Deflected from writing a post this afternoon by the startling news from Alabama: denied tenure, a junior faculty member tried to take out her department and succeeded in killing three colleagues.
What a tragedy for everyone, the maddened assistant professor as well as those whose lives she ended, and all their families.
Considering how much commitment, work, and struggle go into attaining a Ph.D., how much more struggle, work, abuse, frustration, and sometimes downright misery a junior faculty member goes through, and how much rides on a single tenure decision—often made by committees not all of whose members may operate with the purest of motives—it’s surprising this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. In fact, the fear that it could does surface every now and again.
Some years ago my department on the West campus of Arizona State University decided to dismiss a tenure-track assistant professor after the chronic frustration of working at that august institution had driven him quite insane. One of my students, a police officer, had let it slip in front of another student that she had arrested this guy for beating up a young boy; I reported this to the dean. The dean and the campus cops confirmed its accuracy, but no action was taken. Only after he threatened to cut off a colleague’s head and pee down the hole—giving said colleague an excuse to decline to come into campus even to meet his classes—did our administrators finally feel moved to get rid of him.
The chair of the department went to the man’s house, accompanied by a phalanx of armed police officers, to give him the news and to tell him he was not to come back to the campus. Before he left on this mission, however, the chair called some but not all of the faculty members and warned them to stay away from campus that day. Strangely, he didn’t tell everyone. It was obvious as day that if our disaffected colleague walked into the second-floor office suite carrying a street-sweeper, he wasn’t going to distinguish between those who merely annoyed him and those who drove him to distraction. But some of us were left to take our chances.
Jayzus! Imagine having a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University and then being denied tenure by a public school in a state like Alabama…probably the only state in the Union that’s more backward about education than Arizona. How crushing!
For those who don’t know what this implies: it’s extremely difficult to land a tenure-track job at a university in the best of times; during times of recession, almost impossible. To hang onto the job and build anything resembling a career in academia, you have to fight your way to tenure, usually on a three- to seven-year deadline. Tenure decisions require you to jump through many flaming hoops, and too many times the decisions are anything but fair. If you fail to obtain tenure, your job at that institution is over and your chances of landing another tenure-track job are nil. Should you stay in the academy at all after that, you’ll likely end up teaching five sections a semester in some junior college, with no research agenda and no chance of ever having a research agenda. Effectively, tenure denial ends the career for which you spent 10 to 15 years preparing.
So, all the while a junior faculty member is working toward tenure, he or she is under soul-wracking pressure. It is, even for the best of us, a difficult time. It’s not surprising that some people crack. Given the pervasive violence and madness in our culture, I guess we’re lucky events like today’s are rare.
What a terrible sad thing. It really broke my heart.
Thanks to this case, I had a tenure denial nightmare once more.
Tenure decisions are personal as well as professional. Obviously, if her colleagues had misgivings about her stabilty etc, they have been proven right. We will never know–b/c tenure reviews etc are confidential (perhaps not in criminal case).
Of course, there is room–a lot–for unfairness. I still have nightmares (a common theme!) about the unfair treatment I received from colleagues at the nice Quaker College where I taught MORE THAN 20 year ago.
Hey–don’t diss UAH. I had an on-campus there over 20 yrs ago and wish I had gotten the job. It is a nice town, full of brainiacs, owing to the NASA presence.
@ frugalscholar: The NASA presence has gotta help. We don’t have that, quite, except that the UofA has one of the outstanding aeronautical engineering programs in the country and also one of the premier astrophysics programs, and so much of the faculty works closely with NASA. “Nice town,” alas, does not describe most burgs in Arizona. “Dusty wide spot in the road” and “sprawling ticky-tacky bedroom community” are what you see most of the time. Tucson, home of the UofA, has some charm…and some not.
The whole tenure process is excruciating. It lends itself to unfairness.
Dunno about your institution, but our hiring process, too, fits that description. It’s one reason we end up with people who haven’t a chance of making tenure. The poor man we drove insane (only one of several, BTW) was a) obviously not what he represented himself to be; b) exuberantly unfit from Day One; and c) questionable in the scholarship department at the outset. His was not the only case where we hired people solely because they presented themselves as members of minority groups (whether we were making targeted hires or not) when they were about as minority as George Bush.
The particular lunatic in question was an “Indian” with snow-blond hair and ice-blue eyes: he had exactly as much Indian heritage as I do. Had I known I could have weaseled my way to a shot at tenure by sporting a headband, waving around a tourist-trap mug decorated with some fake Indian symbols, and nattering on about “my people” at every opportunity, I would have trotted out Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa and paraded them back and forth in front of every hiring committee in the land.
Of course, that would have ensured that I would have gone insane by now. But then, that’s a distinct possibility as it is…
I’d be astonished, but having heard and seen some of the nastiest, cutthroat politics conducted behind half-open doors before committee decisions are made, it’s clear to me that the process is fairly seriously flawed.
At least it was as conducted next door to where I worked — by certain persons of considerable influence, decisions of such gravity were treated like a popularity contest at several levels. I can’t recall a single instance where the applicant’s work record were discussed at more than a perfunctory level, it was all about the person’s bearing, potshots at the individual’s working relaitonships/patrons/mentors/sponsors, ethnic or educational background.
Perhaps these folks were unique to their breed, but it only takes a few to poison a process quite thoroughly. I’ve never been able to shake the sense of discomfort with academics in that arena since.
The weird thing about academia is that all these apparently unique and bizarre personalities are so commonplace as to be cliches. A couple months ago I edited a mystery novel set in a university, and by the time I got a third of the way through the book, I thought the author was actually writing about ASU West. She actually had the guy I described above — the Wottascamsee Indian — down perfectly, to a T. That happens often when you read fiction about academics; The Lecturer’s Tale is a sterling case in point. Everyone who reads it thinks it’s about their campus.
Today we learn the Alabama perp killed her brother in an incident that was or was not an accident, depending on the variant you come across, and that she and the hubby were briefly suspected of sending a pipe bomb to her dissertation director.
Did anyone do a background check on this woman at the time they were engaged in a national search to fill her position? Dollars to donuts the answer is noooooo.