Tenure as Academic Hazing

I have always been disturbed the lack of transparency within academic departments.

Doctoral students rarely know the requirements for comprehensive exams and dissertations at the time of application and acceptance. Sure, they know that they will have to do their comps and write a dissertation, but they don’t always know the details. Will the comprehensive exams be written? Will there be an oral component? What are the requirements for the make-up of the committees? What is the ideal length for a written exam or a dissertation? What is the process for the dissertation proposal? It would be great if guidelines for these were published and shared with applicants and students. It would be fair.

This lack of transparency continues on into the postdoctoral years, particularly with the tenure process, during which senior faculty members commonly treat junior faculty members like children. Too often, because of a history of exclusion and discrimination, this is a situation of older white men playing the father role to younger women and members of racial/ethnic minorities. I often refer to the tenure process as a form of academic hazing.

In the corporate sector and on the administrative side of the higher-ed house, you are not allowed to send threatening e-mails to your colleagues without serious ramifications. I realize that most faculty members do not act this way, but even some of the most professional and civil senior members are shockingly unfair when tenure dossiers are in question. Although many departments do not commit to creating and publishing requirements, or even guidelines, for tenure, they know what they don’t want, and they can recognize it in an instant.

Some recent examples:

• A colleague’s first book is discredited as a book because it isn’t really long enough to be a real academic monograph (even though it was published by an academic press, whose editors considered it long enough to be an academic monograph).
• Another colleague’s external reviewer questioned the validity of a book’s press in their review letter, wondering if this imprint of a well-known academic press was a vanity press. When the confusion was cleared up, the reviewer refused to change the letter.
• Another colleague’s first book focused too much on practice, even though his area of scholarship is practice and he was hired to teach and, presumably, conduct research in that area.
• Another colleague’s articles are questionable because they are not published in one of three acceptable mainstream journals in the discipline, even though the department knew that his work was interdisciplinary and he was hired because of the interdisciplinary nature of his research.

I could go on, and so could all of you. Why do we do this? Why do you do this? And why do we pretend that these practices continue in the name of quality scholarship and academic rigor?

What does this do to junior faculty? It infantilizes them, destroys their innovative spirit, makes them bitter and jaded, demoralizes them, etc. Where is the mentoring? The capacity building? The succession planning?

I am not advocating the elimination of tenure, but I am advocating a radical overhaul of the process. When you hire an assistant professor, the requirements for tenure should be outlined in the offer letter he or she receives. Additionally, yearly evaluations should document each new hire’s progress toward achieving tenure and promotion, and the evaluations should be signed by the chair of the tenure-and-promotion committee, the department chair, and the assistant professor.

I know this is far from perfect, but at least it’s a start.