Issues Before and Leading to Tenure and First Promotion

As women seek entry and tenure with promotion in the academy, they are, of course, more successful when the overall political, economic, and legal structures support equity in education. In a time of political and economic backlash, such as the present, psychological biases and barriers flare up that are making women's entry into the professoriate more difficult. As law professor and legal expert Martha S. West observes in the report section of this special issue, regarding hiring at the University of California (UC), "In 1998, 48 percent of recent U.S. Ph.D. recipients were women, but only 13 percent of UC Davis faculty hires were women." She sees this as "strong evidence of sex discrimination, particularly in the absence of alternative explanations for this disturbing phenomenon" (199–211). The imposition of Proposition 209 in California, originally intended to curtail the entry of "unprepared" undergraduate students into the UC system, has had devastating effects on the numbers of women faculty hired at entry and senior levels of the academy. West shows how Proposition 209 took the teeth out of federal affirmative action legislation by allowing faculty throughout the entire UC system, 80 percent of whom are male, to have "'relaxed'" into "thinking affirmative action was gone and that everything was back to 'normal,' meaning hiring people most like themselves" (204).

Once a woman faculty member is hired on a tenure-track position, she prepares herself for the first major turning point—whether or not she will be tenured, and, most often, promoted. Two authors in this special issue—Juliann Emmons Allison and April L. Few—discuss their experiences in tenure-track positions in research universities. Their articles, both first-person narratives set in the context of scholarship on tenure, open this volume. When Allison and Few began writing their articles, both were assistant professors and social scientists aspiring for tenure at large public universities (15,000–25,000 students). Their stories support a major theme running through the articles, reports, and book reviews in this volume—that is, the need to change policies governing the types and timing of tenure requirements. In the cases of Allison and Few, changes in tenure requirements would acknowledge the life circumstances of women faculty who are forming and taking responsibility for families and who may be also engaged in substantial work within their communities as part of their teaching assignments.

More broadly, the authors in this volume support changing tenure requirements to reflect a more holistic vision of what it means to deliver a quality education to students, without the current primacy afforded to quantity of specialized scholarly publication. The contributors to this volume illustrate in different ways how the focus on quantity of scholarship belies a bias in favor of the ideal male worker and conforms to a corporate concept of productivity. Moreover, as Michael W. Kaufman, Harry C. Staley, and Jeffrey Berman pointed out as early as 1976, the technological model by which the university has been driven confuses faculty "reputation" with faculty "quality." Faculty reputation, customarily marked by "earned merit in the profession, memberships and consultancies, even honors and awards [is] frequently [the result of] privileges of networks of influence and professional contacts, and thus may have very little to do with genuine qualities of intellectual and pedagogic excellence" (1976, 2–3). On the other hand, faculty quality, in terms of ability to educate, is perhaps measured more accurately by caliber of teaching, advisement, and supervision of students as perceived by colleagues, students, and chairs of departments, all activities that the contributors to this volume think need to be more highly valued in the criteria for tenure and promotion.

In Allison's first-person narrative, "Composing a Life in 21st Century Academe: Reflections on a Mother's Challenge," she analyzes the tensions that arise as she tries to meet the tenure and promotion requirements in a system that is geared toward individuals without major responsibilities for children and family. Situating herself as a White, middle-class, feminist social scientist and a mother of four, Allison discusses many facets of discrimination against women, ranging from devaluation...