Jesse Leaves Wisconsin

(Reposted from 9/9/15) 

Jesse Stommel is leaving a tenure-track job at Wisconsin to go take a job as a faculty development director at the University of Mary Washingon. He wrote a powerful blog post about the descision, which you should read.

I want to highlight just one point, out of the many, skipping the issue of the Wisconsin GOP attack on higher education (which is the main story): Jesse writes [his emphasis].

My work — the work I was hired to do — has not been supported. While I was initially assured that digital work for broad public audiences would count, I was later told I should wait to do that work until after tenure and focus on traditionally peer-reviewed publications for academic audiences. In January, the following bolded words were sent to me in a letter for my official file: “The Committee wants to send a clear message that what matters is tenure, what matters for tenure is peer review, and work posted on the web is not considered peer‐reviewed.” 

Jesse is an emerging leader in digital humanities,  pedagogy, alternate forms of publication, and more. This kind of work is what makes him a nationally-known voice in higher education. It increases, well, increased, UW Madison's reputation. It matters.

That his department/committee couldn't figure out a way to count that work is an indictment of their inflexibility. 

Tenure and Activism

Here's a great piece from Conditionally Accepted about the way being on the tenure-track makes us conservative. It's wide-ranging and important, thinking about identity and many related issues. Read it all. Here's the bit that especially dovetails with my interests on public writing, activism, and the academy [my emphasis]:

More generally, I bear the burden of fear and doubt because the institution itself does not explicitly reward activism, advocacy, and community engagement.  I appreciate informally being told teaching a community-based learning class looks good, or that open access research is the way of the future for scholars.  And, at a minimum, there is little sense that such efforts would hurt one professionally (though I remain skeptical when such claims are made regarding activism).  But, formally, these initiatives are not valued; they are not explicitly mentioned in the tenure expectations outlined in our faculty handbook, nor is there a longstanding tradition of favorably evaluating community engagement and advocacy.  As I told my colleague, it’s great that the Center offers so much to faculty who engage the community in their work — even offering a small stipend to those who go through training on community-based teaching; but, short of the institutions explicit valuing of such efforts (i.e., counting it toward tenure), only a few brave souls will venture into them.

As I've said many times -  If we believe that something is important, we have to make it count for tenure, promotion, and hiring.