Cold and Sweet

Last fall, when I was talking about going up for tenure, I wrote that the university would have to be stupid not to give me tenure. Even if I were a shit professor – which I’m not – a tenure line (a full-time position, basically) ends with the person it’s attached to, and it’s difficult to get funding to institute a new tenure line to replace the person who has been fired. It’s especially difficult to get funding from the conservative-leaning Commonwealth of Virginia during an economic recession. In addition, because the university benefits from the “service” (free labor, essentially) of tenured faculty, there’s no real reason to fire someone unless there’s something really wrong with them, not in the least because there have been multiple high-profile lawsuits during the past ten years involving women and minorities successfully suing the universities that denied them tenure.

I know I was denied tenure because of discrimination. It happens all the time, and it happened to me. Like, I know this. I consulted with two separate lawyers, and both of them told me that I have more than enough evidence to bring the case to court. This is fairly cut and dry.

The actual process of being denied tenure was an awful lot like gaslighting, though, and it made me question my perception of my own abilities and accomplishments. Like, was I actually bad at my job? Did the people I was friendly with secretly hate me? Was I actually an imposter this whole time? Was I totally delusional to think that I was doing good work?

So last week I received two teaching awards and one special teaching commendation from my university. All three offices granting these awards contacted me for interviews and photo ops, and I had to explain to them that I was leaving the university after having been denied tenure.

The most surreal of these interactions was when I was contacted by the woman from the Dean’s Office who sent me the first of a series of letters informing me that my tenure case was denied. I told her she fired me, and she wrote back immediately (without thinking, I guess) to say that she had no memory of doing so. That makes sense, I replied as gently as I could, because she fired me on the day that a national emergency was declared. She had no response to that.

Until she did. It turns out that my university is in a lot of financial trouble because of the pandemic, and enrollments have plummeted. The classes I was supposed to be teaching in the fall are still on the books, however, and they both have large and full enrollments. Because there’s been a hiring freeze, the university can’t get anyone else to teach those classes, and I’m the only person at the entire university who does what I do. The woman from the Dean’s Office therefore got special dispensation to raise my salary if I would agree to stay at the university for an additional year.

What I wanted to do was to thank her for the offer and tell her that I’d consider it if she could give me 1.5 times the salary I’m going to receive from the Ivy League school I just signed a contract with, which happens to guarantee half the teaching load and infinitely more resources, but I refrained. Instead, I politely declined with the excuse that I’ve already made other arrangements.

I would prefer not to have to interact with anyone at that garbage school ever again; and, despite my best efforts, all of these email exchanges were awkward as fuck.

Still, it feels good to be validated.

What Happened

During the past week I updated my CV, my website, and all of my online profiles to reflect the fact that I’m moving to a new job. I’ve been holding off on doing anything with Facebook because I know it’s going to result in people asking me what happened, so I should probably figure out what to say. Okay, here goes:

What happened is that I was offered a part-time position with full benefits, an amazing salary, and a lot of research perks at an Ivy League school, and I accepted. This is partially because I’d like to buy a townhouse in Philadelphia, but it’s mainly because I want to be able to devote more time to writing without having to worry about participating in university administration as tenured faculty.

That’s not the question people will be asking, however.

What happened at the university I’m leaving is that it’s a large regional public school that doesn’t provide even basic resources for research or teaching (I had to make my own photocopies off campus, for instance). I put up with this because I liked my colleagues and students; but, in my second year, a seventy-year-old man became department chair at the same time a seventy-year-old man became president. Both of these men are aggressively awful, and the stress caused me to develop an anxiety disorder. This specifically affected my interactions with my department chair, who openly harassed me in front of my colleagues and in front of university administration, none of whom did anything to stop him. When I finally went to the Title IX Office to request a formal intervention, the university did a complete 180 from granting me substantial yearly raises in order to retain me to unequivocally denying my tenure case.

Essentially, I was denied tenure on the basis of a disability that was exacerbated by workplace harassment, so I walked away and accepted a better position elsewhere.

The situation is obviously more complicated than that, but this is the gist of it. In any case, I'm tired of talking about this, and I'm looking forward to putting all of this unpleasantness behind me and moving on with my life.

2020 Writing Log, Part Eighteen

- I edited my chapter outline for Malice to streamline the story, and I cut three of my planned chapters. Each of the remaining story arcs will now have six chapters. I think I might take a long hiatus from posting the story after the fourth arc. I want to wait until we have more information about the Breath of the Wild sequel, and I think it might be worthwhile to hold off until another trailer comes out so that I can benefit from renewed attention in the Zelda franchise. I’ll see how I feel when the times comes, I guess.

- I went ahead and posted Chapter 36 of Malice. This is a short chapter that serves as more of a transition than anything else, but I enjoyed myself. I’m super grateful to the marvelous and talented TheRVStar for providing an illustration!

- I wrote super rough drafts of Chapter 37 and Chapter 38, and I wrote a bit of Chapter 39 and Chapter 40. I also commissioned an illustration for Chapter 41 that I'm pretty sure is going to be amazing.

- I edited Chapter 35 and posted it on FFN.

- I left reviews on a handful of zines on Etsy. I’ve been trying to figure out what I like about zines, and I think it probably has something to do with the pleasure of reading things printed on physical paper. In any case, Sarah Mirk’s anthology Year of Zines was a wonderful discovery that I made this week.   

- I got some stickers back in stock on my own Etsy store, and I mailed out a lot of orders this week. I went ahead and raised the prices of my zines by a small amount. I’m still not making money, but I think it might be better in the long run to match my prices with those of other sellers so that I can at least break even.

- Speaking of zines, I finished the super rough drafts of all the stories for my Haunted Houses horror-themed flash fiction zine. During the coming week I’ll put together a PDF document to send to the artist I’d like to create the cover illustration.

Onwards and upwards, friends. Stay safe, and stay sane.