The Evolution From Faculty to the Dark Side

The writer is a current president.

I recently did something mildly self-tormenting: I went back and read my own tenure file from a quarter century ago.

Every word was accurate. I can say that with confidence, because the junior faculty member who submitted it felt compelled to accompany the application with three additional binders of exhibits. What the file does not capture is that the same person was, at the time, a vocal activist who could be found marching across campus and joining picket lines with something approaching enthusiasm.

I have since spent 30-some years on the other side of those binders. As a chief academic officer, the boxes would arrive first. My assistant would wheel them in, unpack them, arrange them open to the first tab across the conference room table. Hours of reading, sometimes spanning several days: the departmental personnel committee, the chair’s response, the dean’s assessment, the college committee. Then me.

The number of files with a negative recommendation was always in the low single digits. And a negative decision from a CAO means any combination of consequences, in any sequence: academic grievance, union grievance, EEOC complaint, state court, federal court. One case followed me for 15 years across three institutions. I was the last defendant dismissed.

Those stakes make what I read in the binders even more remarkable. Every single year: faculty at the frontier of knowledge, student-centered teaching, and scholarship bettering the lives of actual communities. And not just what the candidates said about themselves. The dozens of colleagues who wrote on their behalf painted the same picture. A university thriving. A faculty elevating the very idea of what a university is for.

I have watched this across more than three decades, multiple institutions, several systems. Red states and blue. Unionized and not. Urban flagships and rural regionals. The geography changes. The governance structures change. What does not change is this: The gap between what faculty say in public settings—department meetings, senate sessions, contract negotiations—and what they write when making the case for their colleagues is one of the most consistent, and least examined, features of academic life. The same faculty who describe an institution under siege are the same faculty who wrote those letters. Sometimes in the same week. Someone near me once called a campus a hellhole with the satisfaction of a closing argument. She had written a luminous letter for a colleague that could only be supported by a stellar teaching, learning, creative environment … two days earlier.

I have seen this too many times, in too many places, to attribute it to individual hypocrisy. Which is what brought me back to my own file.

The junior faculty member who submitted that application was not being contradictory. He was being rational. The institution rewards affirmative performance in one context and resistance in another. Rational people respond to incentives. The same colleague who writes a glowing letter on Tuesday and raises their fist at the microphone on Thursday is not being incoherent. They are being structurally fluent—they have mastered the two registers the institution, over generations, built for them to speak.

Clark Kerr once described the university as a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking. He was not wrong, and he was describing something deeper than parking. The dual register is not a bug. It is a feature. Both registers serve the institution, which is precisely why both persist.

I do not say this to indict anyone. I was the person marching and the person writing the letters, sometimes within months of each other. I understood neither fully at the time. I understand both better now.

What I am less certain about is what, if anything, we are supposed to do with the recognition. Except, perhaps, start by naming it honestly—which is what I am trying to do here.

Or maybe we just give everyone tenure from the get-go and save millions in time spent in these evaluation processes that yield nary a negative recommendation (talk about grade inflation) and in the legal processes that follow the few that are rejected. After all, we can always dismiss for criminal convictions. And that’s all that matters anyway.