A View from the Outside

I remember sitting in a classroom in West Texas several years ago, listening to my English professor lecture on some British author. Actually, he was staring out the window and telling us about the remarkable attributes of mesquite trees—there was some connection between Lord Byron and southwestern vegetation. At that moment, like the heavenly light dazzling Saul on the road to Damascus, a voice inside me said, "That's what I want to be, an English professor!" What a great job! You have nice colleagues, wear tweed sport coats with bow ties, give lectures on Byron and mesquite trees, and get paid for it! I could do this, I told myself (with only the vaguest sense of what "graduate school" was going to be like).

Had the Fates been kind, they would have given me a copy of a book like Mentor in a Manual to read before mailing out those graduate school applications. Mentor in a Manual is something like a U.S. Army training manual as compared to the travel agency brochures one might find at a recruiting office ("See Hawaii!—Join the Marines!"). It is encyclopedic, loaded with useful hints and suggestions for survival, and it will disabuse anyone of romantic ideas about academe, just as reading about bayonets puts Hawaii in a different light.

Not that I regret choosing a career in academe. The professorial calling does have its unique pleasures, but I might have considered my career alternatives as a librarian or navy midshipman more seriously had I known that being good is not always good enough in academe. As Schoenfeld and Magnan put it in their preface, "There is no entitlement to tenure based upon a record that is merely competent and satisfactory for a prescribed period of time" (xiii).

Jennifer Maier has done a nice job already of enumerating many of the book's fine qualities and its faults. (I would add that a reference book of this sort should have annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter.) The dynamics of working at nontenure schools bring others to light. When Schoenfeld and Magnan write, "To be sure, not everyone is a tenure fan" (xiii), that is an understatement. Adamant opposition to tenure has become institutionalized at many small private colleges. At a nontenure school, the faculty signs a series of contracts. In the middle of a multiyear contract, an assistant professor may be eligible to apply for promotion to associate. But this title does not carry the significance and rights it routinely would at a tenure-granting school. Despite its "cold hard reality" attitude, Mentor in a Manual perpetuates another romantic notion that is often assumed in graduate schools: that the job is at a large tenure-granting institution. I note that only two of the thirty-three reviewers listed in the preface are associated with small private schools, both of which presumably offer tenure. The rest? Wisconsin, Purdue, Wisconsin, Vermont, Wisconsin, and so on. I do not disparage the accumulated wisdom of the tenured faculty at these institutions, but they are hardly representative of all colleges and universities in the United States.

At a tenure-granting school, of course, life begins with completion of the Ph.D., and usually after five or six years an assistant professor can apply for associate status. But at a nontenure school, the dynamics are not the same. A substantial percentage of faculty members at these institutions may have only their master's degrees; several may be finishing their doctoral coursework or dissertations. Promotion to associate status usually requires a Ph.D., but at a nontenure school the countdown to promotion may begin whenever the instructor starts working full-time, regardless of his or her degree. At first glance, this seems to be a pretty good deal. However, you may find yourself working under people who have not paid their academic dues, so to speak, or at least do not have a common educational background. In this kind of environment...