On tenure

I am going up for tenure and promotion in the fall and spending the summer putting together my file for review. This process involves both information gathering and analysis, then reflecting on that information to make my case to the review committee. The stakes are high because if you don't get tenure, you are asked to leave the institution. If you do, you have a job for life--in theory.

This process puzzles people outside academia, who are not given the same assurance of job security. Tenure can be a tool to recruit and maintain excellent faculty, but it can also make it impossible for the institution to shed themselves of faculty who are under-performing. I knew a tenured faculty member whose favorite coffee mug read "I'm dead wood, but they can't fire me." Smug as that seems, he happened to be a very good professor. I've seen all examples and believe that faculty with sufficient passion and egos continue to achieve long after tenure.

The American Association of University Professionals (AAUP) sees tenure as necessary to protect academic freedom, but remember Ward Churchill? He was a tenured faculty member at the University of Colorado who ignited national ire by declaring that the technocrat workers in the World Trade Center were "Little Eichmanns." Whether or not his status gave him the right to say that, tenure did not protect his job after the the Governor of Colorado called for his dismissal.

So note to self: if tenure is achieved, at least keep your nose to the grindstone and remember it is your job to provoke deep thought--maybe even in a Churchillian manner. For now, I'm sifting through eight years of Student Opinion Surveys and looking at my competence on a one to five scale. These surveys are a student's final gift or revenge, as I get to disclose the glorious and shameful in the pursuit of job security.