Comments on: Dealing with rejection

By: bryan

bryan — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 20:25:10 +0000

Jesus, you have got to be the worst fucking revenge cook I’ve ever read! Rejecting the invitation? What is that, is that a revenge, that’s a breadcrumb! Let me tell you how it is when I serve up my revenge. I read the invitation at an awards ceremony with the President of the University there, make some droll remarks about the quality of said institution, announce the free download of a five hundred page satire in ebook format attacking said institution, spit in his wine, leave, and moon him at the door. Later, my intellectual lackeys catch him on the way home and steal his lunch money. This is for starters. Next follows a spiteful course over several decades, op-eds in which the University, faculty, and President of my ire are ridiculed. Reviews of research and books from members of said institutions are naturally always going to be the nastiest imaginable, and because of my natural talent for nastiness the most enjoyable and widest reported reviews in any publication. Fistfights, poisonings, and lurid sex and drug scandals at conferences will also be an integral part of my revenge programme. I will seduce the wife of the President of the University, and post our sexual escapades on the internet. Whenever I travel through the city where this institution is located I will pass by its campus with a diaretic dalmation and neglect to scoop the poop when I leave. Those bastards will rue the day they ever tangled with me.

By: Ray

Ray — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 18:18:10 +0000

I like the idea of tenure. I wish everyone could have it, just like I wish everyone could have federally funded single-payer health insurance the way my parents do. But given that not everyone has it, doesn’t it seem like a classic case of keeping the workers down and divided by inducing inter-worker rivalry with an artificially scarce reward? House prof vs. field prof? (I miss the Invisible Adjunct.) As for the original question, I think the psychological mechanism you’re reaching for is “parental approval” or “integration of the outcast.” Some people have the gumption to reject a group that once rejected them; other people are likely to gush “You like me! You really like me!” I’ve certainly felt the latter impulse often enough, embarrassing though it is.

By: Leo Casey

Leo Casey — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 15:42:31 +0000

An old friend who left Harvard before her tenure decision, and is now at another elite institution, told me that she decided “to say FUCK YOU to Harvard before Harvard could say FUCK YOU to me.” I love that spirit. If only a lot more did the same thing.

By: harry

harry — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:57:39 +0000

Sorry cafl, I was in a wierd mood when I wrote that. I take your point about the military, and also some public school teachers—though I would say that it is relatively easy to avoid being a vulnerable art/music/phys ed teacher, and become, instead, a less-vulnerable english/science/math teacher (though I understand that phys ed is, in the US, and bizarrely, a good bet for future administrators. Here’s a conjecture based on dave and doug turnbull’s comments. The tenure process actually habituates people to working pretty hard. Its true that you can slack off after tenure, but you have lost the inclination to do it by then. You are habiutuated to writing a lot, you’ve got your teaching into a sufficiently good state that you keep that up for the next decade, you’ve raised other people’s expectations about your productivity, and don’t want to let them down. Most research universities, in addition, predicate raises after tenure on the judgements of your peers. My university takes both research and teaching reasonably seriously in that judgment. Big raises are predicated on the ability to get soemone else to hire you. So there are still considerable incentives to work moderately hard, in addition to the habits you’ve picked up. So maybe tenure actually makes people work harder post tenure. Those sectors in which people have de-facto but not de-jure tenure might do well to imitate it….

By: Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:07:30 +0000

As a tangent to the dicussion about tenure above, in my 7 years in the non-academic job market, I’ve met many, many, many times more people who are lazy and do little work and just skate by than I did in my 8 years in academia. Tenure is a nice gig, I’m sure, although as others point out the path you take to get there is one of the worst imaginable (in terms of pay, pressure, and prospects.) But, even if you’re jealous from afar, you can relax knowing that 95+% of professors who have tenure are still working extremely hard, certainly as hard as the majority in private industry, in my experience.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 12:47:22 +0000

I don’t want to get into a debate about whose job sucks worse. But I will point out that unlike most of my colleagues, I enjoy the tenure clock because the sphincter-clenching terror it provokes has pretty much cured my hypochondria. Who has time to worry about the irregular heartbeat? The wet, hacking cough? The burning sensation when I…well, you get the picture. The tenure process has, in a sense, saved me. Most Americans waste their time on “The Apprentice” and staggering amounts of internet porn. Really, it’s staggering. I just checked. But not me. Because of the pressure I face for tenure, I barely even pay attention to my classes anymore. Remember my students’ names? I’m fortunate if I can remember what time class is. And where. And in the unlikely event that I do show up, I’m usually so intoxicated by my love of my research, as well as by bourbon, that my students seem to feel free to talk, eat, fornicate, all while I am trying to impart some wisdom that will help them to survive the coming Rapture. So I focus mostly on my writing, trying to get yet one more article into a journal that’s less-often read than the masthead on Highlights for Children. By the way, my new manuscript takes the form of a Goofus-and-Gallant strip, where Goofus clearly doesn’t understand the relationship between performativities of power and post-colonial hegemony, but Gallant can find the aporia in a Dick Cheney speech in three, uncomplaining minutes. If I get tenure, I plan to devote the rest of my career to alcoholism and silent, barely contained rage.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 12:46:41 +0000

By: nick

nick — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 10:36:02 +0000

I was told by my tutor at Oxford that, if I were to hit the US job market, I ought to avoid the whole cycle of rejection and focus on ‘upper second-division’ institutions. It’s well established that the top tier colleges work their APs into the ground, and hire from outside. Didn’t we talk about a paper published recently on related patterns of hiring in the Ivy League which endorses themoabird’s argument? Ah, yes.

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:51:16 +0000

In the corporate world firing is unusual, so after a while (because of seniority, and usually less than six years) lots of people don’t have to worry unless their corporations go bust. That might be true for operating companies. It’s not so in the world of professional services, which is boom-or-bust. Banks are notorious for this. They routinely massacre transactional bankers when the markets are sickly. (Bankers are also sacked when the markets are healthy, but in those circumnstances generally pick up a new job in about 15 minutes.) I had lunch with a Deutsche Banker a couple of years ago. He told me he wasn’t sure he’d have a job when he got back to the office. (He didn’t.) And he was only one of many: without exaggeration, I’d say about half the bankers with whom I’d worked personally lost their jobs in the early ‘00s. Of course, some of these guys make so much money that, if they aren’t stupid during the boom (as many of them are), they’ve got enough stashed away to ride out the bust. Even in my own niche of this world, which until recently tried to preserve a (thin) veneer of genteel otherworldliness, nobody is safe. The corridors of many a City and Wall Street law firm were strewn with the corpses of freshly-slaughtered associates not so very long ago. Even partnership – roughly the equivalent of tenure – is no longer a safeguard, and it is far from unknown for partners to be axed or ‘de-equitised’. From where I sit, academic tenure seems a huge plum indeed, but not a disproportionate compensation for the many sacrifices taking the academic’s path entails. And not so important a compensation as what I, perhaps naively, see as the truly great thing about an academic career: despite all the distractions, one is paid to think about things one really wants to spend one’s time thinking about.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:40:55 +0000

Selection bias in your anecdotage; of course it’s only some who accept the later offer Selection bias the other way, too. It’s only some who accept the earlier offer. People turn down junior jobs at places like Harvard and Yale more often than you might think.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:40:37 +0000

Selection bias in your anecdotage; of course it’s only some who accept the later offer Selection bias the other way, too: it’s only some who accept the earlier offer. People turn down junior jobs at places like Harvard and Yale more often than you might think.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:57:09 +0000

Interestingly, at the elite law schools (well, Harvard anyway) tenure is almost automatic once you’re hired. Not quite—there are occasionally some battles. But it’s pretty rare for someone to be turned down. Any thoughts on why the difference?

By: Sparta

Sparta — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 01:38:09 +0000

I gave up academia when I realized that my starting salary in industry would be higher than a tenured prof with a named chair at MIT. This might be a bit atypical, I was pretty well known in the field. But on the other hand I was not likely to make it on tenure track. The odd thing is that at this point I spend far more of my time on research than my academic collegues and I have an engineering department to build stuff. OK I am somewhat constrained in what I have to work on, there has to be a commercial application on the horizon. But I felt much more constrained at MIT where every idea had to be sold to our lords and masters at DARPA. The same certainly does not hold in the humanities. The demand for the skills is not the same. The bizare part is that some of my collegues at once competing companies have started to drift back into academia. Now they have industrial experience they are much more in demand in academia. They can make up the salary difference by consulting for contacts they found while in industry. The upshot is that several of these people are working as tenured profs alongside people who tried to stay in the system and work their way up through the ranks where they are currently still chasing tenure. So cheer up, it could be worse.

By: cafl

cafl — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 00:32:35 +0000

Harry lists “Almost all public schoolteachers, doctors, local government and federal employees, cops, military employees” as having the equivalent of academic tenure. Where I live (California), teachers’ contracts are renewed annually. It is true that union contracts mean that seniority determines who is “riffed” in low-budget years, but academic specialty also enters into this. For example, all the art teachers may lose their jobs. Further, there is termination for cause, albeit with a somewhat lengthy termination process. Local government employees including cops are similarly subject to being cut due to budget considerations, sometimes via union contracts with seniority provisions. Federal employees are now the subject of mandated outsourcing programs instituted by the Bush administration. Military officers are typically subject to “up or out” policies, such that if an officer is not promoted he/she is severed from the service. So it doesn’t seem to me that these occupations are so comparable to tenured professorships, though the union seniority situation may have certain parallels.

By: Nasi Lemak

Nasi Lemak — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 22:59:16 +0000

Selection bias in your anecdotage; of course it’s only some who accept the later offer but that’s much more noticeable than never darkening Harvard’s door again. I know that if my employer refused to renew me after five years, I would devote the rest of my life to enthusiastically vexatious litigation against them (like that embittered former philosopher who hates Oxford University Press with a vengeance). So I’d never appear in that anecdote, at least.