Dr. Jones, J1
1 Department of Everything is Temporary, Cambridge, MA, USA
Abstract
Thirteen tenured faculty and seven untenured tenure-track faculty participated in this study. Visiting and non-tenure track faculty were not included because they are invisible and do not impact department politics in any way other than doing all of the work the tenure-track faculty don’t want to do (see Participants for a list of academic positions in the department). Everyone participated involuntarily and there was no consent process that they know of. Participants were remunerated according to their rank and gender; see omitted Appendix A for salaries of tenured vs. untenured professors and males vs. females vs. non-binary professors (n = 1, that would be me, thank you very much!). In order to protect the identities of the unprotected (i.e., untenured) participants, their personas were removed entirely and replaced with fictional characters whose features were sampled from a pool. The events that happened to them, were also entered into the randomization matrix of the story. On the flipside, to protect the author from getting sued by the tenured faculty without entirely protecting the tenured ones from their wrong-doings, features of the tenured faculty were separately randomized and re-assigned to re-mixed versions of their personas. If you are confused, don’t worry: This is explained in meticulous detail in the randomization section, which you won’t read, so it doesn’t matter anyway if I forget to put it in.
Keywords: academia, rank, tenure, faculty, stress, burnout, randomization, ghosts, crises, lies, libel, defamation, quitting
1. Introduction
I am a scientist. And as a scientist, I’ve never had to write a work of fiction (unless you count weaving a story from dubious results – though I’m relieved to say that none of that crap ever got published).1(don’t worry, there’s no footnote, actually.) But here I am, writing a “fictitious” or “fictionalized” (what’s the difference?) account of what happened in my, I mean, umm, a random, unspecified, department of a university that happens to be remarkably similar to mine. I would have preferred to write it as non-fiction (otherwise known as memoir), but because I don’t want to hurt people or get sued, here I am, reluctantly writing fiction (but let’s be honest – and I’ll be honest: I’m always way too honest – it’s mainly the getting sued thing).
What does one do when one has to do a thing one doesn’t want to do, instead of doing the thing one would prefer? Well, any number of things depending on their circumstances and personality, obviously; but in my case, I’m going to bend. the fucking. rules. I’m going to write this piece of fiction in the only way I know how: as a (pseudo-)scientific manuscript.
So, first I’ll write the Introduction, in which I set the scene and tell you what we know about the topic so far [highly selectively, though, so that it leads impeccably on to the study itself, which now appears vital and obvious]; what gaps in the literature the study is trying to address; why it was important to run this particular study; a brief description of the methods [without going into too much detail because that’s what the Methods section is for]; and hypotheses, if applicable (not applicable in the case of an exploratory study such as this one, though possibly applicable since I do have a theory? I have no idea, because I’m fake-collecting qualitative data and I don’t know anything about that!). Can you tell I taught research methods for 6 years?
But I’ve already broken one of my very first rules! I now quote directly from the spoon-fed instructions I give to my research methods students: you must introduce the purpose of your study by the end of your first paragraph. This isn’t a formal rule in the discipline, by the way, but it’s my rule. I don’t want to have to read a page of blabbery nonsense before I get to the crux of the matter: the point of the paper to decide whether I want to print it to read it properly. If I re-read my first paragraph and interpret the last sentence as encapsulating the whole paper, I’d have to summarize the book as “A paper written by someone who is too honest but wants to avoid getting sued”. Truth, but not very specific. So let me at least end this paragraph – the fourth paragraph – with purpose: this marks the end of the introduction to the introduction.
1.1 Background
Something something stress in academia something tenure something something. I wouldn’t know, because I burned out before getting there. I typed “stress and the tenure process” into Google Scholar and found 734,000 results. Thus, if we assume an average of 5 academic authors per paper in this world of ever-increasing collaboration [1], and round generously because that’s easier to understand, it turns out that almost 4 million academics have wasted their time studying their own jobs and the stress they cause them. In other words, this is clearly a highly important enterprise to which I must add another study.
1.2 Purpose
I have a stone coaster at home that I keep on my bedside table. It’s engraved with the phrase: “The Crisis of Today is the Joke of Tomorrow”. I’ve had it for 10 years, and it reminds me that this too shall pass and turn into a funny story. In this paper I recount the story of an academic department struggling to define its identity due to lack of leadership and conflict with The Administration. The main experiment tracks the dysfunction that occurs while the department searches for its next Chair. I end up as one of the victims of this dysfunction, too mired in the politics to do my job (or, to continue wanting to). While traumatic at the time, the events that led to my resignation seem absurd in retrospect.
2. Methodology
2.1 Participants
What follows is an incomplete, inaccurate, idiosyncratic glossary of academics in one department.
Adjunct: Ghost, or object to be discarded when no longer necessary. Hired begrudgingly to fill gaps due to tenured faculty not wanting to teach dispreferred classes. Referred to with disdain because “some don’t even have PhDs”. Discussed as a problem that calls for pest control even though they teach more than half of the classes. Too beaten down to be scared.
Assistant Prof: To be taken advantage of because they will do anything to prove their worth. Make the mistake of trying to teach well Must answer emails all day and all night. Very scared, but also determined. (see also, “Untenured”)
Associate Prof with potential promotion to Full: Firing on all cylinders to strategically select project with biggest payoff in terms of things that count; grant funding, publications in high-profile journals, high-visibility service. Ruthless elimination of anything and everything that does not contribute to promotion, such as mentoring students. More angry than scared.
Associate Prof resigned to endless Associate purgatory: Bitter at how life turned out. Particularly bitter at productive Assistant Professors: how dare they work so hard, making us look bad?
Chair: A person who has given up all of their hopes and dreams of an academic career, at least temporarily, to manage the most self-involved, passive aggressive, competitive, entitled, and needy workforce on an unimaginably low budget. The fact that everyone is highly intelligent and some kind of expert on something or other makes things worse, as each person deeply believes that the thing that they are an expert in is the most important one with the greatest need for resources.
Dean: Someone who prefers money to research and doesn’t mind receiving 1,000 emails per minute and always being in at least 3 places at once. The awkward middle-person between money (the Provost and above) and research/education (the faculty), but obviously money always wins (as per the job description of “must prefer money to research”). Always overpromising to stem the flow of complaints coming from all sides. Carefully ration their time/energy/support of faculty in direct relation to that person’s importance, derived by a quick calculation based on (rank + productivity + grant funding) divided by salary.
Full Prof: Died and went to heaven where they can freely express how much they loathe others. Rampant complaining/derailing of meetings because there’s no next step to be working towards. Drag up grudges from decades before most people came, to establish seniority. Assume everything that ever gets done is thanks to them because they are always the most senior person on any project. Never answer emails or meet with students, who end up finding frightened Assistant Profs to help them instead. Don’t take kindly to being told what to do.
Grad Students: Idealistic; utterly convinced that they are currently undergoing more stress than anyone has or will ever undergo. Those who end up making it to Assistant Prof may later suffer from Pseudobulbar affect, “a condition that’s characterized by episodes of sudden uncontrollable and inappropriate laughing or crying” (Source: Mayonnaise Clinic), when they look back and realize how much easier this stage had been.
Lecturer: Not a real academic, will never be deemed worthy, most scared. Will do more work than any other rank but will never receive recognition.
Senior Lecturer: Still not a real researcher, still deemed unworthy, still laboring in vain, but a bit less scared.
Tenured Prof: One who has received carte blanche to be themselves, which surprisingly often turns out to be an asshole.
Visiting Prof: Invisible; too depressed to be scared. Allowed the honor of attending faculty meetings, where they do not have a say in anything and are often not even recognized by colleagues. When they speak, everyone is startled because they’ve never heard that voice before.
2.2 Design
Since people were not randomly assigned to academic positions, and events weren’t randomly assigned to people, and since none of this is really in any way an actual experiment, the design section is null and void.
2.3 Materials
The experiment took place in a modern building, newly built for the purposes of housing the growing department. The modern building had an “open office” look, with floor to ceiling windows allowing full view of each participant’s office, which is very helpful for snooping and very unhelpful for privacy. Participants in this experiment were unionized, and you can read the relevant union contract here [REMEMBER TO ADD LINK!!!]. However, you may notice that the contract had actually expired for the duration of the academic year covered in the experiment. Thus, the participants were actually in between contracts, “cost of living” adjustments were frozen, and everyone was very nervous about the future. All participants had been, or anticipated being, subjected to a rigorous and confusing tenure process, but the guidelines for that process change every year in mysterious ways, so sharing one version of them with you here would be pointless.
4. Test and Evaluation
I collected the data by being one of the participants and writing down everything that happened in a notebook. I then typed it up and threw it in a folder marked with the year, never to be opened up again.
5. Results and Discussion
I didn’t get to write this part because I quit my job.
6. Conclusion
Mental illness turned out to be the shocking and surprising factor driving the relationship between stress and tenure. Meanwhile, I learned that writing fictional research papers is way more fun than writing the real dry kind, so here we are.
7. References
- Wren, J. D., Kozak, K. Z., Johnson, K. R., Deakyne, S. J., Schilling, L. M., & Dellavalle, R. P. (2007). The write position: A survey of perceived contributions to papers based on byline position and number of authors. EMBO Reports, 8(11), 988-991.
9. Appendix B: Excuses, Excuses
I tried to print the paper, but it printed me a cat instead.
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