Yale University

Tenure Matters: An Historian’s Perspective

This paper juxtaposes (i) the findings of the 2006 Modern Language Association Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion with (ii) the story that Alvin Kernan tells -- in his professorial memoir In Plato’s Cave (1999) -- about his pursuit of tenure at Yale in the 1950s and early 1960s to advance the view that “tenure” is best understood as a practice defined by a set of protocols that have been created and elaborated over time.

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