Eira Tansey

One of the upsides of the stressful year of applying and waiting for tenure is that it’s nudged me to reflect on how grateful I am for the people in my life who have given so much of their energy, wisdom, knowledge, and kindness. If you read articles about getting tenure, there’s a lot of emphasis on the individual – what you have to write, what you have to document, what you have to apply for, what you have to speak to, what you have to appear in, and most importantly, what and who you have to say “no” to. This weirds me out, because it plays into a lot of harmful constructions around what success looks like, portraying it as a solitary and highly individual quest. And it erases so much of the relationships and networks that help individuals reach success.

I would not have achieved tenure were it not for dozens and dozens of people who consistently said “yes” to me, and the communities that I am connected to deserve to be acknowledged for their role in helping me along the way.

I wouldn’t have become an archivist in the first place had it not been for the people who introduced me to the field, advised me on what the various paths were into it, and hired me for the archivist jobs I’ve had. I’m profoundly lucky in that I’ve reported to supervisors who probably trusted me more than I trusted myself and allowed me a lot of autonomy to figure things out and chart my own path. I’m grateful that they have been consistent advocates for my professional development.

I’ve been an archivist for over a decade now which blows my mind. The vast majority of archivists in my professional network I’ve met directly or indirectly through the Society of American Archivists, which has been my professional association “home” for almost as long as I’ve been in the field. Many archivists have a gregarious streak, and it didn’t take long for the SAA annual meeting to start feeling like an amazing cross between a college and family reunion. So many archivists I’ve met through SAA have become not just professional contacts but trusted confidants who I can call to discuss a range of messy ethical issues with. A few of them have even become close friends who I chat with so regularly that we’ve ended up traveling together or I’ve met their families when we pass through each other’s towns. I know this is cheesy but I really think archivists are some of the best people on Earth. We aren’t perfect, goodness knows we have so much work to do to be better collectively, but there’s something sublime about the fact that I know an archivist in almost every state who would show up for me in a pinch if I were travelling and got stranded within 50 miles of them.

One of the greatest joys of my career so far has been finding a niche where I can write and speak on issues I care about. For several years, this focus has been on archives, recordkeeping, the environment, and climate change. While climate change is anything but joyful, the co-authors and co-panelists I’ve spent time with writing articles and presenting at conferences on this topic have been some of the most thoughtful and generous people I’ve ever worked with. Being asked to speak at an event is such an honor that when I was asked to do a keynote for the first time I went into the restroom at work and cried because I was so bowled over by the thought that someone thought the things I’d been saying were worth having that kind of platform (for you astrology nerds keeping track of my chart, it won’t surprise you that I’m a Cancer moon).

Writing – for print or for a keynote – is really hard work. The only way to get good at it is to have folks who you can trust to be honest with you about what to keep and what to cut from your drafts. Having a go-to list of people who are willing to give me that kind of feedback is priceless, and with the exception of my hot takes on social media and my room temperature takes on this blog, everything I’ve ever published has scores of invisible ink marginalia from my most trusted comrades.

My colleagues at the University of Cincinnati have taught me so much, from technical skills (how to use GitHub) to informal coursework (a crash course in environmental history) to workplace solidarity (a front-row seat to shared governance and being a union member). Like all public sector environments, public universities can be challenging given the lack of public investment in common goods. But I’ve always felt very fortunate to work somewhere where I get along very well with my colleagues, and where there is a lot of mutual appreciation, support, and sharing of what we know with each other.

Sometimes some communities are a way station and not a place where you end up sticking around for very long, but you can still learn a lot from liminal spaces. Over the last several years I’ve spent some time in and out of a number of civic and political groups, all of which have contributed to my voice, writing, politics, and sense of responsibility for making archives meaningful to people who are not archivists. I am grateful to have been welcomed into those spaces while they, or I, lasted.

I think it’s important to end this on a note that recognizes that while getting tenure is an amazing achievement, there is a tendency – encouraged by the process of getting tenure – for people to wholly define themselves through their work. A few years ago I returned to an active religious life and community for the first time as an adult. It has been one of the most grounding things I’ve done to stay anchored and continually renewed for the long haul, and I’m grateful to those I worship with for the space they’ve held for me to slowly form this part of my life.

I’m so fortunate to live in a city where I have a very strong friend network, many of whom are such incredible women that I’m at a loss for words to describe how much they mean to me and how difficult it is to imagine my life without them. Some of these friends I knew from growing up here, but a number of them I picked up when I returned to Cincinnati, primarily through a fundraising group connected to Planned Parenthood. These friends, as much as my family, are what make Cincinnati home for me.

Cincinnati has been my home for almost all of my life because my parents live here. After I completed my MLIS while I was still in Louisiana, I knew I wanted to be closer to them and crossed my fingers I’d end up with a job within a day’s drive of Cincinnati, but luckily now I’m within a 10 minute drive of both of them. My dad and I regularly debate each other about religion, politics, and history which keeps both of us sharp in our respective writing. My mom and stepdad regularly make dinner for my husband and me, and both are such inspiring role models for developing local community networks situated around their musical activities. I’m also beyond lucky to have taken that detour to New Orleans, where I ended up with someone who had never been to Cincinnati before he met me, but the communities he’s built here have sustained both of us. I will be forever grateful to him for moving home with me.

Comments Off on I got tenure (and I had a ton of help along the way)

Yesterday the University of Cincinnati (UC)’s Board of Trustees officially approved my application (and dozens of other faculty members!) for tenure and promotion. It’s the culmination of a nearly year-long review period, and I’m still processing my feelings around what it means to get tenure, both on a personal level and in the larger context of higher education at the moment. The way I often handle my feelings is through writing, and while I’ve been doing a lot of private writing (towards the end of the waiting game, I kept a notebook in my work desk that said TENURE ANXIETY on the front and I wrote in it whenever I started freaking out), I’m taking opportunity to talk about what this means in a more public space.

As I went through the tenure process, I realized going up for tenure is a very mysterious thing to folks who don’t go through it themselves. Like most major life experiences, it’s hard to fully explain to anyone who hasn’t gone down the same path, which can make it feel very isolating and lonely. But because tenure is a significant personal milestone, while also being implemented very unevenly for academic librarianship, and while also dramatically eroded across higher education, I think it’s worth shedding some light on what it means and what it took (for me) to get to this place.

In colleges and universities, tenure is the ultimate job security for faculty – you’ll often hear people refer to it as a “job for life.” According to the AAUP, “a tenured appointment is an indefinite appointment that can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency and program discontinuation.” The way this works for pre-tenure (i.e. tenure-track) faculty is that after a probationary period of typically 5-6 years (though sometimes longer depending on disciplinary or institutional circumstances), a faculty member goes through a rigorous review process in which their work is evaluated by a series of reviewers. The criteria for achieving tenure varies radically across disciplines and universities. Some folks going up for tenure are in colleges or departments with very specific tenure expectations (e.g., you must publish X-number of articles in a specific set of highly-ranked journals), while others have more ambiguous criteria. If you do not get tenure, you typically have the remaining time in your probationary period to stick around, but then you are out of your job.

At many institutions, there is usually some type of pre-tenure review or reappointment at least a couple years before tenure. The idea behind this is to make sure you’re on the right path to eventually achieve tenure. For UC library faculty, it is not uncommon to be go through two reappointment periods prior to going up for tenure, during which you submit a dossier similar to the one you eventually compile for tenure. I started as an assistant librarian in late 2013, went up for reappointment and promotion in 2015, and went up for reappointment again in 2017. For reappointment you only have to describe and document your work under that specific period of review, but going up for tenure requires a review of your entire duration since you began your tenure-track position.

In order to apply for tenure, you have to submit a dossier that documents the last several years of your work and demonstrates clear growth, as well as an upward trajectory showing that you will continue to be a valued part of the university. You can review statement (which functions as a general overview of why I met the criteria for tenure and promotion) and the criteria for Library Faculty. At UC, we have an electronic dossier system, and we supply documentation as evidence showing how we meet the criteria for reappointment/promotion/tenure. In addition, we include copies of our CV, job description, recommendations from our supervisor, and letters of recommendation. My dossier included dozens of pieces of evidence including everything from records retention schedules I’ve written to my peer-reviewed journal articles to letters from leaders in the archival profession.

The first level of review is the Library Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) committee. Assuming the RPT committee recommends your application, then it goes to the Dean. Assuming the Dean recommends it, then it goes to the Provost. The Provost then makes a recommendation on your case to the University Board of Trustees. Then the Board of Trustees approves a long list of recommendations from the Provost. This process varies between universities (and even between colleges at UC), but in all cases, the idea is that your case goes through multiple levels of review (and usually in at least one early stage, the reviewers write a thorough evaluation of your work), often by people who don’t know much about your discipline, job duties, or areas of research.

I submitted my application for tenure and promotion in October 2018. I had been working on my dossier for several months before that, and it’s a good thing I did because about 6 weeks before the deadline to turn everything in, my dad had a massive stroke (which followed a number of very stressful hospitalizations earlier in the year for other issues he had). I am my father’s primary family member, and so I was dealing with visiting him in the hospital, then a rehab facility, and finally getting him into assisted living all while finalizing a dossier about the future of my job. I’m glad to say my dad pulled through the stroke OK, given his age, general frailty, and previous hospitalizations that year. But the toll my dad’s stroke took, combined with having to empty out and sell his condo in order to keep paying for assisted living, made an already inherently stressful year of waiting for my future to be decided even more fraught. I would not have managed to get through all of this had it not been for the immense support that my husband, my mom, and some very close friends provided to me.

After my dossier was submitted, the waiting game began. The Library RPT committee recommended me for tenure and promotion at the end of November 2018, and the Dean recommended me in January 2019. I received notice of the final recommendation from the Provost in early June, and the Board approved it a few weeks later. The entire process from submission to approval took over 9 months, but of course if you include the dossier preparation, the experience of going up for tenure took well over a year.

I worked very hard to get tenure – and I also got a tons of help getting here, and a lot of luck in ending up in a tenure-track position in the first place. I am very conscientious of how many wonderful and worthy people have been chewed up by institutions that rely far too much on precarious labor. First, tenure-track and tenured positions are declining across higher education while adjunct and contractual positions (i.e., positions with quite a bit of precarity and less stability) now represent the majority of faculty positions. There are multiple reasons for this, and I recommend looking at some of the reports from AAUP. Second, the faculty status and tenure status of academic librarians is all over the place – some academic librarians have faculty status but do not have tenure, some have a tenure-like situation which is not called tenure, some have neither, some have both. There is an entire website dedicated to academic librarian professional status categories, since some RPT committees at other universities require external reviewers who have both faculty and tenure status at their institutions.

I know how profoundly, wildly, fortunate I am to get tenure. I crave stability (it will surprise absolutely none of you at this point to learn I’m a Capricorn through and through), and Cincinnati is my hometown. I got my start in archives as a student worker in the library where I am now tenured. I’ve been educated or employed at UC almost all of my adult life, except for my 5-year detour in New Orleans, where I spent the earliest years of my archivist career and met my husband. Being able to continue to work as an archivist at a place where I have deep roots is exactly what I was hoping for. I know that the entire framework of higher education is fragile – particularly for those of us in the public sector. I feel a sense of relief that this process finally came to a happy end, but also a deep awareness that this is not a feeling many people who work in this field get to have.

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