Tenure

Several of you have asked about tenure—what it is, why I’m doing it, etc. Some of you have filled out a survey of former students or written me a letter of support. Others of you have just been generally encouraging. I have a big deadline on Friday, and so my head is swimming in all the miseries of this process—the asking for favours, the soliciting of feedback, the trying to figure out how to say self-aggrandising things about myself without feeling totally absurd. I thought maybe I’d try here and see if I could connect to the lovely parts of the tenure process—and to the reason I’m doing it in the first place.

The job at GMU is the best job I’ve ever had (although this one at NZCER is pretty good, too). I have a combination of doing deep and important work with the teacher-students, being able to be as creative as I want in that work, and doing it with colleagues I like and admire. I get to have students who are interesting and smart and who are doing the most important job anyone can do—raising the next generation of thinkers and citizens, and making the world a better place. I get to support them to be better at this amazing thing they do. And I get paid to do writing and research about things that are interesting to me. To top it off I have a set of leaders who are supportive and thoughtful, who keep the entire organisation in mind but encourage me to dream and to have new ways of being in the world. I have made deep friendships there, have done the best teaching I’ve ever done anywhere, have been able to do interesting research and writing—and have done a little bit of changing the world along the way. So those are some of the reasons it’s a job worth holding on to.

Of course, it’s also true that I never wanted a tenure track job, because I’ve never particularly liked the values behind the tenure track. Hundreds of years ago, tenure began to protect intellectual freedom—to let people prove themselves as scholars and thinkers, assure them they’d have a job for life, and then they can be as creative or as clear-spoken as they want for the rest of their long and scholarly careers. It’s a good concept to support the freedom of thinkers in a free society. In practice, the tenure track means that people go flat out for six years (or five or ten or however many the particular university requires). And then they put together lots of materials arguing that they’re fantastic, and committees decide whether the case is convincing or not, and they get a job for life—or they get a one-year contract as a parting gift as they try to find another job.

So, there’s the tension. If I don’t apply for tenure, I have to resign. If I do apply for tenure and don’t get it, I get fired. If I do apply for tenure and do get it, I have until September 2009 to go back to Mason and be a professor again (an “associate professor” this time).

If I get tenure and then decide not to work at GMU anymore but to work elsewhere in the US, having gotten tenure at GMU will be a help, although I’ll likely have to go through the process all over again. If I try to teach in a university in other parts of the world, the US tenure system is not applicable and people won’t be all that interested that I have that particular ticket punched. (As I write this, I’m beginning to jot notes to help me hold on to all the pieces I have yet to finish for the deadline this Friday—I can’t do anything about them here on the train, but I can feel my anxiety mount.)

So, getting tenure at GMU means I can hold on to a job I love for a wee while longer (or forever) as we decide whether to live in New Zealand more than a couple of years. (“Are you still deciding whether you’ve emigrated?” someone asked me yesterday. Seems like an odd thing to be still deciding, but yes, I suppose it’s true.) So tenure at GMU is an escape hatch, a way to say, “Nope, sorry—we’ve had a great time living here, but we’re ready to go back to our old lives.” Similarly, if I don’t get tenure, that’s a clear message that the door which I’ve kept open is closed to me. No thinking about that one anymore.

I have discovered one last hidden delight about applying for tenure and asking people to evaluate me: they write letters and fill out surveys that say nice things. I am amazingly lucky to have done work I love with people I love, and it’s beautiful to have their recollections about that work, too. So, wish me luck as I plod forward this week and the rest of the month, and we’ll all have to assume that whatever happens is for the best. Life’s like that.