The Two-Year Track

Life After Death in Academe

A social scientist is reincarnated at a community college as the professor he always hoped to be

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By A.J. MARLEY

The problem with "publish or perish" is that you don't, in fact, perish. When I was denied tenure last year, I had the distinct experience of being a dead professor walking. Colleagues seemed to avoid me, students to look right through me. Doors that once were held open were closed in my face.

For an entire semester — between the time my department recommended denial and my provost finally agreed — I had to give myself pep talks before leaving my car for the long walk to my office. A half-block is really long when you're deceased.

Before every class, I would go into the bathroom just to look in the mirror and steel myself against breaking down or saying anything untoward in front of my students. At least I finally achieved my goal of taking sack lunches to work because I couldn't bring myself to show my face in the campus food court, much less the faculty dining room.

My department's tenure denial was transmitted to me the day before Thanksgiving (nice touch), so I spent the holiday season with anything but good cheer, and could not sleep more than two hours a night until several weeks after New Year's.

But although I died a gruesome academic death after seven years of probationary hell and many years of graduate-student purgatory (academic afterlife seems somehow to precede academic demise), I am now reborn and in a much better place, both literally and figuratively. As it turned out, the Promised Land in academe was not tenure, but teaching at a community college.

How is my new full-time gig better than my old one? Let me count the ways.

First, my primary strength and passion — teaching — is appropriately valued at the community college. My salary as a community-college instructor is 40 percent higher than it was as an assistant professor at a comprehensive state university. Even if I had been tenured and promoted to associate professor, I would still have earned substantially less there than I do now at the community college. Sure, my salary at the university would have eventually caught up, but it would never have gone much higher than the top of the pay scale at the community college, and I get better benefits and other goodies here — a laptop, reserved parking.

Other support for good teaching at the community college includes plentiful state-of-the art classrooms, generous budgets for video clips and other supplemental materials, and a great deal of freedom in designing new courses and curricula.

Second, my community college is, surprisingly, much more collegial and intellectually stimulating than the state university was. I already have many more interesting friends and lunch companions than I ever had there.

I think that's because at a two-year college, faculty members all have roughly the same agenda — to educate our students — so there is relatively little competition. At the university, most of my time was spent competing for resources with other Ph.D.'s in my discipline, measuring each other up, and pecking each other down. (Indeed, I am pretty sure my tenure denial represents a case of academic mobbing, but let's not revisit that morbid topic.)

At my community college, I spend time with a diverse array of facultymembers (mathematicians, philosophers, biologists, welders, chefs, coaches, psychologists). The more permeable academic boundaries permit us to find all sorts of ways to collaborate and cross-fertilize one another's work.

Right now, for example, I am working with a business instructor, an agriculture instructor, a welding instructor, an IT instructor, and community groups to offer a course on "social entrepreneurship" in which students start their own nonprofit organic-agriculture enterprises. The project started with an idle thought I uttered aloud one day, but within a few months, many other faculty members, administrators, and local leaders were helping to make it a reality.

A collaboration like that would have been much more difficult at my university and would have taken much longer to launch, if it ever even left the ground.

Third, and most important, my overarching reason for entering academe — to help make the world a better place — is much more realizable in this job than it ever was at the university. In fact, I was specifically and repeatedly advised there not to change the world until and unless I had been granted tenure.

For example, when I got my university students involved in a community-based research project that resulted in a report published by the city and read (and enthusiastically received) by a variety of local policy makers, I was warned by administrators to curtail my "community activities" and told instead to "churn out some more articles" from my four-year-old dissertation.

Please note that I was in a department that claimed to want to develop a graduate program in "applied" social science, so it is not as if community-based research involving students was somehow irrelevant to my professional work or to the institutional mission. But clearly this was an institution that wanted its young, idealistic junior-faculty members to hole up in their offices and do big things like write articles that no one would read.

By contrast, during my first week at the community college, I was welcomed by a local organization and elected to its board. We began establishing a partnership between the college and the organization to work on several projects, including the "social entrepreneurship" course. Administrators here praised me for such efforts and invited me to speak about them to a group of local civic and business leaders.

So not only have I had more opportunities here to change the world than I did at the university, but I am also professionally rewarded for trying to do so.

In effect, being denied tenure has allowed me to be reincarnated as the professor I always hoped to be — engaged, intellectually stimulated (and, I hope, stimulating), appropriately remunerated, innovative, and truly free to pursue the ideas and activities for which all my professional training and experience has prepared me.

They say tenure is the best guarantee of academic freedom, but I don't know — maybe tenure denial is even better.

A.J. Marley is the pseudonym of a faculty member in the social sciences at a community college in the West.