Report of the Tenure Committee of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Regarding The Tenure Application of Minerva McGonagall

Dear Headmaster Dumbledore,

It is with great satisfaction that we submit to you this report regarding the tenure application of Professor Minerva McGonagall. We recommend that she be granted tenure, although, as you will see further on in this parchment, we have several reservations.

This report proceeds by outlining the five areas in which Professor McGonagall’s application was evaluated: Education, Scholarship, Teaching, Service to Hogwarts, and Service to the Wizarding World. As you will see, her record is adequate in all areas, though stronger in some than in others. Where we see deficiency, we have noted it, and wherever possible we have given you guidance for how you might continue to mentor Professor McGonagall into the ideal of a Hogwarts professor, set by so many eminent wizards before her.

Education

As you know, Professor McGonagall received her education at Hogwarts (1947–1954). Some premonition of her unique talents came in the fall of 1947 during the sorting ceremony; surely you remember, as we on the committee do, that young Minerva was a hatstall. Ultimately, she was sorted into Gryffindor, although the Sorting Hat was not wrong: she would have made an excellent Ravenclaw. This protracted deliberation proved prophetic; as a student at Hogwarts she received excellent marks, particularly in your Transfiguration classes, and she has always exhibited a prodigious boldness.

McGonagall achieved nearly all that could be achieved as a student at Hogwarts. She received numerous top marks on her N.E.W.T. and O.W.L. examinations, played for her house Quidditch team, served as Prefect, and in her seventh year she was named Head Girl. Under your tutelage, McGonagall achieved the rare feat of becoming an animagus, able to transform herself into a tabby cat. For this and other accomplishments, McGonagall received the Most Promising Newcomer award from Transfiguration Today. This is indeed a high honor, although she has not gone on to receive the Most Outstanding Transfiguration Practitioner award, or even the award for exemplary contributions to field of Transfiguration given by the International Confederation of Wizards, as might have been expected of someone on her trajectory.

All of us on the Tenure Committee had the pleasure of teaching her in our own classes. (Professor Beery never tired of remembering the story of McGonagall’s dislike for the Venemous Tentacula in his Herbology classes). But there is some cause for concern in her training. At an institution such as Hogwarts, diversity of perspective among the faculty is of the utmost importance, and we worry that Professor McGonagall’s career has been distinguished insufficiently from your own. She was your student, and it was you who taught her most of what she knows about Transfiguration. Her early career was spent in your shadow, as the junior member of your own department. We worry that Professor McGonagall is simply a duplication of you — that she has not and cannot carry the field of Transfiguration beyond replicating your own skills. We have one Dumbledore at Hogwarts; do we need two?

Scholarship

Relatedly, we wonder what Professor McGonagall has achieved beyond that which she accomplished during her years as a student at Hogwarts. Becoming an animagus is impressive, to be sure, but what has she done since? Tenured members of the Hogwarts faculty should be pushing the boundaries of their disciplines; they should be magical innovators, and not simply tradents for old knowledge. Since only one professor per department may hold tenure, would not Hogwarts have been better served by hiring a more senior Wizard, and allowing Professor McGonagall to continue on in the junior role? The junior position might have suited her better in the long run. What shall become of her career, and more alarmingly the reputation of Hogwarts, if Professor McGonagall decides to marry and have children? This is no doubt why Hogwarts has seldom employed witches: their attentions will be divided by the calls of home, hearth, and motherhood. The reviewers from Durmstrang and Ilivermorny raised similar concerns (though the reviewer from Beauxbatons did not). It was on the strength of your recommendation that we overlooked this deficiency.

Professor McGonagall submitted as part of her tenure file three columns written for the Daily Prophet, two articles for Transfiguration Today, and a proposal to compose a textbook to replace Emeric Switch’s excellent but increasingly outdated A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration. In our opinion, only the articles have any bearing on this tenure application. The columns for the Daily Prophet are fine — one delves into some important matters relating to switching spells — but they are not works of magical scholarship. Anything written for a popular newspaper by definition falls below the standards of publication expected of Hogwarts faculty; if it is written to be understood by the common witch or wizard, it is not scholarly. Likewise the book proposal cannot be considered here. A witch may propose anything she likes, but until the book has been printed, bound, and entered into the Hogwarts library, we ought to consider it nothing more than a whim. Even then, until it has found the same enduring value as Switch’s textbook, it is simply a maintenance of the status quo, and not a new contribution to knowledge. The impulse to compose a textbook at all surfaces the alarming possibility that Professor McGonagall is more interested in the teaching of Transfiguration than in advancing the field itself.

The two articles for Transfiguration Today are the most promising of Professor McGonagall’s publications. The first of these, “Technical Matters Pertaining to Vanishing Spells,” is an excellent contribution to the field. The second article seems less relevant; “Metamorphmagus and Animagus: Commonalities and Misunderstandings” is a questionable work of comparison. Some might ask whether metamorphmagus transformations belong to the category of Transfiguration at all, since the ability is congenital and not learned. This was highlighted by the external reviewer from Durmstrang, who wondered whether metamorphmagus transformations are proper magic, and whether Professor McGonagall was giving a veneer of respectability to an illicit or at least unseemly form of magic through her article.

Professor McGonagall has excelled in her service to Hogwarts, taking on many duties related to running the school. While this is helpful, we fear that it might reveal a lack of scholarly interest or aptitude. That Professor McGonagall has spent so much time organizing holiday faculty socials, handling disciplinary actions, and offering tutoring for students of Gryffindor house is all well and good. But doing these things while the book proposal languishes and she coasts on the reputation she earned in her school days is alarming.

Teaching

The Tenure Committee is of two minds about the teaching record of Professor McGonagall. Some members, in agreement with one of the reviewers, understand her teaching to be of sufficient quality, and perhaps even marked by exemplary use of classroom discipline. Others on the committee, however, and a plurality of the external reviewers, saw Professor McGonagall’s classroom techniques as too practical, relying too heavily on flashy demonstrations and wands-out exercises. Some would prefer a more theoretical approach to Transfiguration, with students acquiring a thorough understanding of molecular transformation before attempting McGonagall’s famous first-year assignment, the match-to-needle exercise, for which first-year students are often intellectually unprepared.

One thing that all members of the committee and all outside reviewers agreed on is that Professor McGonagall commands respect from her students in the classroom. Committee member Professor Cuthbert Binns took advantage of his status as a ghost to secretly observe Professor McGonagall’s teaching of a sixth-year conjuring lesson. From his perch in the shadows high in the rafters of the classroom, Professor Binns noted that Professor McGonagall had complete control of the room at all times, although the lesson included more frivolity than he would have expected. The choice of Dungbombs as the item to be conjured was, perhaps, regrettable, and the eagerness with which students later recounted this lesson underscores that while they remembered the lesson itself, they might not have grasped the serious theoretical underpinnings upon which conjuring rests. While her student evaluations note her strictness in class, they also dwell on these practical exercises as particularly memorable experiences. (In their evaluations, students also commented on McGonagall’s constant choice of unbecoming drab robes). We wonder whether it is to the detriment of their understanding of theories of conjuring for students to spend so much time on the conjuring itself. This sentiment was expressed strongly and with unusual clarity in the evaluation of one particular fifth-year witch, Miss Umbridge, who noted that she saw no reason why she should need to bring her wand to a Transfiguration class at all. We quite agree.

Service to Hogwarts

Professor McGonagall has acquired heavy administrative duties during her ten years at Hogwarts. As noted above, this is alarming, and it causes some to question the seriousness of her commitment to scholarship. It does, however, make for an impressive record of service to Hogwarts.

The first instance of Professor McGonagall’s accumulation of administrative duties came in her second year on the faculty, when her dissatisfaction with the scheduling of Quidditch matches led her to ask Headmaster Dippett whether she could take it over. As she wrote in her narrative self-report for that academic year:

I grew weary of waiting for the schedule to be released, only to find that it was hopelessly riddled with conflicts and gaps. I decided that rather than waiting on my colleague, I would simply ask whether I could do it myself.

This has emerged as a pattern in Professor McGonagall’s time at Hogwarts; frequently she identifies inefficiencies in the institution and takes on the work for herself; her reforms to the house elf staff have been splendid. This has been a boon to the wizards whose administrative burdens she has relieved; it has freed some of us on this committee to focus more carefully on our scholarship. But these divergences from her academic work, however welcome, are alarming in the context of Professor McGonagall’s sub-par publishing record.

One reviewer wondered — and the Committee cannot help but ask as well — whether this propensity to take on administrative tasks, combined with her stalled scholarly agenda, isn’t evidence that her true ambitions lie in administration. Wouldn’t Professor McGonagall be happier in a more practical role at Hogwarts, where there are lower expectations for publication and where her affection for practical tasks might be indulged? In her own words, Professor McGonagall describes this accumulation of ancillary tasks as a case of “wherever I see the need, I pitch in to help the school operate smoothly.” But questions remain about her commitment to innovating in the field of Transfiguration, and she has failed to reach the renown held by you, her predecessor as Head of Department.

This Tenure Committee exhorts the Headmaster to curb her dalliances in administrative work, and to encourage her to devote herself to tasks more suitable for Hogwarts faculty. We do, however, recommend allowing her to continue setting the Quidditch schedule, as even Professor Binns cannot remember it running so smoothly in more than a century at Hogwarts.

Service to the Wizarding World

If Professor McGonagall has embraced the tasks of administration at Hogwarts, she has been alarmingly absent from view in the broader Wizarding World. Aside from her occasional columns in the Daily Prophet, Professor McGonagall has not been a regular fixture in wizarding society, and certainly not among the magical public’s intellectual leaders.

We wonder whether this is a healthy state of affairs for Hogwarts’ reputation. Our faculty have always included renowned wizards, sought after for their expertise and skill. How does it look to have a witch on the faculty, and a tenured Head of Department at that, who does not regularly testify before the Wizengamot, attend the events of the Department of Magical Games and Sports, or get contacted for interviews on the Wizarding Wireless Network? Potions Master Slughorn humbly notes being asked for wireless interviews seven times this academic year already; why then has Professor McGonagall not reached similar prominence?

This leads us to a question that runs throughout our report: whether Professor McGonagall has her priorities inverted. She privileges practical teaching of students and administrative work, but Hogwarts is used to seeing its wizards as leaders in their fields, authorities in the broader public, and figures of broad relevance. Whether and how Minerva McGonagall fits that pattern remains to be seen.

Concluding Remarks

The Tenure Committee votes unanimously to recommend tenure for Professor McGonagall and promotion to Head of Department. We do so, however, with the reservations outlined above. We believe that Professor McGonagall is a talented witch, an effective teacher, and an asset to the institutional life of Hogwarts. We are not as certain that she has a robust publication agenda, or that she has the appetite to be a public figure in the broader wizarding world.

Overall, however, our opinion of Professor McGonagall is positive. She has proven herself a valuable member of the Hogwarts community, and her talent is undeniable. If she can seize on the achievement of tenure, and use it as a platform from which to strengthen her academic work and rid herself of as many administrative tasks as possible, then she might yet find a prominent place in the wizarding world.

Eric C. Smith is Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity and New Testament Studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. He is the author of Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Jewish Glass and Christian Stone: A Materialist Mapping of the Parting of the Ways (Routledge, forthcoming). He was sorted into Ravenclaw, but would have been a superb Hufflepuff.