Last week, University of Alabama-Huntsville Professor of Biology Amy Bishop opened fire in a faculty meeting, killing three of her colleagues and wounding three others. Despite our hopeful image of the Ivory Tower as a place far removed from the ugliness of “real world” violence, stories like these remind us that, regrettably, wishing doesn’t make it so. (As an aside, I have argued before on this blog– in a post titled “The Problem With Packin'”— that all campuses should be weapons-free zones.) The reports of witnesses at the faulty meeting seem to indicate that Bishop gave no warning of her plans, sitting through a full hour of the meeting before she began shooting. And, subsequently, Bishop’s husband has reported that he didn’t see any signs of trouble, either, though he did note that she had borrowed a gun and visited a shooting a range in the last couple of weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the event, all reports seemed to point to Dr. Bishop’s tenure denial as the cause of her psychological “break.”
More news of Dr. Bishop’s shady past has come to light in the last several days, casting some doubt on the theory that her tenure-denial was the cause of the shooting. In 1986, Bishop shot and killed her brother in an incident that at the time was ruled an “accident,” but since has been revisited with considerable suspicion by the Braintree Police. Seven years later, in 1993, she was also questioned as a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor. These new findings seem to point to a long history of psychological distress and a proclivity for violence on Bishop’s part. Perhaps her tenure denial was the “trigger” for this particular incident, perhaps not. It’s likely that we will never really know.
Whether or not Bishop’s contentious tenure bid was the culprit here, though, I still think it’s worth looking at the havoc that the tenure process can wreak. Tenure is a phenomenon that is largely unfamiliar to (or misunderstood by) those outside of academia. But inside of academia, it’s everything. In most colleges and universities, tenure is rewarded on the basis of the candidate’s demonstration of excellence in three areas: scholarship, teaching, and service (which is largely interpreted to mean administrative service, like serving on committees and advising students, but also can include more nebulous categories of judgment, like “collegiality”). The reward of tenure is job security; one can’t be fired after receiving tenure without demonstrable “cause,” and the standards for that demonstration are considerably high. The aim of tenure is to protect academic freedom, to insure that scholars do not feel pressure to edit or amend their work for fear of being dismissed.
Since the 1970’s, there has been a steady decline in the number of academics who hold tenured positions. In 2005, the figure of college professors who are either tenured or tenure-track was put at just over 30%, which means that more than 2 out of 3 academics are neither tenured nor eligible for tenure. Given the considerable reward that accompanies tenure, one might think that those numbers are appropriate. But, let’s look at the typical career trajectory of an academic:
On average, it takes between 4 and 9 years to complete a Ph.D., which is a prerequisite for teaching at most postsecondary-level institutions. For many, this is at least a half-decade of “unemployment”– if not also significant debt-accumulation– occasionally off-set by graduate student teaching (at truly exploitative remuneration) or small stipends. IF one is lucky enough to land a tenure-track job right out of grad school, which is a considerable achievement in this day and age when most academic job candidates spend at least 2-5 years in fixed-term appointments, then one begins a “probationary” period of employment. On average, the “probationary” period before tenure usually takes another 6 years, at the end of which one is evaluated on one’s achievement in the three areas mentioned above. So, in the 7th year (plus the 4-9 years of grad school and possibly a few more in fixed-term appointments), one FINALLY gets to make a one-time bid for tenure that, according to statistics, less than 3 in 10 cadidates will actually receive. If a candidate’s tenure-bid is denied, he or she usually gets a one-year terminal appointment to look for a new job and, possibly, start all over again… only this time with the added disadvantage of being “damaged” goods.
So, imagine that: almost two decades of one’s life and work, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars of debt, all-in on one make-it-or-break-it chance for job security. You don’t have to be a Vegas bookie to raise an eyebrow at those odds. Of course, none of that is justification for what Dr. Bishop did– nothing could justify that– but I hope it might give some pause to those who think that the academic life is a cushy and stress-free existence where professors don’t have to worry about being fired like the rest of the working stiffs in the “real” world. Office politics are office politics no matter what kind of “office” one works in, and many tenure decisions are inflected with all of the human-all-too-human personality and ideology prejudices that contaminate every office. Of course, the stakes are high in any case where job termination is a possibility, but I fear that the general public’s romantic idealizations of academia sometimes distort the realities of this life. Tenure is deadly serious business. Whether or not tenure was the chief cause of this case being actually deadly is probably unlikely, but one can see how it easily could have been a contributing factor.