Saturday, December 17, 2011

Ever-Charging Ed from Outside Edmonton on Tenure.

One of my colleagues gave me the new David Perlmutter book on tenure (Promotion and Tenure Confidential) as a Christmas gift. I'm two years away from the big push, but I already started leafing through it.

What annoyed me the most about it was the assertion that personal relations play as big a role as the actual research and scholarship.

There's also a section about protecting one's online reputation! Bullshit to all of that, I say. If my work is strong enough, good enough, that should be what any T&P committee is looking for.

I'm awfully depressed about this suddenly, and wish I could erase it all from my head. If tenure is just going to be a popularity gauntlet, I don't know why it's worth anything.

The people around me are stooges, popular fops with nearly no ambition. I find that I'm the only one who's going after something here. The rest seem content to teach the same classes, and evaporate off campus after their teaching and committee work is done.

These are the people who will judge me?

16 comments:

  1. Your colleagues want to make sure you and they will be happy to work together for, potentially, the rest of your career.

    Colleagues that get along will perform unappreciated committee work well together and allow the department to operate on each person's good word and a handshake. Departments that contain waring factions or undependable faculty members require lots of rules to govern how courses are taught, committees are assigned, graduate students are advised, etc. Extra rules are needed because the level of trust among the participants is too low.

    How well you play with others is very important, though I'd grant you that it shouldn't be 50% of the decision.

    Remember that popularity can mean many things. Do you have to be drinking buddies with them and arrange play dates with your kids? Maybe you could be "popular" because you are dependable and successful. If you are pulling your own weight and more by teaching and researching well, then you'll be popular because you make the department look good.

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  2. Throughout my working life, I found that one's professional qualifications or competence have little to do with determining whether one gets to keep a job. Most of the places I worked at were more like social clubs where actually accomplishing anything tangible was an afterthought and keeping one's nose to the grindstone could, in fact, result in being shunned or marginalized.

    Are personal relations important? Yes, they are, and one must be careful with whom one is friends with. If one is on good terms with the "wrong" people, think about looking for another job, particularly if the boss or a boss's toady doesn't like them. But being friends with the "right" people under one boss is no guarantee that one's job is safe should there be a change in the management. Also, whoever is "right" or "wrong" could be determined by someone who's buddies with that same boss or boss's toady so one's fawning or sycophancy may have to extend past one's immediate colleagues or department.

    Think back to high school. Think back to elementary school or even kindergarten. Remember the dynamics of the playground or the sandbox and one has a very good idea of how the workplace functions. Just like a child with the shiniest toy could soon be rejected by the other children, an employee can find himself or herself isolated for similarly trivial reasons.

    Look up topics such as workplace bullying or academic mobbing. (Ken Westhues has written a lot about the latter subject.) That, unfortunately, is the reality one often has to deal with. Unfortunately, being tenured or having permanent status doesn't provide immunity or make one's job secure.

    I've been there. I've suffered for it.

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  3. My workplace has eliminated 'collegiality' as a criterion for tenure, thank god. Everything considered has to have a paper trail; hence, research, teaching evaluations, and on-record service. And we function quite well, so I think it's absolutely possible not to have 'plays well with others' be part of evaluating someone for tenure. If someone does not play well, that will be reflected in poor service, or in an unwillingness to serve, or at the outside in other people's refusal to serve with someone (which only happens to egregious assholes as everyone wants someone's labor on committees!). Or it will show up in teaching evaluations.

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  4. "The people around me are stooges, popular fops with nearly no ambition. I find that I'm the only one who's going after something here. The rest seem content to teach the same classes, and evaporate off campus after their teaching and committee work is done.

    These are the people who will judge me?"

    You mean, just as you have judged them?

    Yes; they are judging whether you will be their life-long colleague. And if you are admitted, then you will join them in judging who will be your life-long colleague.

    And I have to say, by this point, you are dealing only with those people who have finished their college degree, applied and been admitted to at least one, but usually two or more, graduate programs, weathered coursework, comprehensive exams AND not only began, but saw through to completion their dissertation, applied to at least your college for a job, survived the interview process well enough to be the only one hired by the department, college commitee and the president, and then ran the pre-tenure gauntlet for around five years, demonstrating their teaching-ability, contributing to the work of the college through service, and probably publishing along the way.

    So the fact that you have done what you have accomplished so far in life, while it may make you an extraordinary individual in many other circles in this world, merely gets you a chance to have a seat at the table.

    See, to actually get tenure, you need to do all that, and NOT be a total self-indulgent judgmental asshole.

    Because when you hear the following:

    "What annoyed me the most about it was the assertion that personal relations play as big a role as the actual research and scholarship.

    There's also a section about protecting one's online reputation! Bullshit to all of that, I say. If my work is strong enough, good enough, that should be what any T&P committee is looking for."

    what you should be hearing is "Yes yes yes, we get that you are super-duper smart; we all are. But if we are going to work together for the next 40 years, you can't be a petulant jerk, because that becomes tiresome after the first dozen years. You have to work with us, not get in our way, and not embarrass us in public by being 'that guy' who we have to explain to fellow scholars at national conferences is not actually as big a tool in person as he appears online. Though you actually are."

    The only pass you get on this is if you actually ARE the stellar unique #1 scholar in the field, whose insights are so indispensable that everyone is willing to put up with your eccentricities just in order to catch a morsel of you wisdom, such that their lives are complete.

    But if you were such a person, you wouldn't be asking about the tenure process in the first place.

    So the advice to somehow be able to get along with other people, and not be an intolerable bore, is a good one, not just for getting tenure, but for life in general.

    But I'm sure you've learned that by now, just from being human; the lesson here is that it also applies to earning tenure.

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  5. This isn't specific to the academy. Every interview is about personality, every promotion decision based on personal relationships. Your qualifications get you through the door; your interactions get you to stay.

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  6. The emphasis on hiring nowadays is "fit", whatever that's supposed to be. I suspect it means that one is required to blend in with the crowd and be like everyone else, becoming an intellectual, cultural, and social clone of one's colleagues.

    I've worked for places where a "unique #1 scholar" would never get hired, unless the boss liked that person, as he or she would make everyone else look lazy or incompetent by comparison.

    I've worked for places where if everyone else watches nothing but reality TV shows and talks about it in the coffee room the following day, preferring to discuss something else such as the possibility that the Higgs boson might actually exist (as recent data from the Large Hadron Collider indicates) could result in a lot of trouble.

    I've worked for places where if everyone else reads the fishwrap that passes for a local newspaper, reading some scholarly journal instead could resulting in eating lunch alone.

    Being incompetent can often be tolerated, perhaps rectified. Being an obnoxious jerk can be irritating but is frequently harmless and can sometimes be fixed. Even being slightly better qualified than everyone else is often acceptable. However, it's the petty stuff like I described that can kill a career, because people might think one is a snob and, thereby, think one is better than everyone else.

    So much for workplace diversity.

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  7. I sympathize with Ever-Charging Ed. I, too, believe I have suffered more than most from unwritten rules and personal prejudices. It would be so nice if everything were clear and above-board, with carefully set-out criteria for things like tenure. I think I'm a decent colleague, but at the same time I know other people that have thought the same and been surprised to find out that most of one's colleagues did not agree. At the same time, sometimes indefiniteness can help one. Still, I think Ed has some legitimate grounds for complaint. What makes it all so much more galling in academics is how few jobs there are. In most work environments it turns out that one's co-workers don't appreciate how one thinks or like what one believes or accept one's idiosyncracies, one can find work elsewhere. Academia is one of the few places where such things can end one's career if they lead to denial of tenure. I've never heard of an accountant that had to leave the profession because of personal issues in one workplace.

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  8. DrDoctorDr - thank you. The contempt recent grads have for people have have done everything they've done already, and more, has always mystified me. "Try not to be a self-satisfied asshole" about covers what I would like to see in a colleague, beyond all the other stuff - teaching, research and publication - which is, frankly, assumed.

    I also work in a place that has eliminated collegiality as a criterion for tenure, and that has eliminated a host of abuses. It really has, and it was the right thing to do. But it unfortunately also means that if we do inadvertently hire a psychopath - they often show up reasonably well at interviews - or simply a self-satisfied contemptuous asshole, we will not be able to get rid of him as long as he publishes and shows up to teach his classes. And then you have a department that has to protect itself from a toxic individual for the rest of his career - particularly since word will get out, and whoever was stupid enough to hire the guy in the first place is never going to be able to offload him to somewhere else. Everyone knows about "that guy". But the embarrassment of having to explain 'that guy' at conferences is not nearly as unpleasant as having to constantly compensate for his poisonous behaviour back home. Believe me.

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  9. @Steve:

    After I got my B. Sc. nearly 35 years ago, I worked for a large oil company. During lunchtime, I preferred to read while everyone else in the office played cards. Apparently, that made me look like I wasn't a team planer and I quickly fell into disfavour with certain people.

    I quit several months later and started working for a company where that sort of thing didn't matter much, so long as I did my job properly and got things done on time.

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  10. @MerelyAcademic:

    In the department where I taught, we had someone who could well have been a psychopath (no, it wasn't me--I was merely an abrasive curmudgeon). This character was often rude to colleagues, threw tantrums if he didn't get his way, and was, frankly, sufficiently immature to the point that few people wanted to work with him.

    Unfortunately, he was reasonably good at his job and, even better for him, the boss liked him so he could just about do whatever he liked.

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  11. If you haven't produced much in terms of publications and grants, then you won't get tenure.

    If you have produced a lot of publications and generated a bunch of grant money, you'll get tenure.

    I think where personal relationships come into play most in the T&P process is when you're on the cusp in terms of productivity; your colleagues are thinking "should we, or shouldn't we?" and if they all respect you and get along with you, well then that makes the decision a lot easier to move over to the "we should" side.

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  12. I was too harsh on Ed; sorry. I distinctly remember my pre-tenure days, in which I was fond of saying every one of the things Ed says, but this was a sour-grapes response to fear. What PP says is correct, Ed (except, in Humanities, you don't need grant money, because there isn't any).

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  13. Hmm. As a current grad student, what worries me most about dealing with these issues in the future is the potential halo effect of extroversion (not just because of teaching – I've heard the advice over and over that teaching is just like a performance, and as an amateur musician who also did things like drama in high school, I agree with that). Our society (here in the US, at least) views extroversion as the norm; introverted women like me are seen as particularly deviant.

    I think I've heard that introverts are better-represented in academia than among the general population, but I'm afraid that things like networking and other "collegiality"-related issues will prove fatal if I don't do something to work on them. Does anybody have advice or other experiences to share with regard to this?

    (By the way, how do most people comment on this blog? I've been lurking for several months, but haven't commented so far because I use my main Google account for everything. This is an old YouTube account I made in undergrad and don't use for anything anymore…right now I'm using a different browser so as not to log myself out of my real Google account on my main browser, but do other people have solutions to make it less of a hassle?)

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  14. H-Squirrel:

    Most readers have a Gmail account they use for a variety of blogg-y things, including writing for CM or just commenting.

    Many people have multiple Google accounts, and simply sign in and out when they change "identities." Others use different browsers for different accounts. As of today, more than 70% of CM users use Firefox or Chrome, as they cause the least amount of trouble with logging in and out of Google accounts. IE is by the far the most problematic browser, and only accounts for 8% of CM users.

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  15. "The rest seem content to teach the same classes, and evaporate off campus after their teaching and committee work is done."

    While I agree that one needs to rotate classes and that tenure shouldn't necessarily be a popularity contest, I wonder what alternatives you propose to 'evaporating' off campus once work is done? Should I remain locked in my windowless office all evening doing research, or should I go home to my family and feed my cat and try to regain some semblance of sanity after a long day?

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  16. re: "evaporating off campus", now that you mention it - I do most of my work at home or in the library. Just because I'm not in my office doesn't mean I'm not working, trust me."

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