This week's Invisible Adjunct Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence (No Cash, Just Glory) goes to "Anonymous tt faculty member," who unravels the mysteries of the tenure system (comments to "Tenure and Academic Freedom Poll"):
It's hard to get tenure unless you have already demonstrated that you have nothing of consequence to say.
Well done, "Anonymous tt faculty member." But we rather suspect you might have something of consequence to say. It goes without saying, of course, that you should not say it until you have achieved tenure.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct at July 28, 2003 10:09 AMi'm not really in a position to know about this in detail, but this is my own personal beef with The University. It seems very clear to me that everyone in the scholarly world is looking over their shoulders all the time.*
Even tenured people established in their fields write defensively. My friends who go to graduate school all come back talking a sort of secret language. The problem is not always that I don't understand it. It's that if I talk a different language which does not obey their rules, or if I question their shibboleths, they refuse to listen or even argue.
There's money in it, you know.
*Language hat says that this sentence is grammatically OK. Jane Austen did it.