February 1, 2007
Jessica Burstein goes right ahead and talks about Tenure Club
For Jessica Burstein, “Tenure Club” was the mental equivalent of a trip to the gym, a break from the grind that goes with being an assistant professor. Her essay, a spoof based on Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s novel-turned-film, appeared in the Jan. 10 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Well,” Burstein explained, “the only other thing I was doing besides sitting at the computer was going to the gym.”
She said lots of readers seemed to like her essay, many of them male. They responded, she said, with comments such as “Oh, you’re so funny,” or “I’d be honored to be hit by you.”
Fight Club follows soap salesman Tyler Durden and the narrator, a bored 30-something, who assemble groups of men who smack each other silly — and bond over the experience. A weird and violent film, Fight Club is really a study of a personality gone awry — and it has a cult following.
Burstein’s narrator takes the same brusque attitude as Durden: “It started a ways back, maybe with the GRE’s. I failed them, knew it before leaving the room. Beat up the test administrator — something between impotent rage and tactics not unlike what had put me in the room to begin with.”
Later, at the university where she teaches, she’s initially denied tenure, so like a prize fighter, sets out to rectify the matter: verbal scuffles with literary theorists like Walter Benn Michaels and wipe-the-parking-lot encounters with troublesome colleagues in the English department:
“Worked my way through the department — some of them wouldn’t show, so I’d follow their husbands or wives or whatever to the playground with junior, and express myself out back of the swing sets, and then suggest a collegial encounter unless they wanted to continue to proxy for their partners.”
Burstein’s narrator ultimately gets tenure “with a research budget that would keep me off campus for the next 10 years.”
In real life, the slog toward tenure is no afternoon at the gym — and thanks to cutbacks, it’s getting harder all the time.
Of the 1.1 million teachers in higher education, about 65 percent are not on a tenure track; they’re either adjuncts or full-time teachers not considered for tenure. That leaves 35 percent either tenured or eligible. Of all teachers in higher ed, about 24 percent are tenured, said Jonathan Knight, spokesman for the American Association of University Professors.
Burstein recently received tenure recommendations from the English department and the Arts & Sciences College Council. If all goes well, she’ll receive approval from the University this spring. “I’m really lucky,” Burstein said. “The department here is explicit about hiring to tenure. It’s also been incredibly supportive and humane.”
When Burstein wrote her essay “Tenure Club,” she had just completed Cold Modernism, a book about writers such as Wyndham Lewis, whose characters react to circumstances without the psychological analysis central to other modern writers such James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Asked whether “Tenure Club” is related to the anti-psychological characters described in Cold Modernism, Burstein laughed and admitted to some fantasies about academe, but then said the essay was just for fun. “I think it’s my form of procrastination…I wrote it because it amused me.”
Another Burstein essay, “Rudeness Loves Company,” appeared in a 2003 issue of The Chronicle. She recounts a Texas childhood that included great affinity for swearing and thank-you notes written “only under the threat of physical pain.” At the University of Chicago, where, she says “fun goes to die,” Burstein discovered “the fact that I was surrounded by people not only smarter, but ruder than I.” And that such rudeness was simply business as usual.
She liked Fight Club, particularly the cinematography and Brad Pitt’s brusqueness. “I just liked how weird it was.”
Burstein also has a soft spot for boxing. “I admire boxing because of the discipline it requires but am also aware that the American Medical Association came out against it because of potential brain damage.”
When Burstein was in Chicago, she spent time at a community center called Northwest Settlement House, where coach Tom O’Shea taught kids to box. “It was a good place for kids to be,” she said. “They shook hands with the coach when he arrived, and they shook hands when they left. It was a place of respect.”
Read Burstein’s essay at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/01/2007011001c/careers.html.
On earning tenure in the humanities
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Ellen Kaisse is the UW’s Divisional Dean of Arts & Humanities. She spoke with University Week about tenure:
Q. How hard is it to get tenure in the humanities these days compared to 10 or
20 years ago?
A. My general impression is that it hasn’t changed much at the University of Washington or other fairly elite institutions. A Modern Language Association Task Force report on tenure covering the academic years 1994 to 2004 (http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion) initially suggested no perceptible lowering of tenure rates among those in the final stages of the tenure process. The denial rate is around 10 percent, says the report, but further research showed that “well over 20 percent of tenure-track faculty members leave the departments that originally hired them before they come up for tenure.” This 20 percent figure seems to be historically true of UW humanities faculty as well, though there was a period in the 1990s when a larger percentage of junior faculty were leaving, many, I suspect, due to outside offers.
The report goes on to say, “Data from studies conducted by other groups suggest that fewer than 40 percent of the Ph.D. recipients who make up the pool of applicants for tenure-track positions obtain such positions and go through the tenure process at the institutions where they are initially hired, and a somewhat larger number of modern language doctorate recipients — more than 40 percent — never obtain tenure-track appointments. In the aggregate, then, Ph.D.s in the fields represented by the MLA appear to have about a 35 percent chance of getting tenure.”
I don’t have figures on the tenure rate for the humanities at the UW but for the College of Arts and Sciences as a whole, averaging over the last 25 years, a good guestimate would be about 80 percent, even taking into account people who leave before coming up for tenure. Probably more than 90 percent of those who come up for tenure are granted tenure.
Q. What in the tenure process has changed, if anything?
A. Teaching has become much more important in our College within the last 15 years. But the MLA report says that across the country, research has become more central. At a research 1 university like this, of course, research has always been important, and it took a while for people to realize that we needed to explicitly honor teaching more than we were in the tenure process. But at institutions where teaching loads are heavy and research used not to be weighted so heavily, research is being demanded more. This is implicit in the MLA report.
Q. Scholarly books and articles have always been part of the criteria for tenure
decisions, but to what extent, if any, are other media being added? What do you think of expanding the criteria?
A. The MLA recommends that the scholarly monograph be less de rigueur in the humanities and suggests the profession “should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure and using scholarly portfolios. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration.”
I think the college would be happy to consider electronic publication as long as the quality of the publisher is high, just as it must be for more traditional media. In fact, I recall a recent case where the book was published electronically; it took a little work to establish the reputation of the press, as it was quite new, but there was no inherent problem with digital publication.
