rynling | 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.