Waiting out a colleague's fate, I remember my own tenure-decision.
As I await for a colleague "the lame feet of salvation" (Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks") from a committee that too often plays "death the redeemer" (Ibid.), I recall waiting for word from the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] when I was considered for tenure.
I had a unanimous endorsement from my department and letters from colleagues at Harvard and other creditable institutions. Still, I had not kept my mouth shut and "the asshole clause" -- possession of appropriate personal and professional characteristics -- had yet to be excised from the Faculty Code. In the semester I stood/stooped for tenure, I had noted in the Faculty Senate that the general education core had yet to pass according to rules that the faculty had agreed to. Throughout the renegotiation of general education in 1990-1991, I had questioned such prescriptions as "Science in Context," calling them pork-barrel projects and an "International POlitical Economy" syllabus that was risible. Before that, I had questioned the delay of fraternity and sorority rush on the ground that the faculty had no business saying when clubs could recruit.
Moreover, a member of the FAC had warned me not to disagree with the dean again after a dean so calm that he was nearly comatose had struck me over a governance dispute. At first I thought the member of the FAC was joking, but he made it clear he was serious. "You're saying that this university is so chickenshit that my disagreeing with the dean and my getting struck by the dean might doom me?" I asked rhetorically. One sixth of the FAC there and then assured me that this university did not need troublemakers. [This was before I learned to say, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Please see the entry in this blog for 14 January 2010.]
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had at least two advantages. First, I was a male. It would be some years before I learned just how advantageous that Y-chromosome was. Second, a contemporary bereft of a Y-chromosome was given to obeying federal law on sexual harassment despite sentiments in her department such as the immortal, "If she followed the law, then that law is wrong!" The FAC lavished ammunition on the whistleblower. Maybe they ran out of ammunition (Admiral Stockdale, 1992) before me. [The university ran out of ammunition when she sued and got a huge settlement. She threw a great party, but I still miss her.]
By the time the FAC sent me its letter, I was in Vermont. I opened the letter and smiled that the FAC had recommended me for tenure. Then I read the letter aloud to my friend. She was a voracious reader and learned, so she gasped along with me as solecisms and errors in the letter accumulated. I do not think that she was much impressed with the institution at which I had just received tenure. "This letter was written by a professor?" she asked. "Nope," I answered. "It was written by six professors."
In the final paragraph of the letter, the FAC explicitly hoped that I would conform more and squawk less than I had in my probationary period. I found the FAC's presumption droll. [Think Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca:" "If I didn't give {names of the underground leaders} to you in a concentration camp where you had more persuasive methods at your disposal, I certainly won't give them to you now."]
When I returned to Tacoma, the main author of that letter took me to dinner to explain away its final paragraph. He apparently did not want me to think that the letter, especially in that final paragraph, meant what it said. I cut him off. "My letter will always say what the words literally meant. Anything you say now is gloss beside the point." My interlocutor seemed flummoxed and frustrated by my unwillingness to go along with his re-mystifying. How lacking in civility of me after all he had done for me!
Thus did I come to understand why my pre-tenure period was called probationary. When I completed my probation, I received a lifetime sentence.
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