Tenure and Promotion in Rhetoric and Composition

Although the number of tenure-track jobs for specialists in rhetoric and composition continues to be strong, several forces constitute a threat to tenure in our field: ongoing reliance on non-tenure track labor to staff writing courses, institutional demands for increased faculty research productivity at the expense of teaching and service, as well as the public pressure for increased accountability that has led to a get tough stance toward tenure. Indeed, the privilege of life-long employment for university faculty can well seem anachronistic in an era when information is being produced and circulated so quickly that few can claim mastery of any but a limited field and when some distance education initiatives construct faculty as (mere) content providers. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that much of what compositionists do in all three categories of academic work-research, teaching, and service--continues to be undervalued at tenure and promotion time. It is important for those who, like me, have been recently denied tenure to see our experience within this larger context. A number of current books provide advice on preparing for promotion and tenure, for the most part depicting academic advancement as a game that is played by rules that can be observed,