FIRST PERSON

An End and a Beginning

Accepting the possibility of tenure denial and dealing with the reality of it are two different things

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By ELIZA PETERSON

My kitchen is gloomy, grungy, and perpetually falling apart. A do-it-yourself ranchette style installed circa 1962, it features dark plywood paneling and cabinet hardware made to resemble spurs. We have tried to find it kitschy, but mostly it is just depressing, the darkest room in the house. We have glued and screwed portions of the laminate countertop back on, nailed drawers back together, and prayed the vintage appliances would keep limping along.

We promised them — and ourselves — "after tenure." Redoing the kitchen was the key material desire I attached to earning tenure in the humanities. A new kitchen would be a symbolic reward for all it had taken to achieve tenure, a status we believed would give us the security to take the home-equity plunge. In the meantime, we clipped photographs from design magazines and waited.

And so on that sunny May morning when the chair of my department called to tell me that I had been denied tenure, I lost not just a job but a kitchen.

To be truthful, the decision did not blindside me. Though colleagues told me I had a strong file, I knew that tenure criteria at my private research university could be unpredictable. Nor would I be the only one in my department to be denied. Living with "tenure-year syndrome," as I wrote in my previous column (The Chronicle, May 16), seemed to reveal much more about my colleagues and my institution than it did about my worth as a scholar or teacher. As I told everyone, I had made my peace with the possibility of denial.

I lied. Accepting the possibility of denial and dealing with the reality of it have turned out to be entirely different predicaments.

After the years in graduate school, on the job market, and as an assistant professor, my tenure case had made it past the department and school levels only to be turned back at the last hurdle. It felt like a brick wall had slammed into me.

The code of secrecy meant I would never learn the reasons my file had come up short in the provost's estimation. Did it make me feel better or worse, I wondered, that he wouldn't have known me had he run over me with his truck. To have one of the more important decisions of your life made by a total stranger is bewildering.

Three sleepless nights later, I watched on SportsCenter as the filly Eight Belles ran a strong Kentucky Derby race, only to break her ankles at the finish line. Touché. All the time and heart I had invested in my university would go unrewarded, too. All it had earned me was the indelible stamp of a person denied tenure. Seemed easier to go with euthanasia.

Adding to my confusion were all the conflicting prognoses of my fate: I should be angry; I should be heartbroken; I should appeal; I should slip away quietly; no respectable college would touch me; departments would be delighted to know I was available; I should leave academe and its headaches behind; I should stay and succeed if only to prove the naysayers wrong. It reminded me of the times my children have had screaming fits in the grocery store. You feel the stares of pity, and everyone has an opinion.

That cacophony was matched by a resounding silence from one quarter. My departmental colleagues, with a few exceptions, chose not to communicate. During the contentious departmental debate over my case — when I received a two-thirds vote in favor — those same colleagues had besieged me with their theories, condolences, complaints, and frustrations. Not that I was terribly eager to talk, then or now, but the cumulative effect of all the silence this time felt like a shunning.

Some graduate students urged me to "fight" the decision. Flattering, perhaps, but with what army? My departmental colleagues gave no indication that they would follow me (or any of their number, in fact) to the barricades. The senior professors I did speak with appeared, instead, morosely helpless. They blamed the university's "toxic atmosphere," to which they, too, had fallen victim and which they felt powerless to change.

One colleague left me a note that expressed regret for the decision and hope for my future success, yet predicted "you will always be angry about this."

But I didn't want to be angry all my life. Nor did I wish to join in the helpless hand-wringing. That would be a greater waste than my years on the tenure track.

For the time being, I have chosen the satisfaction that comes with confounding colleagues' expectations that I should be a cowering wreck. Dignity and forthrightness are easy to embody in my increasingly brief visits to the office because the bar is so low. Surprising people by merely walking upright offers both small victory and perverse amusement. I am always cordial, sometimes frank, but never ashamed.

A few people have praised my plucky stance. Being commended for how you handle tenure denial is a dubious honor, yet it also makes clear the absurdity of the logic that equates losing a tenure bid with losing dignity. I need my dignity not to prove something to my colleagues. Rather, I need it to prove to myself that I need not be helpless in this scenario. I have decisions to make.

My immediate future is the "terminal year" — a label my friends outside of academe seem to find comical. Perhaps only in academe is it considered normal for you to continue working for a year at an institution that has effectively judged you as unworthy. The awkwardness is priceless.

Yet on a rational level, I have to admit, the terminal year is a fairly generous severance package, not to be pooh-poohed in this economy. I will receive a year's pay and lightened duties while I plot my next move.

It is, as some have marveled, a gift of time. And I am grateful for the months to absorb the body blow and sort out the future. But "the gift of time" is also, as I read recently in The New York Times, a new, more-sensitive label that school districts have offered to children held back a grade or placed in remedial classes. For the overachiever that lies within every professor I've ever known, myself included, remedial work is unnerving.

Do I really have to reopen questions I thought I had long since answered? Is being a professor what I want to do most? How far am I willing to go to continue being one? How far is my family willing to go?

Those questions are scarier to confront now than they were when I was a graduate student without a mortgage. But they reanimate that earlier self, the one who saw the future as holding as many possibilities as pitfalls. Thinking back to graduate school, I recalled that anxious season when several friends and I were close to finishing our dissertations, but none of us had tenure-track job offers waiting. We decided to celebrate in style, anyway. We booked a mariachi band and popped the champagne. Years afterward, as we find ourselves on different paths, we have never regretted that impulse.

So I have redefined my outlook to focus not on being denied tenure but on completing my circuit on the tenure track. Even if the result is negative, even if you decide to go around again, it is still a noteworthy event.

At one university I know, the department of a woman denied tenure threw her a goodbye party. Maybe it's an odd occasion to sip the bubbly, but the spirit strikes me as right. It ought to resemble a graduation, with all its bittersweet emotion, more than a wake. Unlike thoroughbreds, assistant professors who fall short on the track don't get shot. As graduation speakers remind us every spring, there's a reason they call it commencement. Tenure, won or lost, contains both end and beginning, too.

I don't know where I will have landed this time next year. For now, I've decided not to make any final decisions. One thing is sure: I will not have to be on the tenure track at my institution ever again. Sense of loss, meet liberation.

At the risk of sounding like a preachy self-help guru, I've realized that life is all a gift of time — not just what I do with my terminal year but with all of my time. So what have I done this summer? Besides digging my toes in the sand, reading trashy mystery novels, and playing Legos with my kids?

I painted the kitchen. Ripped off the spurs and the cutesy rustic valances. Painted every visible surface a bright white. It's still held together with wood glue and duct tape, and the next time I open the knife drawer, the handle may possibly come off in my hand. But it's not a ranch and it's not dark anymore. It's clean and bright, and no longer instantly reminds me of "the denial."

Looking around the room now, my husband and I think, Wow, we should have done this years ago. What were we waiting for?

Life doesn't wait for tenure. So go ahead. Paint your kitchen.

Eliza Peterson is the pseudonym of an assistant professor in the humanities at a university in the East.