It shouldn’t have taken this long.

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What is “Tenure”?

Last week, I mentioned that you haven’t received posts from me lately because I’m going through a vital promotion process in my day job. Tenure is the holy grail of academia. Junior professors go through a multi-year process to demonstrate that they are worthy of having a job at their current institution for the rest of their lives.

If you earn tenure as a professor at a university, you will theoretically have job security until you decide to retire.

It’s a big friggin deal.

Each university and department has a set of criteria that junior faculty must meet to be eligible for tenure. The junior faculty prepares a dossier of their work over a set period — usually five years — and that dossier of work goes through a lengthy review process where the entire university hierarchy, and sometimes faculty and admin from other universities, judges the dossier as worthy of tenure.

Faculty who submit their tenure package receive feedback at each iteration of evaluation throughout the semester, but the final word on whether or not you’ve earned tenure doesn’t come until the end of the academic year.

It’s a long friggin process.

Tenure is designed to provide faculty with the protection to study topics and subjects that are decoupled from specific political or economic agendas. No one would study structural racism and white supremacy at a major university if it meant you would be fired for pursuing such subjects. Indeed, many universities, state legislatures, and federal lawmakers advocate pursuing these subjects as a fireable offense. Tenure means academic freedom, as in the freedom for faculty to study what interests them rather than what folks in power would prefer not to be studied.

Tenure is worth pursuing as a concept and a practical reality. I’m happy to complete the first step in this process finally, but it shouldn’t have taken this long.

Delays, delays, and more delays

When a faculty member is first hired, they start their first year as an Assistant Professor. They then have roughly five years to accomplish the work outlined in their contract, earning them tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. This pre-tenure period is called the “Tenure Clock.”

This clock can be delayed for various reasons to allow a given faculty member adequate time to attempt to complete their requirements for tenure and promotion. The birth or adoption of a child, the death of a close relative, and a global pandemic are all reasons why a junior faculty member would have their tenure clock delayed. The birth of two children and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed my tenure clock by three years, one year for each significant event.

I’m grateful that I was at an institution with these policies. Many professors can’t access such and must push through serious life events with no accommodation. I started on the tenure track (started my tenure clock) in the fall of 2014. Without those three life events, I would have gone through the tenure process in the fall of 2019. I was set to “go up” for tenure in the fall of 2021 but never did.

I’ve talked previously about my issues at my former institution before. I won’t detail those issues again here, but suffice it to say my situation at WVU became untenable. I had to get out of there, and fortunately, I found another faculty job elsewhere. But changing institutions cost me two additional years added to my tenure clock.

As a policy, adding time to a faculty member’s tenure clock makes sense if the new institution has a different tenure standard than the old one. My current institution is more teaching-focused, while my former was more research-focused. I’m a capable teacher, but the teaching standards at my new institution are more rigorous, and they wanted to give me time to demonstrate that I could hack it.

I’m salty about my transition, though, for two reasons: (1) The people in charge at my former institution failed to do right by me (and many others) and should be the ones facing increased job insecurity; (2) My current institution didn’t have robust systems in place to make my transition smooth. I’ll perhaps talk more about that after I’ve earned tenure, but because of vague policies and less than clear communication of standards, I had to delay my tenure clock by an additional year after I arrived.

So, ten years after beginning my tenure journey, I am now eligible for something that typically takes half as long. I’m grateful for the necessary delays and will forever be salty about the ones that could have been avoided.

Was it all worth it?

My post-tenure life

The short answer is yes. A job for life that isn’t directly tied to earning an enormous sum of money is an incredible accomplishment in this society. So long as my current institution is financially solvent and students keep enrolling, I can work here for the next quarter century or more.

But is that what I want to do with the rest of my life?

Hell. No.

Don’t get me wrong—I love teaching and research. I could do both for the rest of my life and be reasonably happy. But if that were all I was interested in doing, then you wouldn’t be reading this newsletter or watching my YouTube content.

Working in a dysfunctional environment to create academic products that other people judge on a subjective scale heavily influenced by racism and gatekeeping never felt good to me. Working at institutions that, for the most part, refuse to face the cultures of whiteness that they cultivate and weaponize to maintain the status quo is a hard living to make.

I’ve lived the academic life for over a decade, and even though I’m about to become a made man, I’m looking for a way out.

And I know I’m not supposed to say that, but part of the reason I’m not enamored with academia is that being honest in the face of systemic problems is not particularly valued in this space. That and I’m incredibly underpaid for the value I generate.

Part of that lack of compensation is inevitable because academia, as it’s structured, cannot capture much of the value I generate. Hence, I started a business this year. But a large part of my lack of compensation has to do with the fact that academia was designed to exclude people who look like me so that white guys with stay-at-home wives could be free to pursue their heart’s desire free from the responsibilities of less “smart” folk.

I’ve been on the tenure track so long that a PhD student I informally mentored earned tenure before I did. And that’s no shade to them, but 100% shade to a system that only captures intellectual value on a narrow spectrum and set of circumstances.

I have never been able to care enough about academic productivity to work at a level that would make my tenure clock go faster. In the immortal words of 49ers great Ricky Waters, “For who, for what?!”

In my post-tenure life, I will maintain my responsibilities to my students and help make my academic spaces more worthy of the people they exclude. But I owe it to myself, the life I have left to live, to manifest the joy and community that comes out when I do the other stuff.

My post-tenure clock starts once I’ve earned tenure, and I promise it won’t take me a decade to achieve my next promotion.

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan