Tenure!

I’m thrilled to announce that my application for tenure and promotion to associate professor at Manhattanville University has been approved effective July 1, 2026! While this required quite a lot of hard work and determination, it also took a lot of assistance, luck, and privilege.

Far more often than not during my academic career, I have received wonderful support from family, friends, classmates, colleagues, mentors, and administrators. That support has been invaluable and irreplaceable. Thanks to all of you for helping me along the way.

To end up at a place like Manhattanville that values the study of sport and is geographically located in a region where I am happy to live has been a wonderful stroke of luck. Even though tenure certainly does not mean what it used to, to be at an institution with tenure and to be in a state where the concept of tenure is not under direct attack has been beyond fortuitous. I am very lucky.

I am privileged to have the education I have and the financial support from my family that allowed me to pursue graduate school and then search for full-time academic employment while working as an underpaid adjunct. I also know that I cannot fully calculate just how beneficial it has been at every stage of this process to match the identity of what many people think of as the stereotypical professor—straight, white, and male—let alone the expected identity of someone who studies sports.

Lastly, there are so many people whose paths have crossed with mine who are at least as smart, insightful, and hard working—both as scholars and teachers—as I am (if not more so), but for a variety of reasons they did not end up on an academic path that led to tenure. While I’m proud of myself, I am also sad that academia and society has lost out on at least some of the contribution they could have made had they not been pushed out, or pushed to opt out, of working in higher education.

Thanks to everyone and I promise to pay forward the support I have received.