Early on the evening of February 14, 2022, I received the call about my tenure denial. The conversation was short — the bad news was delivered by a senior colleague who had prepared multiple presentations on my behalf and argued my case for two weeks. In the end, the vote at the School of Management at Yale University went against me, and my candidacy was unsuccessful. In that experience, I realized a fear shared by many academics — that, for whatever reason, your colleagues will not be able to see the value of you or your work.
And like other faculty members who have been denied tenure, I knew I needed to find a new job. After a difficult year, I am grateful that I will be starting as a full professor of psychology with tenure at Northwestern University in July 2024.
Plenty of tenure denials, however, mean the end of someone’s faculty career. So I wanted to share the following thoughts about how to cope with this disruptive and life-altering experience, based on what I have learned in the months since that evening phone call.
What should you expect after a tenure denial? In reflecting on her own tenure denial in a chapter from Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, Grace Park writes of a central tension: “A tenure denial is made to seem as if it is the sole responsibility of the person denied tenure, but it is also evidence of a department and institution’s collective failure.” It is the tension between person and institution that will captivate you in the weeks and months after you are denied tenure.
My own thoughts were largely focused on my part in the decision. In my case, I did not question my academic standing, teaching, or scholarship before or during my time at Yale — I am immensely proud of my work. Its impact and scope, in both research and mentorship, far exceeds even what I envisioned for myself. Instead, I focused on my decision to work at Yale in the first place, and the toll it would now take on me and the students I train.
I felt guilt about moving my family, and I was anxious about having to pick up and move yet again, disrupting our social lives and schooling. (We had moved to Yale from a prior faculty position, and once before that for my postdoctoral training.) I felt anger about my own selfishness — that I had been so steadfast in pursuit of a faculty career, I had forced my family to collectively sacrifice to make it possible for me to do a job that involves so much rejection, displacement, and uncertainty.
Institutions differ in how they communicate tenure decisions. At Yale’s School of Management, there is no formal evaluation document or summary of the meeting to decide your tenure case that candidates can review. The meeting and the decision are meant to be secret. Secrecy, though common in these proceedings, means that there is little accountability for how individual faculty members vote on any specific tenure case. As a recipient of a negative decision, I was frustrated that professors would make such a consequential decision and then not be expected to defend it.
Once denied, you can appeal, though the process varies by institution. I found the experience to be helpful in managing some of my anxiety. The very act of appealing — of assembling a body of evidence that I believe showed that the outcome was erroneous — helped me because it reminded me of the “institution’s collective failure” in the process. I also had an opportunity to speak to people who could offer legal advice and who had appealed tenure denials. Those conversations helped me to understand how and why tenure decisions fail excellent faculty of color every year.
Trying to reverse a tenure denial through appeal or legal action is a decision that each person must make on a case-by-case basis. Even though my attempt ultimately failed, appealing made sense in my case. The tradeoff was the effort it took to gather the materials, which was significant and time consuming.
Who should you tell about a tenure denial? Like other scholars before me, I chose to be public about my tenure denial. I did so because I worried that keeping silent would be too difficult, not just for me but for my graduate students and research collaborators whose futures were also affected by this decision. I wanted the opportunity for all of us to talk about it openly with our extended networks, so that each of us could receive the support we needed. I wanted my students and colleagues to be able to talk about it with other people openly, with the knowledge that doing so would not be a violation of our trust. This, above all other considerations, determined my course of action.
The public nature of my tenure denial had several unintended positive benefits: The sheer number of people who wrote in support of me as a scholar and person was overwhelming. Going public also helped me reach a largely invisible extended network of colleagues who have gone through similar career challenges. Sharing the experience has lightened the burden for me, and helped to raise my public profile so that I could reach new job opportunities that may not have been available beforehand.
Alongside the positives of being so public were some important drawbacks. One basic and highly reliable phenomenon in social psychology — discussed by John T. Jost in his book, A Theory of System Justification — is a tendency to believe that the world is just. We gain a sense of prediction and control of our social experiences by developing narratives about how the world works, and those narratives tend toward a kind of cosmic justice — where good things happen to good people. When bad things happen, rather than update this narrative, many people will justify someone’s misfortune by blaming that person’s poor decisions, work, or character.
This is the negative side of being public with a career setback — it exposes you to just-world thinking. Faced with a tenure denial that is difficult to explain, some colleagues will rely on just-world thinking to maintain their own sense of prediction and control of the academic structures in which we all have a stake. Unfortunately, if more people know about your tenure denial, that means more people will speculate about your worth, your scholarship, and your character. It has not been enjoyable to experience that level of speculation in the public eye.
Therapy with a licensed counselor has helped me during this entire experience and its aftermath. Having someone to talk to other than family, friends, and colleagues was essential. I needed help to move forward and a counselor was instrumental in that. Friends, mentors, and colleagues also came through in many ways, big and small, and I will always be grateful for their support when it was most needed.
What was it like looking for a new position? The hardest part of having a tenure denial as the context for job interviews is the dichotomy between your own feelings of anger and guilt, and the emotional needs of the interview context, which are mostly sunny and positive. I found myself spending time displaying more positive affect than I was feeling, a state of inauthenticity that is stressful.
I also tried — unsuccessfully, given how often the subject came up — to avoid having conversations about the tenure denial during job interviews because discussing the situation made displaying positive affect more difficult. I found that it was helpful to keep my own comments brief and look for opportunities to change the subject.
Interviewing was a good distraction, aside from the interpersonal awkwardness. The travel and the research presentations were an escape from feelings of anger and regret. These trips were future oriented, and helped me focus on next steps and new possibilities. During these visits, I found myself thinking less about what happened and more about what was to come.
One challenge of applying to jobs after a tenure denial is the feeling of wanting to get away from your current institution as soon as possible. Existing in uncertainty for more than a year is challenging, but as a family, we were determined to find the next job that would fit us best. That meant turning down some opportunities that did not fit so that we could wait for something better. Of course it also meant dreaming about our future lives in places and within opportunities that did not end up materializing. And there were no guarantees that better options would continue to arrive.
The need to avoid a long period of uncertainty makes sense and is something to plan for. Typically, after tenure denial, you are allowed a final year of employment in your department while you go back on the job market to relocate. That can be an excruciating year. During this time at Yale, I have been fortunate to find refuge in another department (psychology), and to have extra years on my contract. Having that alternate community and extra time lessened the day-to-day discomfort of departmental life post-tenure denial.
I also found it appealing to consider nonacademic career options, although I never fully engaged in an external job search, which has its own set of challenges. Just the realization that other career paths might be open to me made the time during the tenure denial more palatable.
Ultimately, this experience has shaped some of my career goals. In the future, I want to continue to work to make tenure denials less stigmatizing, and to support structures and processes of academic evaluation that enhance transparency, accountability, and procedural justice. I hope my reflections here will help others face this challenge, too, and move forward to the promise of what is to come.
