Tenure Track

Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow. Within one minute, five gunshots destroy the idyllic existence of a public college campus. After a female student kills her lover/professor, two students, and herself in front of a packed classroom-an event that becomes known as "Bloody Valentine's Day," the university responds by instituting a strict prohibition against student-faculty relations. Three years later, History Department Chair Jane Roardan finds that Lewis Burns, a young History professor up for tenure, is accused of having an affair with politically-connected undergrad Mandy Taylor. Administrators assign Jane to handle the matter and minimize damage to the school. While trying to uncover the truth about Lewis, Jane must deal with her own well-hidden indiscretions as well as fears that her teenage daughter may be the victim of a predatory teacher. By the time the story concludes, both historians realize that in order to properly deal with the present and set a new course for the future, each must come to terms with their own past mistakes. Tenure Track deals with current issues such as sexual harassment, professional ethics, responses to campus violence, and the differences between perceptions and realities of the past; but ultimately, it is a story about personal relationships among family, friends, and colleagues within the world unto itself called a university. Like stepping onto a real college campus for the first time, readers will be introduced to myriad characters, some of whom turn out to be very different from first impressions, whose smart, witty banter camouflage all-too-human weaknesses. This is the book professors DON'T want you to read

The author is a History Ph.D. and award-winning writer who lives in Austin, Texas. She has studied and taught at numerous institutions of higher education, ranging from the Ivy Leagues to community colleges.