Yet Berube and Ruth view these non-research positions as requiring a doctorate, arguing that it is the appropriate credential for
tenurable members of the profession.
The demographics of the professional respondents are consistent with what others (Healy, 1995; Ervin, 2002; Geller & Denny, 2013) have reported as the general makeup of the writing center profession: primarily tenured or
tenurable writing center directors as well as directors with administrative staff positions, mostly from departments of English, writing, composition/rhetoric, and other humanities.
Students of academic life express this decline quantitatively, citing shrinking enrollments in history courses, the disappearance of required history courses in university curricula, and the loss of
tenurable faculty positions in all history-related areas.
Feminists moved between universities, often contract teaching at several universities before landing
tenurable positions, and we would meet up at the same functions and public lectures.
Priests in New Spain or New Granada found themselves outside the usual ecclesiastical hierarchy as far as preferment was concerned, for all
tenurable appointments required the direct approval of the crown, whether for a bishopric or for a mere half-prebend.
In many departments, NTT faculty operate largely outside the collective reckoning of the tenured and
tenurable, their abstracted presence recognized only during times of personnel reviews and budget cuts.
Just short of that, it devoted its
tenurable, monomaniacal labors to the repetition of two bulletable and unprecedented points: first, to demonstrating that society could definitively shift in a single flicker from civilization to barbarism, as if the difference between the two were nothing more than the angle at which the same artifact were tilted under the light, one way and then the other; and second, to demonstrating that those who stood closest to this drastic flickering, who even pulled the levers, turned the dials, and watched it happen right there in the streets, would afterward insist, "We never saw a thing." "Who could be positive?" "Our hands were roped to the galley oars, and we were pulling with all our might, heads down." "Don't you see?
People who write about higher education agree that such teachers continue to be overworked, underpaid, and often egregiously deceived into staying on by the vain hope that someday they can become regular,
tenurable faculty members.
An Australian study by Allen and Castleman (2001:161) challenges this argument in finding that even for faculty under age 30 and accounting for length of service, men were more likely to hold senior positions, already have tenure, and hold a
tenurable position.
Might anger be blocked in the present moment not only because it isn't nice, or
tenurable, but also because it feels dishonest to continue protesting when "we" are better off than we were, while others are less well off than "we" are now?