My mentor was denied tenure. Why should I stay in academia?

December 17, 2019 5:38 PM

Ruben Reyes Jr. discusses the impact that Harvard denying Lorgia García-Peña tenure has had on black and brown students. García-Peña is a scholar of romance languages and literature, and was the only latina professor on the tenure track at Harvard. Especially as she was expected to head Harvard's ethnic studies department, which still does not exist at the university despite a 50-year push, her tenure denial has been met by widespread uproar and protest.
posted by Conspire (29 comments total)

My hot take is Harvard’s main MO is to dangle tenure and not grant it. More grist for the mill etc. Some of the best scholars of my generation have been denied tenure at Harvard and their old-boy ilk. It’s not a career ender at all in my word, and can in fact be a an opening to a long, productive and lucrative career at more... let’s say reasonable institutions.

This is of course still bullshit and reveals a system-wide level of assholery; I just wanted
to give some context from some proverbial boots on the ground.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:44 PM on December 17, 2019 [35 favorites]

My hot take is Harvard’s main MO is to dangle tenure and not grant it.

Yeah, it is definitely a known thing that Harvard generally does not give tenure to junior faculty - when I was in grad school my professors told us that if you got a job at Harvard you had to get out of there before you were up for tenure.

Which is obviously fucked up in its own way.
posted by Ragged Richard at 6:01 PM on December 17, 2019 [16 favorites]

So here's the thing. I have also heard that Harvard doesn't tenure junior faculty, which is deeply toxic and fucked-up. But it's also racist and sexist, because junior faculty are more likely than senior faculty to be people of color, to be women, and to study subjects that have historically been neglected because of racism and other power hierarchies. So if Harvard institutionally fucks over junior faculty members, it institutionally re-inscribes the racism and other -isms that exist in the academy. It may be true that Harvard has a problem across the board with denying tenure to junior faculty members, and it may be that the same thing would have happened if Dr. García-Peña were a white man. But this is still, fundamentally, a story about racism and sexism.

Also, fuck Harvard.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:14 PM on December 17, 2019 [71 favorites]

My cousin was denied tenure at Harvard and she was promptly offered an excellent professorship at another institution.
posted by ducky l'orange at 6:15 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it is definitely a known thing that Harvard generally does not give tenure to junior faculty - when I was in grad school my professors told us that if you got a job at Harvard you had to get out of there before you were up for tenure.

But that is going to disproportionately reduce the number of black and Latinx faculty, since tenure is a lifetime appointment (and the field in question wasn't even established until the late 60s) and there are only a handful of non-white professors in each tenure class.

It's probably part of the reason there is no ethnic studies department, either; there are no mid-career professors to champion it. And why would you come back later to found one, at an institution that has made it clear they don't care about your discipline? Plus you have to live in Boston, where even the tenured black professors can get arrested for breaking into their own homes.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 6:21 PM on December 17, 2019 [30 favorites]

I am sorry that my prior comment distracted attention from the overtly racist and sexist structural problem that Harvard has. That is a big problem, and what this article is all about. I do still think it’s worth mentioning it’s not just them, they have a whole club.

Also, fuck Harvard, again, still.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:00 PM on December 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

Yeah, it is definitely a known thing that Harvard generally does not give tenure to junior faculty - when I was in grad school my professors told us that if you got a job at Harvard you had to get out of there before you were up for tenure.

This practice has, reportedly, diminished quite a bit at the Ivies since I was a grad student. Not enough, apparently.
posted by praemunire at 7:26 PM on December 17, 2019

This is gonna come off as critical, so I want to preface it by echoing all the points above re:structural racism and sexism at Harvard - and the academy at large, and the need for an Ethnic Studies or ethnic-studies-like dept. at harvard.

----

Some more background. I say this from the perspective of someone that has sat on tenure committees (not at this level of institution!), and has had friends do so at institutions like Harvard.

I'm also going to preface it by saying that there obviously could be more to the case apart from the below.

---

She is an Associate Professor.

Looking at her CV, she was promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor in 2017 on the strength of her book "The Borders of Dominicanidad", published in 2016, which was incredibly strongly reviewed, has won awards and is clearly seminal and groundbreaking.

Unlike most other institutions, Harvard tenures at promotion to full professor. This promotion in the humanities usually requires another book or book-equivalent.


To go for full prof, her ongoing project "Translating Blackness: Migrations and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives" should be in press (or at least have stellar pre-publication reviews of several chapters!), OR she has received a job offer at Full professor from somewhere else prestigious that she can leverage to say "promote me or else".

Unless there is something missing from the public record about scholarship, who the hell advised her to go up for full at a place like Harvard, when she doesn't have a new book out and its associated reviews?.

--

Again, if I've missed something I apologize, but these are the kinds of career-stage analyses that are basic in academia.
posted by lalochezia at 7:46 PM on December 17, 2019 [18 favorites]

The stuff about Harvard's general tenure practices seems like missing the point. If the diversity of their senior faculty wasn't so abysmal, they could deny García-Peña tenure and it wouldn't be anything remarkable. The issue is not "A person was denied tenure," it's "Their already-shitty diversity situation just got worse."

Hell, suppose that that denying her tenure was the right move on a purely individual level. Still. If your diversity, as a not-tiny school, is so bad that losing one mentor makes your minority students feel this badly betrayed, you were already fucking up before you lost her.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:52 PM on December 17, 2019 [44 favorites]

There are plenty of people who have made tenure at Harvard. None of them have been Latina. Funny how that is.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:03 PM on December 17, 2019 [9 favorites]

Also here we are talking about bona fide superstar. This case really is egregious beyond explanation.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:04 PM on December 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

Unlike most other institutions, Harvard tenures at promotion to full professor.

If this were true, how could an associate professor be "up for tenure" and subsequently "denied tenure"?

Were this true, Harvard's public response would be that she was not in fact denied tenure, as she was not eligible. A lack of this sort of response indicates that an associate professor can in fact be offered tenure in theory, if not in practice.
posted by explosion at 8:05 PM on December 17, 2019 [4 favorites]

but these are the kinds of career-stage analyses that are basic in academia.

And your point?

"This is how the system works" is not a valid defense of an unjust and biased system.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:12 PM on December 17, 2019 [17 favorites]

Explosion: tenure and promotion to full happen at the same time at Harvard. At most institutions an associate professor would already have tenure.
posted by col_pogo at 8:35 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

(Incidentally, I'm just trying to clear up some confusion. I agree that this decision and the status of ethnic studies at Harvard are both seriously problematic, and that Harvard's shitty tenure system is not a good excuse.)
posted by col_pogo at 8:39 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

She was going for full prof after only two years as associate?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:11 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Mod note: As folks have noted already, it'd make for a better discussion in here to not just keep coming back to the "but that's how Harvard does it" well when the core point of contention is that there's systemic issues tied up with how Harvard does it. Maybe more discussion of the stuff Reyes Jr talks about in the link instead?
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:21 PM on December 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

I think what people are also missing with their assumptions of "how things are done" is that nobody sits people of color or working class people down and tells them all the implicit rules. People who aren't steeped in the culture of wealthy white academia are often set up to fail in this way.
posted by storytam at 10:15 PM on December 17, 2019 [20 favorites]

White male supremacy, that is. I remember when Bev Taylor was denied tenure—people were furious when she went to greener pastures. Not much has changed in 25 years.
posted by Melismata at 5:37 AM on December 18, 2019

I really appreciated hearing the nuances of Harvard’s system. I heard the news and talked about it with colleagues (in academia) when it broke, but the crucial bits of context that lalochezia and others provided were largely absent.

White supremacy is enforced through (among other things) policies, policy enforcement, etc., etc., and general conversations about the overall problem rarely wind up giving me ammo to go back and fight more effectively. Prof. García-Pena’s denied tenure did not happen in a vacuum or generic academic environment, but at Harvard. Understanding the general situation at Harvard more thoroughly is helpful, both in thinking about the inflection point of white supremacy, and in thinking about her as a political actor.

Discussion of structural bias and white supremacy in academia is a weekly, often daily, part of my job. Unfortunately, however, in my experience, conversation about specific inequities can itself be quickly derailed by the move to discuss structural bias or white supremacy generally. I support the general conversation, and I acknowledge that people want and need to talk about the broader issues, but “let’s talk through and testify about the general problem of white supremacy” is itself a well that will never run dry.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:34 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

I know of two white males in the government department at Harvard who were recently tenured who have ok records but certainly weren't stars (and one was actually quite mediocre). Its simply not true that Harvard doesn't tenure junior faculty.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:08 AM on December 18, 2019 [5 favorites]

The "This is how Harvard does it" angle is not to justify or excuse this decision, far from it.

For me, it's to show how racist and sexist systems are formed under the guise of competition and meritocracy. It is to suggest that Harvard will not solve their racist/sexist faculty problem without changing their basic operating paradigm.

Put another way, even if Dr. García-Peña got her tenure, Harvard would still have a huge problem with racism and sexism, because it is an essentially unavoidable consequence of how they do business. Letting one great scholar in who happens to Latina would be a nice milestone, but wouldn't really address the underlying problem, as I see it. And even if the news were that Harvard had just granted tenure to their first Latina, I'd be here talking about their problem with systemic racism and sexism.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:46 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

White male supremacy, that is.

i mean, probably just established white supremacy that white non-men benefit from, plus sexism.
posted by gaybobbie at 10:09 AM on December 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

Understanding the general situation at Harvard more thoroughly is helpful, both in thinking about the inflection point of white supremacy, and in thinking about her as a political actor.

Nobody is actually suggesting that the specific details don't matter. But it is a hidden premise to assume that details are contextual and it sets up a false dichotomy that a structural lens itself is a remote abstraction that can be compartmentalized and put aside in discourse. What's needed is not just any nuance or any understanding, but a critical understanding. Working academics routinely fail to be critical, because of the incentives around them. It is easily argued that lalochezia's presentation was an uncritical one even as it purported to offer information about the objective details of some institutional process.
posted by polymodus at 10:56 AM on December 18, 2019

The idea that tenuring 95% of APs is not-racist (most universities) while tenuring 50% of APs is racist (super-elite universities) is kinda silly. In fact if García-Peña had been denied tenure a at place where 95% of APs get tenure, it would be a much bigger blow to her career, rather than the mild hiccup it is now. I don't think lowering tenure standards automatically increases diversity.

Focusing on this policy misses the fact that by all accounts García-Peña was a star, plus she had the added benefit of coming from an underrepresented group. For those reasons she should have been tenured, but she wasn't. That seems to be the problem.

Tenuring crap white males and not tenuring good POC/women is of course racist.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:38 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

The "This is how Harvard does it" angle is not to justify or excuse this decision, far from it.

For me, it's to show how racist and sexist systems are formed under the guise of competition and meritocracy. It is to suggest that Harvard will not solve their racist/sexist faculty problem without changing their basic operating paradigm.

Yeah, I want to be clear that I added my "Harvard doesn't give tenure" story because I thought it was an interesting piece of this story, not because I though this meant everything was fine and there was no racism at play here. Apologies if it came off as the latter.
posted by Ragged Richard at 3:19 PM on December 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

In fact if García-Peña had been denied tenure a at place where 95% of APs get tenure, it would be a much bigger blow to her career, rather than the mild hiccup it is now.

Yeah, I kinda mentioned that it won’t necessarily hurt her career that much, in the first comment in this thread.

Do you have data on what percent of tenure track hires get tenure at Harvard or their peers? What about top public universities with programs in ethnic studies?

If she were at a ‘lesser’/less racist institution with higher tenure conversion rates, she’d have easily got it.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:02 PM on December 18, 2019

It's no longer true that Harvard doesn't give tenure. I have multiple colleagues who were tenured at Harvard in the last ten years. Harvard has worked hard to let people know that you can get tenure there if hired as an assistant professor.

Garcia Pena is the only Latina faculty member at Harvard. That means her tenure case needs to be handled well.

Garcia Pena's case was handled badly because of racism at Harvard. The end.
posted by medusa at 8:33 PM on December 18, 2019 [7 favorites]

The three names that come most readily to mind when I think of Harvard are Larry Summers, Steven Pinker, and Alan Dershowitz.

I think García-Peña would have done Harvard's reputation a lot more good than it would have done hers.
posted by jamjam at 2:31 AM on December 19, 2019 [6 favorites]