This is the final third post in Kevin Birth’s series, What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life. Previously: Departmental Politics, Teaching the Curriculum. Update: Kevin surprised us with a fourth post, which we’ll publish next week.Â
Behold how good and how pleasant it is: for brethren to dwell together in unity! (Psalm 133:1, KJV)
Ah springtime—the time of annual reviews of junior faculty. That time when tenured faculty give reassurance that somebody is well on their way to getting tenure. Or, more rarely, that time when the powers-that-be must be brutally honest with an untenured professor.
Cynthia was one such case. Her tenure decision was two years away—when considers that for most journals it takes a year or more from submission to publication, it is not that long a time. After her initial unbelief that she was in trouble, she asked the chair for a lighter teaching load. “If only I had more time to write, I know I could get published.â€
Unfortunately, the chair to whom she made this argument already taught more and published more often than Cynthia. In addition, the chair remembered a time when senior faculty routinely robbed junior faculty of release time that they had earned. The chair knew that by giving a course off to Cynthia, she would be taking a release course from somebody else—somebody already considered a “productive scholar.†The chair fought back the desire to simply reject Cynthia’s request. In bygone days, chairs would have said, “Deal with it,†and then worked to fire the faculty member before the public scandal of a failed tenure case. Having lived through those times, the current chair was more charitable: she told Cynthia, albeit coldly, “I’ll take it to the P and B.â€Â [Read more…] about What I Wish I’d Known About Faculty Life: The Tenure Track, Etc.