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This one is dedicated to those who were denied tenure

To commemorate the fifth-year anniversary of being denied tenure, the Official Blog Wife and I have joint essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education today on the aftereffects of that decision. For most people who are denied tenure, the costs are financial, familial and emotional. In my own idiosyncratic case, I was fortunate enough to be ...

By Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

July 4, 2011, 1:05 PM

To commemorate the fifth-year anniversary of being denied tenure, the Official Blog Wife and I have joint essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education today on the aftereffects of that decision. For most people who are denied tenure, the costs are financial, familial and emotional. In my own idiosyncratic case, I was fortunate enough to be spared the first two of the three, which allowed this to be a "controlled case" focusing solely on the emotional legacy.

My big takeaway:

Indulging in "What happened?" musings is inevitable—indeed, most social scientists are trained to search for underlying causes. But a good social scientist must also be wary of overdetermined outcomes. There is always the element of chance to any outcome. Get 20 tenured academics in a room, and that stochastic element explodes. After five years, I’ve grown comfortable with the idea that there is a limit to how much I will ever know about what happened. But it took nearly all five of those years to reach this point.

To be blunt, my wife’s essay is much better than mine, and is chock-full of embarrassing anecdotes like this one:

My husband is one of the most confident people I know. This is both attractive and exasperating. We once had a disagreement about the meaning of a word. When I read the dictionary definition to him, he said the dictionary was wrong. The rabbi who married us compared him to Jacob in her sermon, saying, "Jacob argued with God."

So read all of her esaay, if nothing else. My only regret is that the Chronicle did not post her full tagline, which should have read, "Erika Drezner is a social worker and coordinator of teen services at the Asperger’s Association of New England. She has learned over time that when arguing with Dan she is right all of the time."

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner