Beating the Clock: Being Up for Tenure Can Make You Feel Like a Criminal

Disclaimer: The author, when asked to pen a contribution to the "Live & Learn" section, could not resist focusing on the question of tenure within academic culture, especially since she is anxiously awaiting the outcome of her own tenure case. Hence, she insists on disclaiming anything contained herein that offends or irritates any member of her college's tenure committee, her senior colleagues and her dean. Thank you.

"Call me Damocles." Thus begins Blaire French's The Ticking Tenure Clock?one of the more delightfully horrifying academic novels to chronicle the perils of the dreaded tenure year. With the sword of fate poised precariously above her head, Lydia Martin, the novel's erstwhile but calculating and slightly manic protagonist, runs the gauntlet of backstabbing peers, cranky students, institutional pressures beyond her control and, last but certainly not least, a gaggle of pompous, self-absorbed senior colleagues who ultimately hold the keys to her academic future. If Lydia is granted tenure, then she will be duly elevated from the status of "minnow" to "whale" in the oceanic food chain that serves as one of the novel's central metaphors for the academic hierarchy. If denied, she will be expelled from the comfy depths of the sea, forced to toil in the shallow recesses or, worse, to flounder on dry, arid land.

Lydia knows, as all of us who have been similarly placed under the blade's edge know, that being up for tenure is a harrowing ordeal. We endlessly struggle for metaphors to make sense of it, and to provide some measure of comfort, if not illumination?which is probably why tenure remains such rich grist for the mill of academic novels.

I have a great affection for academic novels and am an avid collector. Perhaps it's because misery loves not only company, but also a good sardonic laugh from time to time. Many have been the times since I began my academic career that I have bolted from the room after an especially dispiriting faculty meeting and raced into the arms and pages of David Lodge, Jane Smiley, James Hynes and others. Lately, I've been reading and rereading my entire collection, primarily because academic novelists produce some of the best metaphors for the process?many invoking a notion of a food chain of some sort. While helpful in a macabre sort of way, I generally prefer to view my situation in light of the game of chutes and ladders. Publish an article, get a positive review of your first book and you get to climb the ladder upward toward safety and security. Proffer an unwelcome suggestion at a faculty meeting, insult a senior whale, wear loud ties or have a book manuscript rejected and down another chute you go.

Almost any academic you query knows of at least two or three truly terrible, unbelievable cases, and we junior, pre-tenure professors live in fear of these ghost stories told late at night in staff rooms to frighten young colleagues into not misbehaving. These are dark and sinister stories that generally involve being blown up in the minefields of departmental politics. This tendency among the tribe to initiate new members by scaring them half to death might account for why one author, James Hynes, has so deftly and convincingly employed the techniques and conventions of gothic horror into a series of short stories (Publish and Perish) as well as a recent novel (The Lecturer's Tale).

I can highly recommend the novel to anyone interested in the genre. Nelson Humboldt, the English composition lecturer in question, has been on a downward chute since he joined the department. In one day he loses his lowly position, his future prospects and all but the last modicum of self-respect. What he gains, however, through a bizarre accident that severs the tip of a finger, is a supernatural, and ultimately evil and soul-selling, power to influence people with a touch?a talent he exploits in his desperate bid to claw his way to tenure at an unfortunately not-fictional-enough Midwestern university. Although he is not quite up to snuff due to a persistent inability to breathe in the rarefied air of high literary theory (which is a source of much ribald humor throughout), Nelson proceeds to overcome this defect by lying, cheating, maiming and even killing his way to the top.

An exaggeration perhaps, but the brass ring of tenure makes people do strange and hideous things. Nelson becomes an actual criminal while the majority of us still soldiering up the slippery incline are just made to feel like one. Indeed, it's little wonder that the language of the tenure process so closely resembles the language of the criminal justice system. In the years leading up to the decisive tenure year, one is officially regarded as a "probationary" member of his or her department. During this period, the tenure-track professor is watched, assessed, reported on annually and continuously judged. Publish or perish. Render service to the department, the university, the profession. Be collegial within an inch of your very life; that is to say, suck up like a Hoover to anyone and everyone who might matter.

There are some sad and disturbing cases, so I've heard, so I've feared, that are regarded as so deviant and potentially dangerous that they are forced to endure a healthy dose of double-secret probation. Assuming that the candidate has avoided enough chutes, as the clock continues its maddening ticking down to the 11th hour, the tenure file, also known as the "docket," is prepared and submitted, often with the assistance of an assigned "caseworker." And then you wait, and wait, and wait, for the verdict to be delivered. In this scenario, tenure is equated with the freedom and protection of the double-jeopardy provision: you can't be tried for the same crime twice. You win a virtually lifelong position from which you cannot be fired except in extraordinary circumstances. You're golden. And best yet, if you survive this grueling process, you get to wreak your revenge by making all the subsequent new batches of junior, pre-tenure colleagues sweat and squirm for years to come.

To go down, to receive a negative verdict is...well, just too depressing to contemplate for more than a few minutes at a time. Those who feel wronged by the process and the decision can fight, but they rarely win. To be denied tenure, regardless of the reason or circumstance, is to land, hard, at the bottom of the last chute, searching the skies for just one more ladder.

Nothing captures the intricate and quasi-Byzantine institutional culture of university life as well as the academic novel. Only fiction will suffice to describe the occasional perversity and the darkly comedic moments. My love of academic novels, not to mention my increasing need of them as a major source of solace, all began with the first one I ever read and the one to which I return again and again: Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, arguably the granddaddy of all academic novels. Set in post-World War II Britain in one of the new provincial ("red brick") universities, Lucky Jim is a frequently hilarious tale of the trials and tribulations of Jim Dixon, a lecturer in the history department.

Poor Jim is attached to one woman he doesn't want and has the hots for another woman he can't have; he is nearly broke; he needs to have his less-than-gripping article on shipbuilding techniques from 1450 to 1485 published soon, but the editor of the journal who agreed to do so refuses to return Jim's frantic pleas for a publication date. To top it all off, Jim is forced to rely on the patronage of the tiresome and pedantic Prof. Welch.

"No other professor in Great Britain, [Jim] thought, set such store by being called Professor," is how Welch is described in one of the kinder passages regarding the man's character. Jim frequently wishes him dead, yet is constrained by hopes of a permanent position in the department. Hence Jim tries to make do with the running internal monologue where he expresses his true feelings, though only to himself.

This inward rebellion is finally turned outward in the end, as Jim delivers a public lecture on "Merrie England" to win brownie points with Welch. Nervous, depressed, angry, underprepared and totally, blissfully drunk, Jim reaches the point where he is past caring. "Well," Jim thinks as he reads from his notes, "if this was going to be his last public appearance here, he'd see to it that people didn't forget it in a hurry... Gradually...he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic, wounding bitterness. Nobody outside of a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish." Overcome by the heat of the hall, Jim passes out, loses his job and inadvertently wins his freedom.

A nice thought, a terrific dream, a grand and lovely fantasy, but not the way, in this day and age, to beat the ticking clock.