straight up rockstar. i put a book in the reading section!
i have a different post brewing in the back of my mind, but i am starting the new year small by adding my first book to the reading section and reporting the following…
i heard today that one of my (soon-to-be-former) colleagues from another department didn’t get tenure. when a tenured prof and a non-tenured one who form two-thirds of a department don’t get along, i guess it is normal that the non-tenured one is likely to be denied tenure.
tenure is such a weird animal. i have heard it said that the tenure process provide the potential for job security—even a possible “job for life.” however, the tenure process often results in very early retirement. that is, going up for tenure provides an one-time guilt-free opportunity for the university to weed out dissenters and to terminate profs for sometimes ambiguous and ill-defined reasons (e.g., not being collegial enough).
in addition, tenured profs get fired regularly for reasons not necessarily related to poor performance. for example, i hear tales of a relatively recent enrollment-downturn-related purge of tenured and non-tenured profs around my university. (see also recent events at tulane university, a seemingly wealthy and prestigious institution that fired 65 tenured profs after the flooding.) tenure seems to operate more like a way of ensuring that the tenured profs are not the first to get fired and have access to some extra “due process” if they face termination. it’s not at all that they have some sort of impregnable forcefield of job security.
all that to say, i don’t think tenure is a bad thing, and this is not a whine about its imperfections. rather, the tenure process just seems to look much less magical from the front of the classroom than it did from the desks.
I am sorry for your colleague: the moral of his story seems to be that, when your department is small, you better get along with your co-workers; if you don’t, don’t wait around to find out what might happen.
That’s probably the moral of large departments, too, but they have their own problems: a former grad teacher of mine was denied tenure at Chicago because she hadn’t published a book. Here’s the thing: the book was a month from publication at the time of her tenure.
Oh, she suffered for that. Her graduate students suffered for it, too….
by greg—Jan 3, 07:20 AM
A correction to Greg, which hopefully doesn’t reveal more info than Chris intended: HER story. The gender being a significant reason she was denied tenure, since the denial was based on “collegiality” as judged by committee for a candidate who is the sole woman in a division of four departments.
by mary—Jan 3, 10:38 AM
Honestly, I was using the masculine pronoun without really intending any particular gender and knowing that my gender might be wrong. Your correction, I fear, says an awful lot.
Speaking delicately: what exactly does it mean to be “collegial”?
by greg—Jan 3, 10:48 AM
hard to say. it’s kind of like obscenity: I think one is supposed to know it when one sees it. i think it sometimes has to do with being disgruntled about the right things, gruntled about the right things, and able to talk about football, politics, or the classics and to know when to talk about which.
by chris—Jan 3, 12:57 PM
Probably has something to do with serving on the right committees, too…
Anyway, I was never very good at that. After a year, I shirked all the parties and stopped talking shop. Which may be one reason I quit?
PS. I like the book. It’s got a pretty cover, and it looks very interesting.
by greg—Jan 3, 01:03 PM
it can also mean,
they have allowed me to impose upon them and have not imposed upon me.
they make me feel smart and learned rather than outdated, tired and boring.
they aren’t too fandangeled, like all those new politically engaged profs are…or conversely, they aren’t fuddy-duddies that keep politics out of the classroom.
they question the canon; the affirm it.
or, and this is still the case in many places, they are boys and/or they have a problem with sexist comments.
by hermit x—Jan 3, 02:02 PM
In other words, collegiality = How my junior colleagues make me feel good?
by greg—Jan 3, 04:47 PM
i meant to say have no problems with sexist comments
by hermit x—Jan 3, 05:05 PM
i once had an ex-boyfriend tell me that he hoped we could have a “collegial relationship.”
by kathy—Jan 3, 08:08 PM
i once told an old girlfriend that, of course, this was as i told her that i felt that our relationship was a sinking ship and that i was a rat trying to jump overboard
by hermit x—Jan 3, 08:16 PM
In which case Jeremy raises an important point, Kathy: was this desire on the part of the ex a way to dump you, or was it some weird, “I want to change our relationship” BS?
If a form of dumping, I include J in what I’m about to say: academic men are just awful.
If a form of BS, J, you’re not included: men are just awful.
by greg—Jan 4, 01:41 AM
what does collegial mean in this context? i have various colleagues who relate to one another as friends, extramarital sex partners, and spouses. does this relational “collegiality” signify a jovial lifting of a glass, whatever the status of the relationship?
by chris—Jan 4, 11:00 AM
well, as he’d already dumped me, i think this particular weasel was trying to say either “don’t hate me” or “don’t kill me in my sleep” or both. i guess i found it especially offensive because i interpreted it (rightly, i’d say) as a suggestion that a)i was incapable of acting like a “civilized human being” and b)after a romantic relationship has ended, two people in an academic setting should obviously pretend as though nothing ever happened, seeing as they, by their very nature, should be above such petty human emotional reactions.
eck. like i said, weasel.
by kathy—Jan 4, 05:34 PM
Weasel:
Then “collegial” means, “let us (you) forget our history together, burn our (your) bridges, and never mention us (me) again.” Sort of Chris’s “jovial lifting of the glass,” but without joviality or glasses.
by greg—Jan 5, 07:14 AM
so it’s: “let’s avoid guilt and awkwardness by pretending we were never a thing and by pretending that we are now all chummy”?
wow. if only those colleagues i mentioned in this post could have pulled that off! (not that they were romantic partners. rather, that they could pretend to get along.)
by chris—Jan 5, 08:57 AM
yes, i think those are good summaries, and btw, the pic of the weasel is much cuter (but not necessarily fuzzier) than his/her human counterpart.
what can i say? some of us deal heavily in denial in all aspects of our lives, and some of us have to work at not actually killing those people in their sleep. i happen to fall in the latter category. but i’m working on it.
by kathy—Jan 5, 06:14 PM
Which, you can be sure of, I appreciate very much—the working on it, I mean! (I don’t even have to sleep with one eye open any more…)
by greg—Jan 5, 10:53 PM