I recently received tenure. While that’s hardly unusual in academe, what is unusual is that it was my fourth attempt. Well, technically it was my fifth, but who’s counting? So I would call my story a case of either heroic persistence or epic tunnel vision. You be the judge.
And while I don’t wish my story to be seen as an object lesson for anyone, it might contain some valuable information and insights.
Having finished my dissertation in American history, I was surprised, and even shocked, to find a tenure-track job the very next year. The position was teaching in the television and radio department at one of the colleges in the City University of New York system.
That requires a bit of explanation. While I was studying for my degree, I decided to make extra money by doing some freelance writing. Since I had always been interested in film, that’s what I wrote about. (This was in the era before blogs, when you actually had to get an editor or editorial board to approve your ruminations and animadversions.) My film criticism brought me to the attention of WBAI in New York City, where producers suggested that maybe I could do a show on the media. I thought it was a great idea since even if I didn’t get paid (very few at WBAI did), at least I could get into press screenings and perhaps impress a few women.
One evening—in a panic because an interview subject had canceled a taping—I hurriedly lined up another guest, who turned out to be the chair of a communication department at the City University of New York. After the interview, we went out for coffee and subsequently became good friends. It was upon his advice that I began applying for jobs in communication departments.
It was that experience that drew the attention of the hiring committee at the television and radio department of another CUNY college. My first few years in that department were, if nothing else, an idyll. I loved my students who, though in many instances suffering from the not-so-hidden injuries of an inferior public-school education, continually surprised me with their imagination and their dedication to getting a college degree. But most of all, I adored my colleagues. Each day at lunch was practically an Algonquin-table helping of wit, charm, gossip, and extraordinary conversations about the media, politics, the latest movies, TV shows.
The one thing missing in that idyllic situation was any agreement on whether the research and writing I did on films and occasionally on television would allow me to get tenure in the TV and radio department. I reasoned that films and television were similar and becoming more and more so every day. What I didn’t reckon on was that at this particular CUNY college, the film department and the TV and radio department were two separate and jealously guarded entities.
Thus, when I came up for tenure four years into my idyll, the college couldn’t decide if my research was appropriate to my department, and so my hopes and dreams were dashed.
At that moment I decided that if academe didn’t want me, I didn’t want it, despite my genuine love of teaching, writing, and research. But to my surprise academe wasn’t done with me yet.
One of the major assets of academics in the CUNY system is a rather effective faculty union. In looking over my case, the union argued that there had been a violation of my rights during the tenure process. After months of negotiations, it was decided that the college had to take me back and reconsider my tenure case. It did and came up with the same answer: no tenure for me. So at that point, I had been denied tenure twice. But all the while, I had been applying for other jobs. And sure enough I landed one.
My new job was at a campus in the State University of New York system. My only problem with the job was that I hate the country. I was born and bred in New York’s outer boroughs and, as I like to say, spent my junior year abroad in Manhattan. So I commuted to the SUNY college and, as my schedule required, spent one or two nights on the campus in a tiny room rented to me by a lovely old widow.
At SUNY I also liked my students, who, like most of my students at CUNY, were the first members of their families to go to college. My colleagues were another matter. Unlike the quasi-Algonquin-club colleagues at my first employer, this group was a nest of vipers. Two, especially, were constantly sniping at the chair and seeking to undermine her. This duo also had taken an instant dislike to two young lecturers and tried to get them fired.
I stood up for the chair and the lecturers and thus earned the enmity of the two malcontents. If that weren’t enough to sink my tenure bid, there was also the criticism that I didn’t live near the college and really didn’t contribute to the academic community. Never mind that on weekends the campus was as unpopulated as the surrounding countryside.
To this day I still don’t know why I was turned down for tenure. Even the provost couldn’t really tell me when I asked for an interview about it. All he could say was that the president had decided against me. In any case, it was tenure turndown No. 3.
Wisdom should have dictated, and it did, that academe was not the place for me. But as destiny would have it, in my search for a new job, not necessarily an academic one, I was introduced to a professor at Fordham University who told me that a faculty member in its communication-and-media-studies department was becoming an associate dean and there would soon be a vacancy for a visiting professor. So without too much hope, I applied for the position and, again to my surprise, got the job. Thus began my 15-year career at Fordham.
For me Fordham was the perfect place. First of all, it was urban. In addition, I found my students to be well above average in intelligence and skills. Also, the university made every effort to be as ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse as possible. More to the point, the Jesuits who ran the place were totally committed to education, and to the liberal arts and the humanities in particular.
At first I was a visiting professor. Later I was put on what was called a clinical faculty line, which meant I taught more but I wasn’t on the tenure track. My contract could be renewed every few years without worrying about tenure, which was fine with me since I had had my fill of the tenure process. That situation persisted until my chairman decided that my commitment to the department was deserving of a tenured line and fought strenuously to get me one. I truly appreciated his efforts but in my heart of hearts the prospect of coming up for tenure again filled me with dread.
That dread proved utterly correct when, in my fifth year, I came up for tenure, and despite my colleagues’ assurances that I was a shoo-in, I was turned down yet again—the ostensible reason being that I hadn’t fulfilled all the requirements for consideration, such as up-to-date classroom observations of my teaching and sufficient letters of recommendation. Thus came tenure turndown No. 4.
At that point I became furious. Upon the suggestion of my very supportive wife, I wrote a letter to the president of the university. We had known each other since the first day I set foot on the campus when he had interviewed me in his role then as dean of arts and sciences. He also has an amazing talent, which I can compare only to the Mr. Memory character in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, of knowing the names of almost every faculty member.
At best I thought my letter would receive a polite but ultimately bureaucratic response. Instead, I got a phone call from an associate provost requesting a meeting. At that meeting, the provost suggested that I could come up for tenure again in a year. Despite serious misgivings about the tenure process, which at this point had reached phobic proportions, I agreed. And sure enough, in May of 2011, I received tenure.
After so many disappointments, I was extremely happy about that turn of events. Still, when people congratulated me, I found myself wanting to change the subject. I didn’t want to dwell on it; I just wanted to get on with things.
But what things? I don’t know yet. I might write another book or a long essay on film or television, or perhaps start that novel I’ve always wanted to write. But I did know that I wanted to tell my story because it might offer someone somewhere some hope.
I realize in writing it, however, that I can draw no universal lessons from my experience. In many ways I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate. In one instance in my tenure struggles there was a strong faculty union to protect my rights, and in other cases, I had the good luck of jobs coming open just when I needed them, and finally a chairman and a university president who knew me, respected my work, and were willing to support me.
What is clear to me is that sometimes persistence pays off. (Also, it doesn’t hurt to have support in high places.) In addition, I believe you should never allow a negative tenure decision to affect your self-worth. (I always felt that the institutions that had turned me down had made a terrible mistake.)
But most of all, if your dream is to teach at a university, as mine was, then, unless circumstances absolutely dictate otherwise, you should follow that dream. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope is a strange invention, a Patent of the Heart in unremitting action, yet never wearing out.”
