Post-Tenure Review and Me

The envelope from the provost's office has an ominous confidential stamp, so I just set it down on my desk and go about my business, avoiding the distraction of dealing with its contents. When I do open it, it's the expected: the provost concurs with the head that my performance `needs improvement', so I'm facing `post-tenure review'. And by the way, your sabbatical is canceled until you're again a faculty member in good standing.

Post-tenure review arose in academia in the 1990s; in the USA first, where tenured faculty have no class consciousness, and you can change any rule of engagement as long as it only affects new people. It is part a result of `business values' worship in American culture, part resentment at the only profession with essentially guaranteed long-term employment, in a country where most employees are treated as serfs with no job security. It was harder to do in Europe, but gradually introduced there too, through the back door of `America worship' by euro-academic bureaucrats.

PTR was sold as a way to get rid of tenured `dead wood', or of people who spend all their time on outside consulting. So it still carries an imputation of `serious misdeed', incompetence even. Sorry, that's not me, not by a long stretch. My research `exceeds expectations', my lectures are clear, my class interaction with students completely normal, graduate students ask me to guide their work.  And yet, it can be done. The mechanism is there, and all it takes is a committed department head.

For these reviews have become something entirely different: a mechanism for the expression of power, one of the few in unhierarchical tenure-track academia. You might think it means your colleagues don't like you, but really all it takes is a couple of determined people with a grudge, and access to the head's ear. Or a head with an agenda, who feels a sense of mission in `doing something about people who can't adapt to where they are'. Or a naive head, an insecure newbie struggling with the job, believing this kind of action will make his faculty take him seriously. Then it moves to the dean, and the provost. To them it's all about sending a message  to the faculty: `yes, as a matter of fact we can use this mechanism to enforce our current policy priorities, even if you're doing your job just fine'.

So this spring term, in addition to my regular teaching and advising and (hopefully) research, I'll have to deal with this nonsense. The head tries to pass the process as `advisory', when in reality it's adversarial and very personal, a wasteful game involving a few men in their early fifties who should have more useful things to do with their time: the head, the dean, the provost and myself. At some point a mea culpa, an act of contrition will be expected from me. If at all possible, I want to deny them that pleasure, to leave in the written record, as clearly as possible, the many reasons why they're wrong. (Or to make sure they know it's given grudgingly; just what it takes to keep the job and no more). This will take some willingness from colleagues who don't know me to stick their necks out and support my position, which at the moment seems like a tall order; why should they?