"Journey" Update, Day 139

Still unresolved

Although I haven’t been focusing on it daily the way I did in the fall, my employment as a university professor at Bemidji State is still going to end in May and I haven’t yet lined up a new job. You may recall that I was urged by my Dean and Provost to apply for tenure and promotion, so I’d be in position to “claim” any job that came available within the state system that my skills matched. I’ve been considering this (the application is due in a couple of weeks), but I had some questions about the timing of it all.

I got an email in response to my questions from the lawyer at my union headquarters. She said that contractually, the President of BSU must make decisions on tenure and promotion by June 15th. This is too late for me, since I apparently need to have tenure before I am terminated or it doesn’t count. She advised me, if I plan to apply, to first get a confirmation that the Dean, Provost, and President would accelerate the process for me and make a decision before my last day. After I received the letter granting me tenure, I could be placed on a system office “retrenchment list” and would begin receiving notices of openings matching my qualifications, which I could “claim”. She noted, however, that “It may be too late for employment that begins in August 2024, though it is possible there would still be an open position.”

From this, it doesn't seem like there's much chance of me getting a job at a university in the system in the next academic year on the basis of “claiming”. Anything that they know they want to fill in that timeframe would probably already be advertised and decisions made well before May. So I’d have to apply and get one of those jobs the old fashioned way. History instructor jobs at community colleges have already been posted, and I've applied. There has been a rumor of a job at a university, but it hasn’t been posted yet. So if there's not much chance of the timing working out (either because the administration doesn't commit to making a decision before I'm retrenched or because all the jobs will be filled by then), there may not be much point applying for tenure.

It's also worth asking myself, if I got a job at a community college and then a university job became available in, say, 2025, would I make the jump and try to claim the university job? If, for example, I got a job teaching full-time at Normandale Community College (which is three times bigger than BSU) and settled in there, but then a job opened at another university in the system, would it make sense to go to another new place? Or if a year or two down the line I got a call from Bemidji saying they had survived their reorganization and a job had become available, would I be interested? I suppose this is really the same question as, if I got a job teaching at some other university in the middle of Wisconsin or in Tennessee and then BSU called back, would I consider returning? Maybe if BSU offered something valuable. For example, if they offered to reinstate my years already worked toward my sabbatical, that might be worth considering. If I had not been retrenched I would have been getting tenure next year and taking a year off to travel and write a book the following. Other than that I'm not sure what, beside proximity to my current home, would entice me to return to BSU.