Today, May 24, marks my second anniversary of tenure. And I’ve got a confession. Tenure made me a worse professor.
Not worse in the “I don’t care anymore” sense. I still show up. I still teach my heart out. I still hand out pizza and rubber ducks, as if they were course materials. But something shifted during that long, grueling tenure process and hasn’t entirely returned.
The tenure process trains you to be careful. You learn to document everything, justify everything, and reflect on everything until your teaching feels more like a performance than a practice. You stop experimenting because experiments might not look great on paper. You stop taking risks because risks don’t always make for clean committee reports.
And if you’re not careful, you start teaching like someone is always watching. Because for a while, someone is.
That’s what happened to me. I slowly backed away from the version of myself who took bold swings and tried weird ideas. I started playing it safe, saying no to chaos and yes to control. I polished everything, trimmed the messy parts, and stopped leaning into the stuff that made my teaching mine.
But here’s the thing. I’m two years in now. I’ve got the stability. The security. The keys to the castle.
And I’m done playing small.
I want the pre-tenure Bruce back, who did things that made students laugh, think, and engage. The one who brought music into lessons. The one who asked, “What if?” instead of “Will this fit in my tenure binder?” The one who knew learning is supposed to be messy, unpredictable, and sometimes a little loud.
If tenure turned down your volume, I hear you. If it made you cautious, you’re not alone. But now that we’re here, we can choose how we show up again.
I’m choosing to take it back, one student, one duck, one slightly chaotic lesson at a time.
Let’s go.
Bruce Elgort 