The Youngest Was The Most Loved

Our department has made a new hire this month. As word has it - I avoid getting involved in searches involving this segment of our faculty - our future colleague is promising, personable, and happy to be aboard. All the things one looks for in a new tenure-track person. I never even asked what our future colleague wangled by way of a salary. One of the other candidates had demanded a salary about $5000 less than what I am making in lo, my third decade at 901 South National.. Another candidate had basically demanded "Find me a job for my spouse." Hiring one of your top choices in a seller's market can get expensive. I hope the department salary structure didn't get knocked too far out of whack. There is a world-class junior asshat in our department who will unleash a whining unto God or the University President, whichever of Them responds first.

I myself used to get quite bothered by this sort of salary compression issue. But with the passing years, I realize more and more how lucky - or blessed, or whatever - I was to land in a tenure track job at a time when the bar was set so much lower. Sure, the department was run by the asshats when I arrived. But as long as probationary types like me acted friendly-like, didn't whine about a 12-hour teaching load and didn't threaten the asshats too much with the publication records we were forced to compile, tenure and promotion were no big deal. I had to plead with our then-department head to be given a third-year pretenure review. The response was "We like you! You'll do fine!" They did like me. Then. The response I got when I went up for promotion to professor was something different, but that is another cycle of posts.

Now, probationary faculty are confronted with a mind-numbing sequence of hoops to jump through: codified departmental and collegiate tenure and promotion guidelines; annual evaluation letters from the personnel committee, head, and dean; the rumblings from Carrington Hall that the standards will continue to go up, up, up as 901 South National becomes even more excellent than it already is. This on top of excelling in teaching, service and research at all times, and acting friendly-like to the tenured faculty. Know what? It's all too easy to gripe about how bad we had it when we taught 15 hours per week, published a book a semester, and sprinted to and from work, uphill in both directions. All too easy to compare salaries and whine that the youngest was the most loved, when in fact the mountains of released time and inflated salaries can't begin to compare with the pressures new hires live with every day of their probationary periods. In fact, as much as I genuinely love what I do for a living and as grateful as I feel to make a living doing it, I sincerely doubt I'd even go to grad school today if this gray miasmic haze of uncertainty and blind chance was what awaited me when I finished.