The first time David Rosenfield went up for tenure, in the late 1970s, an academic career lay before him. The second time, 30 years later, he was trying to reclaim it.
Mr. Rosenfield’s first bid succeeded. In 1980 he became an associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University. But when a leave of absence grew unexpectedly longer, he had to resign his position. In 2008 he put himself in the tenure process again.
In between, Mr. Rosenfield stepped in to run the family business, in steel distribution, and little by little became an entrepreneur, drifting away from the academic life he knew.
When academics switch jobs, they usually move from one college to another, seeking a more desirable locale, a more esteemed reputation, or a bigger paycheck. Given the grueling process of earning tenure, most professors who’ve got it negotiate a way to keep it, and others at least get credit for having started on that track.
Mr. Rosenfield returned with a CV notable for its conspicuous gaps in the sort of publishing and research that had helped earn him early tenure the first time.
“The hard part about coming back is not the teaching but the research,” says Mr. Rosenfield, now 65. “You’re starting out from zero.”
His willingness to go through the process again stemmed from a desire to resume the academic career that he’d planned since high school. It also meant proving that he had — or still had — what it takes to contribute to a department striving to increase its research output.
Ernest Jouriles was chair of the psychology department in 2008, when Mr. Rosenfield was hired as an associate professor on the tenure track, one of a few scholars the department added around that time.
“There’s a lot of emphasis with regard to how much you’re publishing and whether you’re publishing high-quality work and whether you’re going to be able to extract external funding,” Mr. Jouriles says of expectations for tenure-track faculty members. “It’s likely that funding was not emphasized quite so much when he first came up for tenure as it is now.”
After three decades away from academe, Mr. Rosenfield found, the standards he faced were higher, but the expectations were clearer. University documents explained the tenure process in detail, and each year a progress report told him whether he was on track, leading to a comprehensive third-year review.
Mr. Rosenfield’s observations ring true to Kiernan Mathews, director and principal investigator of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, a Harvard-based group that conducts a large-scale survey of professors’ workplace satisfaction. Those on the tenure track are expected to do more research, publish prolifically, and snag grant money even when demand for funds outweighs supply.
“We’ve definitely heard from senior faculty who have looked at the standards assistant professors have to meet, and they say, ‘I would not have earned tenure under these same standards,’ " Mr. Mathews says.
‘Like a Black Box’
After completing his Ph.D. in 1976, at the University of Texas at Austin, Mr. Rosenfield went to Southern Methodist to begin life as an assistant professor. He was part of a cadre of young tenure-track faculty members in a predominantly male department. Friendships with colleagues came easily, he remembers, in an environment that was less competitive than it is today.
“My best memories about that time in general relate to the camaraderie between all of us,” says Mr. Rosenfield, a native of Dallas, where Southern Methodist is located. “We all supported each other and were working together toward mutual success.”
Part of that work was trying to earn tenure. Mr. Rosenfield published papers in his research areas at the time — including the effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation — and presented his work at national and regional conferences. He brought in grant money and, of course, he taught.
Nonetheless, he wasn’t quite sure where he stood on the path toward tenure. “Back then it was like a black box,” he says. “We sort of were told, Do a good job at research and teaching and don’t worry, you’ll get tenure. I had no idea what the process was. I was young and idealistic, so I thought, Well, it’ll all work out.”
For Mr. Rosenfield, it did. In 1980, in his fourth year at Southern Methodist, he learned that he had indeed earned tenure.
In 1981 he planned to take a year off to help with his family business while his father recovered from heart-bypass surgery. But that time frame changed when his dad died shortly after the operation.
At first, Mr. Rosenfield taught one quantitative-methods course per year. But as the business grew and demanded more of his time, the university eventually asked him to resign his tenure, in 1984.
“I was at a place in my life where I had to make a decision,” he says. “Was I going back, or was I going to try this new adventure? I had really developed strong relationships with the people I was working with. They were like family to me, and I felt like I was sort of abandoning them to go back to academia.” So he stayed at the company.
His First Love
By 1998, after expanding the family’s company through several acquisitions, Mr. Rosenfield missed teaching. He believed that students could learn from a business CEO about the role of psychology in the workplace. Southern Methodist agreed to hire him as an adjunct to teach one course a year in organizational psychology.
He sold his company to a private-equity firm in 1999 but kept running it until 2003, when he retired. That left him free to teach and to do the painstaking work of re-establishing his research agenda at the university. He became a part-time research professor — a job in which colleagues made use of his statistics expertise — and then a visiting assistant professor.
In 2008, Mr. Rosenfield was up for a job as an associate professor. Like every other candidate for the position, he had to give a job talk and be interviewed by the dean, faculty members, and graduate students. He got the job, and at age 58 he was on the tenure track again.
This time around, Mr. Rosenfield says, the process is clearer, and colleagues are more focused on it than in the 1970s: “People are supportive, but everybody has their head down, working full speed ahead, trying to get over that hump of tenure.”
He says he was worried that his age would be a problem, since universities hope that tenured faculty members will contribute to a department’s reputation for many years. But with his steady publication record, new grant money, and an undergraduate teaching award, among other accomplishments, Mr. Rosenfield made the cut. In the spring of 2014, he was one of 10 professors at Southern Methodist who earned tenure.
“Few people would be willing to go through this again,” says Alan S. Brown, a psychology professor who worked with Mr. Rosenfield in the 1970s. “He really proved it to himself that he was back in the game.”
Earning tenure wasn’t as stressful for Mr. Rosenfield as it could have been if he were younger. “Things were a little different for me,” he says, “because it’s not like the outcome was going to change the course of my entire life like it would for somebody 30 or 35 years old,” he says. “On the other hand, I really wanted to be able to do this. This was probably going to be my only shot.”
As for his business career, Mr. Rosenfield says that it helps inform the lectures he gives in his organizational-psychology class, and that he has no regrets: “It’s good to change what you do periodically. It keeps you young.”
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
