Tenure, by Blaine L. Pardoe and Mike Baron
★★★★★
What a ride! Tenure by Blaine Pardoe and Mike Baron was a lot of fun. It's a revenge fantasy – Death Wish in the Age of Wokeness. Braxton Knox, a not-yet-tenured university professor of history is fired and cancelled after a female student accuses him of bigotry and homophobia after he had used the wrong pronoun, calling her "Miss." She preferred "they/them" as her "personal pronouns."
Braxton is a working-class university professor – a one-time Army veteran that served in Afghanistan, he used the GI Bill for college and eventually became a history professor. He is politically conservative, more or less, but he keeps it out of the classroom and focuses on teaching the materials at hand.
After he is fired, it isn't the end for Braxton's troubles. Antifa targets him further to make an example out of him. His wife is run off the road and killed. His house is "swatted" and his daughter killed in her bed by trigger-happy FBI agents.
At this point, Braxton turns from a mild-mannered university professor into Death Wish's Paul Kersey, an architect who's wife and daughter are attacked and his wife murdered by petty thugs in a 1970s crime-ridden Chicago. Kersey (played by Charles Bronson) hunts down the killers one-by-one while the Chicago Police are ineffectual and scramble to catch the vigilante. The franchise continues in Los Angeles in Death Wish II, where his traumatized daughter is raped and murdered, and on to further iterations where friends, girlfriends, and families of friends are all victims of petty thugs or organized crime.
Kersey is re-cast as a doctor in the 2018 remake featuring Bruce Willis.
In Pardoe and Baron's telling, Kersey – er, Braxton Knox – is a university professor that suffers a similar fate and, like Kersey, goes on a spree of vigilante justice. He hunts down the Antifa killers one by one, but he doesn't stop there. He also brings justice down on cowardice university administrators that kowtowed to the student's demands and fired him rather than defending his rights to free speech, freedom from compelled speech, and the like. The very last 'victim' of his justice is the student that kicked the whole thing off by leveling accusations against him in the first place and contacting Antifa.
I should come clean and confess that I am a university professor (and a veteran to boot). Hahaha. And so, I was immediately sucked in and was rooting for Braxton. (Come on, give me a break – it's fiction!). I am definitely more left-leaning than the authors, but I am not blind to the excesses of the extreme left. The absurdities of their thoughts and behaviors in Tenure were hilarious. The first third of the book leaned nicely into the recent humorously fun and over-the-top Nobody films starring Breaking Bad's Bob Odenkirk. The villains were caricatures and I looked forward to their demise at the hands of Braxton and his friends.
The book ends with a bit of a partisan screed against the left – but it sets up a continuation of the story. Like Death Wish and Nobody, Tenure is primed for a long-running series. I am hoping that Pardoe and Baron lean more into the humorous aspects of Tenure that hooked me at the start.
- Mark James