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The Promotion

Dr. (Ms.) Michael S. Whitt

    Dr. Samantha Whitman, a thirty-seven year old associate professor at Auburn University, was waiting to see if the Tenure and Promotion Committee would promote her to full professor as her credentials were impeccable.*
    From her second quarter at Auburn, Jan. 1972, Samantha had taught graduate courses each term. Eventually two of them became her load. Her chairperson, Dr. Floyd Robison, wanted to give her a slightly lighter load to allow her time to publish and keep Auburn on the map for reasons other than how the football team was doing. As long as Floyd was head, these two courses and the supervision of graduate students who taught the undergraduate social foundations of education class, constituted her load. The class was Samantha’s brain child.
    Her course was distinctive for several reasons. One was that Samantha guided other foundations faculty members in establishing laboratory experiences based upon the anthropological participant-observation research method. The students observed and recorded interactions, behaviors, and activities for an hour of the two they spent in lab. The other hour they helped the teachers in any way they needed and that was growth producing for the university students. They tutored, created educative displays, and presented short lessons, among other things.
    Later the students turned the data they collected into mini-ethnographies in which they established the structure of relations, behavior patterns, and values which were characteristic of the student group and teacher. The students read an excellent ethnography by Gerry Rosenfeld, Shut Those Thick Lips: Can’t You Act Like a Human Being? before doing lab work. This ethnography focuses upon the students’ sad situation in a New York City slum school.
    Floyd resigned as Department Head in 1978; he could not abide the new dean, a coward who lacked integrity. Mack Blackburn replaced Truman Pearce, the best and strongest education dean Samantha ever met. Mack’s lack of character strength was a shock after working with Truman since 1963.
    A search was conducted which Blackburn ruined. The committee recommended four candidates. The dean nixed the best of them. The Dean was a gay man as was Will Pinar, the candidate he eliminated. Will at only thirty-one was an associate professor at The University of Rochester. He was a journal editor having created the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. He published three books and several articles, and understood the Auburn culture better than any of the others. The dean may have been threatened by Pinar’s accomplishments and progressive perspective.
    The dean tried to hire mild mannered, unthreatening, Dr. Murray Millman, who was unsatisfactory to half the department, including Samantha. This group raised cane, They wrote to Millman telling him that as far they were concerned, he was not wanted in the department. They told him this in person when he visited a second time. He withdrew his application.
    Mack refused to finance more out side searches. This meant the foundations members had to settle for a person in the department. Spencer got in as chair in summer, l978. No one was enthused about him, but the alternatives were no better. Out of bitterness and revenge, he saw to it that Samantha taught an undergraduate class every term. It had irked him that she always got two graduate seminars when Floyd was head. Samantha did not mind, but the fact was she was an amazingly good graduate level teacher. Glowing reports from her graduate students, and the fact that she served on 35 doctoral committees demonstrated this.
    Spencer’s festering resentment toward Samantha began when they team taught a large undergraduate class the first fall after each was hired. Spencer discovered that Samantha was far more creative and talented than he. He wanted to jump on her band wagon by doing joint projects and publications. Samantha saw through his self serving agenda and avoided projects which exploited her imaginative capacities. She bruised his ego by refusing to have an erotic relationship with him. Many women were attracted to him before he soon got fat, but Samantha was not one of them. He knew she had extra-marital relations with full disclosure to her spouse and soul mate, Gabriel Timmerman. That irked him too. He lied to his wife.
    Samantha was working from 1980 through l983 on a small grant received by chaired history professor, Dr. Don Lewis. Don, Samantha, another history professor, an English professor, and a religion professor worked as a team to create an honors course in the history of civilization in relation to technological developments. The course was for freshman physical science and related majors, e. g., engineering and pharmacy.
    Spencer’s resentment was increased when Samantha refused to allow him to dump another course on her when she was working at least one-third time on the grant. The first year involved enormous amounts of reading to decide what would be the best ones for the course. The second year the course was taught. All the team attended most of the meetings. Don did much of the teaching. Samantha did two lectures on Giambattista Vico because he was among the first thinkers to introduce organic ideas into his philosophy, freeing science and technology from a narrow mechanical paradigm. She gave two lectures on similar ideas in Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose and one on William Blake’s poetry.
    Lewis’s work overlapped the supervision of the graduate students. Then in 1980 the undergraduate sequence was changed. The course she created in social foundations was combined with the history and philosophy of education. This movement left no time for Samantha’s laboratory experiences, unless much important content was sacrificed. A worthless course was added; “Number Crunching” 101 called officially ”research and measurement,” and the lab was sacrificed.
    Dr. Lewis insisted that Samantha’s work with him was part of her load. Spencer had the gall to say she was getting paid and thus it could not be counted as part of her load. The “pay” amounted to thirteen dollars a quarter for each faculty member. Samantha rolled her eyes on this one for a long time when she saw Spencer. That was the smallest honorarium which the team had heard. The honors group laughed and joked about it.
    The grant was only for $20,000. Money was needed to copy the readings the team examined to determine what the honors course readings would be. Some money was needed to teach certain aspects of the class, and to travel around talking about the honors class to various academic and educative groups. The team presented papers at the Alabama Academy of the Sciences in Birmingham, the National Society for Engineering Education in Huntsville, and the Southeastern Regional Honors Council in Nashville. The traveling took much of the money, especially for gas, restaurants, and hotel rooms.
    When she decided to apply for promotion, Samantha was working on the first year of the grant in winter l980. She spent several hours filling out the application and getting it perfect. Several days before the deadline, she turned it in to the departmental office to be sent to the Tenure and Promotion Committee.
    A few minutes after she handed it in, Spencer came to her office and said, “Sam, I’m not allowing you to go up for promotion. You haven’t been very cooperative since I became department head, and you don’t follow rules or fulfill the expectations of the administration.”
    “You might have told me of this ‘ah er’ ‘disobedience’ criteria before I spent the time filling the application out.”
    He left mumbling some excuse.
    Samantha was hurt, confused, and angry. She wondered if he had the authority to block her application for such trivial reasons or for any reasons. During the time Samantha thought Spencer might block her promotion, she thought about the sorry crude Spencer happily supported. This relatively incompetent man had been at Auburn for six years before Samantha and was only now going up for full professor. Ben Lauderdale was still an assistant professor when Samantha came to Auburn. She was promoted to associate professor her second year. He had one-third the publications Samantha had and few presentations at academic and scholarly meetings. This man had done little to distinguish himself as a scholar. His only claim to the extraordinary was that he was unusually rigid, cantankerous, and hateful to any colleague with whom he disagreed. Before Samantha had a chance to think about what to do, Phil Spencer came back around to her office, figuratively speaking, with his tail between his legs.
    “It seems that you can go up for promotion. Dr. Littlefield’s office told me that it is strictly up to the professors as to whether or not they’ll go up.”
    Samantha and Taylor, the Vice President for Academic Affairs and a Shakespearean scholar, were friendly. They shared fundamental values regarding the university, scholarship, and professional ethics. They discovered these commonalities through university-wide committee work. She was smiling inside in appreciation of Taylor’s integrity. With a poker face she returned the application to Spencer, whose resentment quotient went up a good bit as he stomped off. Samantha laughed at his lack of knowledge regarding the extent and limitations of his power. Samantha felt this was the first thing one should learn when accepting positions of power. She felt as if she had been on a roller-coaster after the morning’s events.
    She called her live-in soul mate, Gabriel Timmerman. When he answered she said, “Oh what a weird morning I’ve had, but it turned out spectacularly! I turned the promotion stuff into the secretary. In a few minutes here comes ‘Polyester’ to my office. He told me he wasn’t going to ‘allow’ me to go up for promotion. I was angry after spending that time filling all that stuff out with your help.”
    “Sweetness, you had the right to feel livid or even murderous.”
    “For a few minutes I did, but before I could decide what to do, he came humbly back. I had doubts that he had the authority to do this. Taylor’s office informed him that he had no authority to stop a professor from going up for promotion.” Gabriel exclaimed, “Great! And thank goodness that creep ‘Polyester’ got told he over stepped the bounds of his thankfully limited power. Congratulations, Sweetness.
    “Thanks. You know the struggle isn’t over. Spencer and Blackburn will keep the path hot to the T and P Committee to try and trash my name. They’ll do whatever they can to block my promotion. I don’t know what that means. Their only ground is
    I, a grown woman, do not slavishly do everything certain administrators tell me to.”
    Gabriel replied, “I don’t think their objections are going to mean much to the committee. I have complete faith in Taylor Littlefield. He has always done right by you, and he has enormous honesty and integrity. He’s not going to put up with that drivel. And I’m certain that he makes sure the professors who are appointed to the committee are persons of integrity and honesty as he is, I. e., people with whom he can work.”
    “You’re right about that, my love. Maybe I have a better chance than I thought when I considered that I’m by no means in Spencer’s or Blackburn’s good graces. I still have my doubts though.”
    Samantha did not give the promotion matter much further thought. It could be a month or even six weeks before the T & P Committee’s decisions were made public. When that day arrived, Samantha was in the office. She soon realized that Gabriel’s optimism was justified; she had been promoted. She was elated as were all of her progressive colleagues, and of course the ever progressive, soon to be Gabriel Timmerman, PhD.
    She was curious how the committee handled the Blackburn’s and Spencer’s labels of “disobedient’ and “insubordinate.” Samantha called them “progressive.” In a few days Samantha ran into a friend from the Accounting Department. They had both been in the main cafeteria and met when they were going outside.
    “Hello Dan,” Samantha greeted him. She was going from the cafeteria to the 10 story building where her office was on the 4^th floor. Haley Center had offices on floors 1-9. Floor 10 was a meeting room. Floors 1-3 had classrooms of varying sizes.
    “Sam,” replied Dan. “I was hoping I’d run into you and was getting ready to call. I have some amusing and amazing things to tell you about what went on in the T and P Committee meetings. Do you have a few minutes?”
    “You bet I do. I didn’t know you were on that committee. Why don’t we go to my office in Haley Center?”
    “Lead the way, my friend.”
    After Samantha closed the door, Dan and Samantha sat. He began his account.
    “Sam, it was hysterical. Your dean and department head were ignorant of the criteria for full professor. They became pests. They kept coming to the meetings and repeating their ‘reason’ for wanting to block your promotion. It seems you’re a naughty woman who doesn’t do what she’s told by the department head and dean. You, according to them, are not qualified to be a full professor because you’re disobedient and insubordinate.” Samantha punctuated all of his points with laughter. She was in stitches and Dan too began laughing hilariously.
    Finally able to talk Samantha gasped, “If those were the criteria for tenure and promotion, we’d be in trouble. Instead of courageous and committed scholars and teachers, we’d have servile and slavish persons, who aren’t good for much of anything.”
    Dan said, “How true.” Dan finished telling Samantha the hilarious details of their consideration of her for promotion.
    After she thanked Dan for filling her in on these most interesting developments and bid him goodbye, she decided to call her most beloved woman friend ever, Donda Clare West. She was an associate professor in the English Education Department at Chicago State University, and the mother of Kanye West, who was soon to become a famous Hip-Hop and R & B star.
    “Donda West speaking,” she answered.
    “Greetings to the most esteemed Dr. West.”
    “Sam!” She exclaimed. “I miss you. What’s up, darling?”
    “Lots, friend. I miss you too. I wish you were back here or at least at Atlanta U. I’ve been promoted to full professor over the objections of my department head, you know as ‘Polyester Pill,’ and the dean.”
    “That’s spectacular, Sam. Tell me all about it.”
    “Jack and Pill kept going to the T and P meetings and asking them not to promote me. The Committee got tired of their repetitive bleating and told them not to come to the meetings again. They informed those two morons that disobedience or obedience had nothing to do with promotion; therefore, put a sock in their mouths.
    One of the older members said, ‘This promotion has to do with the quality, especially depth and comprehensiveness, and quantity of Dr. Whitman’s publications, presentations, and other accomplishments.’
    Dr. Littlefield took over for the grand finale, ‘Dr. Whitman has many quality publications, presentations, and other accomplishments. Her scholarly reputation is international in scope, including Europe, Latin America, and North America. She is one of the best graduate level teachers in the university and certainly the best in your school. Obedience or the lack of it is irrelevant and immaterial to promotion. We don’t want to see you again with respect to this case.’”
    Donda’s exuberant laughter punctuated most of the points Samantha made in her account of the promotion. She was especially tickled when Samantha told her the part about Taylor telling Mack and Pill that obedience or lack of it was irrelevant and immaterial.
    Donda said, “Sam honey, that’s one of the best stories I’ve ever heard. It’s wonderful. You must, when you have time, write it up as a prose essay or a fictional short story.”
    Samantha replied, “Oh sweetheart, that’s a great idea. I’ve a list of things I want to write about as soon as I can, but at the latest when I get out of the University. The story of my promotion is a priority. Promotion or not though, things are going down hill here. In part it’s related to the movement to the right in national politics, e.g., by that “tired old man we elected king,” in a song by our musical ally, Don Henley, “The End of the Innocence.”
    “I hope we get to visit soon so I can hear all about those disturbing developments. I love that Henley line.”
    “Until the next call I send you all my love.”
    “Bye Sam, I love you too.”
    As Samantha left campus, she was thinking about how thankful she was for the truly good friends she had from Taylor, Dan, and Gabriel to Donda in Chicago, and a few others. They are worth far more than their weight in gold.
_________________________

    * She had published ample essay length articles, shorter book reviews, and had given several presentations at impressive academic and professional meetings. She spoke to the membership of the Alabama Education Association on “Censorship, Academic Freedom, and the Public School Teacher,” published in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 5, No. 1 (summer, l983). She presented a paper at a symposium called Vico/Venice in the Italian City of that name. The paper was on the commonalities between John Dewey and Giambattista Vico, the 17^th and l8th centuries Italian philosopher, who was obscure until the 20^th century due to being far ahead if his time. “Dewey and Vico: Toward a Humanistic Foundation for Contemporary Education,” is published in Vico Past and Present, Giorgio Tagliacozzo, ed. (New York: Humanities Press, l981). She presented a paper at the American Industrial Arts Association annual meeting in Seattle titled “Social and Cultural Perspectives on a Humane Technology for the Future,” published in Industrial Arts and a Humane Technology for the Future. (Washington D C.: AIAA, 1974). These and other publications and presentations have a scope and depth that made her an internationally known scholar in Latin America, North America, and Europe. Most of her publications were in journals with a 90% turn down rate. Samantha was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, whose duties were to set journal policies and make recommendations as to whether or not to publish certain manuscripts in JCT. She had done consulting work with the Southeastern Teachers Corps and some publishing companies.

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