Training the Professoriate for the 21st Century

This autobiographical account relates the journey of becoming a critical teacher researcher.. Through critical refection and analysis, the cultural, historical, and social contexts of research, teaching, and technology use are described as lived experience. Rich narrative accounts exemplify personal and professional experiences before and during the professoriate in a tenure track position.

This is an essay I wrote in 1982, during my terminal year at Connecticut College, where I was denied tenure in English. After submitting it unsuccessfully to several venues--American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and College English--I gave up trying to publish it. (As a postscript, I include the rejection letter from College English.)
While it is thirty years old (typed!) I think it deserves to be made public. In addition to conveying what the experience of being denied tenure is like to experience (a kind of social death), it offers some insight into the costs of the tenure system. In fact, I think it's quite prescient about the future of tenure-track jobs.
The negative decision did not end my career, as I feared it might. I got hired at Hofstra, where I got tenure and stayed until retirement. But I confess that the denial of tenure still rankles.
I dedicate the essay to those less lucky.

This volume is about the education of gender and sexualities, which is to say it explores how gender and sexuality identities and differences get constructed through the process of education and «schooling». Wittingly or not, educational institutions and educators play an important role in «normalizing» gender and sexuality differences by disciplining, regulating, and producing differences in ways that are «intelligible» within the dominant or hegemonic culture. To make gender and sexuality identities and differences intelligible through education is to understand them through the logic of separable binary oppositions (man-woman, straight-gay), and to valorize and privilege one normalized identity within each binary (man, straight) and simultaneously stigmatize and marginalize the «other» identity (woman, gay). Educational institutions have been set up to normalize the construction of gender and sexual identities in these ways, and this is both the overt and the «hidden» curriculum of schooling. At the same time, the «postmodern» times in which we live are characterized by a proliferating of differences so that the binary oppositional borders that have been maintained and policed through schooling, and that are central to maintaining highly inequitable power relations and rigid gender roles, are being challenged, resisted, and in other ways profoundly destabilized by young people today.