Virtually no subject is taboo in academe any more. Professors can advocate and analyze anything from sex toys to infanticide. But the one subject people still won’t talk about is the denial of tenure. Although tenure as a practice generates a lot of talk and a lot of ink, when it comes to personal stories, it is easier to talk about getting the Ebola virus than about not getting tenure. Please allow me to break the silence.
For 10 years I was the memento mori of the tenure system. I had published two books at major presses, numerous articles in scholarly journals, and yet I had been denied tenure -- not once, but twice. While almost all of my colleagues seemed to have glided through the door of job security, I remained out in the cold, wandering from institution to institution like a ghostly reminder of ad hoc committees past.
One of the hardest things about being denied tenure, aside from the insecurity of not having a job, is the eternal task of having to describe your condition to all comers. Like the condemned in Dante’s Inferno, or the Ancient Mariner, you have to tell your tale of woe repeatedly. Whenever I met a new colleague, had a job interview, or went out to lunch with a friend, their sympathetic clucking, while well-meaning, seemed to conceal hidden reservations -- “What did you do to bring this fate upon yourself? You must have done something!” There were days when even I wondered if I hadn’t committed some heinous and immoral act during an amnesiac episode.
For there seems to be a general agreement among academics that the tenure system, for all its oddities, usually works. After all, academe is a meritocracy. Or is it?
To answer that question, I might as well assume the “long grey beard and glittering eye” of the Ancient Mariner and briefly recount my tale. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976, when I was 26, and became an assistant professor there. At the time, the English department had not given tenure to any of its junior faculty members since 1961. Of course, I hoped to be an exception. But when the time came, my candidacy was gracefully sunk -- after brief consideration -- along with those of other junior colleagues, all of whom floated off to other institutions.
I went to Brandeis University, where I was assured by all that tenure was a done deal. After all, by then I had one book published, a second in galleys, and a third project under way. The following year, the department voted unanimously to grant me tenure. But a few months later, I received a letter from the provost, informing me that my request for tenure had been denied. No explanation given.
Only after much investigation and an unsolicited phone call from a “deep throat” who had been on the university’s tenure-review committee did I discover that two members of that committee were ardent Zionists and had blackballed me because of my association with the literary and cultural-studies scholar Edward W. Said -- my dissertation director -- and because of some pro-Palestinian articles that I had published. Although the vote of the committee was four to two in my favor, the provost -- taking advantage of a budget crisis -- nixed me. He feared the reaction of wealthy donors who would see my byline with a Brandeis affiliation in, for example, The Nation or The New York Times, for which I had been writing.
That is when my real education in academe began. Like most entering junior-faculty members, I had never thought to look into the promotion-and-tenure procedures of the institution that had offered me a job. I was just happy to find work in a tight market. And, like most liberal-minded people, I had assumed that merit in academe was rewarded, and that wrongs could be righted. So, optimistic, I decided to appeal the decision.
However, I discovered that Brandeis did not have an appeals procedure for contesting a promotion-related decision. I also found out that the tenure process was shrouded in secrecy, and that any attempt to discover officially what had happened would slam into the protective barrier of confidentiality. Confidentiality can work two ways, protecting some while endangering others. It is for that reason that many colleges and universities, including my current one, have “daylight” procedures that allow faculty members almost full access to documents and reports regarding their employment.
Now I was left with the “option” of suing. Many academics assume, as I did, that the Constitution will protect them from capricious exercises of power: that their right to free speech includes intellectual freedom to write or say what they want without suffering repercussions on the job. When I decided to bring a lawsuit, tears practically came to my eyes as I imagined the courtroom scene in which I would be vindicated. But, clearly, I had watched too many legal dramas.
I subsequently learned that if you work at a private university, you are not automatically protected by the rights guaranteed under the Constitution. A corporation, which is what a private university is, has the power to fire anyone it likes, as long as its decision is not based solely on issues of race, gender, or disability. You can be denied tenure simply because you are not “collegial.” In fact, lack of “collegiality” is one of the major reasons given for not granting tenure to faculty members. The only rights you have as a faculty member are the ones your university has chosen to enumerate in the faculty handbook.
Like most academics, I had filed my unread handbook in a bottom drawer, along with unread brochures listing library and parking regulations. Reading the handbook now with a new interest, I noticed a distinct lack of agency for faculty members who were mistreated, and a distinct abundance of agency for administrators.
To sue, I had to raise money. Graduate students, friends, and faculty members helped me to establish a legal fund. Although I was helped by the American Association of University Professors, Ralph Nader’s National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, civil-rights legal associations, and several concerned lawyers, I discovered another sobering fact: Despite the aid of lawyers who would work pro bono, bringing this suit would still cost more than $50,000, including depositions, fees, and other expenses. I did not have that kind of money; my legal fund amounted to barely $2,500.
Nor could I risk having to pay fees, damages, and court costs if I lost. With a wife, two children, and no trust fund, I had to be even more careful with money than when I had been steadily employed. The conclusion I reached after several years was that a legal battle was not possible for a person of ordinary means.
I also learned that universities count on the ability of their in-house legal counsel to drag out a lawsuit, incur extra expenses for plaintiffs, and wait out anyone who brings legal action. Indeed, university counsels throughout the United States meet regularly at annual conventions to discuss such tactics, just as literary scholars meet to consider whether deconstruction is dead. How can a single individual confront all those institutional resources alone?
Indeed, “alone” is the operative word. Anyone reeling from a denial of tenure feels profoundly isolated. By definition, professors rejected for tenure are, like the Ancient Mariner, separated from their colleagues, and, like defrocked priests, often seen as tainted in some way. In my case, even when most of my colleagues saw the denial as unjustified and lamentable, they still acted awkwardly, as if trying to say the right thing to a dying friend.
But this anxious time was not all negative. Aside from having learned much about the ways of academe, I learned about myself. I had the rare opportunity of finding out the true nature of love and support from my friends and family. My wife helped me through many dark moments. It was especially hard telling my young children that, essentially, I had been fired. But my fears that they would see their father as a failure were unfounded. Rather, my difficulties gave them a way to understand their own struggles, and my persistence helped them to be feisty in their own lives.
Not everyone was so supportive. A few people I believed to be friends were so disturbed by my horror story that they fled. But many more friends came forward with reassurance, love, and hope. Some of them kept me employed in academe for more than five years, before I found my current position. One spring, when things had gotten so bad that I was facing a fall semester with no job and no income, a casual acquaintance who had remembered my dire straits called to tell me about a one-year replacement job in his department. That job saved my academic life and led me to more jobs and more friends.
But in the meantime, my application letters, stamped with the academic mark of Cain, were greeted with various levels of skepticism and ostracism. I had some of the most humiliating experiences of my life at job interviews -- for entry-level positions that involved deplorable course loads and conditions -- during which faculty members would ask me why, given my credentials, I wanted to teach at their institution.
Along with the feeling of being alone comes the Herculean task of maintaining one’s self-confidence and productivity. Losing tenure is like being thrown into the ocean with weights around your feet. Half the battle is just keeping afloat emotionally while trying to keep your reputation from going down like the Titanic. For me, work was a solace. I knew that I could always write, even publish, and find my academic justification for being not in the approval of others, but through a body of work unconnected to the tenure mill. I also took solace in the legion of fellow part-time and adjunct compeers who work arduously without even the glimmer of tenure as a possibility.
But the nagging feeling of being in my 40s and not having tenure, while all the scholars I’d come up through the ranks with had secured that laurel, rankled me. Until one spring morning, on a run in the Catskill Mountains. As I ran up a hill with an expansive view, the whole tenure business seemed very far away -- an angry swarm several valleys off. It suddenly occurred to me that it was illogical for me, an inherently anti-institutional person, to ask for an institutional imprimatur.
So, I decided at that moment to give myself tenure. It wasn’t exactly like being knighted or being sworn in as President, but I conferred tenure on myself with a degree of solemnity. And from that moment on, I no longer felt untenured.
That personal act of empowerment did not solve all of my problems, of course, but it did relieve the psychological burden of having been rejected for tenure. A few years later, I found my current position, and, with the help of supportive colleagues, am now a tenured full professor.
My happy ending should not belie the difficulty of my journey and those of many of my colleagues who are still adrift. Having been without tenure for many years, I do value the protections it provides, particularly the guarantees of academic freedom that some critics even now seek to abolish.
But we need to work to make sure that the system of judgment that we call tenure is fair, accountable, and open to daylight. Tenure notes, personnel files, committee deliberations, and the reports of deans, provosts, and presidents should be available to candidates the way that F.B.I. files and student records are.
Further, professional organizations such as the A.A.U.P. should see their colleagues who have been denied tenure not as castoffs but as possible victims of inequity. The groups should provide some assistance to these colleagues -- legal advice, job counseling, and information on sources of research funds, for example, to help them continue their careers.
And those who are denied tenure need to organize themselves so that they do not feel so alone. After all, academics often rally to the cause of those who are the targets of injustice. How ironic that when injustice is meted out to us, we fall silent.
Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the author, most recently, of Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995).
