The letter came today, exactly six years after I had been offered a job as an assistant professor of English at a liberal-arts college in the Midwest:
“I am pleased to report that the Board of Trustees has approved your tenure and promotion, effective with your contract for 2006-07.”
So, this is it. I have a good job, probably for the rest of my working life. I’m a tenured professor.
I actually liked the impersonality of the letter. For some reason, I didn’t want to be hugged or slapped on the back just then. I didn’t feel like leaping into the air or sauntering down the hallway to tell everyone. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts, surrounded by my books and papers. I closed my office door and sat down.
The letter was the outcome of 20 years of work and worry. I looked at the reflection on my darkened computer screen: a middle-aged, overweight guy with a wife, three kids, a mortgage, and, at last, a secure job. If only I could hand the tenure letter to my younger self, who was so worried that he’d never find steady work in academe: “Here you go, Tom. Nothing to worry about. You’re fine.”
But what did that letter mean to me now? Would people treat me differently? Who would I be when I opened my door and entered the hallway?
I’ve heard that some professors experience post-tenure depression. Drained of energy, they find themselves unable to write or teach with much enthusiasm for several weeks. They wonder, “Is this all there is?”
I didn’t feel that way at all. I don’t mind the “golden handcuffs.” I really doubted I would ever get to wear them. Still, I did experience a mild sense of anticlimax. After all, I hadn’t really done anything recently to merit special recognition, like an Olympic gymnast who sticks a landing. I wasn’t going to Disney World to celebrate.
Looking back, the two most exhilarating moments in my academic career were my admission to graduate school and my first real job offer. Graduate school started as a lark, undertaken when I couldn’t find a decent job; the second was a new lease on life a decade later, when I thought I’d be a part-time faculty member forever.
I knew that I should feel less anxious about my future, but I could still feel the tension in my back and my stomach. Perhaps bodily stress -- a feeling I remember first noticing in graduate school -- is an essential part of the academic socialization process. I suppose, in a larger professional context, tenure is just the beginning of another struggle for the next promotion and the next book contract. Each accomplishment only lifts one up to a new baseline of expectations. As Benjamin Franklin said, “The only way to be safe is never to be secure.”
I suppose I also felt something like survivor’s guilt. Given how many qualified candidates there are for every academic job, hardly anyone can claim to have “earned” tenure so much as “received” it through a series of fortunate accidents: the vagaries of supply and demand, the right dissertation topic, the ally on the search committee, or “the cut of one’s jib.”
No one deserves tenure in the current job market, and, like the sole survivor of a plane crash, I wonder, “Why me?” Was I chosen for some purpose that I cannot yet understand? What can I do with my life that will justify the seeming arbitrariness of my good fortune?
Pervading all of those reflections was a sense of melancholy gratitude to all the people who wrote letters to support my candidacy for tenure. I’m sure I could be a more generous colleague. And there were also dozens of teachers and mentors who helped me along the way since I was a little kid. I hoped -- if they ever thought of me -- they would forgive my youthful arrogance and ingratitude.
I suppose all I can do is “pay it forward” whenever I feel tried by the careless words and actions of my current students. In multigenerational enterprises such as teaching -- when the people who helped you are often long gone by the time you finally recognize their importance -- you make up for your own failings by bearing the failings of others with patience and humility.
Of course, that kind of filial piety has its limitations. One of my graduate-school professors once called me, somewhat derisively, “a good Catholic boy.” Such a persona served me well all the way through the educational system, although I sometimes rebelled when forced to remain in one place for too long without advancement. (Inside every “good boy” is a simmering rebel who might want to kick your teeth in if you don’t acknowledge how good he is!)
But it’s true. Professors are, for the most part, people who learned to please grown-ups when they were children -- and sometimes never stop, even after receiving tenure.
Perhaps I have never been “me,” since my entire life has been spent seeking approval from teachers, editors, colleagues, and even my students. I find it difficult to think without triangulating my thoughts through the minds of other people.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of tenure is the possibility of slowly and tentatively developing a sense of integrity -- of becoming yourself instead of what you think other people want you to be. But, after a lifetime as a supplicant, it’s hard to know where to begin. Is there a “self” within that “construct” who just received tenure?
That pattern of defining oneself in relation to authority figures is so deeply ingrained in academic culture that it may take decades to overcome. How do you know what you believe if you do not allow yourself to think in ways that challenge the values that have made you what you are?
Apart from offering hope for an integrated self, tenure raises the old existential possibility of choosing to be free, of finally taking responsibility for one’s actions, instead of blaming one’s failings on some oppressive institution. What happens to a self-conscious “outsider” who becomes vested in the garb of the local “establishment”? In time, the pose of exclusion degenerates into the pseudo-embattlement affected by so many privileged and celebrated academic rebels. How does power speak truth to itself when it denies its own power?
Tenure means I am part of an institution, and I am responsible for what it does. If I don’t like something, then I should work to change it rather than simply criticizing without offering realistic alternatives.
Tenure makes me want to read the faculty handbook. I want to understand the governance structure. I want to read the old course catalogs to understand the development of the curriculum over the decades. Tenure enables me to think of my place of employment as my college -- itself a smaller unit in my profession -- rather than as an institution that is not mine and, therefore, is beyond my control or responsibility.
And, I think, ultimately, that’s why tenure is important. Faculty members need to be stakeholders in their institutions: citizens rather than subjects.
In return for that privilege, faculty members have the obligation to not give tenure a bad name. Tenure should not be a guarantee of lifetime security without continuing performance as a teacher and productivity as a scholar. It does not give you the right to disengage from your primary job in pursuit of extracurricular opportunities, or to thumb your nose at the good-faith efforts of administrators to preserve the mission of your institution. It does not give you the right to mouth off about things you know nothing about, or to shame and downgrade people whose political and religious beliefs are different from yours. It does not give you the right to behave like a prima donna or ancien régime aristocrat, treating students and junior colleagues like permanent inferiors. It does not give you the right to assume that you really deserve all of your privileges, while you ride on the shoulders of the growing numbers of adjuncts and teaching assistants.
What are you doing to provide and preserve tenure for others as worthy as you?
All of those points are directed at me -- and my future self -- as much as to anyone else: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Eventually, I got up from my desk and taught my next class. I didn’t feel different at all, and I still don’t. The personal congratulations came in due course. The president of the college found me and offered his handshake and warm regards. The department held a party. Our big, bearded chairman gave me a hug. For all of those personal gestures of acceptance, I am most grateful. I’m humbled by my colleagues’ faith in me and happy to be a permanent member of the faculty.
But, no matter what I or others think now, the meaning of tenure for me will be determined by what I do with it in the years to come. People always like to think they will be virtuous before they are really tested.