Before her case unraveled, everyone in the English department was rooting for Cora to get tenure, including me. The road had been rough. She had taken on too much service, not just to the department and college, but also to national organizations. She’d had difficulty in getting the publications she needed. Her book had not yet been picked up by a press. Several articles were awaiting decisions.
I was in my fourth year as department chair, and I had already shepherded several candidates through the tenure and promotion processes. I hadn’t lost a single vote, even on those who had squeaked by with what the committee considered the bare minimum of research qualifications. The one promotion that my then-dean had absurdly asked the president to turn down was won on appeal. (The book that my colleague had used as his basis for applying for promotion to full professor was coming out in June. The vote for promotion was in early April. The publisher’s pre-order page was up, and it was listed on Amazon. Between the president’s decision and the appeal, my colleague had gotten a copy of the physical book, which he displayed at his hearing. It was a slam dunk, with the dean looking foolish and the president acceding to the will of the committee.)
So, by the time Cora came up for tenure, I was feeling pretty cocky. Championing my department’s professors through the tenure process is my favorite part of the job. There’s a clear objective and a clear path for achieving it, and it requires some skill, especially when a candidate has a book published by a lesser-known press or articles in less prestigious journals. I’m an intense advocate for my faculty, from adjunct to distinguished professor, and it’s one reason I’ve stayed in this job into what is now my 10th year. (It’s my 21st year as a professor at my school, so I’m officially part of the old guard.)
One thing hangs over all of our tenure decisions: The administration does not automatically allow departments to replace someone who has been denied tenure. So if, say, my department had a medievalist who gets turned down, we might wait for years and still not get a line for a medievalist. I can say this with confidence because we had a medievalist who was turned down before I started as chair, and we still have not replaced him. It’s not that we don’t want a medievalist, but we are also a department that has had a number of colleagues in areas from creative writing to linguistics leave due to retirements, resignations for better jobs, and, yes, deaths, and almost none of them were replaced. If Cora didn’t get tenure, we might never be able to replace her.
In my annual reports on Cora, I was pretty clear that she needed to step back from her service obligations and concentrate on publication. I said it was unfair that no one was stepping up to take on service needs, but the responsibility wasn’t hers. I also advised her to give up on the book and use the chapters as articles.
Cora listened. She did what she needed to do. She took apart her book and sent out articles to journals and edited volumes. She did some new work. By the time of her tenure vote, she had four published pieces and three that were accepted and forthcoming.
I looked over the dossier that Cora had prepared and asked her to include all correspondence with the editors of the forthcoming pieces, which she did. She also included reader reports on one, an article that was accepted for publication in a Well-Regarded Journal. The emails between Cora and the editor for the WRJ were quite clear. She emailed in August asking after her submission, which had been revised according to notes from the readers. The editor emailed in early September, saying, in part, “The readers accepted the article with revisions.” This sufficed, as she had other similar correspondence about other articles and chapters.
I’m sure that some of you are thinking that Cora was a marginal-at-best candidate for tenure, and maybe you’re right. But her outside evaluators were mostly in her favor. I thought I’d get enough votes to put her over. And I did.
A few weeks later, the president overturned the decision and denied Cora tenure. I was pissed off — annoyed by the administrative interference and the amount of work it would add to my already full plate. Fine, I thought, screw it. Let’s kick into action. I got on the phone and emailed and texted, sounding the alarm. I was in touch with our union rep, appointments-committee members, other professors and chairs, and our new dean, who was in her first year. Most agreed to write in support. The union rep and the dean spoke directly to the president about Cora. I sent an impassioned plea to the president explaining that it’s become much more difficult for monographs to be published by a decent press now. Cora, I said, had been “an exceptional colleague who has expanded the offerings of the department and college and contributed to the academic advancement of both the students and her discipline.” Others also wrote in and communicated their deeply held belief that Cora should be tenured.
I was working on my appeals presentation when the president called me. He said that he was giving serious consideration to rescinding his decision and approving Cora for tenure. “But I’d like you to do one thing: Can you contact the editors at the journals and make sure the articles and chapters will be coming out soon?” I explained that we had emails to that effect. “Just reach out to them yourself,” he said.
Midday on a Friday in January, I emailed three of the editors. One of them, the senior editor of the Well-Regarded Journal, got back to me about 15 minutes later. He wrote a brief response: “After checking our database, I could not locate any record of [Cora] submitting a manuscript by that title. … I will inquire further with our managing editor just to make sure that I am not missing anything.”
I felt like throwing up, but I still wanted to believe Cora. The senior editor and I went back and forth a bit; his managing editor confirmed that no article was in their database but that they would check with the press that runs the journal. I forwarded him the emails Cora had given me. I sent him the three reader reports from the peer reviewers he had supposedly assigned to the article. He was freaking out. I was freaking out. Neither of us were quite willing yet to say what was becoming pretty obvious: Cora hadn’t submitted an article.
Meanwhile, I had reached out to Cora. She insisted that she had submitted her revisions in November and sent me a document from the third-party submission site Scholar One, which the journal uses for managing submissions and peer review, with a November date on it. It looked official. It turned out that it was — except for the date. The next day, January 20, the editor told me that it was the cover page they use for initial submissions, and that Cora had submitted the article the day before, on January 19. She seemed to have taken that cover sheet and edited in the November date.
The editor then listed everything that he had discovered. His signature was wrong on the emails. Moreover, “my email contains remarks that are not ones I would make — e.g., the idea that the ‘readers accepted the article with revisions.’ Readers don’t accept articles.” He was very clear that “we are NOT accusing” Cora of any kind of deception. But he was also clear that Cora “does NOT have an article that has been accepted by [the journal], or that will be published by the journal.” She had, though, just submitted an article; it would begin the process of being reviewed.
“Thanks very much for this thorough and distressing response,” I wrote back. We followed up with a brief phone call in which we were both much more candid about what, at this point, we were sure had happened.
I was angry. At Cora for lying; at myself for not doing more due diligence and for convincing so many people to support her appeal; at the president for being right. That one stung because, well, we all like feeling superior in our judgment to our administrators. And, to be completely honest, I was also upset because I didn’t want to lose Cora. But there was no way I could save her.
When I called Cora, I told her about what the editor had found. She said she understood. She sounded like she was tearing up. She asked what she should do. I said she had to withdraw her appeal. I asked what went wrong. I said she should start searching for another job because this one was going to end after this semester. But I said that I would be happy to recommend her; she could put me down as a reference. Whatever feelings of betrayal I might have were my damage to deal with. I understand the tremendous pressure she was under. My own book contract came through with only weeks to spare when I was going up for tenure. I got why Cora did it. I still wanted her to land on her feet.
Cora wrote to the dean to end her appeal. Her next email to me read, “Thank you for calling today and letting me know. I will contact [the journal] in a couple of days. Right now I am confused and upset and don’t want to e-mail them when I am in this condition. I wrote to [another professor] to let her know that I am withdrawing my appeal. Please thank all my colleagues who supported me and I apologize for this confusion.” A week later, she wrote, “I hope you know that this not how I behave or act. … I am completely in the dark on this.”
A few days later, nearly two weeks after I asked her to withdraw her appeal, Cora emailed with an extensive explanation. It was, to put it mildly, unbelievable — so much so that I replied, “If that’s true, you should call the police.” According to Cora, she had been sabotaged by a friend who worked in the business world. “He has no idea about the academic world or why publications are vital for my annual evaluations (tenure). In this, he is not different from my relatives and nonacademic friends,” she wrote. “They all assume that my responsibilities at the college are similar to the duties of a high-school teacher.”
Cora said she had shared her Gmail account’s login details with this friend “in case of emergency.” Then, the friend decided to pull a “prank.” “He wrote the e-mail and reports in jest, as a practical joke to demonstrate to me that he could write like someone with a Ph.D. Although he is smart and has a sharp memory, he is sensitive to the difference in our education levels. I once let it slip by that I thought people who went to graduate school had better analytical and problem-solving skills. He kept that comment in mind and wanted to prove to me that I was wrong. … When you told me the truth on Tuesday, one thing that racked my brain was his motive. I could not understand why he’d go to such extremes just to pull a joke on me. I knew he likes to jest and play harmless practical jokes, but I never imagined he would do what he had done just to prove that he could write like an expert in my field.”
At one point, the story went, the friend thought Cora would figure it out, but “he decided to keep quiet because he was curious how far he could go before I caught on.” I wanted to tell Cora that the amount of effort required for this supposed joke verged on the psychotic. She wrote, “I don’t want … you to think badly of me. I am ashamed of the way I was so easily tricked.”
Cora told me she had made an appointment to meet with me in person in three days to “explain” more. She canceled that appointment and promised to make another, which she never did.
I apologized to the president and thanked him for his foresight. We both recognized that this was simply a sad situation all around.
Five years later, we have a new president, and I’m still the chair of the English department. I’ve definitely changed how I confirm that articles or books will be coming out. You bet I contact the editors before anyone goes up for tenure or promotion. We have so few junior faculty in the entire college that, to my memory, neither the tenure-and-promotion committee nor the president has turned down a single person for tenure since Cora.
Cora has a good job outside academia but is still connected with her scholarly work. She occasionally teaches a course.
One thing bugs the hell out of me. The other article and book chapter that Cora said she had had accepted were published exactly as she said they would be, in the journal and in the book, which came out from the presses she said they would come out from. The article that caused all of this uproar has also since been published in a book from a solid press — five years after she supposedly had submitted it to the journal. In other words, her scholarship was good enough. She was good enough.
No, we have not been given a line to replace her. The courses she created in her area lie dormant in our catalog, there to languish until some undefined future when things get better.
