When tenure is denied, frustrated professors explode - and disrobe:
The scholar was well liked and well published, according to the e-mail that arrived last week, but he was denied tenure in April. And then he lost it. One day on campus, he started shouting expletives about the university administration (some versions of the story have this taking place in a class; others do not). He then moved into a hallway, continuing to shout and removing his clothes, taking leaflets off the walls. At some point, he was subdued by campus security officers......while people don’t like to talk about it, professors suffer breakdowns [when denied tenure].
“I’m surprised this kind of things doesn’t happen more often,” said Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a frequent writer about the way academe treats junior faculty members and graduate students. “So much of the system makes people feel utterly powerless,” he said.
Nelson said that he knew of one professor (not at Illinois) who suffered a breakdown after he was denied tenure, and responded in part by stripping naked and climbing into a college building by hauling himself up a wall, holding onto ivy, and climbing in. The professor was eventually able to reverse the decision and to win tenure...
Nelson of Illinois said that the system is sufficiently “crazy” that one can’t help but lose faith in it...In such an environment, he said, it’s not irrational for a tenure candidate to be less than rational. “We badly need more sanity in the tenure process,” he said. “Sometimes the paranoia is merited.”
There are some who would say that creating "more sanity in the tenure process" could best be done by eradicating tenure altogether.
Posted by kswygert at May 3, 2005 05:19 PM