The Trouble with Tenure, Part Two.

A very lame part two. I had planned to get on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website and gather all sorts of morbid statistics about how horrid one's chances are at landing a tenure-track job in English-- and believe me, they're rotten-- but life just keeps on happening, and I just haven't had time to do it yet. Kind of like the deep spring clean on the house that didn't happen before my parents came this past weekend. I did manage to toss both bathmats the cat relieved herself on in to soak in some skin-removing, acid-like stuff. Score one for me.

Anyway, the thing that makes this job search so difficult is that every time we think we can close the book on it for a while, a new posting crops up somewhere and Hope climbs a mountain once again. I always pictured it all delicate and shimmery there at the bottom of Pandora's box, but since it keeps tackling the summit of Everest without supplemental oxygen, I'd have to say it's made of hardier stuff. The inevitable unsuccessful descent is still crushing, however, so I'm not sure the image is improved all that much.

The latest round of excitement and bone-crushing despair was over a job in Virginia Beach. We had some philosophical and religious differences with the school's mission, to say the least, but had managed to come to terms with it because Mr. Milkweed was extremely forthright on his application. When they offered him a campus interview, they had no reason to believe that he was anything other than what he said he was. The interview went extremely well, and Mr. M reported that the members of the department all seemed quite normal, and that the school itself did not seem to live up to many of the stereotypes assigned to it and other similar schools. We were very excited.

But then days went by after his return with no word, and those days turned into weeks, and they finally called him one day to turn him down. At some point we knew the silence had to be a bad thing, but we kept running scenarios where they'd offered it to another person who had backed out, or where the department was having trouble getting the funding for the position approved...but in the end, it was a big, fat "NO" to add to all the other rejections.

And that was it, I thought. I washed my hands and wiped them off on my jeans and was ready to move on to the next season, the next wave of clothes from the attic and baby stages and fun plans for the summer with NARY A JOB THOUGHT IN SIGHT when another position was posted. And the wheels turns around again.

I'm unsure where we go from here. When does it become silly to continue chasing after something that may never happen? Does it become silly? Should we just find a way to numb ourselves to the possibilities every time another copy of his CV is sent on its merry way, and keep trying, trying, trying?

It seems that the trouble with tenure isn't really a problem with tenure at all. It's a problem with managing expectations, wanting to get to the next step, wishing for the opportunity to get in the door of a university to begin the fight to even be considered for tenure.

Pandora (1878) Dante Rossetti

Hope wasn't the only thing floating around in Pandora's box. It was in there with some really bad stuff, including greed, vanity, envy, slander, and every single disease that's ever assaulted the earth. All of that, plus "pining," the inclusion of which some have questioned, describing it as merely a minor annoyance.

In my experience, I have to say...it's not.