Tenure

The long and the short of it is that after moving to Charlottesville, Virginia almost 7 years ago, with four children under the age of six, in hopes of reaching the goal of academic tenure - that moment has finally arrived.  On Tuesday of this past week Jared received an unscheduled knock on his door by the Dean of the Darden School, Bob Bruner, to inform Jared that he had indeed been recommended for tenure!  We were all beyond thrilled and full of relief.  As Gavin put it, "I can now take that off my worry-wort list"!  Jonah wonders if this means we can get a barn and some longhorn cattle.  I can only describe my resulting feelings as a heightened sense of permanence.  For our entire marriage in the back of my mind I always knew we'd be moving on at some point and for the first time I feel completely settled.  I love Charlottesville, always have, and cannot be more excited that I get to stay in this place that every day feels more and more like my final home, or at least my home for the indefinite, foreseeable future.  I would be happy to raise my children here, grow old with Jared here, and scatter my ashes here when all is said and done.  We all feel very blessed.  Below is a not-so-quick description of what "getting to tenure" means that will likely get boring for some, but I need it written for record keeping's sake.  Bear with me if you continue:

In 1997, after Jared and I got married in May and honeymooned for most of June and July in UT, CA, CO, OR, and AZ, we moved to Portland, Oregon where he would start at Coopers & Lybrand (one of the 'big 6' firms) as a tax accountant and I would start my year long dietetic internship at Oregon Health Sciences University.  We lived in the Hawthorne District of SE Portland, one block off of Hawthorne Boulevard, right behind a Safeway parking lot, where a glance out our window would let us know how much time we had until we needed to grab the next bus into the city to make it on time to our respective jobs.  But it was here, in that little 500 square foot apartment, that the quest for Tenure all began, though we just didn't know it yet.

I have a clear memory of sitting around our little oak dining table in our tiny dining nook, with plants growing in the corners on small stands and our hand-me-down furniture from Jared's parents' recent move nearly butting up to the dining table chairs.  Jared reported over dinner that he had called an old professor at Ricks College to talk to him about what it would take to become a professor.  What!?  We hadn't really even settled into our new life in this new city with our new careers, and even though we were pathetically attached to each other and the 8-10 hour days apart were painfully long, I never dreamed we'd be having this conversation.  Now Jared is one of the most optimistic people I know.  But this new job as a tax consultant in a professional environment that rewarded (and at times expected) 70-90 billable hour work weeks and looked down upon taking Sundays off,  was not was he was hoping to pursue for the long haul, despite his bosses giving him the "fast track to partner" green light.  After two years of "associate" work, a merger with Price Waterhouse, a move into our first house on 67th Avenue SE, and a baby coming, he seized an opportunity to switch firms and tried his hand in a specialty consulting area (R & D tax credits) at the slightly-smaller Grant Thornton, and again quickly became a rising star.  The grind-it-out mandatory hours were gone, but the traveling started and although exciting at first (Jared loves discovering new places) it got tiresome and he had the chance to pursue a different adventure: a move out to the East Coast, with me and baby Caleb in tow, to try his hand at an exciting high tech start-up company as their finance guy (www.vecna.com).  This too was a  great opportunity, and an opportunity to work closely with some terrific people.  But throughout all of these ventures, in the back of his mind, was this nagging thought of being a professor, something we talked about periodically after that first conversation in our first tiny little Hawthorne Boulevard apartment.  He felt being a professor would be an ideal fit for what he loved doing: reading, reasoning, writing and teaching and being able to be more self-directive with his time.

What was clear to him was that he didn't want another degree in accounting being that he already had his Masters and Bachelor's in that area, so the question was: what to study for the PhD?  Someone (I think maybe his brother Jason, who was also thinking about academia as a career) suggested that a better plan might be whatever his favorite class was when he was at BYU.  Turns out the answer to that question was easy: Business Ethics at the Marriott School of Management.  So Jared figured, why not try his hand in that area?  So the GMAT was taken and he surprised himself with a terrific score.  Applications were sent off and he received offers from the Darden School of Business at UVA, the University of  Washington, and the University of Minnesota's Carlson School.  All three were great offers, but they varied widely in how they would prepare Jared.  When we traveled to Charlottesville from our home in Maryland, where we were living at the time working for the start-up, we fell in love with Charlottesville.  Looking back, I'm not sure what the exact draw was: maybe the smallness compared to the DC area, the beauty of all the forested hills which reminded us of Portland, the more easy-going nature of the people, I really don't know.  But there was a feeling we both had and couldn't shake:  we loved Charlottesville and wanted to live here, would love to raise our family here.  We then made a decision to accept the offer from U of MN primarily because it seemed the best fit of the programs for Jared's PhD training, but also to in some small way to preserve the possibility of being able to come to Darden on a permanent basis after the PhD (a possibility that would likely not happen if he were trained there, as most schools don't hire their own PhD grads).  The bottom line is that it was a gamble, as there was absolutely no way of knowing if there would be a position here when Jared finished his PhD, but we took the bet anyway.

So off to the midwest we went, two kids in tow... Liam (2 months old) Caleb (2 years old), and made a home in the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota.  Amazingly, Jared picked the house to buy without me when Liam was 2 weeks old, and we ended up in the northern Twin Cities suburb of Brooklyn Park, in a ward I served in as a missionary!   I got to rekindle friendships and build upon relationships with great people I taught and saw baptized years earlier.  I was thrilled for this reason alone, but was also very happy to watch Jared's eyes - that have always twinkled - get even brighter; he was in his true element!  It was here in MN that we made a poverty level of income, benefitted from state welfare programs gratefully, had two more boys, yet never seemed to feel pinched for things we wanted as we found great joy in the simpleness of life and made do with what we had.  Now, like every one of his other pursuits, Jared excelled in the program and we walked away with a PhD in 4 years....a year faster than most of his colleagues, and amazingly enough, headed to our dream job at Darden.  We pinched ourselves many times at the thought of being where we had only dared dream of those few years earlier.

UMN PhD Graduation with Norm Bowie, one of his advisors

Darden brought with it some more great opportunities for Jared to excel and he did just that.  He was a great teacher, prolific publisher and co-author, and someone the school looked to for extra projects.  We were feeling pretty good about getting a positive outcome when it came to tenure time.  But then we had a very dear friend who was also a professor and up for tenure and he came up short.  In a matter of hours I felt like Jared realized that this too could be our outcome and we were not sure we were up for such a decision.  He was out of the house in the 5am hour that next Monday and this became his daily routine that continued for the next two years.  Now to be clear, adding the 5am start time just pushed his efforts into the extreme level of exertion as he was already spending about 10 hours every day at the office.  Now, for those who might think this sounds like a familiar tune....busy life....getting to a better place in the career ladder... concerned about all the what-ifs - - you are right, this is exactly how we felt, and there were times when I felt I really couldn't take the intensity of it all much longer.  There were moments - and thank goodness it wasn't continual - when our relationship, our marriage, our capacity to keep going was pushed to the extremes and we both felt like we were hanging by a thread.  There were days and days that would go by and the kids would not see Jared because he left before they woke and got home after they were in bed.  There were times when the stress was so intense, the burdens so heavy, that simple conversations could not be had, tempers were quick, tongues were sharp.  These were hard times, but times I would not trade back as I feel that Jared and I have become that much closer to becoming one, and for this I'm eternally grateful.

In action at Darden 

So it's been long road since that dinner-table conversation as newlyweds in 1997.  And specifically, the last ten years (literally, no pun) have been filled with experiences from all extremes and everything in the middle.  Yet in the midst of a hectic life we have managed to create great memories that are highlighted in our yearly Holiday letter and in my written journals.  Life has been good for us and we feel deeply of the love God has for us and appreciative of the guidance we have received over the years.  We are where we are supposed to be, doing what we are supposed to do and living the life we are intended to live.  And we've had fun!  We've had many great adventures together, had time to serve in church callings and coach some of the boys' sports teams and go to the beach and take road trips and camp in the mountains and visit foreign countries and see lots of school plays, and play lots of board games,  and launch model rockets and laugh together.  I would be remiss if I did not thank Jared for all of the Herculean effort he has made in creating a wonderful life for myself and the boys, all while accomplishing this great professional feat of earning tenure at a top university.  Jared is a doer, and a finisher and I am in love with him!

Here is a a snippet from Jared's journal:

"One thing is clear: this is a massively difficult career path, and the risks and uncertainties can be overwhelming.  I feel tremendously blessed that things have worked out so favorably, given how strongly the odds are stacked against success.  I'm so grateful to have been watched over and guided and upheld - not only from the heavens but from Jodi and the boys.  So many people to thank!  Great advisors at Minnesota, terrific mentors at Darden, wonderful co-authors and colleagues, faithful supporters of all stripes.  Folks not in the profession will never understand how unbelievably difficult it is, for example, to simply publish one paper in a top journal - it's truly excruciatingly difficult.  But it's not just a decade of fighting with referees to publish this particular paper or that; there were so many stressful steps along the way, starting at the very beginning: getting accepted into a good program, making the right choice, passing comprehensive exams (the summer Gavin was born), passing dissertation proposal defense, competing in competitions and winning a few awards for my work, being recognized by the field at various conferences, venturing onto the job market (the year Jonah was born), interviewing, passing final dissertation defense, starting a new demanding job in a high-intensity environment like Darden's, successfully navigating re-appointment at the 3-year mark, and then - after all that - crossing the final evaluative hurdle of the tenure review.  Ten years in the making, to get to this point!  And at so many of those milestones, there were so many opportunities to get derailed, or fall short, or somehow divert a successful trajectory.  It's not a high percentage career path.  No wonder meeting with the Dean in my office on Tuesday was like having an outer-body experience.  (Am I really having this conversation?)  There is so much pressure at every step of the way, and it's so easy to miss a target or swing and miss - and after all that, after all these years of toil and labor and reading and writing and teaching, after all the countless early morning hours and late nights, after all the classes taught and papers rejected and papers accepted, after all these years of being supported and upheld by Jodi and watched over by Heavenly Father, one short conversation to tell me I've finally arrived."

So now ... we've arrived.