An eminent economist at the University of Chicago, one the institution’s numerous Nobel laureates, tells about successive conversations he has had over the years with his great-aunt, who always followed with interest his childhood achievements and his adult career.
“So, how is it going?” she asked him as he was completing his doctoral studies. “Very well,” he responded. “I have just been awarded my Ph.D., and I have been offered an excellent job at a great university.” She was delighted and impressed.
Several years later, when she inquired again, he informed her that he had just been promoted to associate professor. Later still, he was able to report that he had been promoted to full professor. The next time she asked how things were going with his work, he said that everything was fine, and that he was still a professor at the university. She looked at him with a mixture of disappointment and sympathy: “So ... no promotion?”
Imagine that you have just received tenure. People expect you to feel joy and relief. But what other reactions might you have? You stand at the crest of a steep hill, possibly exhausted from the long climb behind you, especially if you have been coping with family responsibilities along with the challenges of your profession. What is the view from your new vantage point?
Do you see before you a garden of earthly delights, offering a range of opportunities that will fill the coming years? Or does the place on which you stand appear now to be only in the foothills of a mountain range that lies before you? Is that prospect daunting or exhilarating? Or is what you see ahead a long, level plain reaching indefinitely into the future? Do you have a sudden fear that you may have been consulting the wrong map and ended up at the edge of the Gobi Desert?
Winning tenure is the major rite of passage for an academic, a consummation devoutly to be wished. But let us remember that, thereafter, except for promotion to full professor, the faculty member’s career path is relatively unmarked by changes in job description or title. The professional trajectory is, in that sense, front-loaded. Some faculty members move into administrative positions, or leave academe altogether, when they feel the need or desire to try something different. But most stay put -- fortunately, because the future of our colleges and universities depends upon faculty members who experience a growing sense of fulfillment and achievement as they mature in their work as teachers and researchers.
Some institutions have systems of social control that encourage faculty members to see their best work as still to be achieved. For example, at the University of Chicago, no one rests on laurels or maintains status through past accomplishments alone. The pressure is kept on through the power of the institutional ethos rather than through any special practices. Chicago faculty members are seen to be as good as what they have done lately, and the result is as powerful a meritocracy as one can find in American higher education.
In general, senior faculty members who lead rewarding working lives do so because they can generate change from within and draw the sustenance they need from their students and colleagues. They maintain a lively curiosity about their chosen fields or move into related ones, remaining productive scholars. They maintain their commitment to teaching, seeking to share what they know in increasingly effective ways and to learn by doing so. They become engaged members of the institutions of which they are a part.
That scenario does not apply to everyone, of course. Some scholars may have trouble with aspects of their vocation -- teaching, research, or the professional and institutional burdens that come with seniority. And even the most devoted and successful professor may go through dry periods, when the future seems to offer no more than a barren form of repetition.
It would clearly be desirable to understand more about how the working lives of faculty members develop in the years after tenure. We can take guidance from the kind of life-cycle studies that have long been central to certain fields, notably anthropology and psychology, and that have made their way into work in other disciplines. We should not expect to find the sort of linear, easy-to-label stages that appear in the popular literature on life passages, which are oversimplifications of actual experience. We should, however, be able to do better at identifying the typical challenges that arise at successive points in a faculty member’s life, and to see patterns in the choices that professors make.
Those are the goals of a research project that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is undertaking in association with a group of selective liberal-arts colleges. The colleges -- Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, Macalester, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and my institution, Barnard -- are engaged in a pilot study of the faculty life cycle, collecting career biographies from their faculty members and experimenting with a variety of support-and-development programs for them. The plan is to widen the project to include other liberal-arts colleges as well.
The project deals with the entire faculty life cycle, but the years after tenure have emerged as especially interesting. Much has been written about the pressure-cooker years of assistant-professordom and the angst of facing a tenure decision; indeed, that is a staple plot element of academic novels. We have also heard much about how devastating a denial of tenure can be, in both professional and personal terms. But might there be another phenomenon that we have not heard much about? Might certain faculty members experience something akin to postpartum depression after receiving tenure?
We know from the extensive literature on postpartum depression that it has a great deal to do with hormones. At the same time, social factors surely contribute to the range of women’s experiences after giving birth; indeed, some adoptive mothers go through painful mood changes not unlike those of a woman who has just given birth to a child, and often fathers do as well.
Within the category of postpartum depression, scientists distinguish different forms, from the mildest -- popularly referred to as the baby blues -- through clinical depression to outright psychosis. What I have in mind here is an analogy with the baby blues. In general terms, postpartum depression can serve as a metaphor for the letdown that may follow a long-anticipated event, the anticlimax of achieving a long-hoped-for goal.
Long-hoped-for is surely an apt description of the goal of achieving tenure. As one of my colleagues observed, some faculty members have been looking forward to it since they received their first A in elementary school. During the extended trial of graduate school and assistant-professorhood, people have ample time to create a fantasy about what their life would be like after tenure. Their senior colleagues are not likely to give them realistic information and advice that might help them revise their fantasies, because those senior colleagues are the ones who will decide their fate. It would clearly be inappropriate to offer advice presupposing that the young scholar will get tenure; on the other hand, it might not be reassuring for advice to be put in carefully hypothetical terms.
The upshot is that junior faculty members think of the post-tenure period as the other side of the wall, in the words of one of my recently promoted Barnard colleagues. Making senior professors fill the dual roles of coaches and judges creates strains and stresses for all concerned -- as if a woman’s obstetrician, having provided support and guidance through her pregnancy, had then to decide whether or not she should be allowed to keep her baby.
The conversations that I have had with a number of Barnard faculty members have yielded several recurrent themes about the experience of receiving tenure. The professors were frank and generous in telling me about their own careers and those of their close friends and colleagues. I am pleased and grateful that they were willing to treat me -- the president of their college -- as the friendly neighborhood anthropologist.
Wendy McKenna, a social psychologist who teaches at Barnard, is analyzing the data that the faculty members have provided for the Mellon study. For now, I would like to outline the following points:
A major variable in how a faculty member feels about receiving tenure is how the achievement intersects with family life. While some may see the security of tenure as an opportunity to achieve a better balance between work and home, many professors find that their responsibilities intensify on both sides, depending on the ages of their children and the needs of their academic departments. The experience is like that of the career woman played by Lily Tomlin in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: “If I had known what it was like to have it all, I might have settled for less.”
Although life expectancy continues to increase, it remains the case that we are expected to consolidate our careers during the same window of time that we are establishing our families. That chronology might have worked when husbands and wives practiced the traditional division of labor, but it is surely not working well for two-career families. With so many institutions allowing candidates to stop the tenure clock for special circumstances, most often relating to childbearing, it seems unlikely that current practices regarding the timing of the tenure decision can persist much longer. At Barnard, we have found that the strongest single predictor that a candidate will receive tenure is the amount of time he or she has had to build a record as a scholar and teacher before the decision has to be made.
At the same time that family burdens may be increasing for the newly tenured faculty member, administrative burdens may suddenly ratchet up, too. There you are at the departmental party thrown in honor of your winning tenure; the chairman lifts her glass of Champagne in a toast, and you see not merely a joyful smile as she welcomes a respected colleague to full membership, but a wolfish grin as she gazes upon ... the next chairman. Unless we find ways to improve the ratio of leadership to paper pushing for department chairmen, and to streamline the governance systems of our colleges and universities for all senior faculty members, the first flush of elation at receiving tenure can quickly become a feeling of deflation at contemplating the meetings, budgets, and memos that lie ahead.
And there is deflation in the economic sense. The period of assistant-professorhood may be one of financial hardship, but academics have a tendency to consider that as temporary -- or, at least, not to worry about how long it will last, because the tenure decision looms so large as to cut off the view of what lies beyond it. It is at the moment of achieving tenure that the full financial implications of choosing an academic career may hit home. Now you must face the fact that, in a society obsessed with wealth, you will never earn the material rewards that many other professions offer. The financial sacrifice has not, after all, been a temporary one, and this is the first day of the rest of a life in which some people will never quite come to terms with that hard fact.
The process of granting tenure generates other problems. Your colleagues -- the same people whom you have been invited to regard as peers since you were hired -- have just sat in judgment on you. The experience is a kind of initiation rite, leading initiates to question their own value and acknowledge the power of their superiors.
Social psychologists have shown a relationship between the painfulness of an initiation and the degree of subsequent loyalty to the group. The probable explanation is that people who have struggled to achieve something want to feel that the achievement was worth all their efforts.
Nonetheless, some newly tenured professors might be tempted to ask themselves whether the stress and suffering was worth the prize. Anger or resentment suppressed during the process may erupt once it is over. One colleague told me about someone who was certain that he would not get tenure, and who had prepared carefully for the battle he intended to wage afterward. When he was granted tenure, he was completely undone and never quite found his footing again.
The confidentiality of a tenure review creates an aura of secrecy and mystery, and makes it a likely breeding ground for feelings of uncertainty and fear on the part of candidates. Just as some will find arbitrariness or ill will in their failure, others may question the reasons for their success. Did I really deserve this more than so-and-so, who was passed over? Those who win tenure may experience a form of survivor guilt vis-à-vis their less-fortunate peers.
Given that the tenure decision is the most significant rite of passage in an academic career, we should try to improve the way we handle it. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we generally do a poor job with those who did not get tenure, often treating them as nonpersons out of embarrassment and social incompetence. But do we do a better job with those who did win tenure? The usual departmental party is hardly enough.
Some institutions, Barnard among them, have all of the candidates meet with the president and provost following a tenure review -- those who have been denied tenure, so that they can be given as much information as appropriate and can express whatever reactions they wish to share; and those who have won tenure, to receive congratulations and discuss how Barnard can support their career plans in the years ahead.
Barnard faculty members who have just received tenure also get grants of $6,000, to be used over a period of up to four years in carrying on their current scholarly and pedagogical activities or exploring in other directions. That is a new program, currently paid for by the Mellon foundation as part of the study of the faculty life cycle.
With will and imagination, institutions should be able to come up with other ways of smoothing the transition to life after tenure more satisfactorily than they do at present. One significant change that would produce more variety, renewal, and refreshment in a faculty member’s working life would be to stop assuming that every year should have the same balance among teaching, research, and service. We should recognize that each of those areas may have its own rhythm. For example, a faculty member may need reduced teaching responsibilities in order to complete a major project; that might be followed by a teaching-intensive year or two while the next project is gestating.
Some of us are helped through the process by what we have learned from our disciplines. Clearly, anthropologists have an advantage in that respect: Viewing the entire ordeal as fieldwork can be quite instructive and serves at least as a good defense mechanism. One of the Barnard faculty members with whom I spoke, a social psychologist, was prepared for the way in which short-term feelings of euphoria following his achieving tenure would be replaced by the realization that nothing much had changed. His familiarity with the literature in his field had led him to know what to expect. We should find occasions for faculty members to share perspectives on the tenure process suggested by their respective disciplines. That might be reassuring, would definitely be interesting, and could even be entertaining.
Just as my discussions with Barnard faculty members have revealed the major causes of post-tenure letdown, they have also revealed the major causes of post-tenure happiness. It is a great advantage, for example, not to have all of your eggs in one basket. Those who have performed professional work in different settings -- research institutes, museums, government offices -- or who have had other careers before entering academe are more likely to realize that they have a range of options, and are where they are by choice. They are also more likely to feel that their post-tenure life will offer a variety of experiences, and that one year will not necessarily be like the one before.
Above all, earning tenure is a moment of self-discovery. One Barnard faculty member told me that he had expected to take it easy the summer after he received tenure, to enjoy a break from the pressure he had been under. Instead, that summer was a time of exceptional productivity for him. With tenure out of the way, he was able to feel the strength of his internal motivation.
To be sure, external pressures and rewards do not stop playing their roles after tenure: Will your colleagues find your work worthy? Will your book be favorably reviewed? Will your students demonstrate their appreciation of you in their course evaluations?
Most faculty members are deeply committed to their work from the get-go. Nonetheless, by earning tenure, you have a chance to learn whether your love of academe is real. Those of us who have found true love in the academy owe it to our colleagues and ourselves to do all we can to make the academic life as fulfilling as possible, after tenure as well as before.
Judith Shapiro is president and a professor of anthropology at Barnard College.
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