On Tuesday, March 18, 2025, the President’s Office and Provost’s Office jointly announced that the board of trustees will grant tenure to  seven faculty members on July 1, 2025. The awarding of tenure is the culmination of an approximately six-year tenure-track assistant professorship in which the professor’s work is scrutinized by both University faculty and external evaluators. At the end of the period, the professor under consideration is either awarded tenure or asked to leave the University faculty, making it a life-changing process.

The Argus spoke with the newly tenured group of professors about their personal backgrounds, academic focuses, and what they hope to accomplish with tenure, which grants the recipient not only a lifetime professorship at the University but also significant academic freedom.

While some professors described a life-long passion for their academic focus, others shared the challenges they faced when determining their career path. 

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Integrative Sciences Alexis May ’05 majored in Psychology and Neuroscience at Wesleyan. Despite her major, she didn’t know where her career would take her.

“After I graduated I sort of just moved to California, living on a friend’s couch and working random jobs,” May said. “But all of the jobs that I was most excited about were related to mental health. I ended up working on a suicide prevention crisis line…. I found that this was an area that I was really comfortable working in and interested in, but I was also really frustrated, because I felt like we didn’t have the science to tell us if the things we were doing on the crisis line were going to be the most effective.”

She decided to do the research herself. After earning a doctorate in clinical psychology, May completed her post-doctorate at the University of Utah, working with veterans. Since then, she has dedicated her career to studying and understanding the motivations behind suicide, receiving research grants from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and Department of Defense. 

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Integrative Sciences Kyungmi Kim, who grew up in South Korea, didn’t realize that her career would lie in academia until after college. She has, however, felt drawn to the questions psychology asks from a young age.

“My undergraduate major was not in psychology,” Kim said. “In fact, it was in French language and literature. I loved reading novels and thinking about why a certain character behaved a certain way. So I think that, even when I was young, I loved trying to understand the human mind.”

While earning her doctorate in cognitive psychology, Kim discovered her passion for the study of human memory. She made it clear that the process of identifying her career focus was neither easy nor straightforward.

“It’s fine if you know right away what you’re most passionate about, but it’s also great to explore different things, to see what excites you the most,” Kim said. “I mean, I love French literature. I might have been fine doing that, but I figured out that there were other things that I’m more passionate about.”

Early-career uncertainty is not exclusive to psychologists. Assistant Professor of Government Justin Peck, who is the sole member of his department to receive tenure this year, not only switched gears after beginning his career but also had an unusual path to tenure.

Peck, whose research focuses on congressional policymaking and checks and balances on the presidency, began his career working on Capitol Hill. 

“After college, I worked for a couple years for [former U.S. Senator (D-Conn.)] Chris Dodd,” Peck said. “I thought that I was going to make the Hill a career. But it turned out that particular form of politics was not for me.”

He left Washington, earning his doctorate in Government from the University of Virginia and changing course towards the world of academia. Peck started at the University in an unusual job for a now-tenured professor: a one-year visiting position. At the end of his year at Wesleyan, he accepted a tenure-track position at San Francisco State University. For most visiting professors, that would be the last that they’d hear from Wesleyan.

However, two years later, Peck received a call from the University.  

“I learned that the professor who I had been sort of subbing in for in my year at Wesleyan was returning home to Singapore,” Peck said. “The tenure track version of the job I had held was open. It was incredible; in this world, that is vanishingly rare.”

On the other hand, the other newly tenured professors have long held academia as a career goal. Assistant Professor of Psychology Royette Dubar grew up on the Caribbean island of Dominica, which lacked any accessible opportunities for higher education. 

“I felt like school was always my safe space, and so as a young kid, I just always thought that I was going to pursue school for as long as I could,” Dubar said. “That meant getting a Ph.D.”

However, her goal wasn’t possible if she stayed in Dominica. After winning a Caribbean-wide debate competition in high school, she was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to the University of St. Martin.

“That’s where I took my first psychology course,” Dubar said. “I already had a sense that I was interested in how individuals grow and develop and learn…[but] that first course in psychology really solidified my interest in the field.”

Dubar, who earned a doctorate in developmental psychology, began her career with the goal of becoming a clinical psychologist, but she found it difficult to diagnose and treat patients, becoming too emotionally invested in the process. Instead, she transitioned to a research-based career studying sleep, particularly in relation to adolescent and emerging adulthood developmental periods. This is now her main focus of study and the main theme across the courses that she teaches at Wesleyan.

Assistant Professor of History and Latin American Studies Valeria López Fadul described how, growing up in Colombia, she always knew that she wanted to study history.

“I always felt really attracted to history, to the stories that people tell, memory keeping practices, and oral accounts of historical knowledge,” she said. “Cartagenas, which is the city where I was born and grew up, has histories visible everywhere.”

López Fadul, who has spent much of her career studying the colonial history of Latin America and early modern Spain, didn’t always know that Latin America would be her historical focus. While earning her undergraduate degree at Yale University, she planned to focus on Near Eastern Studies. 

“I actually studied a lot of Arabic for a really long time,”López Fadul said. “I was really interested in Arabic poetry and the Arabic medieval historiographic traditions, which I find absolutely fascinating.”

She found her way back to Latin American studies as she was pursuing a graduate degree.

“I wanted to go to graduate school for history, and I thought I should do something that keeps me close to Latin America, at least in my work,” López Fadul said. “So I ended up doing Latin American history.”

In her time at Wesleyan, López Fadul has taught a wide breadth of classes, but has particularly enjoyed teaching about different philosophical approaches within the discipline of history. In January 2025, she published a book on the linguistic diversity of colonial Latin America.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Courtney Patterson-Faye, whose research has focused on the intersections of race, gender, and body size, particularly focusing on Black women, emphasized how her area of research felt unavoidable. 

“My work has been designed around the social and political construction of body size that basically impacts all of our interactions,” she said. “It impacts our interactions, how we treat people, how we publicize people, how we categorize them, how we conceptualize them, and how we even think of them.”

Patterson-Faye’s work is deeply political and focuses on multiple topics that have been consistently demonized by President Donald Trump and other members of his government.

“I am Black; I know what it means to navigate a world that was not built for me every day,” she said. “So I don’t see this current administration or political climate as anything different from what I’ve known, but it’s the intensity that bothers me.”

Nevertheless, Patterson-Faye indicated her strong resolve in the face of attempts to caricature her academic work. 

“There’s some beauty about me being a Black Studies scholar and a sociology professor at Wesleyan,” she said. “I’m in a very good space. I’ve never felt limitations [on my academic freedom]. But I’m not talking about racism, classism, misogyny—I feel those things all the time.”

Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl, who came to teach at the University after a long career working professionally in theater, described her rather unconventional career path.

“A lot of people in academia have a really specific track of graduate school, post-doctoral fellowships, get a teaching job,” Pearl said. “Whereas for me, I got my undergrad and then worked in the field for a really long time. Then I went back and got my MFA, and then I came here.”

Pearl worked in professional theater for close to 25 years and has her own theater company.

“Being a professional director coming into this job, I love using a production as a classroom,” Pearl said. “I can teach by working with students. A huge part of my pedagogy and my practice is collaborative.”

Heading into the tenured portion of her theater career, Pearl has high hopes and expectations for future Wesleyan productions. She emphasized that the theater department’s classes are open to both brand-new and experienced students and reminisced on her production of “Method Gun,” which was held during the COVID-19 pandemic via Zoom. 

“It was like a life raft for us,” Pearl said. “The weekend when we did the show, the first two Zoom shows in American theater went up. We were one of them. And because I have this professional community, all of these people from across the country attended.”

Regarding their new academic status, there was one thing that every professor mentioned: job security.

“Thinking outside of the realm of academia and in the realm of just being a person with a life and a family, the security is incredibly valuable,” May said. “It takes off the weight of uncertainty that I think follows academics for a longer period of time than some people in other careers.”

Most professors also agreed that their newly tenured status conferred significant academic freedom.

“I feel like I have permission, or maybe mandate is a better word, to really bring my work, my values, and my interests into my teaching in a way that feels more possible now than it did when I was an assistant professor,” Pearl said.

Others suggested that tenure would allow them to pursue specific projects that would have been risky as an assistant professor.

“Tenure allows you to have a little bit more flexibility to pursue other projects that might require new skills or historiographies that you need to master,” López Fadul said.

Dubar agreed that tenure not only allowed for a broader slate of future research opportunities but also served as a broad validation of the work that professors have done to date.

“I think one thing that it means to me is a sense of validation that my work is important, that my work matters, and that my research or my work makes an important contribution to the field,” she said.

May concurred with López Fadul.

“The bread and butter of the research I do isn’t going to change, but I do feel like I can pick projects that have higher risk and higher reward,” May said. “When you’re pursuing tenure, it’s like, okay, I’m gonna make sure I’m writing papers that I’m pretty confident are gonna get published. I’m gonna write grants that I think have a higher chance of hitting.” 

Nationally, the future of academic freedom under the Trump administration has increasingly been called into question. On Friday, March 7, 2025, the White House took the unprecedented step of cancelling over $400 million in research grants at Columbia University, demanding a slate of changes to University policies that critics have argued infringe significantly on the academic freedom of professors and on freedom of speech on campus.

Many of the newly tenured professors argued that, while tenure grants significant benefits and security, it also gives tenured professors a responsibility to stand up for those with less voice.

“When you’re on a tenure track, you’re sort of being evaluated,” Kim said. “You don’t know how different people’s opinions of you might potentially affect your tenure. Once you’re off that track, you can have more strength and confidence in supporting others who need help.”

Peck took particular issue with the arrests of university students who participated in pro-Palestine protests across the nation, which has recently occurred on the campuses of Columbia, Tufts University, and the University of Alabama.

“I do think it is the responsibility of the tenured faculty at a place like Columbia, or if it were happening here at a place like Wesleyan, to speak up and defend the people at these institutions that are being singled out and punished for what I think of as speech,” Peck said. “It’s the obligation of people who are in secure, comfortable positions to do what they can to defend those who don’t have that privilege.”

Sulan Bailey contributed to reporting.

Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz can be reached at mpinsofberlo@wesleyan.edu.