What happens to university professors after they get tenure? Here are two popular images:
Image No. 1: They spend little time in their classrooms, laboratories, and offices. They are less accountable—and less connected—to their students, colleagues, fields of study, and professions than they were before tenure. They relax, maybe too much.
Image No. 2: Although they are free and unfettered to do research, write, and think as intellectuals, few professors live up to that enviable possibility. Many tire out, burn out, or opt out. They are detached from the scholarly work for which they were tenured. As such, their contributions to their students and society decline.
Those images reflect at least one valid assumption: To be a teacher and scholar, one must have something to teach and study—a set of ideas worthy of students’ attention, a subject to understand deeply. I do not dispute that. But I do dispute the message that both images communicate: that what professors teach and study dissipates as they gain tenure.
Indeed, through my research on professors’ learning and development, I have found just the opposite. Tenured professors’ scholarly learning intensifies, as do their desires to engage it. Nor are scholarly subjects all that they learn. The tenure period heralds a rarely discussed challenge: how to create a life that lets one pursue the scholarly learning for which one was tenured while carrying out a rapidly growing mound of unrelated work that, because it is new, must also be learned.
To better understand scholarly learning, I conducted two three-year studies—one in the early 1990s and the second around 2000. In the first study, I examined how 38 professors’ jobs changed with tenure and how they felt about that change. Most of the professors whom I studied loved exploring their subjects of study and sharing them with others. That made me want to understand what that love of a subject was about and how professors pursued it after gaining tenure. So I interviewed 40 more professors from diverse disciplines and fields, who had received tenure within three years at one of four major research universities.
In those later interviews, more than 90 percent of the professors portrayed themselves as, indeed, pursuing the subjects that meant the most to them and to which they felt most devoted. About the same number said that they were striving to learn how to teach or research in new ways—for example, when they were assigned, for the first time, to teach nonmajor classes or huge auditorium-style classes, and as they took on new research projects, often at others’ behest.
Once protected from faculty service as junior faculty members, many now also struggled to learn new administrative duties—how to think about a curriculum given enrollment pressures, how to review a colleague for tenure, how to run an academic program. Much of that new work required the professors to learn about parts of their campuses with which they had not previously engaged: the admissions office, financial-aid office, budget office, and so on. They also had to take on new responsibilities in their disciplines or fields—serving as a journal editor, chairing a technical review panel, or directing a professional conference.
More than three-quarters of the professors I interviewed indicated that they were learning a great deal about themselves as scholars, as professors, and simply as people. Just as many said they were learning about the constraints and freedoms of academe—the boundaries that you could push and those best left alone. More than half said they were learning academic subjects unrelated to the scholarship to which they were deeply committed and were unsure how to balance it all. In brief, tenured professors were learning a great deal about themselves, their subjects of study and teaching, and the professional worlds of which, by way of tenure, they were now a central part.
Consider the case of Marissa Velez, a psychologist at Hope State University. (The case is real, but names and other identifying details have been changed.) Deeply committed to the study of women’s midlife development, Velez had sought out a tenure-track position in psychology. But so that she and her partner could live in the same city, Velez broadened her job search to include psychology-based positions in schools of business. She accepted a tenure-track job teaching master’s and doctoral students in a human-resources-management program in the business school at Hope State, a major research institution. She was successful. Six years later, tenure was the reward.
Interviewing Velez shortly after her positive tenure review, and again two years later, I pieced together her work-life at Hope State. Before obtaining tenure, Velez had struggled to develop her understanding of human-resources management while continuing to work on the topic she loved, women’s midlife experiences. Bringing them together was a challenge. Not only did she have to learn the knowledge of human-resources management as a distinct field of study, she also had to join and become active in a new national and international network in that field. She had to cultivate colleagues, understand the culture of a business school, develop courses, learn how to advise students, and think through how to engage in institutional service and outreach.
She worked hard at those tasks but struggled to stay in touch with the study of women’s midlife development. For example, she tried to bring that topic into graduate students’ programs of study, taking care to relate it clearly to human-resources management. But colleague dynamics around “who would get to teach which courses” barred her from teaching assignments that would have given her access to students whose interests could indeed mesh with her own. Unable to forge such connections, she increasingly saw herself as working at a job that was at some distance from the subject and field she cared most about, and as struggling to get back to her center.
Velez was at a low point right after gaining tenure when I first met her. Her sense of being blocked from the scholarly learning that she loved converted into feelings of distance from that learning. She worried she might never reconnect.
Shortly after our first interview, however, Velez heard about a new campus institute focused on urban research and outreach that would connect the campus to the surrounding city. In an application to spend a year in the institute, Velez proposed to conduct an ethnographic study of female corporate officers’ personal and career challenges in midlife—examining how those women responded to incursions of workplace pressures into their home lives, as well as the spillover of their personal needs and interests into their workplaces. In brief, she designed a research study that captured her favored scholarly learning while also reflecting the interests of her business school and human-resources-management program.
I interviewed Velez again two years later. This time she sparkled with energy. The new project, she said, was well under way. Her expanding work in human-resources management, tied to her institute effort, let her pursue ideas in psychology in ways that mattered greatly—to her, to the business school, and to the university. Bridging two features of her work—the stuff of duty and the stuff of desire—she had gained hope and energy. It took effort, commitment, and hope on her part to make that happen.
So what happens to professors after they get tenure? Like Velez, they struggle to pursue the subjects of study they love, but in the contexts of their distinct work lives, careers, and campuses. Those who strategize or luckily stumble on ways to bring the different parts of the academic life together get to pursue their scholarly learning. But doing so usually requires that those professors learn something else: how to make that scholarly learning happen, how to create space and time for it, and how to shore up intellectual, financial, and social resources to support it.
What might all this mean for higher education today? For newly tenured professors: Get ready to learn in ways you’ve not dreamed of, and about all manner of things. Amid all that learning, hang true to the subject, question, or idea that you love. Search consistently for ways to pursue it. It’s all too easy to lose in the flurry of academic duty that arrives with tenure.
For academic administrators and policy makers: Bring professors’ scholarly learning out of the dark. Make it a topic of open public discussion—as “real” on your campus as it is in professors’ lives. Link institutional change authentically to opportunities for professors to pursue scholarly learning that they care about deeply.
Doing that will require campus leaders who understand the substantive ideas that individual faculty members value, and who then strive to have that understanding inform policy deliberations. That cannot occur if those leaders fail to grasp the personal meanings that infuse many professors’ careers.
A major finding of my research was that many newly tenured professors are driven by desires for passionate thought—flarelike insights into academic subjects that they deeply care about. Professors persist in pursuit of passionate thought even when overloaded with other learning and work. It may be time for institutions to pitch in and help.
What a loss it can be for a professor to let go of such pursuit just when, by way of tenure, that professor gains an opening to it. The loss may be greater still for that professor’s institution.
