Who Wrote the Book on Tenure? Love, War, and Pursuit of Job Security

Mentor in a Manual: Climbing the Academic Ladder to Tenure. By A. Clay Schoenfeld and Robert Magnan. 2d ed. Madison, Wis.: Atwood, 1994.

In her 1928 New Yorker review of Doris Langley Moore's Machiavellian guide to romantic conquest, Dorothy Parker quipped: "The Technique of the Love Affair makes, I am bitterly afraid, considerable sense. If only it had been placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful instead of just successive." After perusing the second edition of A. Clay Schoenfeld and Robert Magnan's Mentor in a Manual, I can only imagine how many failed academics, now enjoying prosperous careers at Microsoft or haunting the career corner at Barnes and Noble, would, with either consummate relief or mortal regret, share these sentiments.

Schoenfeld and Magnan's modestly stated purpose—to answer the question "How does an assistant professor earn tenure?" (xvi)—is probed with balance and perspicacity in this 499-page volume, which is easily navigable despite its heft. Its straightforward, congenial tone, along with its enormous, friendly typeface (think Tenure for Dummies), functions, like its human counterpart, to soothe the anxieties of its target audience (the new hire, just out of grad school) even as its opening interrogation—"Do you really understand what being a professor is all about? Are you sure you're deeply committed to pursuing a career in academia?" (1)—stokes them. The part of the reader is played by August Wilmot (Bill) Campion, a young botanist. We follow Bill, a new assistant professor at "Midland University," through a series of pretenure challenges—institutional socialization, political sticky wickets—typical of those faced by new faculty at a midsize institution, with a balanced emphasis on teaching and research activities.

The book's twelve chapters fall roughly into four subject areas: the nature and character of the profession, teaching strategies and expectations, research paradigms, and the presentation of credentials (originally titled "Packaging the Product for Sale"). Two appendixes offer an extensive reading list and a conciliatory, genuinely practical guide to the scarcely conceivable: "What Do I Do If I Don't Make Tenure?" Its breadth of content makes Mentor in a Manual a reliable reference guide for the first half dozen or so years of employment—longer if read, as it ought to be, by grad students who still have time to change their minds after learning what they are in for.

As a reference manual, Mentor in a Manual's virtues are many and its faults few, with one major exception. It is well researched, chock-full of interesting statistics and authoritative quotes, and fully referenced at the end of each chapter. Despite its compendious content, it is easy to peruse at a glance because of its numerous bulleted lists ("How to Avoid Getting Fired," "The Ten Commandments of Tenure"). In addition to its pragmatic appeal, the book does an impressive job of conveying the idea that promotion and tenure decisions are influenced by intangible factors; often the unwritten gestalt particular to each discipline and institution counts as much as, or more than, the strengths of a given c.v. Along these lines, the authors' decision, in chapter 1, to forgo "practical tips" and "bottom-line requirements" in favor of a frank, philosophical analysis of what it really takes to succeed in the profession is a sound one. Schoenfeld and Magnan, who admit having "been through the wars" themselves, occasionally employ combat imagery—even quoting General Colin Powell—to illustrate the tactical considerations required to achieve the tenure objective. Yet as many of us, particularly at smaller institutions, discover, even at its uncertain start the path to tenure is neither the long military campaign we feared nor the enduringly passionate affair we yearned for. If we're lucky, it's more like a lengthy engagement, and posttenure like a long, good marriage, full of satisfactions and compromises, an institution that changes...