When a Bid for Tenure Fails, This Is What Bouncing Back Looks Like

Being denied tenure is a career blow that can leave emotional scars. After roughly half a dozen years of work, you’re left to grapple with feelings of anger and a personal sense of failure. You’ve fallen short of securing what is widely viewed, in academic circles, as the holy grail.

Though tenure denials are far from rare, they carry a hard-to-overcome stigma. And it’s that stigma that keeps many professors from talking freely — even years later — about their termination, how they coped, and what they did next.

Indeed, many onetime tenure candidates contacted by The Chronicle refused to talk about it, in part to put as much distance as possible between the career-altering event and their efforts to pursue their next endeavor. One professor who later won the tenure lottery was still so leery that he requested anonymity.

To be sure, a tenure denial can be a death knell for an academic career, particularly if securing another tenure-track position is your goal. A failed tenure bid also often sets in motion a series of tough questions: Do you appeal the decision in an effort to stay where you have essentially just had a bad breakup? Do you give academe another chance? And what lessons do you draw from the experience?

Every story of tenure denial and its aftermath has its individual details and points of clarity. Here are three common trajectories that follow rejection and the rebound.

A New University

When a former assistant professor at an elite East Coast institution learned he hadn’t been awarded tenure, he decided to do two things at once: He appealed to administrators to reconsider his rejection, and he looked for a new academic job elsewhere. Although his tenure appeal failed, his job search was a success. He’s now an associate professor — with tenure — at a public flagship university in the Midwest.

His publishing, teaching, and service record played a key role in making him competitive on the job market, even with a tenure denial in his past, he says.

“I had a very respectable publishing record at the time I was denied tenure,” said the scholar, who asked to remain anonymous because the stigma attached to tenure denial still looms so large.

Employment prospects for the associate professor surfaced early on. A think tank, interested in his expertise, offered him a position unsolicited, with a salary that topped what he was earning at his former university by more than 25 percent, he said in an interview by email. But he didn’t want to leave academe, and the relative autonomy it offers to professors.

“My thinking at the time was that if I left academia it would be hard to return, and I certainly didn’t want the career uncertainty that comes with working at a think tank for the rest of my life,” he wrote. “I wanted what was unfairly denied to me: the stability and certainty of tenure.”

He made the shortlist at two other public institutions, he said, but the college he chose was appealing, in part, because it was willing to immediately review him for tenure. He also was “impressed with the faculty and the department.”

However, his job search wasn’t without its awkward moments. Search committees inevitably asked why he had left his former institution. He went with the straightforward approach.

“I told them directly that I was denied tenure and I believed this was unfair because of my record,” he wrote. “I was honest and direct and confident.” It was an uncomfortable conversation, he said, but one that had to take place. Still, he’s concerned that his tenure denial could negatively affect his future career prospects.

His advice for pretenure faculty members: As you apply for tenure, also look for jobs at other institutions — just in case. And, he wrote, “never put the institution you are working for above yourself.”

Embracing the Alt-Ac Life

When Katharine S. Bullard was denied tenure, in 2013, she decided that life as an academic was over for her.

“I knew I didn’t want to go on the tenure track again,” said Ms. Bullard, a historian who had taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in New Jersey.

But what her next move would be didn’t begin to take shape until her “terminal year,” the academic year that generally follows a tenure denial. Rather than using that time to get back on the academic job market, Ms. Bullard cast a wide net and reached out to people about job prospects.

“I worked all of my contacts, even from high school,” Ms. Bullard said. “I was just calling people up, reaching out to everyone I could. That’s what you have to do.”

Ms. Bullard had worked as an activist for the teaching-assistant union while in graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the contacts she’d made there proved fruitful.

Before her terminal year was even up, Ms. Bullard was working part time for the Service Employees International Union, a position that became her first full-time job after the denial.

“My terminal year was a hard year, but I would advise taking it,” said Ms. Bullard, who also appealed her case during that time. “It gives you the space to decide what to do next.”

For Ms. Bullard, strategizing her next moves — at one point, with the help of a career coach — ultimately resulted in her working at a university again. A friend of hers, who works at Lehigh University, passed along an advertisement the Pennsylvania institution had posted for a research program-development officer.

Ms. Bullard applied, got the job, and started work in January 2016. She keeps track of available grants for faculty members, helps them determine which ones to apply for, and develops faculty seminars and workshops, among other things.

“There’s a whole community of people with doctorates at universities who are not faculty, and they have incredible skills and networks,” Ms. Bullard said. “You can do intellectually satisfying work without it being your own research.”

Ms. Bullard said she knows people denied tenure who have gone on to new tenure-track jobs and she admires their fortitude. “I didn’t have it,” she said. But she doesn’t see that, or her tenure denial, as a failure. She thinks people should talk more about the experience — although for many people, she said, that just takes time.

“It’s very painful, and I would say, Go to a therapist,” Ms. Bullard said. “I’ve gotten very outspoken about it because I’m further away from it now. Just know you’ll get there.”

Leaving Academe

When Molly Jensen was denied tenure, in 2015, at Southwestern University, in Texas, she decided not to appeal the decision — even though her colleagues at the time said she should. Her students also wrote to administrators in protest.

“I was at peace with it,” said Ms. Jensen, of the university’s decision. Instead of fighting for tenure, Ms. Jensen returned to the environmental-nonprofit world she had begun working in before starting on the tenure track at Southwestern, in 2009. Ms. Jensen had been director of development and community relations for a sustainable-food nonprofit organization in Austin, Tex., not far from where Southwestern is located.

She found ways to introduce students to the causes that her prior work had centered on. As an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Southwestern, she wrote a grant application to help start a community garden on the campus. She also formed partnerships with nearby sustainability groups.

But at one point, Ms. Jensen began to question where her service-learning approach to teaching fit in. And she thought about whether her status as the only untenured person in her department made her vulnerable. Southwestern was in cost-cutting mode while she was on the tenure track, she said.

“I was starting to think about what else I might want to do,” said Ms. Jensen, whose tenure-track job followed stints as a part-time instructor and then a visiting professor at Southwestern.

In hindsight, Ms. Jensen said, that period of exploration while she was on the tenure track was a good move. She tapped into the connections she had made in the nonprofit world to begin the networking that led her to apply for four jobs. She was a finalist for all of them.

A month after her tenure denial, she signed a contract to begin a new job working for a nonprofit group that serves at-risk children. Ms. Jensen has since moved on to her current role as an associate advancement director for the Sierra Club. She oversees fund raising in four states, including Texas, where she is still based.

“I joke that I work with more Ph.D.s at the Sierra Club than I did in academia,” said Ms. Jensen, who earned a doctorate in religion, ethics, and society at Vanderbilt University.

The kind of transition she made is one she wishes more academics would see as an option. Academics who tend to complain about working in higher education “never thought they could go into another field,” Ms. Jensen said, even though they have many transferable skills.

“From the time that we’re in graduate school, there were so few jobs, the pinnacle of success is to just get one of them,” she said. “We’re told we should be happy to just have a job.”

There is one thing, however, that she misses about her life as a professor.

“I miss the students,” she said. “I really enjoyed teaching them.”

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.