Call for Essays about Tenure Denial: Guardians of Mediocrity: How Universities Use Tenure to Protect the Status Quo

Edited Collection, Guardians of Mediocrity: How Universities Use Tenure to Protect the Status Quo

Contact email:

tenureabuseanthologyATgmailDOTcom (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )  

Deadline for Submission of Abstract: June 1st, 2015  

Abstracts of essays are invited for a forthcoming edited collection highlighting the failures of the university tenure procedure, a process now often used to get rid of faculty who challenge institutional incompetence. For this collection, we are looking for well-written essays (in the style of literary nonfiction) about college professors (4-year or 2-year schools) who were denied tenure when personal agenda overrode fair evaluation of teaching, scholarly, and professional accomplishments. Narratives should be compelling and poignant in the stories they tell and should also try to contextualize flawed tenure decisions within historic and/or cultural shifts. Anonymity will be granted at author’s request.

The goal of publishing such stories is to draw public attention to contemporary abuses of the university personnel decision process, as well as the strain of anti-intellectualism that has infiltrated higher education in the United States, and to underscore how students and educational quality suffer when good teachers are unjustly fired.

We already have interest from an indie publisher who wants to grant a percentage of royalties to each author featured in the collection, as well as provide them with one free copy of the anthology and discounts on additional copies. We hope to represent a diversity of voices in order to show the widespread and systematic nature of such abuse.

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a bio (listing relevant previous publications, especially nonfiction or personal essays) to:

tenureabuseanthologyATgmailDOTcom (Change AT to @ and DOT to . )

by June 1st, 2015. Contributors will receive notification before end of June 2015. Completed chapter drafts (approximately 5,000 – 7,000 words) should be submitted by November 1st, 2015. All chapters will receive review by the editors prior to submission of book manuscript, and further review may follow at later stages of the process.