cover image The Ticking Tenure Clock

The Ticking Tenure Clock

Blaire A. French. State University of New York Press, $53.5 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-7914-3935-7

Though topical in its treatment of the tenure process, this extended one-liner suffers from unsympathetic characters and a lack of satiric imagination. Cynical Lydia Martin, a junior professor of political science, finds herself without sufficient credentials to achieve tenure at Patrick Henry University in Albermarle, Va. Desperately trying to find fodder for a second book, she happens on an animal rights group whose relative obscurity makes for a good case study. Her colleagues remain predictably unsupportive and petty--each tending to his or her own tenure prospects. In a community littered with egos, machinations and bitchery, Lydia seems right at home. Her obsessive interest in a recurring analogy (assistant professor is to full professor as minnow is to whale) merely highlights her penchant for reductive reasoning: other people's lives matter only in so much as they further her career. Although she periodically suffers from self-pity and -loathing (presumably intended to foreshadow a cathartic transformation from bad person to good), these bouts do little to complicate her character. Even if we accept that the circumstances of her case study (which include being jilted by a nice guy) affect a profound change in Lydia's personality, French chooses to elide whatever feelings of guilt Lydia might have experienced along the way. In the name of convenient denouements, she quickly rounds out a story that never adds much to its title. (Oct.)