Tenure Chase
drorzel | June 10, 2014I had a couple of conversations at DAMOP last week about career issues, and I just want to note that I will never get used to the idea that I'm a respected elder anything, whose advice would be valued. I basically feel like I lucked into my whole career, so I hesitate to advise others as to what they should do. But then, there's a huge element of luck in any tenure-track career, given the tiny ratio of jobs to candidates.
One thing that came up was, of course, the question of how it is I run a blog, which connects to the larger question of work-life balance. One of the people I spoke to…
drorzel | July 22, 2013I'm starting to think that maybe I need to add "Work-life Balance" to the tagline of this blog, given all the recent posting about such things (but then, one of the benefits of having done this blogging thing for eleven years is that I know this is just a phase, and I'll drift on to the next obsession soon). Anyway, the genre of work-life blogging generally just picked up a new must-read post from Radhika Nagpal at Scientific American: The-Awesomest-7-Year-Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty-life:
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance.
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Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems:
[The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…
drorzel | May 19, 2011Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating "social media" alternatives for academic publishing, citing "disastrous consequences" of the "filter-then-publish" model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I'm not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is:
The conventional system is legible: you can count and measure a scientist's production. The incentive is to produce more of what the elite wants. In a publish-then-filter system nobody cares about quantity: only the impact…
drorzel | July 18, 2007A comment I made at a meeting yesterday that I think is worth reproducing out of context:
A big part of making it from junior faculty to tenure is deciding which bits of unsolicited contradictory advice you're going to ignore.
drorzel | June 27, 2007The final step in the tenure process here is the Very Nice Letter. I'm not sure that it's an official step, as opposed to an established tradition, but whichever it actually is, at the end of the process, a candidate who passes the tenure review gets a letter from the faculty committee that handles tenure and promotion reviews highlighting the positive things said in the course of the tenure review.
As one of my colleagues noted, this is probably the only time (prior to retirement) that you get an official letter telling you how great you are, so these are to be cherished. I got my Very Nice…
drorzel | February 19, 2007In my campus mailbox this morning:
Dear Chad:
I am pleased to report that on Februrary 10, 2007 the Board of Trustees approved our recommendation that you be tenured effective September 1, 2007 at the rank of Associate Professor.
Woo-hoo!
It took about half a second to decide to sign the copy indicating my acceptance, and send it back. That brightens an otherwise groggy and out-of-sorts morning...
(Amusingly, the other thing in the letter describes an offer to pay half the cost of a set of academic robes for those occasions when I want to look like a medieval scholar. It's actually a pretty…
drorzel | January 4, 2007One of the standard elements of most academic hiring and promotion applications, at least at a small liberal arts college, is some sort of statement from the candidate about teaching. This is called different things at different places-- "statement of teaching philosophy" is a common term for it, and the tenure process here calls for a "statement of teaching goals."
I spent hours and hours on this, because I get a little obsessive about written work. It did get read closely by the ad hoc committee, at least-- at my first meeting with them, they asked a couple of questions about details of…
drorzel | December 19, 2006A few weeks back, I was talking to my parents on the phone, and my mother asked "What do you want for Christmas?"
"Tenure," I said. Because, well, that's what's been on my mind.
This is going to be the Best Christmas Ever...
drorzel | December 11, 2006Inside Higher Ed had a story on Friday about a Modern Language Association study on tenure and promotion. The study group just released its final report (available for download here. Given that I'm waiting to hear the results of my own tenure case (a decision could come at any time, starting this week), there's no way I can let this pass without comment.
The report makes a number of specific recommendations, helpfully summarized by Inside Higher Ed:
The panel -- the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion -- urged departments to:
Create "transparency" in hiring and…
drorzel | November 16, 2006The last step in the tenure review process (from my end) is the approval of the Procedure section of the report. By rule, the ad hoc committee sends the candidate a copy of the section describing what they did in the course of the review (with the names removed), and the candidate gets a chance to respond.
I'm not quite sure what I would object to in this, as it's a really sketchy outline of what they did, most of which is directly determined by the official procedures spelled out in the faculty manual. It's a part of the process, though, so I read it over, and sent my official acceptance in…
drorzel | November 6, 2006I'm going to be too busy to blog much for the next few days. This is partly a matter of it being the end of the term, with lab reports due (drafts tomorrow, the final reports Thursday), and exams (next Thursday), and grading, and an end-of-term push in the lab with one of my research students. But mostly, I'm going to be thinking about seven questions.
The way the tenure process works here is that candidates have two interviews with the ad hoc committee. The first is to meet the committee, and establish a sort of initial context for their fact-finding, while the second interview is to give…
drorzel | October 27, 2006Steinn reports a new metric for research productivity that some people are using: the "H-number":
The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest "k" such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations.
So, you start off with a H-score of zero.
If your 5th highest cited paper has 5 citations but your 6th highest cited paper has 4 citations then your H=5.
If your 10th highest cited paper has 11 citations, but your 11th highest cited paper has 9 citations, then your H=10.
And so on. High H is better.
Yeah, that's just what we need, another quasi-…
drorzel | September 1, 2006Behold, the Tenure Box:
Well, actually, it's an oversize milk crate, but that's nit-picking. The stuff in the box is all for my tenure review: the blue folders are copies of my research materials, the green folders are my teaching materials, the yellow folders are my CV and statements, and the thing at the front is a bound copy of my Ph.D. thesis.
I'm not handing it in just yet-- I'm still waiting for an update on a paper that's been submitted-- but it's basically done. That's the whole stack of stuff, and now that I look at the picture, I'm sort of wondering whether I shouldn't've made…
drorzel | August 25, 2006One of the things required for the tenure review is a full and up-to-date curriculum vitae. Having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting my CV, it seems a shame not to make more use of it than that, so I might as well recycle it into a blog post (after stripping out my home address and a few other items).
Of course, I'm too lazy to do it in proper HTML, so what's below the fold is an automated conversion from the RTF file into really, really bad HTML. But, having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting the Word file to get it to look right, I'll…
drorzel | August 25, 2006
(This is a screen cap of my desktop at work. The shortcuts are frequently-used folders, and I added one for my tenure materials only a couple of days ago.)
drorzel | August 15, 2006I'm in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I've been saying this for weeks. It's a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I'll post a few of the things I'm writing, when it's reasonable to do so.
A major part of the tenure process is finding external reviewers for the research material. As most institutions don't really have enough people in a given sub-field to assess research in-house (especially at a small college), and as trusting such an assessment would be a little dodgy, the research review is traditionally…