December 2003 Newsletter

Additional Warnings about the Tenure Process
by Lisle Rose

Robert David Johnson’s recent article on his tenure struggle at CUNY Brooklyn is an indication that sailing the stormy seas of contemporary academe continues to place individuals in harm’s way. My own experience would suggest that some additions to Johnson’s four excellent warnings to junior faculty would be in order.

I received my doctorate from Berkeley in 1966 and joined the history department of a large Midwestern state university. Determined to write a publishable dissertation, I had stayed an extra year in graduate school. My director gave this plan his enthusiastic blessing.
Joining a tense, joyless and divided group of senior people, I discovered that about half the people who had interviewed me at the A.H.A. meeting had already departed for other jobs. Those who would fire me were not those who had hired me. The department was every man for himself. Keeping a properly low profile in department meetings as a junior faculty member, I quickly realized that the few alliances that were formed were single-issue, ad hoc and constantly shifting. People essentially agreed on negatives, on what they did not like. (Eventually, eight of eleven concluded that they did not like me.) Senior faculty made all tenure decisions, meeting once each year on Wednesday night at nine o’ clock on the top floor of the university library. Tenure was awarded only by unanimous vote, and there was no appeal process. Unfortunately, not until I reached the university did I learn that the colonial historian had strenuously opposed my hiring; no one told me that at the time I accepted the position.

I made at least three major mistakes and doubtless a host of minor ones. First, I submitted my doctoral dissertation for publication six months after reaching campus, and it won honorable mention in the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize competition for 1967. The book (Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South, 1789-1800) was published by the University of Kentucky Press in the spring of 1968 to generally favorable reviews. Kentucky thought it good enough to submit for Pulitzer Prize consideration. Subsequently, I was invited to comment over the next two to three years at meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association and one or two other historical organizations whose names escape me after a third of a century. I also wrote quite a number of book reviews between 1969 and 1974. You could, as they say, look it up.

I soon realized, however, that some senior people--and not only those who had published little or nothing--found my efforts rather distasteful. Rushing into print was seen as a kind of threatening grandstanding (“publish and perish”). It was considered poor form and insufficiently deferential to academic mores. A junior colleague worthy of senior consideration as a congenial department mate did not immediately raise a high professional profile. Nor did he buy a house before being tenured. I did so when my late wife and I discovered at the last moment (pediatric technology being comparatively crude and non-predictive in those days) that our family was about to expand from three to five. Twin babies would require exponentially more room. Compounding the felony, I accepted the kind offer of the medievalist, who was moving on, to purchase his nice home in an upscale neighborhood for a fair price. Word quickly came through the grapevine after we’d moved that this was not the thing an untenured young faculty member did. Several senior wives made their displeasure particularly clear. One lady was heard to declare, “We never had anything that nice at their age.”

My second mistake was in reading Gar Alperovitz and Gabriel Kolko and deciding to do something about it. I found Atomic Diplomacy and The Politics of War intriguing but utterly wrong-headed. At that time, the department had one man in twentieth-century history, a specialist on the Progressive Era. Not being entirely stupid, I went to him, to the department chairman, and to several other senior people and asked them how they would feel about my doing a book on the origins of the cold war. In his letter confirming my appointment, the chairman who hired me just before leaving for another university had said that I would be on tenure track and for the first year would be expected to teach the early national period of American history. In any case, the twentieth-century man, the chairman, and the several senior people I spoke to all said roughly the same thing: “We don’t tell you what to write here.” I seem to remember that a few people, including the twentieth-century man, were even more supportive. Foolishly, however, I didn’t press on to ask if such writing would one day jeopardize my tenure chances.

My third mistake was to commit a number of “service” blunders of the kind Robert Johnson talks about avoiding. The students, who generally liked me, asked me very early on to be faculty adviser to the student disciplinary court. I also taught a class or two in a new “team teach” formula worked up by several colleagues, which did not long survive. And, after my fate was already decided, I worked with a handful of others to defuse the extreme tensions on campus following Kent State and Cambodia by agreeing to participate in a “free university” that folded after one class, when the kids discovered that I wanted them to do some reading and thinking, not just vaporing. I also chaired a large, highly emotional meeting at a local high school where the radicals did vent and calm down.

So for all these reasons, opposition to me grew rapidly within the senior circles of the department. Before he left, the medievalist warned me to be careful. I tried to be. I spoke whenever appropriate about my sincere pleasure at being at the university. After all, it was a good job. Sometime in the early fall of 1968, at the beginning of my third year, the senior faculty held its annual Wednesday night tenure meeting, and my name came up for the first time. The book had come out and some people suggested that in light of that and my active participation in the profession through meetings and book reviews I was ready for tenure. One of the associate professors was usually designated to tell those up for tenure why it had not been granted. (Presumably the chair told the successful people; I know he told those who were denied outright.) The designated messenger told me that there was opposition, but it was basically on the grounds I hadn’t been at the university long enough to get tenure. Fair enough.

Then one day about a month later, the twentieth-century century man caught up with me on campus as I was walking to teach a class and informed me that I should be warned that I was not liked. When I asked him why, he said, “They just don’t like you.” When I asked what I could do to reverse matters, he replied, “Not much.” I began quietly looking about at the AHA and other meetings for another job. It was at this time, of course, that the bottom fell out of the job market. In any case, people would plausibly ask, “Why do you want another job? You’ve got a good one.” A difficult question to answer.

Things went swiftly down hill. The following year, we hired a new chairman who was interested in military/diplomatic history. He promptly informed me that my ongoing but still preliminary research on the cold war would jeopardize my tenure chances, and I just as promptly informed him that, fine, I would drop it and return to research in the early national period (I had an interest in analyzing the similarities and differences between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, which still seems to me a plausible and untouched subject). I received the distinct impression from a number of people that if I dropped my cold war research, tenure, despite all the tensions and animosities, would be granted. It was not. Indeed, I learned through the grapevine that at the next annual tenure meeting (at the beginning of my fourth year) a senior colleague brought the one bad review Prologue had received, read it to the meeting, and declared that my scholarship was not good enough for me to be considered for tenure.

Left in limbo (I had one more year on my contract, one last chance at tenure), I called a senior historian who had been one of the interview group that had recommended hiring me (and had since left). When I told him of my predicament and asked his advice, he replied, “Lisle, you’ve been fired.” Accepting that evaluation, I returned to my cold war research, which gave my colleagues what they considered an ironclad reason to fire me: I had not fulfilled my contract to be the early national man (I continued to teach early national history to the end). According to the department, of course, I “resigned to seek other opportunities.”

At no point was I given an opportunity to confront the senior department faculty en masse and ask for explanation, clarification, forgiveness, whatever. Some would talk to me; most would not. One told me that “many elements go into the tenure decision”; another told me to take my impending dismissal “like a man.” The new chairman just chuckled uneasily and said: “You can never tell what these characters are going to do.”

On one point my few supporters and many detractors could agree. I had come to be considered a “troublemaker.” It would be folly for me to fight for tenure because that would further disrupt the department and confirm beyond all question my “troublemaker” status. The thing was to go quietly and hope that prospective employers would not ask and I would not have to tell about the troubling times. Unfortunately, the word apparently seeped out anyway. During my three-year job hunt, several highly promising leads (“we’ve got a position and you seem to be the person for it”) and one firm job offer abruptly dried up--this in spite of the fact that professors Robert H. Ferrell of Indiana University and Lawrence Kaplan of Kent State suddenly leaped to my defense out of the blue, as it were (I had met neither man before), and provided much badly needed aid and comfort.

I was traveling on the West Coast in late August 1970 (after teaching a summer session at the University of Arizona) when I received a short, cold note from the department chairman informing me that there had just been a meeting and I had not been granted tenure. I returned for my final year, and very late in the following spring managed to obtain a last-minute one-year appointment at Carnegie-Mellon, but any chance for a permanent position fell through when that university lost tons of money in the stock market. I found a job in government, which at that time was considered in academic circles tantamount to selling your soul to the devil. Perhaps it still is.

My experience raises four more red flags for those engaged in the job/tenure hunt.

First, understand what academic freedom is and is not. It does not include (at least before the granting of tenure) the right to follow your interests wherever they might lead. Practically speaking, academic freedom is the right of each department in a college or university to police itself, to set its own rules, procedures and criteria regarding who will “make partner” and who will not. And justice has nothing to do with the decision. No one is “entitled” to tenure because of hard work and productivity.

Second, ask openly if the decision to hire you is unanimous or whether there are those who oppose you. In the openly divided and venomous climate that seems to pervade many academic history departments today opposition may not be a total show stopper because divisions may be so rigid and run so deep that you–or your champions among the senior people–may be able to negotiate your tenure with your antagonists for some sort of quid pro quo. But in any case, find out who may be hostile before or just as soon as you come aboard.

Third, familiarize yourself with the tenure procedures of the department you wish to join before committing to a job. By what means and procedures are tenure decisions made? Is there an appeal process in place? Can you in any way prevent people who are hostile to you from destroying your career through innuendo or outright lying and malice? (Robert Johnson’s brief allusion to a whispering campaign that he was having affairs with three married male colleagues is pertinent in this context.) Despite a persistently wretched job market, aspiring academics should give departments that do not provide sufficient safeguards a wide berth. Your entire professional life may depend on it.

Fourth, be highly sensitive to the vibes around you and don’t get out of line before attaining tenure. “Getting above yourself,” calling undue attention to yourself, is very bad form and will be dealt with accordingly. Do not rush to publication at the outset and do not participate in too many professional meetings early on. Two or three articles in the first three to four years and perhaps commenting or giving a paper or at most two is sufficient. Hit for the big book publication just before the tenure decision is about to be made. Above all, avoid the “troublemaker” label that can follow you down through the years, perhaps even into other lines of work. (I once examined my personnel records at the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act and discovered that when the security people went out to interview my past employers they had to caution one unidentified individual not to pass on “hearsay evidence.”)

Academe is now long behind me and I’ve been off happily doing other things. In eleven plus years as a professional diplomat, I worked with Eliot Richardson on the Law of the Sea, developed a U.S. policy on the Arctic, and helped negotiate a space satellite international search and rescue system with the Soviets, French and Canadians that has saved well over ten thousand lives to date. I’ve written some more books (eight in all) and enjoyed doing every one. Aside from a very few friends, I have had no contact with academics. I hope academic life has largely reformed itself into more pleasant and just pathways. Unfortunately, Robert Johnson’s article suggests that in all too many instances, my experiences and recommendations remain relevant.