An Incomplete Picture

After finishing my interdisciplinary Ph.D. and spending several years juggling research and teaching jobs in a few different fields, I was delighted when I had the opportunity to take a faculty job that was a joint appointment between two departments in two different colleges at a top-notch public university.

Although I was warned that joint appointments carried risks, the job had all the hallmarks that suggested it would be a successful combination: two fields interested in each other, and two departments that had worked together to create a job description that made sense, intellectually and organizationally.

To avoid the dangers of sending a tenure-track faculty member through a double gantlet, the departments had agreed to a tiebreaker: The job would be 51 percent in one department so it was clear who won if there was a disagreement. The second department would place a letter in my tenure file but the first one would pass judgment.

Being split between two departments did have some strange features. My life stayed on my laptop, since I might be physically located in either of two offices. Teaching and advising were relatively simply allocated -- halved for each department. Research appeared to be unproblematic; I had always done work that spoke to both fields and continued writing grants and publishing in both.

Occasionally there were conflicts -- simultaneous graduation ceremonies or faculty meetings. There were two sets of procedures, policies, and whatnot to get to know and, inevitably, some extra coordination work. But, intellectually, the joint appointment was a big payoff -- twice the great colleagues, legitimacy in two fields, and access to students with different but complementary backgrounds.

The first sign of trouble came during my pretenure review.

My mentors in both departments lauded my personal statement, and I had just published an extremely visible article in a top journal in one of the two fields. Grants were flowing, students were flocking, my teaching evaluations were well above average, and although my writing output was a little low it seemed to me to be within the expected range with a nice mix of the two fields to boot.

I fully expected to be told that I was doing fine, or that I was doing all the right things but not enough of them.

What I found instead was that the evaluation of my work so far had little to do with what I had achieved. Dryly, one of the committee letters slammed a positive evaluation of my teaching from the second department by observing, “the “qualifications of [the reviewer] are not noted.” I was chastised for not doing service to the profession, despite having helped found an interdisciplinary professional society that was going gangbusters.

The letter from my second department meekly suggested that I seemed to be fine, but hedged along the lines of “although we usually know a candidate well enough at pretenure review to gauge whether they are likely to make tenure, we just don’t know this candidate very well.”

That comment was taken up by the primary department, essentially setting off a chorus of “hey, we don’t know him very well either,” and leading to a narrow 4-3 vote not to fire me immediately.

To add insult to injury, my salary review that year complimented me on receiving good ratings from student evaluations of my teaching but noted that I only taught a moderate number of students and a standard course load. In fact, I had voluntarily overloaded -- teaching a full load in one department, and another half load in the second, including some large undergraduate courses that had been ignored.

Clearly, both departments had an incomplete picture of me.

When an annoyed administrator chastised me for missing a faculty meeting, I reviewed my attendance from the meeting minutes in my two departments. On average, I had attended about 75 percent as many meetings as my colleagues in each department -- twice over. Still, I was perceived to be slacking off when it came to meetings.

I realized that exactly the same problem was taking place in the perceptions of my teaching, research, and external service. Unless I was able to do the work of two professors, I would be perceived to be subpar, even while doing more work than anyone else.

Worse yet, the disdain for my service showed that interdisciplinary work outside the traditions of one discipline or the other counted for nothing.

I spent the next year on a public-relations campaign, trying to raise my profile and advertise to anyone who would listen in either department what I actually did in the other place.

I sent memoranda to department heads and deans about my activities and achievements every few months. One dean suggested meetings between the two deans with me once a semester, to which I eagerly agreed. I accelerated my rate of submissions to conferences in both fields, pouring on the travel (nine countries in a year!) to stay as visible as possible, even while trying to write and manage my strangely distributed life. I attended meetings religiously and even volunteered for extra committee work. I had been giving 150 percent; now I was going for 200.

It’s a classic complaint that pretenure pressures cause everyone to work hard. People frequently use that as a way to empathize with me without acknowledging that I really am working harder and in a more difficult situation, further burying the problem and increasing my frustration.

In my last pretenure year, what little personal life I had disappeared (I am single) and my health began to decline. One semester, I had exactly five evenings and three weekends free.

While some tenure-track professors do overwork, it is certainly atypical at my university that a strong faculty member with above-average teaching, research, grant, and service qualifications would have to go to these lengths just to jump the hurdle to tenure. Otherwise, the mortality rates would be higher -- both in terms of faculty members not making it to tenure and in terms of deaths among assistant professors.

Going up for tenure this year was truly bizarre. My conference publications (considered as prestigious as journal articles in one field, but viewed as fluff in the other) were moved out of the all-important peer-reviewed category. My students in one department were the only ones solicited for feedback on me until I ferreted out the omission.

Then, in a last-minute twist, the primary department argued that the secondary department should not be permitted to see my dossier to avoid “undue influence.” Perhaps the second department’s input would be limited to evaluating my teaching, perhaps not. All of that took place after the formal tenure review had begun and dossiers were supposed to be final.

It was jarring to see such irrational behavior in the evaluation process while my colleagues appeared to respect me and my work. The department head who forgot to mention my overloaded teaching schedule in my salary review was a staunch supporter. On the universitywide tenure committee, differences in evaluation criteria from one field to another seem to be accepted, even honored.

Why, then, was I being given such a hard time?

While we can all agree that faculty members should be evaluated for tenure on the basis of their teaching, research, and service, we can’t seem to agree on what counts as evidence of quality research, good teaching, and appropriate service. It’s like when people are planning a wedding; they presume there is an agreed-upon formula for how things are done and take great offense if traditions are violated. The problem is that any two etiquette books frequently provide mutually exclusive advice about what is traditional, and it’s hard to agree-to-disagree because there’s no acknowledgment that there may be conflicting standards. People seem to think they are applying the same criteria as everyone else.

This year I was offered a job with tenure in a single department at another university. I very nearly accepted it. Even if I do get tenure at my current institution I’m certain my colleagues and the administration will probably never really “get it,” they’ll never consistently remember to judge me differently.

But with an appointment in one department only, I would miss the cross-fertilization: the hallway conversations, the teaching, the slate of conferences that cover the whole breadth of my interests rather than one slice. The National Research Council has released a report that cited the promotion and tenure process as the single biggest barrier (even surmounting training, grant support, and publishing) to more interdisciplinarity in research. Ironically, the report cited my university and its joint appointments as exemplary.

So I’ve taken my chances and am awaiting my fate, hoping that 150 percent was enough.