Here’s a vignette that shows how an academic can get tenure, or at least how one well-placed one did.

“Preparing my dossier for tenure was far more terrifying because I felt as if I had everything to lose,” Gina Barreca writes in The Chronicle Review. “I revised my personal statement until the prose was so tortured that it sounded like a bad translation from Croatian.”

“ It was the early 90s, and my scholarly work made heavy use of terms like ‘enactment,’ ‘intratextual,’ and ‘hegemonic discourse.’” She got it: Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.