“Deadwood Resentment Syndrome” is a real condition prevalent among academics—it just hasn’t been clinically established yet.
In a typical case, a young language scholar might explain his bitterness toward the head of his promotion-and-tenure committee like this: “I’m better than him at everything he is judging me on. My teaching evaluations are higher than his, undergraduates flock to my classes, I get lots of doctoral advisees, I am publishing like crazy. He is deadwood compared to me. So why does he get to vote on my future?”
No assistant professor is immune to such musings. Because I write a column on promotion and tenure for The Chronicle, I get to talk to many junior faculty members from all disciplines. While I don’t claim that the deadwood resentment is universal, it is found in biology labs and cloisters of the humanities; among civil engineers and sociologists. Accusations of deadwood, however, are too widely applied and do not take into account other mitigating factors: The senior scholars seen by some junior faculty members as deadwood may in fact be icebergs whose CV’s do not reveal the many valuable, below-the-surface services they perform or the nuances of post-tenure-track careers.
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The causes of tension between the tenure trackers and those who vote on tenure are not mysterious. Publishing and grant expectations have shot up drastically in the last generation. To take an example from my own field, when I went on the job market in 1995, I was A.B.D. and had published two refereed articles in decent journals. Just last year, in contrast, one of our tenure-track hires had been principal investigator or co-principal investigator for several grants, and was author or co-author of five good research articles—all while she was a doctoral student. She is our new normal.
Adding to the problem is a brew of concurrent demands on junior faculty members. They pursue home and family happiness as well as rewarding careers. The job market in many fields is so constricted that the tenure track feels to many like their one shot at making it in our profession. The promotion-and-tenure process has always been fraught with tension, but now more than ever the “life or death” analogy is used to describe it.
When I talk to assistant professors (and not a few grad students) who may be showing symptoms of deadwood resentment, I don’t deny or dismiss their beliefs and feelings. A comparison of credentials of members of the promotion-and-tenure committee with those of many junior scholars can become a Plutarchian exercise of trying to find differences between two people. But there are counterarguments to offer, especially when young scholars start throwing around—in private, among themselves, or online pseudonymously—terms like “deadwood” to describe their elders.
No one denies that there are professors among the tenured class who have surrendered their honor, put their feet up, and coasted through the middle and latter parts of their careers, mistranslating “tenure” to mean protection from any accountability and “academic freedom” to mean “I can do anything I want,” including failing to prepare for class, blowing off office hours, and publishing fitfully. The hotshot assistant simmers in silence while—from her point of view—a desiccated stump in the next office scrutinizes her teaching evaluations or article-impact factors.
To begin, there is the problem of how to compare scholars from different eras. Publishing more articles to get tenure today does not mean that one is necessarily better or has achieved more than the full professor who published fewer articles to get tenure in 1980. The number of journals has expanded greatly, and there is an increasing stress on producing “least publishable units"—that is, articles that cover narrower ground than their predecessors of a generation ago.
Second, the eras of then and now are not equivalent. An astute sports fan recognizes that Mickey Mantle is not, retroactively, any worse a hitter because he might have more trouble with today’s pitching. The Great Mick did what he had to do in the 1960s under the system and expectations of his time. Likewise, people who got tenure in the 1980s or even 90s may have had a quantitatively lower bar than today’s new scholars, but there is no reason to believe they would not adapt to today’s expectations if they had to.
Another aspect of the poverty of simple comparison was pointed out to me early in my own career by a senior colleague: “We expect a lot of you, but then you get a lot of support we didn’t get.” Many full professors are somewhat startled by the extent of research support that today’s junior scholars receive in many fields at research universities. The expansion of doctoral programs, increases in research financing, and new grant possibilities all mean that an assistant professor in 2010 has, in general, much more of a support system than the previous generation of scholars did.
Moreover, the argument that is sometimes made to explain the decreased studying time of students—the rise of enabling technologies—applies to the current tenure-tracker as well. The iPad, iPod, laptop, netbook, and desktop computer and their software may frustrate and distract us at times, but they represent an exponential leap in saving work time if one so chooses. For example, as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, I was hired by a doctoral student to help enter the data for her dissertation. My job was to read aloud the numbers on computer cards so she could type them into a newfangled statistical program on a mainframe. What took around 50 hours then requires a single keystroke today.
It is also unfair to criticize someone for failing to do what you have not yet attempted. The probationary faculty member who complains about the post-tenure productivity of senior scholars has not yet demonstrated he or she can do better. As the author now of about 30 outside evaluations for tenure, and a participant in innumerable discussions about tenure standards, I think it is generally agreed that a key marker that you deserve promotion and tenure is the near certainty of scholarly productivity after tenure. Simply publishing the minimum number of articles, scoring adequate teaching evaluations, and putting in the least possible service is not enough.
Then there is the even more delicate issue of compensation. I once attended a conference of associate deans that was discreetly titled “Motivating Midcareer Faculty.” Practically everyone in the room was from a public university, and the No. 1 lamentation from the participants was that we had very few carrots and fewer sticks to motivate anyone. Nearly all the supremely productive junior, midcareer, senior, and even emeritus faculty members we knew produced because they wanted to, because they loved the work.
It is impossible, however, to have 100-percent buy-in to a system based essentially on voluntary goodwill. People who have been working for decades at one institution, unless they have gone into administration or been lucky with counteroffers, are probably suffering from market-driven salary compression. In some departments, newly hired assistant professors not only get a great deal of research support, but also may make as much as or more than some seniors. It can be demoralizing to know that no matter how hard you work, you will never be valued at what you think you are worth. Many unproductive faculty members appear to use this logic: “Suppose I start publishing and put lots of extra effort into my teaching; then I’ll earn an extra 1 percent. Whoopee.”
Which brings us to the iceberg analogy. When I first accepted the position of head of an academic unit, a dean told me, “Get ready to live in a world where 90 percent of the good you do is never recognized by anyone.” But to some extent the various elements of a senior scholar’s workload are equally invisible. Most obviously, many perks associated with hiring dissipate after tenure: Lower teaching loads, lighter service requirements, even the patronizing but useful kindliness of the department chair might cease once you become “one of us.” A newly tenured colleague described how, the week after the joyous letter from the provost arrived, he got almost a dozen individual e-mails notifying him of additional service or duties requested for the year to come.
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Truly concealed are the obligations that accrete after tenure into an ever larger off-the-books service requirement. One professor jokes that his full-time job is writing letters of recommendation, while his part-time job is being a professor. As the years go by, you accumulate more and more former students. A full-professor friend now in his 70s estimated that he has written several hundred letters of recommendation in the last two decades, and spent many hundreds of hours on the phone praising former students to search committees or corporate employers. That work—and its results—appears nowhere on his CV. There are many other unseen tasks for the seniors, often involving service for the juniors. Academe would fall apart if senior faculty members started to avoid such duties in favor of their own publishing agendas.
There is also the question of the rhythm of a career, the seasons of life in academe. The great editor and critic Cyril Connolly wrote about the kind of artists who flamed out in youth versus those who endured for the “marathon of middle age.” We need to have a serious discussion about what productivity means after tenure, or after “full” is added to one’s title. Are we really expected to churn and burn for 50 years? We need to find a way to offer incentives to middle and senior faculty members who have lost the incendiary inspiration of their early careers. Simply labeling them unproductive creates nothing but bitterness and fails to solve the problem.
Finally, in the end, does the judge’s CV really matter? Another apologia for the seniors is that the job of someone on a promotion-and-tenure committee is not to outclass or compete with probationary faculty members, but to estimate their worthiness for promotion and tenure. To use another sports analogy, nobody expects a soccer referee to spontaneously drop his flags, jump into the game, and outscore the players. You don’t have to be a great jurist to sit on a jury; you don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning novelist to recognize great literary talent; you don’t have to be a five-star chef to appreciate delicious cuisine.
Deadwood resentment syndrome is real; so is the dilemma of unproductive tenured faculty members. We must be careful, however, about casting aspersions on our colleagues—of any rank—before we fully measure the extent of their contributions.
