Sunday, January 19, 2014

"Are You a Tenure Failure?" Dr. Python Wonders.

Parting is such sweet sorrow...or it's just a kick in the teeth.

It's getting to be that inglorious time of the year when tenure decisions are being announced. This is what separates the mediocre from the excellent, or so adminiflakes would have us believe.

It seems in my observations over the years that this form of academic hazing is capricious at best and the manifestation of evil at worst.

If you, dear reader, have words of encouragement for your brethren during this time of shock, horror, and grieving, now is the time to share it. If you have a horror story, I would hope this is a place to share, rage, and be supported.

- Dr. Python

21 comments:

  1. I have a different take. I am on a search committee this year and am reading applications.

    If you've been denied tenure somewhere and are on the job market:

    1. Tell us. If we see "I've been at Uni X for several years and am leaving", we want to know why and we'd like a letter from Uni X. It isn't the end of the world: after all your level of research might be fine for us.

    2. But, if you are applying to our job (which is mostly teaching; we are upfront about that), be sure to provide teaching letters from your university! You'd be surprised at how many don't do that.

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  2. I hope this gets good responses, given the real seriousness of this issue. I have seen many people get tenure who haven't earned it and many get denied who did. In each case, it's the students who get screwed. Somewhere in this game that has become higher education, the students have been left out as beneficiaries; they are called 'customers' instead. I believe in my heart they are my charges; they are the ones I work for in the sense of contributing to their growth so that they can become what they envision themselves to be. No amount of entitlement or administrative politics will change my heart, even if that means I have to change jobs again. It may sound silly to many who read this blog, but I have a calling to do right by my students, and my students alone. My God is bigger than my dean, my interim president, and the BOT. I will survive not being recommended for tenure; I feel badly for the disappointed and hurt students, and the future students at my SLAC, if the board does not overturn my tenure denial. If you think these words are somehow useful, go ahead and use them.

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    1. I agree completely - in so many ways, what's good for an 'academic career' is bad for students, yet they are at the heart of the job and the vocation of academia.

      I became an academic to be an academic - to learn new things and to teach them, to help young people discover the joys of learning, to stretch their minds, to become engaged, effective citizens with the mental tools needed to form their own opinions on the issues that matter to them. If I'd wanted to just do research I'd've never aimed to be faculty. Yet nice tidy metrics from research, especially ones involving money, are all that gets rewarded... in the UK, at least.

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  3. I know several faculty who didn't get tenure at a A- school and found work at B- schools. They are doing very well and are a real benefit to their new universities. I'm sure it's terrible to go through but you can come out in a better situation.

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  4. That's no longer as likely as it used to be.

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  5. Once you've been denied tenure at you a list University these days, there just aren't that many jobs left in the B list, and none of them can afford to hire someone as stellar as you probably are.

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    1. As someone who has tenure at a B-list place, and has unsuccessfully applied to places on the C-list at better locations, I've wondered about this kind of psychology at work: "oh, he's a successful researcher, I doubt he'd be able to teach `our students'", or "no way we can afford him" (when if they actually checked our public-domain salaries they would see how shockingly easy we are to beat financially, by many a C-list place), or even "his vita makes me feel little".

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    2. My acquaintances moved from R1 schools to places that wanted to be R1. The new schools wanted researchers who could bring funding or quickly get their research labs running and get some funding.

      They took a pay cut in order to continue research and found the atmosphere at the smaller schools to be more comfortable and the research expectations more reasonable. In one case, the R1 was clearly smoking crack when they let the faculty member go and she is a superstar at her new home.

      At my school, we'd be concerned about somebody at an R1 trying to get a job with us, where the workload is more evenly split between teaching and research. We would consider the candidate but we'd need some evidence of quality teaching from the CV or interview.

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    3. Interesting, Ben. In addition to student evaluations, what would count as "evidence of quality teaching" in this case? If the institution does not have a graduate program, does graduate-level teaching or thesis direction even matter?

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    4. No doubt, it's hard to evaluate. We might be persuaded by the candidate mentoring undergrad researchers, a good teaching philosophy and recommendation letters that describe the candidate's interest in teaching. I've seen some application packages that include a cover letter claiming that the person is dedicated to teaching but everything else says, "I have taught but let me tell you about my awesome research." Often, the candidate doesn't even bother refashioning the CV to highlight teaching. We infer that the candidate didn't do any research about us (or read the job ad) or is just looking for any job available.

      Both teaching and mentoring grad students are good but it's more important to see how the candidate plans to use those skills to teach and mentor undergrads.

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    5. Thanks Ben, that's good to know.

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  6. Our faculty T/P votes take place in the fall, and they're almost always favorable. If the candidate's research group thinks he/she is OK, the rest of the faculty goes along. I think that's appropriate; the real selection should happen at hiring, and if publications have continued at the average rate in the research group, tenure shouldn't be such a big deal. After all, we're most definitely a backwater in my field, and with our salaries and obtuse administration we're lucky to hire promising researchers at all.

    That's not the end of the story, since a College committee and the Provost still have to approve it. Whether the case sails through depends on the relations between the Dean (resp. the Provost) and the department (that is, it has nothing to do with the merits of the file). And surprisingly to me, Dean and/or Provost like to use the tenure-promotion process to send little passive-aggressive "messages" to the department, and not uncommonly stop on their tracks the T-P process of candidates with a strong faculty vote. It's easy to find excuses in anyone's file, and student evaluations are an obvious place to go. Teaching so many required classes to masses of students who never learned the high-school level material makes us very unpopular.

    Thus, even if you've passed the faculty vote, I hope you're on the market this year. And if you're not, and get tenure come summer (Trustee's approval) don't miss the next hiring season. Being just tenured you'll never again be in a better position to try for a better location, or a stronger department. Even if you have to go through the process again somewhere else.

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  7. Earning tenure today is far more than simply teaching or researching (or both). One cannot ignore the service demands placed upon us - distasteful or not.

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  8. or you could work in a system without tenure. . . where everyone is on renewable 3-5 year contracts, living with a nagging feeling that your re-appointment year might just be the one when they decide to cut the workforce by a %, and, "hey, look, if we just don't renew all these people's contracts, half of the work is done for us!"

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    1. Within the debate about tenure, the idea of using contracts is often put forward but I haven't heard of any schools that actually use it. Is this a theory or do any schools do it successfully?

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    2. A significant percentage of the full-time faculty at my university -- -- theoretically 30%, but that's the official ceiling, so it's probably more if you leave out the statistical gymnastics involved in claiming to be just under the cap -- are in this position. We also have tenure-line faculty, but there's increasingly a non-tenure-track track (or road to nowhere, since we can be promoted to "contract associate" and "contract full professor," but don't receive the full salary or responsibilities/privileges that go with same) that runs alongside, and includes much of the faculty teaching the core and intro courses. It's just as hair-raising as vietcong describes, especially as one gets older, and worries about being involuntarily retired/non-renewed (with, of course, less savings than a TT faculty member thanks to a lower salary and an abruptly truncated "career"). Of course, tenure is not as secure a protection as it used to be (they can always "restructure" your department or program out of existence), but they don't call contingent faculty -- even those of us in relatively stable, well-paying jobs -- members of the precariat for nothing.

      I'm pretty sure that the kind of job I hold is the wave of the future -- and because full-time contingent jobs look like a good way to staff all those teaching-intensive classes without cutting into research time *or* feeling guilty about using too many part-time contingent workers, tenure track faculty are likely to keep adding drops to that wave, until suddenly they realize they're increasingly alone on an ever-widening beach, with a very big, very destructive wall of water at their backs.

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    3. This is the standard if you are a faculty member working for the Department of Defense, with a few exceptions (the Naval Academy is the most notable one). Faculty members work at fully-accredited, degree-granting institutions, hold academic rank, but most do not hold (and have no prospect of) gaining tenure. The rules have changed over time (and may be subject to change in the future), but for now, it's a pretty tenure-less environment. The relatively good pay and benefits (especially in certain fields) do go some way to offset the no-tenure stress, but don't entirely make up for them. Faculty members in these positions also don't enjoy the protections usually associated with federal employment--long-term job security, ease of moving into other positions, union protection, etc.

      http://www.ndu.edu/press/pen-and-the-sword.html

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    4. also, this: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED424814

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    5. What vietcong describes is my situation. The admin. recently changed the evaluation process, which makes it easier to remove faculty, even with a contract. Faculty had very little to no input. We are not allowed to unionize.

      It is stressful.

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    6. Across the Seas U has renewable contracts, with another twist: Our promotion ladder looks like the usual T/P line, but it is also possible to slide back down the ladder if one's initial, promotion-worthy burst of (research) productivity fails to bring more projects to fruition. It's the slide back down that usually tells people it's time to pack it in and find a job elsewhere--but, on the bright side, at least for locals, the academic job market in this country is in nowhere near the dismal state of North America's. And people who don't "make it" at AtSU usually do very well for themselves at another university.

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  9. Ben - I know that Florida Gulf Coast University does so, as does Chatham in Pittsburgh. Gotta be others too.

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