Fine lines in the road to promotion

Recent articles in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed discuss the MLA's report on slower promotion rates to full professor for women. (The Chronicle's is behind the subscription wall, but you can get all the information at IHE.) Here's an excerpt from IHE:

Many women report being punished for performing the parts of their job in which they may take the most pride. One woman is quoted saying that her career had been “helped and hindered by my own propensity continually to propose new courses or substantially revise existing ones" and by "the unusual time/effort I put into grading written work by both undergraduate and graduate students.” Another woman surveyed said she hurt her career because of a "difficulty saying no."

The issue about saying no is really partly an issue of energy. In the case of BSS (whose most recent bullet I dodged, by the way) saying no, and knowing that you'll say no, still eats up time and emotional energy. I think part of the issue for female faculty is calibrating the kind of response to give. If you're too pleasant and accommodating, well, there are always other faculty out there looking for an Academic Handmaiden who'll take your pleasantness for a strong wish to be one. If you muster the energy to say no--and it does take more energy to say "no" than "yes"--sometimes it may come out in a more strident way than you intended, just because of the unintended vehemence of your answer. Then you look like someone who's "not a team player"--or worse.

Time spent in the office. My theory is that although admin would like people to be in the office a lot and students would like us to be there 24/7 in case they get a random impulse to drop by, women faculty who make it to full professor are in their offices less than those who seem to be stuck at associate. In short, the culture of a place may encourage being available (and police it through pointed remarks like "oh, are you on campus today?") but it rewards staying away and getting research done. Could mentoring help this paradoxical situation? I'm not sure how, since there's a double message here: "Be on campus and available" and "Stay away and write if you want to get promoted." Balancing the two is another of those fine lines.

In the comments section at IHE, one commenter ("Jen") mentions that she's on sabbatical but is going to go in for a meeting since there otherwise won't be a woman on the committee. Would I do this? Not on your life; if you're on sabbatical, you're gone. Committees are eternal, and the mills of academe grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small, so there's little chance that something major would transpire while you're away. Yet I wonder if women aren't more prone to the "my department can't get along without me, for who else would do X?" syndrome than men are.

Deadlines as pieces of flair

Tenured Radical had a great post the other day called "Senior Scholars, This is Your Conscience Speaking" in which she tells us to get moving on those book manuscripts we're supposed to review. She's absolutely right, but I'd like to add one small demurral.

Deadlines are deadlines for a reason, and we ought to honor them. This goes double for tenure review deadlines, which are usually due late in the summer. I've never been late and am usually early with these, because someone's career is on the line.

The same mostly holds true with reviewing book and article manuscript submissions. But (and you knew there was a "but" coming) deadlines for reviewing manuscripts are not pieces of flair. Remember in Office Space where the manager tells Jennifer Aniston's character that wearing 15 pieces of flair is the minimum, but if she really were serious about her job and not a slacker, she'd want to wear more? If an editor says "We would appreciate receiving your review by August 30," I assume that this is a real deadline and that this isn't a hint that I should want to get it in sooner and will be considered a slacker if I don't. Of course everyone wants to get things done early, but that doesn't always happen. If I only have 15 pieces of flair here and get the thing in by the stated deadline, I'm still doing all right.

To get back to Tenured Radical's example: I think it's up to the editor. If the editor from the press wants it by the middle of the summer so that the author can do corrections in late July and August, he or she will tell me so and set a deadline in June or July--and, in fact, those have been more customary deadlines for book manuscript reviews than late August.

So do what Tenured Radical says and get those manuscripts reviewed and out the door. But just because they're resting on your "to-do" pile doesn't mean that they have to be in your guilt pile, too.

Darwinism in Academe

From Jessica Burstein's "No: A Love Song" in the Chronicle (I think it's behind the subscription wall--sorry). Burstein tells about having a panel rejected by an organization that she'd been with since its first meeting (I was at that first conference, too), and along the way she says this:

Here's what I know to be true. Academe is about being rejected. Everyone is told no. Am I right about this close reading? No. Will you read my dissertation? No. Can I have this job? No. How about this fellowship? No. Publish my article? No. Might I have tenure? No. Do you want my book? Nope. Could I get a promotion, a raise, an office with a window, an office, 15 extra copies on the Xerox machine? No, no, no, no, and yes — wait, I changed my mind: No.
. . . In Texas, or its outlying areas — Cincinnati, Seattle, Amsterdam, Algiers — academics proceed by virtue of an algorithm of envy. Born of denial, "no" is its currency, while "yes" swaggers through alleyways like dinners with Susan Sontag or Stephen Fry: You weren't there; but they had fun, and quips were exchanged.

Finally! She's so right, and yet this is the part of academics that we all pretend mightily just isn't so, that all things are open to us, when actually most of us will spend our careers getting rejected.

And yet we enable this behavior to occur. I'm reminded of this when I hear well-known people in the field saying things like "I think I'll do a panel on X at the next MLA" or other big conference. Isn't it a competitive process for them as it is for the rest of us grimy proles? How do they know it'll be accepted? Is it because--gasp--the proposer has a big name? MLA and all other conferences piously deny this, although a few years back PMLA, in an essay about why fewer academics submitted articles to it (answer: because they thought they had a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted), did admit that it relied heavily on "solicited contributions" rather than those submitted to a blind review process. (I think that has changed.) I know that some conferences "strongly encourage" (yes, that's a euphemism)including a "well-known scholar" as a respondent or chair if the organizer wants the proposal to be accepted.

I'm also reminded of this when I'm on a conference committee or hiring committee. Everyone gleefully wishes for a big pool of applicants or proposals to make a "strong program" or get the "strongest applicant." The more competitive a pool is, the better, according to everyone's estimation, and if a pool is small, everyone wonders whether it's good enough.

But wouldn't a sufficient number of good ones (applicants, proposals) do? Do we have to wish for excessive numbers? We're not breeding salmon here; we're choosing applicants or proposals. How Darwinian do we have to be? How many people do we have to say no to in order to satisfy ourselves that we're competing our way to the top?

The answer is "a lot," and that's why Burstein's conclusion is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Words to the wise for newbies and not-so-newbies

Tenured Radical has a post with excellent advice for new (and not-so-new) professors. While this is really just a post seconding her suggestions, I have a couple of other, more minor ones to add:

Learn to do whatever you can for yourself. In a department where I used to work, one of the administrative assistants had a sign up that said something like "Your failure to plan does not constitute an emergency for me." She would reinforce this by sitting at her desk and reading the newspaper in a very leisurely manner, ignoring us while we were dancing around her, flailing our arms, imploring her to open the photocopying room (or to fix the copier, which was about as robust as Marguerite Gautier on a bad day).

In addition to being nice and to saying "thank you," as TR suggests, some of us learned that if we could cajole Ms. "What? Me hurry?" into showing us how to change the toner, add paper, or whatever else we needed to do, we didn't need to bother her. The same holds true for ordering desk copies, calling for travel reservations, or whatever else is nominally in the administrative assistant's realm: if she (or he) is busy, and if it's not a usurpation of his or her power to do it yourself, do so and lighten the load, unless there's some kind of status war involved that you don't want to be part of.

And yes, say "thank you."

Leave your door open and your light on. Obviously you can't always leave your door open if you're taking a phone call or are on a noisy hall, but colleagues who might be inclined to stick their heads in and say hello if it's open will walk right on by if it's closed. You want to get to know people, and this is a good way to see them, students as well as your new colleagues.

Don't take things personally; it's not always about you. The Chronicle and other publications on academe sometimes make the departments sound like a snake pit, where every movement, word, and gesture is parsed by mean-spirited colleagues waiting for you to slip up. Although some people may behave this way, thus leading to the widespread advice on the Chronicle's career boards to "STFU," most will want to welcome you and see you do well.

This isn't the interview process: your new colleagues already decided that you fit in to some degree, or you wouldn't have been offered the job. They are probably giving you something of a popularity rush right now as everyone tries to get to know you. This will drop off in a few weeks, but not because of anything you said or did; it's just that everyone gets busy.

Speaking of busy: I have yet to meet an academic (or anyone else, for that matter) who responds well to any intimation that he or she is not as busy as you are. This seems to infuriate everyone without exception. Yes, you'll be really busy, but to complain that you're more overworked or have less free time than X to X's face is stupid impolitic.

Will work for praise

Reviewing and evaluating is part of our job; if you think about it, it's most of our job as professors. We're paid for it, in one way or another: salaries (for teaching); books or checks, for manuscript reviews for presses; a "professional service" line on the cv for being a manuscript reader for a journal.

If I'm honest about it, though, the real reward for some of this is just plain praise. I was really pleased when a number of the students this summer took the time to say (in turning in their last project) "thanks--your comments really helped" or "I learned a lot" or "I really enjoyed the class." Maybe I'm naive; a cynic might say that they're trying to ingratiate themselves so that a softened-up, benevolent Dr. Undine will go easy on the grading. Since all the grading is pretty straightforward, however, and (in an online class) there's no wiggle room for "participation," I'd like to think that they were sincere.

The same holds true for reviewing. Although there's a pro forma quality to thanking the reviewers in the acknowledgments part of a book, when an editor this week took the time to thank me for my comments and pointed out the ways in which they'd be helpful for the author, it made my day. Eventually I'll fill out the forms and collect my check (or books), but right now, I'm still basking in being paid in praise.