The tenure labyrinth - teachers in Afro-American studies

Black Issues in Higher Education, Oct 16, 1997 by Edwyna Smith

My first academic job interview resulted in a job offer. My doctorate is in American Studies, but the job offer was in Afro-American Studies. Because I am actually interested in Afro-American Studies, this was not a great hardship for me. However, a light did go on in my head. I remembered hearing - more than once - that for Black scholars, all roads tend to lead to Black Studies.

Because there are so few actual departments of Afro-American Studies, job appointments tend to be "joint" appointments - which means at least twice as many professional obligations as faculty members hired by one department. It also means that tenure, which is granted by a department and not a program, has just become exponentially more difficult to achieve.

Many junior faculty members have no idea what is involved in attaining tenure since mentors may gloss over the obstacles that most of us will face. Thus, we emerge from the challenges of graduate school triumphant and ready to embark upon our new careers as scholars. The tenure track is a surprise - like a sudden splash of cold water.

Even so-called seasoned academics sometimes pursue what might seem to be rather bizarre strategies for obtaining tenure. Those strategies include: negotiating with, or even accepting an offer from, a competing institution in order to hasten the tenure process at one's own college or university; writing a "cross-over" book, because despite the disdain that academics profess for the masses of "lay" readers, a spot on the "Today" show (or even C-Span's "Booknotes") would be duly recognized and rewarded; or reincarnation as a "public" intellectual, because, as previously mentioned, a spot as a panelist on a show like the PBS Lehrer NewsHour gets recognition.

Exactly what are the requirements for tenure? First and foremost, of course, is the Ph.D.

The next most important requirement is publication. This may include, though not necessarily, publication of a revised doctoral dissertation. And publications should be restricted to one's narrowly prescribed niche, which is determined by the dissertation - ruling out most work that is truly interdisciplinary (remember those joint appointments?) or original and iconoclastic. The current constriction of the university presses and their markets, however, has a negative impact on the possibility of doing this.

After a book, the most respected publications are articles for academic journals, most of which are cranked out specifically for tenure review reports and are so dense and dull as to be unreadable.

At some research institutions, teaching ability is not a particular consideration, although student evaluations of teaching performance are still used to deny tenure. However, the evaluations of one's "peers" is a consideration. Those evaluations usually involve a tenured colleague assigned to oversee the progress of junior faculty members, which includes observations of lectures or of discussion sessions with students.

What is referred to as "service" to the academic community may include serving on peer boards, holding professional organization memberships and serving as officers in them, refereeing papers, delivering papers at conferences, and serving as a panelist to critique papers at a conference. Committee work is less essential if one has an "in" with someone who is both tenured and politically well-placed - a description that may well resonate with redundancy.

Hurdles to tenure that I have witnessed or experienced include the actual sabotage of job opportunities by professor"mentors" by methods as Machiavellian as deliberately starting a rumor on the gossip grapevine or inserting career-damaging asides in so-called letters of "recommendation."

Ultimately, actual decisions about who does or does not get tenure have as much to do with fiscal stability - or instability of a given institution as with supply and demand. Thus, the analogies of the academic job market to a slave auction are not farfetched. Besides which, woe to the one caught in a political crossfire between an administration and a beleaguered department. Again, think about those joint appointments. How much leverage do you really think a "program" has when it comes to the internal machinations of a "department" making a tenure decision?

Black academics with tenure seem to hesitate to provide Black junior faculty with a leg up, such as: providing insight into what they have found to be important considerations in tenure decisions; acting as mediators in the sometimes highly charged political atmosphere of American colleges and universities; and, in short, creating the kind of network that is apparently essential for navigating tenure.

While some of these tenured folk may believe that there is only a small territory to parcel out, it is more likely - and indeed, history supports the conclusion that opportunities expand with expanded interest and participation.