Setting One Thing Straight

Gentle readers, some of you may have read this morning Christopher Shea's essay in the New York Times Book Review, "The End of Tenure?" 

Some of you may even have observed the growing frustration with the privilege of tenured workers "on numerous blogs and op-ed pages."  Some of you may have nodded in recognition at the sketch Shea relates:  according to the increasingly popular notion, we tenured elites "are guaranteed jobs for life, teach only a few hours a week, routinely get entire years off, dump grading duties onto graduate students and produce" obscure research, or even "stop doing research altogether . . . dropping their workweek to a manageable dozen hours or so, all while making $100,000 or more a year."

Gentle readers:  I wish.

But how absurd.  Only in a society with a strain of relentless anti-intellectualism would such a caricature take hold.

As a counterexample, here is one person's story:  mine.  I hope other tenured professors will make theirs known.

I am a first-generation college student, and my family neither valued college nor helped with my college expenses.

After four years of undergraduate education, for which I went into debt despite scholarships, I was the fortunate recipient of a fellowship from Texas A&M University.  With a baby to raise, I lived in two rooms on the $10,000/year stipend, wrote a masters thesis on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and earned my M.A.  I had no car.  I walked to school.  I walked with my toddler to the laundromat.  I walked to the grocery store.  Et cetera.  I finished my M.A. in two years.

I was then happy to be made a teaching assistant, teaching a 2-2 load (two classes in the fall, two in the spring; 28 students per class) to the tune of $12,000 a year.  For five years, we lived on that.  I continued to take out student loans to pay for necessities and, later, for a Montessori daycare and then an Episcopalian private school for Grey, because the public school in our neighborhood was very weak.  I put education first as a value, as a priority--and not as an upward-mobility strategy; rather, I valued critical thinking, a trained mind, thoughtful living.  Period.  I valued it for myself and I valued it for my son, and I willingly (and gratefully) took on debt to attain it.

For a while at A&M, I tutored in the Writing Center; I routinely worked with business and finance majors who received offers, fresh from their B.A.s, of $60,000 a year and upwards.

I finished a Ph.D. with a scholarly dissertation in five years.  (I believe the average is 7 years.)

When I received one tenure-track job offer while finishing my final year of graduate school, I felt lucky.  Many of the rejection letters, perhaps to soften the blow, included the numbers of applicants for the job.  More than 200.  More than 400.  In one case, more than 600.  I felt lucky to have any offers at all.  This was after 11 years of higher education.

My salary was $37,500 in my first year at Wabash College.  By contrast, someone I knew well, who went to law school (a three-year postgraduate investment), began his first job at $85K.  Year by year, merit review by merit review, I inched my salary up.  I routinely worked 60- and 70-hour weeks; I taught free courses through the public library and through the Clemente Course program in order to help the community.  I paid over $700 a month, every month, toward my own student-loan balance.  But ten years later, chairing my department and teaching a 3-3 load, I still had not reached my friend's entry-level salary. 

And three years into teaching as a tenured associate professor at an R1 (a research 1 institution, the supposed grail, where we get to work with graduate students and teach a 2-2 load), I still have not.  And that's okay.  I'm happy.  I feel lucky.  I'm not in it for the money.  Most of us aren't. 

Shea's piece quotes the blistering new book by Andrew Hacker, who claims that "today's senior professors can afford Marc Jacobs."  Hardly. 

I started my teaching career in consignment wear, graduated to Target, and this year's big back-to-school expenditure consisted of two shirts and this thrilling sale purchase from Talbots:

Item #  Description              Size              Color       Qty  Price
------  -----------------------  ----------------  ----------  ---  ---------
231642  Cardigan                 Misses L          PERIWINKLE   1 @ $14.49  Each
231642  Cardigan                 Misses L          PALM LEAF    1 @ $14.49  Each

Yep, thirty bucks plus shipping.  And readers:  my cardigans look pretty good.

In seven months, I will have paid off my student loans.  I will be 43.  I am a tenured professor, I have never had a graduate student do my grading, and I have had exactly one year "off" (at half-pay, not full-pay--the standard deal) during my thirteen years of employment as a professor.  (During that year, I wrote two books, one of which was The Truth Book, and the other is a still-unpublished scholarly volume.)  Here at UNL, sabbaticals are competitive, not a given.

I would not claim that there's no truth in the caricature.  I would not claim that the pyramid scheme of classroom staffing (with a few tenured and tenure-track professors at the top and many underpaid TAs with 2-2 loads and adjuncts pulling 4-4 and 5-5 loads) doesn't deserve careful, thoughtful reform.   I have always thought so.

And there well may be deadwood in some departments.  There well may be unproductive professors who are overpaid. 

But that has not been my experience, and it's not the story of the colleagues I see around me, who are hardworking, passionate teachers who care about students' progress and futures--and who have been vetted rigorously, year after difficult year.  Remember, there's a severe weeding out:  many graduate students don't make it to the Ph.D.; many Ph.D.s don't get a tenure-track job; many young professors on the tenure track are turned away, sometimes heartbreakingly, at their second-, fourth-, or tenure-year review. 

Say what you like about the foibles and excesses of tenured professors; they have earned it.  From a huge and eager field of contenders, they are the ones whose teaching and research stood multiple tests.

If anyone's handing out Marc Jacobs to professors, I'll be first in line.  Until then, I have rewarding, challenging work that I love.  I paid the price, and I'm not complaining. 

But I'm here to argue against these uninformed caricatures of what a tenured professor is and does.

Consider the motives of those who attack higher education.  By dismantling the one remaining arena where our educational system explicitly privileges critical thinking, discussion, informed debate, and original research over rote, to-the-test cramming, what do they stand to gain?  By tapping into and channeling the justified anger of parents who've seen tuition payments climb--as we too saw, for our son (and we sucked it up, because education's what we value)--what long-term goals do they seek to achieve? 

Rather than "all but calling for an end to the role of universities in the production of knowledge," perhaps these tenure-bashing pundits (and frustrated parents) should call for colleges and universities to invest in more tenure lines, so that the vast bulk of undergraduate teaching would be done by carefully vetted experts who publish original research in their fields, not underpaid TAs and exploited, harried adjuncts.  Those adjuncts should be given a shot at job security and fair compensation for their work--but until more tenure-line positions are approved, they can't be.  

It's the business model that dominates most universities, not individual professors who've struggled to navigate it, that should be taken to task.

Be wary.  That's all.  Find out the facts for yourselves.  If you know professors, ask them for their actual stories.

If you are a professor, tell yours.  Tell the public the truth about tenure.