Tenure

The title says it all: a couple of weeks ago, I received notification that my tenure and promotion to associate professor is officially approved. I am immensely relieved. I’m fortunate that the whole process was fairly smooth for me, but you just never know, and part of me couldn’t believe that this would ever happen for me.

To be honest, I didn’t really see tenure as a realistic possibility for myself for the first five or six years of my career. Partly it was because I was working an “alt-ac” job for that period, and partly it just seemed as though these opportunities were vanishingly few, and I couldn’t see why I should be an exception.

Of course I worked hard—we all work hard—but I’ve benefited from a huge amount of luck. Most crucially, I happened to have a mentor who pushed for me at an opportune moment (and kept pushing for me). I also have great, level-headed, professional colleagues, which I know makes me immensely fortunate. I won a life-changing fellowship for which I know hundreds of other people were equally qualified. I stumbled into a number of opportunities that had to do with being in the right place at the right time. For example, I obtained a digital humanities-focused postdoc in 2011 on the strength of pretty much exclusively web-design skills—nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but it seems to me that expectations of DH job candidates now are a lot higher.

I did a lot of purportedly ill-advised stuff on the way to tenure, and I still feel some vestigial anxiety when I read other people’s advice about how to obtain tenure. (For what it’s worth, this seems like a relatively bullshit-free list of advice, though I didn’t follow all of it.) I didn’t really have a strategy or a game plan. I jettisoned my Ph.D. dissertation (because I hated it) and started over on a new topic. I had babies and hobbies. I never work on weekends or evenings. (It’s not that I don’t want to, exactly; it’s just literally impossible for me.) I published in popular outlets rather than exclusively scholarly venues. I blogged and ran my mouth. I don’t know, at a different institution with different colleagues, things could have gone a lot differently, but I’ve been lucky.

You often hear about a sort of emotional slump that ensues after obtaining tenure. I don’t know about that. Mostly I just feel extremely lucky and grateful. The pleasure that comes with this accomplishment isn’t so much a tidal wave of emotion, as I sort of expected. Instead it’s a little twinge of relief—ah! I have tenure!—when I think about the future. I keep waiting for some time to really sit and absorb this news and think about the future, but my life doesn’t seem to work that way right now. Perhaps this summer.

I don’t know if I see myself really operating differently going forward; most of what I’ve done, I’ve done because I wanted to and thought it was worthwhile, not because I thought it would earn me tenure. And I still get evaluated constantly, like everyone: I’ve got a two-year review right around the corner. But if tenure gives me some space to make some more deliberate and sustainable choices, then I’ll be really grateful.

It’s possible that I’d more fully digest the change in status if we weren’t all trying to navigate a horrifying social, political, and academic landscape right now. Even as I celebrate this apparent promise of security, I feel more vulnerable than I ever have in my life. I fear persecution for saying the wrong thing. I’m concerned about my institution’s finances and the decisions administrators will make in response. I’m worried about my kids’ futures and about my students’ futures. Institutions that I’d assumed would always exist have crumbled away like sand castles, and the people and organizations I’d hoped would combat these attacks are weirdly—shockingly—silent. It’s clear we can’t rely on the protections and opportunities that we’ve previously taken for granted, and, like so many other people, I’m terrified about what the next few years will hold. The world, very suddenly, is much, much crueler and stupider than I’d thought it was.

It seems to me that a common side-effect of an academic career is a constant, low-level fear of the other shoe dropping. Who did you forget to email? What did you forget to grade? Did you accidentally offend someone? Did you miss that meeting? I don’t know if I expected tenure to help with these anxieties, but if it does, I’m still waiting for it to kick in. And now, in addition to the more pedestrian background fears, I feel a constant churn of tension about political decisions beyond my control.

So unambiguously good news at a terrible time, is the upshot, I guess. I do want to mark this achievement for myself, though, despite everything. I did work hard, and I am proud and happy. May we all have occasion to celebrate, even in these dark times.