Tenured at last ... time for a new tat.

Thursday, December 15 was a darn good day. Ten years after receiving my doctorate I was granted tenure at the University of Texas at Austin. What is nice about the situation is that I earned tenure without betraying my sense of who I am to be as a scholar. I staked my career on the importance and viability of community engaged scholarship and was ultimately rewarded by my university.

We don't talk about it this way, but one way to look at tenure is as a ritual hazing process that threatens to render academic freedom irrelevant. While on the tenure track, junior faculty are continually discouraged by caring senior colleagues from engaging any methodologies, publication venues, communities or activities that could be seen as controversial, experimental, untested, or not properly deferential to established norms. There is of course irony in this. We academics are supposed to be in the business of generating knowledge, not regurgitating what already is. Nonetheless, the overwhelming message is to use traditional methods to engage research that is solid, easy to conduct and write up, and to crank out as many publications as possible. The extent to which the publications chart new territory is nowhere near the point. Rather the point is quantity of publications in rigorous publication venues.

While the messages on how to achieve tenure generally come from folk who are genuinely concerned with your success, the critical by-product of the heads down, stay in your lane, nose to the grindstone approach they have been taught to advocate is the production of tenured scholars who are unable to push boundaries, unable to challenge established wisdom, unable to rock the boat. And with apologies for the string of metaphors, for some us, this is an unsatisfying approach to intellectual life.

I am excited beyond words that in the end, my university chose to reward rigorous, purposeful, productive community engaged scholarship. I took a leave to serve in the Federal Government when I was told not to, published in venues that I was told wouldn't count as much, took stands in local controversies when I was told to wait until after tenure, and after amassing the first dozen or so publications I began co-authoring with my advanced students (and allowing them lead authorship!) so that they would be more viable on the job market once they finished. And in the end, it turned out just fine.

While words cannot express my gratitude to the university that signed off on the work I've done, there were also two senior colleagues, Ted Gordon and Doug Foley, who were outliers in their support for taking the stands that I felt compelled to take, and for pursuit of activities and methods that I felt most appropriate. They were, in many ways, the bridge between my work and acceptance by the academy. Words cannot capture my lifelong gratitude to them both.

Along with the wonderful feeling of relief, the congratulations from friends, and the humbling recognition of all the folk who have supported me for years, the biggest lift this gives me is that I can continue to be full-throated in my advocacy for a community engaged approach to scholarship. I can now speak, write and act not as someone who calls for others to do what he would not, but as someone who chose a path because it felt like the right thing to do and then was rewarded. Thanks UT Austin, for your support of a scholar who seeks to be defined by his community engaged intellectual work.

Austin School District Leaders Blundering through the Charter question

Austin Independent School District (AISD) is making a mess.

The school board is deciding whether to have IDEA charter take over much of the east side schooling in Austin. At their Monday 12/12/11 Board meeting, IDEA charter school friends & staff (many from out-of-town) took up seats INSIDE the already small AISD board auditorium, while directly affected parents, students and small kids from the east side were forced to stand for several hours OUTSIDE the auditorium. Meanwhile the board hemmed and hawed until 1am before punting the thing over to next week. The display was pathetic on many levels. It also told me much of what I needed to know in order to decide where to stand on this one.

There were many problematic aspects of the proposal. Here are just two: 1) the proposal on the table requires IDEA to perform at the same level or better than the current schools they would replace. If they are only required to meet the current level of mediocrity then what is the point of turning over the keys to an outside entity?; 2) The community - and by community I mean those families directly affected - is overwhelmingly against this, making the situation colonial, hell perhaps even mercantilist, in nature. An outside governing entity contracting to another entity to run the ship for $$ over the objections of the locals. Seems so much the last 500 years of global history.

Capping the whole thing was a tragic lack of Board leadership. At-large Trustee Barksdale was the lone voice grasping the big picture and asking important questions about a matter (granting the district's 1st in-district charter) that has gigantic implications for the future of AISD and the future of Austin. Trustee Moya on the other hand, did little more that grandstand as she emotively offered her logic for favoring the charter. She declared that things are bad so we have to do ... something. That's it? Yikes. Likewise, Trustee Guzman offered that, charters are coming one way or another, so we might as well get on board. Yikes again. There might be good reasons for granting charters. Those were not. Meanwhile, other Board members are backpedaling into this thing. They are refusing to act affirmatively, but rather allowing the decision to wash over them, which only means that a lot of angry parents are going to be out again next week, only to be ignored again, and only to become more angry. ... What a mess.

Amidst constant Police Surveillance, keep your house in order

I was reminded of a few things today around police surveillance and criminality. Yesterday, (Friday 3/6/10) Michael Lofton, a long-standing community activist and leader in Austin, put out a call. His e-mail offered the oft-told tail of a young black male high school student who gets into small trouble that spirals into major trouble once the police get involved.

I was immediately reminded of earlier examples of this scenario, as well as the research detailing the implications of police presence in our schools and the too-frequent criminalization of black boys in particular. The second reminder came the next day (Saturday 3/7/10), and after I had written a letter calling for research into the positive and negative impact of the police presence in central Texas schools. The reminder came in the form of a sheriff knocking on my Austin door in order to arrest me. The arrest was for failing to pay a 2008 ticket that I received for failing to wear a seatbelt. So whereas reminder one was about the prevalence and impact of police surveillance in schools, reminder two was about the need to have your house in order if you are an activist who will speak to police powers that be.

My thought is not whether my letter led to the attempt the next day to arrest me for a 2008 failure to pay a "no seat belt" ticket. Rather, my thought is that I don't need something as silly as this in the way of my trying to serve as a community resource. When you get arrested you can be embarrassed and sullied, and your work can become that much harder. I owe it to myself and others (including my kids who could have seen me arrested) to have all things personal in order when I go out to do and serve greater goods.