My first academic job interview resulted in a job offer. My
doctorate is in American Studies, but the job offer was in
Afro-American Studies. Because I am actually interested in
Afro-American Studies, this was not a great hardship for me. However, a
light did go on in my head. I remembered hearing – more than once –
that for Black scholars, all roads tend to lead to Black Studies.
Because there are so few actual departments of Afro-American
Studies, job appointments tend to be “joint” appointments – which means
at least twice as many professional obligations as faculty members
hired by one department. It also means that tenure, which is granted by
a department and not a program, has just become exponentially more
difficult to achieve.
Many junior faculty members have no idea what is involved in
attaining tenure since mentors may gloss over the obstacles that most
of us will face. Thus, we emerge from the challenges of graduate school
triumphant and ready to embark upon our new careers as scholars. The
tenure track is a surprise – like a sudden splash of cold water.
Even so-called seasoned academics sometimes pursue what might seem
to be rather bizarre strategies for obtaining tenure. Those strategies
include: negotiating with, or even accepting an offer from, a competing
institution in order to hasten the tenure process at one’s own college
or university; writing a “cross-over” book, because despite the disdain
that academics profess for the masses of “lay” readers, a spot on the
“Today” show (or even C-Span’s “Booknotes”) would be duly recognized
and rewarded; or reincarnation as a “public” intellectual, because, as
previously mentioned, a spot as a panelist on a show like the PBS
Lehrer NewsHour gets recognition.
Exactly what are the requirements for tenure? First and foremost, of course, is the Ph.D.
The next most important requirement is publication. This may
include, though not necessarily, publication of a revised doctoral
dissertation. And publications should be restricted to one’s narrowly
prescribed niche, which is determined by the dissertation – ruling out
most work that is truly interdisciplinary (remember those joint
appointments?) or original and iconoclastic. The current constriction
of the university presses and their markets, however, has a negative
impact on the possibility of doing this.
After a book, the most respected publications are articles for
academic journals, most of which are cranked out specifically for
tenure review reports and are so dense and dull as to be unreadable.
