'Put on a Happy Face': Tenure, Grievance, and Governance

This paper examines the processes of tenure denial and appeal from the standpoint of the author, who has been the Grievance Chair at Carleton University since 2000. The focus is on the ways that the grievance process as textually mediated provides for regulation and control over the forms of interaction between appellants and senior administration. The paper provides an ethnography of grievance work during the appeal process, to advance our understanding of ways that participants to the process deploy texts to produce accountable institutional orders. Further, by examining the ways that senior administrators justify their decision to deny faculty tenure, we can glimpse the emerging dynamics of inter-university competition for students, research funding, and prestige. It is argued that the decisions of senior administrators to use tenure denials, as a means to remake the university, not only threaten faculty, but threaten the integrity of the university mission. (Contains 1 table and 10 footnotes.)