The Lesson of the Line: A Parable for Travelers of the Tenure Track

Before the reader even reaches the title page, Life on the Tenure Track offers an appropriately Shandean emblem for the account to follow: a long, meandering dotted line that loops back around itself, crawls over to a second leaf, and twists into a pattern that resembles nothing so much as the offspring of a figure eight and an ampersand. This quirky ellipsis symbolizes the singularity and eccentricity of any given journey on the tenure track, a reminder that the coils and curlicues of one scholar’s progress are necessarily characteristic of and peculiar to him or her. The image serves as both a promise and a reminder, a symbolic delineation of the verges and the virtues of James M. Lang’s reckoning of his own first year on the trip.

Like the line, the structure Lang uses to shape his relation is irregular, as the text adheres only loosely to the passage of his early months as an English professor. The prologue, “Before (and After) the Beginning,” lays out the preparatory groundwork that informed Lang’s decision to join the faculty at Assumption College, clarifies how he reconstructed the events of his first year in his fourth, and explains how he has selectively availed himself of hindsight to comment on those events. Subsequent chapters proceed at once chronologically and topically: “October” concentrates on Lang’s efforts to produce scholarship while he juggles obligations, “November” chronicles his various time-consuming service commitments, and “December” finds him overwhelmed by the ugly necessities of grading. Later chapters, rather than focusing on comparable nuts-and-bolts topics, offer more open-ended ruminations on the challenges associated with earning tenure. “February” features Lang reassessing his priorities following a stay in the hospital, for example, while “April” recounts an uncomfortable epiphany on the subject of departmental politics. When both halves are taken together, the book proceeds as though it were three parts bildungsroman, one part instruction manual, and one part Chicken Soup for the Professorial Soul.

Lang opens the volume by conceding to the inevitability of particulars. With the advantage of retrospection, he confesses that his own “adventures on the tenure track” seem to him “completely idiosyncratic” and his responses to the crises he faced likewise “cobbled-together and provisional” (7). Looking back on the period from August 2000 until August 2001, he offers the reader an enlightening, sometimes harrowing narrative of his debut as an English professor, live and largely improvised. In ways that become progressively more vivid and evocative, his discovery narrative is knit together with his personal circumstances: his consciousness of the needs of his wife, Anne, and two young daughters, Madeleine and Katie; his educational and professional training at Notre Dame, St. Louis University, and Northwestern, which clarified and conditioned his expectations of Assumption; his committed Catholicism, which bears heavily on his deliberations and decisions; his ongoing battle with Crohn’s disease, which amplifies his on-the-job anxieties yet furnishes him with a timely opportunity for reflection. This accumulation of detail creates a disarming distance between Lang and the reader. It stands in the way of simple identification and exemplarity, yet it thereby increases the heuristic value of his story.

The audiences Lang targets — “junior faculty members in all disciplines,” “graduate students around the country,” and “senior faculty and administrators” who may profit from an “unguarded perspective” offered by a grunt currently in the tenure trenches (8 – 9) — will no doubt anticipate, experience, and remember the early throes of a career in distinctive, solitary ways. As a consequence, Lang wisely promotes creative extrapolation far more often than he encourages direct application. I found his first-person perspective off-putting at times, but he has a knack for turning readerly resistance to good effect. He carefully outlines the contours of his own background to supply the audience with a clear set of motives for his decisions and conduct, a tactic that, when it fails to elicit recognition or sympathy, nevertheless [End Page...