Your must-read academic link of the week is today's Inside Higher Ed article by Gary Lewandoski, with the provocative title: Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself. His thesis is pretty much clear from the title:
When I started my own tenure-track position I had the same questions. I perused published sources and quizzed colleagues to gain insight. I believed that by identifying the right steps to take, people to meet, ways to teach, scholarship to pursue, committees to seek out, and committees to avoid, I would bring clarity to the ambiguity of the tenure process. Unfortunately, my desire to cobble together a magical checklist was still plagued by a fundamental problem. My approach made getting tenure the primary goal.
On the surface, this is perfectly reasonable. Tenure provides job and financial security, as well as the ability to take risks in one's scholarship and the opportunity to help shape the future of one's institution. Yet, I believe a superior approach is to get a tenure-track position and then immediately remove the idea of "getting tenure" from your daily (or perhaps even moment by moment) thought process. That's right. Getting tenure should not be your primary goal (though admittedly this is secretly a "how-to get tenure" article). Instead, your goal should be to follow your interests, your passion, your curiosity, and your creativity. In other words, you should follow all of the things that got you into this field in the first place.
He goes on to justify this from both experience and psychology research, so you know it's good.
This is excellent advice, though it's unfortunately the sort of advice that's a lot easier to appreciate from this side of the tenure review process. Still, if you're on the tenure track, read it, and think about whether you can apply it to your own life.
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This reminds me of Douglas Adams instructions on unassisted human flight, fall at the ground and miss. And about as useful.
If you really ought to be a professor, you naturally do good teaching, good research, and good service to the university. Then, if you keep records of your activities and be prepared, tenure will likely occur.
I think it is useful if only to remind you that if you have to force yourself to do things you don't want to do (or are unable to do for whatever reason) for the first 7 years, you're probably not going to want to do them (or be able to do them( for the next 30, so why not try to find a place that will reward you for the things that you want to do (or allow you to accomplish what they expect you to do) sooner rather than later.
Sounds great. Real world is messier. At many places, teaching, research and service have taken a backseat to the One Criterion that trumps them all: grant support.
I agree in part, but the tenure decision is very different than any of the previous career bottlenecks we all have to go through. The standards for evaluation, and the background and objectives of the evaluators, are much more diverse than they are at the graduate student and postdoctoral levels (and even the job hiring level). I agree that you have to be yourself and follow your own interests, but it is important to understand how the rules of the tenure decision are different.
Having preached the difference between primary and secondary goals for several years now I am very pleased to read this.