You need how many letters to prove you should get tenure?!

Many academics badly underestimate how much diversity there is in how universities do business. This includes me. Because I was caught flat-footed by a new paper that examines a common part of the tenure process for academics.

When someone is going up for tenure and promotion, it’s common to ask people from outside the university to write a letter describing how this person fits into the research community. These external letters can be a good safety valve to prevent a department from glossing over problems with one of their faculty.

When I was at UTRGV, the “external letter” requirement was just getting implemented. One of the key factors was how many letters to ask for. Speaking at a panel this week in DC, someone mentioned the practice, and talked about the difficulty in getting “three letters.”

Three letters turns out to be on the low end of the task. The most common minimum number of letters was five.

Some universities require a minimum – I say again, a minimum – of ten external letters.

All I can think of is, “How insecure do you have to be in your decision to hire someone that you need external validation from ten other people?”

References 

Hannon L, Bergey M. Policy variation in the external evaluation of research for tenure at U.S. universities. Research Evaluation: rvae018. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvae018

Texas in lead to be first state to eliminate tenure

The Texas senate passed Senate Bill 18 a couple of days ago. If approved, the law would eliminate tenure in Texas public universities starting fall of 2024.

This is deeply disappointing. Both the bill itself and the weirdly limited reaction from higher ed. Higher ed leaders should be on every news channel, every talk show, writing op eds about why tenure is valuable. The response is nowhere near what it needs to be.

Is the loss of tenure on par with states that are allowing kids to work in factories again? No. But it’s part of the same small minded and regressive mentality.

Anyway, you can check the progress of the Texas bill on the Texas Legislature website.

Related posts

Tenure in US higher education is under threat, and I’m not sure it can be saved

Tenure in US higher education is under threat, and I’m not sure it can be saved

Texas, where I used to work, is considering legislation that would end tenure in its universities.

Needless to say, I think this is a horrible idea. Texas already had post-tenure review (every five years). I know, I went through it.

As much as I am concerned about the legislation, I am even more concerned about the apparent lack of reaction to it. This should be the five alarm fire for American higher education, all hands on deck emergency type of reaction. And I’m not seeing that.

How did we get here? I’ve long has a suspicion that tenure was becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack because the job market for academics has been so tight for so long. When I’ve seen moves to curtail tenure, universities usual response is, “We won’t be able to attract talent, people won’t come to a place without tenure.”

Well, when the educational system has been churning out far more qualified candidates than jobs for decades, that threat rings hollow. A lot of people will take their chances at a job without tenure, because people have to eat and people want to work in the fields they trained to work in.

I hope these bills will die in committee, as many do. But I’m not feeling optimistic.

External links

A Texas trilogy of anti-DEI, tenure bills

New Texas bill would end tenure for college faculty

How Republicans’ threats to tenure and diversity might undercut their own efforts to advance Texas’ universities

Tenure was already in decline. Now some Republicans want it gone from colleges for good.

New beginnings

Today is my last day as a tenured full professor at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

This is going to be a tough post to write.

Since starting at The University of Texas Pan-American, I’ve made no secret to people here that I would love a reason to move back to Canada. But it’s always been a low-level, “Wouldn’t it be nice if...?” wish. I had been looking and occasionally applying for years.

But this year, a new word kept forming in my head:

“Flee.”

I kept wondering throughout the summer, “Is it time to go, regardless of the job I have now?” At one point, I took out a lot of cash from my bank account in case I needed to leave immediately. The sort of money that many people call the “Fuck you” fund in case they have to leave an abusive partner. Things have felt that bad.

Living in the United States in 2020 has broken my belief in this country. 

And I don’t think an election and a vaccine is going to fix it.

It’s not just that the current administration is awful (though it surely is). It’s how so many people have embraced the awfulness. It’s about how the US can’t address its chronic problems. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create these problems but it sure as hell threw them into sharp relief.

Over at the Better Posters blog, I’ve been compiling pictures of 2020 events in the United States. They are probably more powerful than anything I might write. 

I accepted a new position at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. And doing so was the most brutal professional decision of my life. That is the only word I have to describe the decision. Brutal. There was some crying on the couch with me holding my wife in one arm and my dog in the other arm.

Giving up a tenured professorship? I mean, that is the thing that you are just not supposed to do. I like being a professor. I like doing research. I still have questions about those sand crabs and crayfish that I want to answer. It hurts to think that for all I know, I’ll never be able to hold one of those little Lepidopa in my hands again. I like my department colleagues. I like the students I work with.

But this job offer seemed to come at a “now or never” moment. Between taking the time to focus writing the Better Posters book, followed by a global COVID-19 pandemic making both field and lab research difficult, my biological data collection had practically ground to a halt. It looks like 2020 may be the first year in well over a decade that I haven’t published something. I’m not abandoning projects in mid-stream. I don’t have any graduate students who are counting on me to finish their degree. No mortgage I’m stuck with.

McMaster is teaching remotely this semester, so I will still be in Texas for a while at least. But the plan is to move back to Canada. I am anticipating massive reverse culture shock. I know that Canada is not perfect, but Canada at least looks like functioning democracy and not like a collapsing empire.

I am not sure what this move will mean for me professionally. But I am convinced that this move will result in a better quality of life for me, my wife, and family. I want to look after myself and them. This is not just me wanting to move home.

But I am not kidding myself. There is a big leap of faith here. And in any leap of faith, you have to ask what do you believe? Do I believe I am smart enough and hard working enough and resilient enough to make this okay for me, my wife, and family?

Leaps of faith are scary.

As I mentioned a while ago, I have recently rediscovered the music of The Alarm and Big Country (both bands connected by frontman Mike Peters). And as so often happens, music helps.

There will be hurt, there will be pain
There will be a lot of tears, a lot of joy
What we have left cannot be destroyed

Time to move on, to let it bleed
What will be, will be

There is a land, there is a sea
There is a place where we can be
There is a hope, there is a dream

Sometimes
You gotta make the journey with me

“The Journey”, Big Country, 2013

Mike Peters: “Sometimes, you’ve got to make the journey. We have to make that leap of faith. We have to cross that line to embrace what is happening now. We’ve crossed that line, and this is a song that lyrically encourages everybody to cross that line. And it acknowledges, ‘Yes, it’s gonna be a tough journey. There will be pain, there will be joy, there will be tears.’ Everything associated in life comes into making this particular journey.”

Rough rides at tenure time

Yesterday, I wrote about Dr. Becca’s tumultuous ride through her tenure process. (And thank you to all who read, like, tweeted, shared, and commented!) Becca has done many early career scientists a favour by documenting this difficult process.

I’ve talked from time to time about how important it is to share our failures. But we particularly don’t like to draw attention to issues that came up at tenure time. I wrote about my problems with tenure after I squeaked through the process. I was not writing a pseudonym, and I didn’t blog about the process much while I was going through it. I was very mad about it then. I don’t get visibly upset talking about like I used to, but I can’t say I’ve made peace with it. With the better part of a decade between then and now, I can see why I got a hard time at tenure, but I still feel I was not treated well.

Terry McGlynn had an even rougher time. He was denied tenure, which he wrote about extensively in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But what I haven’t done specifically is to talk about what came afterwards for me. A lot of people think that after academics get tenure, they drop off and take it easy.

I got better.

After tenure, I finally had everything in place. The gears were turning, and I started to get the researcher coming out much more consistently, with more original data driven papers. And I had seen the adage, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I lowered my standards and stopped waiting for projects to get that one last bit of data. And stuff started to happen for me. I became one of the most published faculty in the department.

I am not trying to brag here. I know many people would look at my research track record and deem it second rate (at best). “Sand crabs, Zen? Nobody cares about your sand crabs.”

The moral of the story? It’s to remind people that trouble, even at this critical point in an academic career, does not have to cripple the rest of your career.

And that publishing well is the best revenge.

Related posts

Now part of the problem
Low points
Nevertheless, she persisted

External links

Coming out of the closet, tenure denial edition

Nevertheless, she persisted

Sometimes, you get to watch a friend win one. And that win is practically as sweet as one of your own.

Friend of the blog Dr. Becca has been getting a rough ride at tenure time. Until today:

THE PROVOST REVERSED HIS DECISION AND IS RECOMMENDING ME FOR TENURE

First things first: Congratulations, Becca! I am so happy for you! Wooo!

Other things: Becca’s win is important beyond just the obvious significance for her and her students and collaborators. It needs to be seen and discussed widely for two reasons.

First, her case needs to be talked about because the grief she was getting was all about one thing: money. Scratch that: it was because she didn’t get the right kind of money. Her job was being threatened because she hadn’t brought in a stand alone research grant from the National Institutes of Health (an NIH R01, to use the jargon).

Becca’s situation is the nightmare scenario that many early career scientists are staring down. The NIH budget is flat, applications are up, and most recognize that the success rate in applying for NIH grants is now so low that many perfectly good projects go unfunded.

In other words, getting a grant has a healthy dose of luck to it and no amount of granting savvy can ensure you will pull down any particular grant. Lack of a grant does not mean your colleagues don’t think you’re doing crummy science.

Becca’s situation shows how dire and destructive this habit of “outsourcing” tenure decisions to granting agencies has become. Professors and administrators need to talk about this and adjust their expectations to line up with reality, and not expect the stone to give blood if you “incentivize” the stone enough.

This is something that has been buzzing in the background for a long time, but the situation has worsened in the last 6-7 years. Academics are used to stability at much longer time scales and aren’t prepare to adjust to the ground shifting underfoot in the time it takes to hire a professor to her tenure review.

Second, Becca’s case matters more generally than her alone because, as Neil Gaiman (channeling G.K. Chesterton) says:

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Becca shows that you can fight the dragons of university administration, and you can win. And a lot of early career academics need to know that. Because dragons are big and scary and it is easy to give up and concede the battle.

Becca was confronted with career dragons.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Related posts

The secret life of a banner

The secret life of a banner, part 2

Tenure is like vaccination

Tenure is like vaccination: they both work best when nobody opts out.

We’re in the middle of two new legislative attacks on tenure in the United States. Anti-tenure sentiment is hardly new, but it seems bound to pick up steam when I look at the current sociopolitical trends in the United States, which might be summarized as, “Don’t get comfortable.”

We academics will need to be vocal about why tenure is a good thing (here is my own defense of tenure), but I worry a lot that conditions have moved too far for us to mount an effective defense of tenure.

One of the key reactions I saw on social media to the announced bills was that abolishing tenure would cause a “brain drain” in those states, and the institutions in those states would have a hard time recruiting top notch faculty. My mind immediately jumped to this graph:

Any discussion of the academic job market that doesn’t take this graph into account is woefully deficient. Possibly even negligent.

One of the arguments for tenure is that the the increases job security compensates, to some degree, for the decreased salary. It’s generally accepted that academic pays poorly compared to industry and other non-academic positions. In theory, tenure is such an integral part of being an academic that people should not be willing to accept jobs that do not provide tenure.

The extraordinary surplus of doctoral students rather puts a wrench in that assumption. There are so many doctoral recipients that it is an employer’s market. Sure, you may lose those legendary (mythical?) “best” people, but there are plenty of people with Ph.D.s who are more than good enough: they’re still highly trained, highly skilled, and completely capable of running productive research programs.

And we know that there are many people with doctorates who are desperate enough to take positions that do not offer tenure: many of them are called “adjuncts.”

We are in a crappy situation all around. Tenure has a perception problem, because people see it as a “job for life” and a blanket protection for incompetence (it isn’t). The adjunctification of so many universities demonstrates that there are enough people willing to take jobs without tenure that both legislators and university administrators feel emboldened to reduce or eliminate tenured positions. I am deeply worried that the concept of tenure in the United States may not be able to survive these assaults.

What we are left with is the principle of the thing: tenure is supposed to allow us to do amazing long-term research, and speak truth to power. Fellow academics, if you have tenure, I urge you to use it, actively and frequently.

Resist.


Related posts

What have you done lately that needed tenure?

External links

Killing tenure
Should public universities have tenure systems? (Quora)
The missing piece to changing the university culture

A strange attack on tenure from Science

Science’s latest editorial is a strange attack on tenure that seems to have originated from some non-academic think-tank rather than anyone associated with academia. But it’s penned by editor Marcia McNutt.

McNutt opens with a strange argument that tenure is preventing women from succeeding in academia.

(Women) are still underrepresented among tenured faculty as compared to, for example, the number of women in similar positions that do not require tenure... A major reason is that young academics must concentrate on their careers to earn tenure at the same time as they would be starting their families, and this issue affects women disproportionately more. ... Whether women see the tenure hurdle and opt out for family instead, or just never opted in to begin with, the result is that there are too few women for a diverse academic enterprise, and if this process does not evolve, how can the highest institutes of learning promote academic freedom and progress?

So let me get this straight. The institution of tenure is the problem for women, and not, say, unrealistic expectations of tenure decision makers, who, by pretty much every set of summary statistics out there, are over-represented by men?

I am willing to bet not one woman working in academic who would feel that their prospects of continued employment would be enhanced by the removal of tenure.

McNutt then argues that, darn it, professors are just old dogs who can’t learn new tricks.

(N)ot all tenured faculty are motivated to stay abreast of new developments. What might have been a booming job market 20 years ago when a faculty member earned tenure may be entirely moribund now. ... Today, tenured professors can continue to hold their positions 40 to 50 years past the date when they received tenure.

Fortunately, I only had to wait a day before this profile of active, engaged researchers who are past traditional retirement age but still doing good science. McNutt’s argument is discriminatory and ageist.

Revising the tenure system to a more flexible form of employment is not going to be easy. ... Those hurt by the system are powerless.

It’s not clear to me who is hurt by the tenure system. I think McNutt is trying to argue that young academics, particularly women, are hurt, because they are more likely to take non-tenured positions. That is not a problem with tenure. This is a problem with adminstrators trying to cut costs.

McNutt’s suggests basically that universities should just give the finger to their tenure faculty and ideals of shared governance.

But it's time for universities to discuss unilateral action and institute some other mechanism.

The editorial comes just a day before this news of faculty – including tenured faculty – being cut from College of Saint Rose. So... yeah. Tenure provides tissue-thin job protection already.

For example, promotion to associate professor could be rewarded with a longer-term contract (10 years), followed by a series of renewable 10-year contracts (or in rare cases, longer contracts) as a full professor. The contracts would be nonbinding, giving the faculty member flexibility to consider opportunities at other institutions.

Oh! How generous! We have to get rid of tenure to make it easier for people to find new work! Because that’s what people want, to have less stability in their lives!

An appeals process (through a national university association) could adjudicate contract disputes or cases of dismissal on grounds of intellectual disagreements.

I’d be more encouraged is I had ever heard of a case of such a mechanism working. In the United States at least, universities are largely under the regulation of the states, so it’s not clear how any national organization could have any teeth.

For goodness’ sake, tenure is not the problem here. The problem is administrators have been cheap, and have tended to exploit their non-tenured faculty with heavy responsibilities and few benefits because they could. Instead of tearing down tenure and turning everyone into contingent faculty and wondering nomads, why can’t we do the opposite?

Why can we not give women on the tenure clock with reasonable performance expectations, not those determined by workaholics with no other responsibilities?

Why can we not provide adjunct and contingent faculty with some of the job security and resources that tenure people enjoy?

Why can we not have strong post-tenure review that ensures that people continue to be competent at their job?

Tenure is not supposed to be a guarantee of a job for life. It’s supposed to provide security against arbitrary dismissal. That long-term security is valuable for research, and I suspect provides a strong incentive for people to work at universities. It certainly did for me.

Pay at universities is often lower than similar positions in the private sector. Would universities who got rid of tenure be willing to bring their pay in line with what people could get in industry? My guess is, “No.”

When McNutt became editor of Science, lots said, “Hey, it’s great to have a woman in charge of Science!” But this editorial is just the latest in a repeated set of regressive articles getting by Science’s editorial team, which have regularly seemed to involve gender issues, and McNutt’s presence as editor doesn’t seem to be slowing things down. I just don’t get it.

Hat tip to Terry McGlynn and Bashir3000.

Additional: In an unrelated but somehow in the same vein of deeply problematic: AAAS, the publisher of Science, elected Patrick Harran a fellow of the society. Harran was charged with four counts of felony following the death of an undergraduate student in a lab accident. More at the Curious Wavefunction and Chemjobber.

Related posts

Breaking brand: Science magazine’s latest self-inflicted crisis

External links

Whither (wither?) tenure?
Saint Rose faculty informed of cuts Friday

You may not be wasting time. You might be laying foundations.

A great post by Matt Might on the difficulties of his tenure process is making the rounds on social media. Spoiler alert! There is a happy ending to his story – he got tenure. I wanted to highlight this bit:

I also started blogging a lot. Blogging, much like answering questions on Quora, doesn’t count for tenure at all, and in fact I was cautioned against doing it, since it was “a waste of time.”

But, blogging became a way to reach out to the world and to transmit technical knowledge, which is what academic publications are supposed to do – but don’t.

Before I knew it, my blog began attracting top-notch students to my lab.

Today, my lab is a team of talented grads, undergrads, postdocs and research scientists. I’m proud of each of them. I can’t imagine it would be that way without my “waste of time” blog.

That Matt is also at Harvard Med School might also have enhanced the effectiveness of his blog as recruitment tool. Many academics blog, but don’t necessarily have a run of students wanting to join the lab.

Continuing on:

And, perhaps my experience is a counter-example to the cynical yet sincere advice frequently given on how to get tenure.

The central theme in this “advice” is that anything that detracts from research – teaching, service, kids, health, etc. – is bad.

This resonates with me. As I noted last week, I’ve had so many good things happen because I “wasted time on the Internet.” Make no mistake, it took a long while, but I think it worked because I approached that time on the Internet with the goal of creating a professional footprint online. I approached it with the goal of trying to be available and helpful when I could be.

And it made me stronger. Blogging, for instance, honed my writing skills, and it gave me a background source of knowledge that paid off in a big way when I had two book chapters to write (this and this).

Of course, some of the stuff I did was pure procrastination and stopped me from getting other things done that I should have done. There are pros and cons, like everything else. I like to say, “Yes, it’s a waste of time... but it’s not a complete waste of time. The qualifier is important.”

I think the pressure on tenure-track faculty to keep focused on research is usually coming from a good place. Senior faculty want their faculty to succeed, and they’ve been around long enough to have seen that when there is a problem in the tenure process, it’s usually because someone’s research projects didn’t work out and fell short.

It is easy to see how “making sure you are making progress on research” becomes “do nothing but research.” The first is good advice; the latter is bad advice. If you only focus on creating academic research, you will have a very hard time accomplishing anything else. And most people are going to want to accomplish other things; and so will their institutions, eventually.

A construction project might go for a while before you see anything above ground level, because you have to put in the foundation first. Same with networking. Same with social media presence.

External links

HOWTO: Get tenure

Related posts

Lessons from Quora

Top down hiring decision

Faculty searches at universities are usually driven by the faculty. Even if a dean or other administrator usually makes the offer, the search is usually run by faculty, who vote and make very strong recommendations for who to extend the offer to.

Which is why this is a surprise.

The University of Texas Board of Regents has, apparently, hired Dr. Abdullah (Faiz) Rahman as faculty member to join our department. It’s on page 355 in the meeting minutes.

And they’ve awarded him tenure, at the full professor level, up front.

And at a salary 66% higher than any other full professor in the department; about double the average for our tenured full professors (budget data here).

Dr. Rahman interviewed as part of the Valley STARS program, described here:

The ValleySTARs program will permit UTB and UTPA to request funding to cover faculty salary and benefits for no more than three years in support of their recruitment efforts for new “star” faculty to teach in STEM fields. Recruited faculty will be appointed to full-time, tenured positions. It is essential that the quantity and quality of teaching and learning in STEM fields is enhanced by state of the art teaching concepts and technology employed by scholar teachers.

The thing is: the faculty in our department never voted on this. We never voted on whether he met our tenure requirements. Apparently, neither did our equivalent department at University of Texas at Brownsville, who will also be part of the UTRGV in a little over a year.

It’s a very unusual move. And perhaps not one that will build bridges and engender the most good will.

External links

Faiz Rahman

Flip-flopping on tenure for UTRGV

When the new Texas university was announced, which we now know will be University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the first thing I remember our Dean saying was something along the lines of, “Faculty will keep their jobs.”

Today, the University of Texas at Brownsville student paper is reporting that may not be the case.

Bobbette Morgan... asked lawyers at the UT System “if tenure at UTB and UTPA means tenure at UT-RGV” and was told “no.” ...

“Legally, that is a true statement, but the intention here is to grow the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley into one of the larger universities,” Cigarroa said.

I myself am not worried about me, personally. My department is short of faculty as it is. But it is disconcerting to say the least to have heard one thing a little over a year ago, and another now. I think this question and concern is more relevant to University of Texas at Brownsville, where there have been multiple legal cases of the institution trying to dismiss tenured faculty.

Additional, 9 April 2014: In an email to faculty, advisor Julio Leon wrote (my emphasis):

In the coming weeks we will share specific processes for how UTB and UTPA tenured and tenure-track faculty may choose to transition to faculty positions at UTRGV. 

This implies that this will not be an automatic process.

External links


A question of tenure

No more As all around

A few years ago, I wrote about Denis Rancourt, a professor who gave every student in his class an A. I listened to an interview with him, and he did it because he didn’t like how pursuit of grades interfered with the intrinsic satisfaction of learning.

He was fired, and even though he had tenure, and that decision has been upheld by an arbitrator.

By all accounts, though, he did much more than just give a highly skewed distribution of grades. He liked breaking rules generally, and admitted as much. It’s possible that factored into his firing.

Related posts

Everybody gets an A

External links

Arbitrator Upholds U. of Ottawa’s Firing of ‘Dissident’ Professor
The Current: March 18, 2009

Photo from here. 

“I'll be brave after I’m tenured”

“I don’t like doing this, but I need to for tenure. I can’t fight the good fight for change if I don’t have tenure. Once I have tenure, things will be different.”

If you aren't willing to take a stand before tenure, forgive me if I have my doubts that you’re going to take a stand after tenure. That “I need to do this to succeed” reason you gave for doing stuff that you handled like a dead fish (at arm’s length, holding your nose) will morph into “I need to do this for my doctoral and grad students to succeed.” It’ll become “I need to do this for grants." It’ll change to, “I need to do this for my annual merit raise.” It’ll be, “I need to do this for promotion.”

Tenure won’t give automatically you courage. If you’re waiting for when the time is perfect and you’re free to fight without risk, you might wait so long that you miss the fight all together.

If there is something about your department, your university, your branch of academia, that you want to see changed, start working on it now. You might not get any braver after tenure. Look around at the people who have tenure. How many of them use it to fight to make things better?

Additional, 2 September 2013: When I saw you should do something, I am not advising that you should go to war with nukes on every issue. I’m saying you should do something. It’s better than doing nothing.

University of Texas Brownsville struggles while waiting for merger into new Texas university

In discussing the plans for a new research university in South Texas, I have told a lot of people that my institution is not the one that will benefit the most. I told them about how the other institutions in the lower Rio Grande Valley have been struggling. A new article in the Texas Observer documents more officially what I had only heard informally.

It is uglier than I had heard. Not surprising when you get rid of a fifth of your faculty, including many with tenure.

Early in March 2012, UT-Brownsville formed review committees to determine which faculty would stay with the school, and which would be let go. The committees ranked faculty based on advanced degrees or tenure status. Teachers at the bottom of the list got cut. The goal was to create an objective rubric for the type of faculty each department wanted to keep—but some departments were so small, it was obvious who would lose their jobs. Fuss-Sommer, whose layoff came in that second round, calls it “a perfect opportunity to get rid of people you don’t like.” ...

The layoffs began in late March 2012, with 30 adjunct professors who taught trade courses like air conditioning or car maintenance. At the end of April, Fuss-Sommer and 104 other faculty members—nearly a fifth of the school’s 518 total faculty—were also let go. Of those laid off, 53 were tenured. ...

“There’s no consistency to it,” Ramirez says. “Some people are staying without Ph.D.s and other people aren’t. … It really looks like cronyism to me, where they’re just picking all of the people that they want or they don’t want.”

Ramirez calls it a “really baroque system” developed by UT-Brownsville Provost Alan Artibise to “shield what he’s really doing, which is firing tenured professors.”

I truly hope the merger into a new university stabilizes things.

External links

In Brownsville, Two Colleges Split and a Community Suffers

Picture by final_station on ; used under a Creative Commons license.

How tenure is like YOLO

Too often, it’s used as an excuse to do something lazy or stupid...

Instead of a reason to do something bold and great.

(YOLO = You only live once.)

There is no ceiling

At a meeting about tenure and promotion today, our Provost made a comment about changing expectations for tenure and promotion. He said, “If I were to try to get tenure today at the university where I originally got tenure, I don’t think I would get tenure.”

His point was that it expectations were getting higher and higher across the board. As far as I could tell, he either welcomed it, or at the very least did no seem to think this was a problem. I should have counted the number of times he said some variation of “moving forward.” He seemed to think it was logical to ask our new hires to do more than the last people hired, so that the university could “move forward.”

This worried me. Because I look around at what it took for myself and my colleagues to get tenure, and you want the new people to do even more?

Human beings can only work so hard and do so much. There is going to be a breaking point. There is going to be a point where there is no more blood to be squeezed from the stone. There is going to be a point where you drive everyone out of academia except single workaholics. And even a lot of them won’t get tenure.

Insecure enough to lie, but too secure to fire?

A common claim by science deniers is that scientists lie to keep their jobs. There’s a premise in that claim: that scientists are working in conditions where they can be easily dismissed. But a lot of scientists are tenured academics, which is supposed to remove the fear of arbitrary dismissals.

I wonder what the overlap is with people who would claim that the tenure system makes it far too hard for a scientist to get fired. I bet the overlap is large, and that they don’t see any contradiction between holding those two positions simultaneously.

The responsibilities of an academic are teaching, research and service fundraising

Two anecdotes.

First, last Friday, I was at a meeting of coordinators for our university’s graduate programs. Our vice-president for academic affairs was talking about the university’s plans to expand their graduate offerings. Why do we want more graduate programs, particularly doctoral programs?

He said, roughly, “We’ve managed to get some funding from agencies like NIH and the NSF. But there’s a lot of programs that we don’t qualify for because we don’t have doctoral programs.” (That’s not a direct quote, but I remember him specifically mentioning those two agencies.)

Second, a few weeks ago, I was in discussion with someone who was in charge of a a fairly new Ph.D. program in biology (not medical biology). He said that they were going to conduct searches for four new faculty members... whose main responsibility would be to write successful grant proposals to support their doctoral students.

It’s been rare to see such naked admissions that institutions see graduate students and faculty as cash cows.

At the program level, this could well be one reason why we have an over-supply of Ph.D.s in the job market now.

The latter might bother me even more. To hear that indicates to me that those poor souls are going to be evaluated for tenure just on whether they can raise money. That is not supposed to be what academia is about. Students, if you wonder why your professor is an incoherent teacher... this may be why. In a situation like that, why would you invest any time more than the bare minimum needed?

If you’re an advanced graduate student or post-doc, you might not want to fret about landing that glamour mag publication as much as you should be writing grant proposals at every opportunity. Federal agencies, state agencies, scientific societies.

Additional: I like this translation of academic speak by Dr. 24 Hours:

“Establish an Independant Research Program” = Get Grant Money or You're Fired.

Related posts

The root of problems: How external funding distorts institution’s priorities

Science careers: fair play or field of bullets?

Yesterday, Elizabeth Sandquist posed an hypothesis:

You can't just be good to succeed in #science, you have to be exceptional. Any thoughts?

NeuroPolarBear replied with a post, and Drugmonkey pulled out an older post.

But my post will be the best, for I shall cite peer-reviewed data in the primary literature.

As it happened, Petersen and colleague published a paper yesterday looking at career success in physics. Appropriately enough, even though it’s a career paper, it feels very much like a physics paper: lots of equations and models and phrase like “leptokurtic but remarkably symmetric.” Hoooookay...

The authors tracked 300 physicists through about 20 years of their careers. They fell into three groups: phsyicists who were eminent (h -index of 61); productive and highly cited (h-index of 44), and early career assistant professors (h-index of 15). In that data from real scientists, Petersen and colleagues see that there are time when physicists are “shocked.” The shocks can be positive (“Wow, I just made this totally great discovery by accident!”) or negative (“Uh oh, they found that paper where I manipulated data.”)

They also look at career productivity, and the ability of researchers to build collaborations.That’s the “ground truth” that Petersen and colleagues use to create models of research career trajectories. This lets them play with some of the parameters.

The models indicate that as competition increases, many people can be taken out of the career pathway by... blind, stinking, clueless, doo-da luck.

Those that survive the field of bullets reach a point where they can start generating collaborative networks, and that builds even more success.

But the competition turns out to be very important in this model; and that relates to tenure. Many people want to see tenure replaced with a series of recurring short-term contracts. The authors imply that the short-term model could be harmful for the development of science. A failure in one short-term contract could derail a productive researcher, since early career shocks can ripple throughout a scientist’s career.

I think Petersen and colleagues would say that you do not have to be exceptional to make it in science. More important is the ability to tough out the early weeding out period, which doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with your talent.

Reference

Petersen A, Riccaboni M, Stanley H, Pammolli F. 2012. Persistence and uncertainty in the academic career Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(14): 5213-5218. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121429109

Incentives to do this job

An article on the Austin American-Statesman discusses a proposal to change post-tenure review in the University of Texas system. Texas has had post-tenure review for a long time.

The details don’t interest me so much as some of the rationale for post-tenure review (my emphasis):

“It increases the accountability universities have to demonstrate to taxpayers that their money's being spent productively,” said Thomas Lindsay, director of the (Texas Public Policy Foundation)’s Center for Higher Education. “I think it's pretty unobjectionable... unless we believe faculty are alone among human beings in requiring no incentives to do their job.”

I have incentives to do my job.

Incentives like pride.

Curiosity. Desire to help students. I have plenty of incentives to do my job. It’s just that a lot of them are internal. They matter to me, not just because of the dollar value. If I was only interested in external incentives (i.e., money), I would have pursued a different career.

I don’t buy Lindsay’s implication that the only reason anyone does anything, ever, is because there is some external carrot or stick.