Since the founding of our august institution, we have awarded promotion and tenure based on how many pages of your research we could read before falling asleep and the rumors we heard about the time you insulted that emeritus professor’s new vest. In short, we awarded tenure based on vibes.

But thanks to a lawsuit that we can’t discuss and probably never even happened, we have formalized our promotion and tenure criteria so that everyone can be held to the same nearly impossible standard. These guidelines were written by almost-retired professors who never could have met these standards back in the 1980s, when all you needed for tenure was 1.5 publications and a bottle of scotch in your desk.

Research

To demonstrate excellence in research, achieve all of the following:

  • Publish at least nine studies in journals that charge $39.99 apiece to access paywalled articles.
  • Write a scholarly monograph that The Chronicle of Higher Education dubs, “The book people will pretend to have read for the next twenty years!”
  • Discover at least one quasar, two nebulae, three undersea mountain ranges, four kinds of beetles, five Egyptian pharaohs, and six lost love letters between Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth.
  • Develop a research agenda that inspires at least twelve hyperbolic clickbait headlines (e.g., “According to Science, Eating Too Many Papayas Will Make Your Face Explode.”)
  • Argue convincingly that Julius Caesar never existed but that both Gladiator movies are 100 percent historically accurate.
  • Demonstrate through scientific, psychological, philosophical, legal, and historical principles that the assistant dean has the moral high ground in his contentious divorce.
  • Get your last name associated with capybaras, kind of like how Pavlov did with dogs.
  • Prove that Shakespeare’s plays were written by his mom for a school project.
  • After further discussion, we really think you ought to publish at least eleven studies in journals that charge $49.99 per article. Honestly, you should shoot for at least thirteen articles in journals that charge $69.99, just to be safe.

Teaching

Teaching is a cornerstone of this university, as evidenced by the mission statement posted on our website, which currently leads to a 404 error page. We have no idea how to evaluate teaching, so to receive tenure, you must accomplish all of the following, plus several additional things we haven’t thought of yet:

  • Lose a month of sleep over one negative student evaluation despite receiving thirty-seven positive comments from the same class.
  • Win at least three teaching awards from our university and at least one teaching award from another university you don’t work at.
  • Get students to embrace at least three disappearing cultural touchstones from your youth, such as Rocko’s Modern Life, the Cabbage Patch dance, that “Summer Girls” song by LFO, or the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito film Twins.
  • Inspire at least twenty students to throw their lives away by going to graduate school.
  • End every lecture with a literal, justifiable mic drop.
  • Cultivate a teaching style so inspiring that you will be played by Jeff Bridges, Viola Davis, Mahershala Ali, or Saoirse Ronan in a prestige movie (immediate promotion to college dean if you inspire the role that finally wins Glenn Close her Oscar).

Service

Service barely counts for tenure, even though the university would literally fall apart without it. (English faculty, we do mean “literally” here; the roof of Chester A. Arthur Hall would collapse tomorrow without untenured faculty supporting its joists on their shoulders.) To get tenure, we expect you to do all of the listed items, even though we will spend approximately forty-five seconds discussing your service during your four-hour tenure review meeting:

  • Chair the Committee for Writing a Recommendation Report to the Vice Chancellor That Will Sit Unopened in Her Email Inbox for Five Years.
  • Maintain your department chair’s perfect daily streak in The New York Times Connections puzzle.
  • Take department meeting minutes and edit out all the personal attacks.
  • Advise all the student clubs that seem like a real handful, including the falconry club, those kids that act like they’re playing Quidditch, the Society of Students who Misinterpret Stoic Philosophy, the Organization for Students Who Just Discovered Hunter S. Thompson and Now That’s Their Whole Personality, and the second falconry club that broke off from the original falconry club.
  • Start a pyramid scheme to pay the librarian’s salary.
  • Dress as our lovable Fighting Elk mascot “Elkvis Costello” for all track and field meets (make sure you can do a back handspring and land in the splits).
  • Figure out how our Tutoring Center can steal Wi-Fi from the apartment complex next to campus.
  • Save a prospective student’s life by shielding them with your body during a bear attack.

Remember, these standards exist to help us decide whether you have a job in academia forever or will never work in academia again. If you have questions about them, please ask three different people and get three contradictory answers. But just some friendly advice, definitely publish fifteen articles in journals that charge at least $4,000 for an annual individual subscription.

Good luck!