Introductory Survey Textbook Denied Tenure Following Decision to Use 'Too Many Active Verbs'

"You used 'shattered' four times in one chapter, and three of them were the subject doing something," said Dr. Verna Ashby, chair of the department's prose subcommittee, reading from a marked-up galley with the flat tone of a coroner.

The textbook in question, An Introduction to What Happened (Bramble & Fell, fourth edition, 611 pages), was denied tenure Thursday by a department that does not, in any ordinary sense, award tenure to books. The distinction occupied the first forty minutes of the meeting. Professor Emmet Sarles, who proposed the motion, argued that the department had in practice been reviewing the volume for three years, via the seminar that assigns it, the students who underline it, and the visiting committee that called it "refreshingly legible."

"Refreshingly legible is not a compliment in a history department," Sarles said. "It's a diagnosis."

The prose subcommittee's report runs nine pages. Its central finding: the textbook's active construction collapses the distance between the historian and the event. Chapter eleven, on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, states that "Cromwell's commissioners arrived and began cataloguing." The report's preferred construction: "It has been observed by this work that commissioners were, in the period under review, in attendance, and that a process of cataloguing was undertaken."

"The passive voice is the discipline's seatbelt," Ashby said. "It tells the reader that the past happened to people, not that people did things on purpose, and certainly not that a textbook did them."

The report acknowledges, in footnote fourteen, that the textbook's readability metrics are the highest of any title on the reading list, and that first-year pass rates rose two years after adoption. Footnote fourteen then states that neither observation bears on the question of tenure.

Students circulated a petition noting that the fourth edition is the first one they have finished. Dr. Holloway, a graduate instructor who teaches the survey, collected the signatures in a composition book and reported the total to the committee. The committee thanked her for the record and asked whether the petitioners had read footnote fourteen.

"They had," Holloway said. "They'd underlined it."

Not everyone on the committee agreed with the denial. Dr. Marrow, the department's archivist, entered a dissenting note into the minutes pointing out that the third edition, the passive one, was withdrawn from the survey in 2019 after two sections independently described the Congress of Vienna as "a thing which occurred." Her note observes that the department has now rejected both constructions in sequence, and asks that the record show this. The motion carried, 11–4, with three abstentions recorded as "pending review of footnote fourteen."

Bramble & Fell's acquiring editor declined to revise the manuscript. "We asked what would satisfy the committee," she said. "They sent back a paragraph. It took me two passes to find the verb."

Dr. Sarles, asked afterward whether the decision would affect the textbook's adoption, said the department's role was to safeguard standards, not outcomes. He then noted that he had cited the committee's own report rather than common sense, and that the report's section on evidentiary standards is on page six.

The textbook remains assigned for the spring term. The committee has asked the publisher to add a preface clarifying that the active verbs do not represent the department's position.

Edda's Rulebook Margin: a tenure standard that reverses itself between editions is not a standard; it is a preference with a footnote. We retire the claim that prose style measures historical distance, because the evidence changed when the department adopted the readable edition and pass rates rose. The finding, pending review of footnote fourteen, stands.