats may well diminish the seemingly unqualified endorsement

I have given to the benefits of research and to the salutary effects resulting from the myriad processes of our scholarly and pedagogical work. As I have

been reminded while preparing this essay, one cannot neatly compartmen

talize the different facets of one s life, and a decision to focus on work implies both an essential judgment about the importance of the conjoined facets and

even a hierarchy among them. Still, the support that I was able to derive from

academic training focused strongly on research, then from my subsequent

pursuit of diverse research activities, contributed undeniably to opening a

safe passage beyond the difficult period of tenure denial.

Conclusion: Drowning, and Moving On

As should be clear from the preceding reflections, the threat of drown

ing and the sense of engulfment in the abyss that threatened my outlook in

the late 1980s seem almost trivial in light of the waves of horror and violence

that have characterized the successive global and political seasons through




which we now live. Yet, for all the evidence we witness each day of our rel

ative good fortune in the global scheme of things, we still cannot, indeed

should not efface our local circumstances, nor minimize the pain and

destructive force of what we can conceive as "crimes against collegiality."The aftereffects of academic cataclysm?for example, contract non-renewal,

tenure denial, rejection of major publication projects, interference and indeed

harassment (not solely sexual) by one's colleagues?give rise to immediate, and then lasting emotions that try one's ability to carry on. The narrative

recounted above provides an approach that suggests that we can work with

our strengths and thereby mitigate, to the extent possible, the immediate

effects of drowning, the overwhelming sense of engulfment brought on by stress, frustration, and emotions outside our control.

However, even when one moves beyond the negative circumstances that

previously created the immediate threat of engulfment, that threat is not nec

essarily dissipated, nor entirely relieved. The danger of this sort of debilitat

ing engulfment, drowning by and in lingering anger and resentment, may be

an experience common for many of us to varying degrees. To complete this

reflection on facing this threat of engulfment, I conclude with an encounter

that occurred at the 1992 MLA Convention, three years after I was denied

tenure, at a cash bar during the first evening of the convention. As I walked

into the room and began to orient myself?who was there? where were the

drinks??I immediately noticed a group of colleagues from the Tulane

department of French and Italian, some of whom I had not spoken to since

departing for new employment. I had one of those rapid moments of emo

tional intensity, a combination of fear, loathing, and uncertainty about how

to deal with this situation. Then I recalled that one of the colleagues present had suffered a stroke in August and that I had wanted to talk to him, to see

how he was doing, to wish him well. And the following thought hit me sud

denly: bearing the burden of resentment and anger just costs too damned

much and weighs so much that one can become emotionally crippled by it.

At that moment, I felt like I dropped a ton from my shoulders as I walked

over to greet these colleagues quite simply and in matter-of-fact fashion,

including the chairperson who was responsible for managing my tenure case.

In short, I was able in that instant to recognize the effects of the over

whelming power of engulfment, and that recognition allowed me simply to

lighten my spiritual load in order to move on a bit more unfettered.

Perhaps this solution is altogether too simplistic and even out of place in

a professional venue such as this, and yet the fact that I hesitate to pronounce the name of this solution gives me pause and then pushes me forward: its

name is simply that of "forgiveness." Recourse to it requires that one face

the burdensome effects of maintaining anger?time consuming and energy




draining?in order to divert that time and energy drain toward more pro

ductive directions, away from the presumed objects of one's ire and toward

active, progressive energies that are enabling rather than emotionally crip

pling. I certainly do not pretend that in my everyday activity as an academ

ic professional, I have now come

anywhere near the zen-like state of tran

quility which I may appear to preach in this conclusion. I also want to be

careful not to suggest that every act of "crimes against collegiality" is readily

forgivable?in fact, some acts are criminal and illegal, and must be dealt with

accordingly. However, my experience with life in our various professional contexts?in the classroom, in conferences and in print?has shown me that

academic professionals all too rarely, if ever, make time and space to consid

er the painful experiences that we do share and to raise possibilities for

addressing these in order better to move on.

I am starkly

aware that the whole issue of "forgiveness" remains extraor

dinarily vexed in the current sociocultural conjuncture, especially after two

bitterly fought national elections with their resultant divisions, and the glob al turmoil that is now our contemporary modus vivendi. However, within the

limited ambit of the concerns in this essay, I return to the multi-faceted

approach that one can pursue in the face of the "winter years," specifically: to accept as beneficent, rather than resist, the effects of the processes of aca

demic work; to be attentive modestly to the humanness of our academic

endeavor and its many challenges; to be open to possibilities of encounters

with new perspectives, however unexpected their sources might be; and to

face the possible risk of "forgiveness," however limited, as a potentially effec

tive secular, healing practice. This process may require also that we forgive ourselves from time to time, especially for the high standards we demand of

ourselves and probably of those who live around us and with us. Above all, this process surely

means opening ourselves whenever possible to the unfore

seen "other," the one within us as well as the ones around us. Although

some

times entailing risks of disruption and upheaval in one's life, this openness is

the only means of finding ways to maintain ongoing, creatively productive encounters, however fragile, however possibly limited in scope and rare these

may be. There are no guarantees, of course, but investment in such possible solutions may well provide the necessary direction and strength to propel forward a career, provided that one can attend to finding a balance between

the complex demands levied on one's time, energy, and emotions.

Notes

1 My account differs considerably from McKelly's and somewhat from Davis s.

One result of the loss of self-esteem that McKelly suffered was "a concomitant

dulling of the intellectual edge" (1997, 211), and he ruefully characterizes academic




culture as one "in which 'work' has sadly come to signify what professors do when

granted all-too-temporary liberation from the Smart Man's Burden, teaching" (213).

To his credit, McKelly finds rejuvenation in the classroom which, "more undeniably

than ever revealed itself as a sacred space that teaches generosity, discipline, and pas

sion as its very idiom" (213). As for Davis, he recognizes that the feeling of isolation

created by tenure denial corresponds to "the Herculean task of maintaining one's

self-confidence and productivity" (1998, B7). He ultimately rejected the need for the

"institutional imprimatur" of tenure (which he eventually received at SUNY

Binghamton) through recourse to a "personal act of empowerment," i.e. solemnly

granting tenure to himself (B7). 2 I elide several years of job searches between 1979 and 1982. To summarize, I

landed a one-year instructor position at a nearby state school (1980-81), which was

eliminated for the following year due to budget cuts. As a stopgap when the job mar

ket that year turned sour, I successfully applied for a junior year abroad director posi

tion with the CIEE, having already gained experience as director of a study program

in France (for Knox College in Besan?on) during a leave of absence while still a

graduate student. Then, having conducted a job search from France, I received the

phone call from Lancaster, PA, in March 1982, with a tenure-track job offer at

Franklin and Marshall College, a positively surreal moment after several years of

investing money, hopes, and energy in the job-search process. 3 I also found myself increasingly out of synch with some of my colleagues, par

ticularly within the junior faculty cohort, in terms of my devotion to the work ethic.

Furthermore, decisions from successive P&T Committees seemed inconsistent and

confusing: the criteria for any given tenure decision were never clear, a situation bol

stering the denial that some of my colleagues evinced about the need for research.

By the tenure year, I had decided that despite these mixed signals, scholarly work was

of utmost importance for survival both within F&M and within the broader profes

sion. Thus, while working hard to prepare a strong tenure case, I also focused my

attention that year on the job market. The result of a limited job search in 1985-86

(four convention interviews) yielded a campus invitation and a job offer at Tulane in

French that I felt I could not refuse, despite the likelihood of receiving tenure the

following fall at F&M.

Works Cited

Annunziata, Maria. 2004. "Dead Professor Walking." The Chronicle Career Network, 31

August, http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/08/2004083101c.html. Baron, Dennis. 2003. "Life After Tenure." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 July,

C3-4.

Davis, Lennard J. 1998. "Beyond Tenure: A Tortuous Journey through Academe. "Tlie

Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 April, B6-7.

Jasper, James M. 2001a "Institutions Are Not Your Friends." Tlie Chronicle of Higher Education Career Network, 31 August, http://chronicle.com/jobs/2001/08/ 2001083102c.htm.




-. 2001b "Moving On After You Are Denied Tenure." The Chronicle of Higher Education Career Network, 1 June, http://chronicle.com/jobs/2001/06/ 2001060103c.htm.

-. 2001c. "What It's Like To Be Denied Tenure." The Chronicle of Higher

Education Career Network, 6 April, http://chronicle.com/jobs/2001/04/ 2001040602c.htm.

McKelly, James C. 1997. "The Naked and the Dead: Dispatches from the Tenure

Wars." In Profession 1997. New York: MLA.

Shapiro, Judith. 2001. "Winning Tenure, Losing the Thrill." The Chronicle Review. The

Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 November, B7-B9.

Wilson, Robin. 1998.'"It's Like You Have Leprosy': The Year After Losing a Tenure

Bid." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 March, A12-13.



Tenure and its Denial: Facing the Winter Years and Beyond

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