tenure
rallain | August 28, 2010Ghostbusters is old enough that I don't mind giving away some spoilers. If you haven't seen it, I doubt you are going to.
In the movie, the Ghostbusters capture some ghosts. They keep these ghosts in some "containment grid" device. Someone from the city doesn't like this and comes to turn it off. After much searching, I found the clip.
I am going to talk about Louisiana education and tenure, but first I will look the players in the above scene. What were they thinking? Here is my guess.
Walter Peck: These Ghostbusters are a bunch of frauds. They are just stealing money from people…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and see if I could find one where the author list included at least one surname for every letter of the alphabet. There wasn't one every week, but it wasn't that hard (particularly with large numbers of physicists from China, where family names beginning with "X" are more common).
Every so often, somebody…
mikethemadbiologist | February 17, 2010ScienceBlogling Abel Pharmboy asks two questions about collegiality and tenure:
1. Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic quantitative criteria outlined in university guidelines?
2. Do you feel that collegiality - or whatever you want to call it: teamwork, cooperation - should be an important factor in making academic tenure decisions?
To get question 1 out of the way, I'm assuming that the guidelines don't specifically mention collegiality (which is really stupid). In that case, to deny someone tenure based on…
jstemwedel | February 15, 2010Abel has a thoughtful post on the horrific faculty meeting shooting at University of Alabama Huntsville this past Friday. New information seems to come out every few hours on the shooter, Dr. Amy Bishop, a biologist at the university who had been denied tenure, and I'm nowhere near ready to weigh in on the particulars of the case (at least, not with anything smarter than my viscera). But I do want to say just a little on a pair of questions Abel posed in his post:
Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic…
jstemwedel | February 11, 2010Following DrugMonkey's lead, I'm going to play along on the meme proposed by Female Science Professor:
What tradition or other general characteristic of academia would you like to see eliminated completely?
According to the rules, which I just invented, the things to be eliminated have to be of a general nature. So, for example, the answer "my department chair" or "my university's moronic president" are unacceptable unless you want to eliminate the general concept of department chairs or university presidents.
The candidates for disposal can be anything to do with academia, from the most…
sciencewoman | July 13, 2009A few weeks ago, I blogged a self-assessment of my progress towards tenure. It seemed like an apt time to reflect in the hours before my annual review meeting with the department chair(s) and in the months before my packet for reappointment is submitted. Reappointment is the first and only gatekeeping between me and submitting that tenure dossier in three years. I feel OK about reappointment, but less so about tenure. So that's the focus of the navel-gazing. (I suspect such gazing will only get worse as the next few years wend on.)
In my self-assessment, I identified a number of areas where…
jane | April 23, 2009Recently b* (who is my tenure buddy, apparently! we're going up at the same time! w00t!) wrote a post that, I think, captures perfectly the angst, anxiety, stress, and mental craziness that the tenure process induces in otherwise sane people. In her case, it was a procedural change that sent her into somewhat of a tailspin, emotionally. This post struck such a chord with me, because not so long ago, I too found myself in an emotional tailspin over tenure, and I must admit that I was completely blindsided by it (which I don't think helped me get over it as quickly as I should have). So b…
jane | April 14, 2009I have a To-Do list that's longer than my arm.
I have multiple deadlines that are Looming Large this week.
My scholarly materials are due fairly soon, and there are a couple more things that need to be sent out into the Great Reviewing Stream ASAP.
I have about 20 research-related tasks that must be done Right Now.
I have been completely neglecting Mr. Jane. We are not even 2 ships passing in the night....we are 2 ships flying in completely different solar systems.
So what have I spent the last 4 hours doing? Writing a homework assignment. (And actually, much of that was tweaking the…
sb admin | March 23, 2009Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to highlighting women in technology. Get your posts together! (Even if you didn't sign the pledge, please join in on the fun!) Details on how to post and tag are here.
I am so excited about my own post---the woman I am posting about totally rocks, and I can't wait to introduce you to her and her work.
Also, while we are on the subject of reminders: If you're not familiar with fellow scibling Isis the Scientist....well, why the hell aren't you reading her already? Anyway, you definitely want to click…
sb admin | March 12, 2009Um, hi. Apparently I've been gone for a while. Yeah. Sorry about that. Life's been a bit crazy around here lately, and I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. I'm not sleeping. I'm not taking care of myself. I'm sick. I'm stressed to the gills. I have way too much to do. I feel like I work all the damn time. Hmmm, maybe that's because I *do* work all the damn time.
In addition to not having time to breathe blog, I haven't really been in the headspace to blog. I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but I'm not sure how to blog it. It's all about tenure, of course: the…
jane | March 12, 2009Um, hi. Apparently I've been gone for a while. Yeah. Sorry about that. Life's been a bit crazy around here lately, and I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. I'm not sleeping. I'm not taking care of myself. I'm sick. I'm stressed to the gills. I have way too much to do. I feel like I work all the damn time. Hmmm, maybe that's because I *do* work all the damn time.
In addition to not having time to breathe blog, I haven't really been in the headspace to blog. I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but I'm not sure how to blog it. It's all about tenure, of course: the…
sb admin | February 25, 2009I'm supervising a few independent studies this year, with groups of students working on fairly large and fairly fuzzily-defined design projects. These groups couldn't be more different from each other in terms of the way they act as a group, act as individuals, and interact with me. It's got me thinking a lot lately about group dynamics among students and the strong influences that certain individuals have over the behavior of the entire group.
One of the groups is highly functional---on the surface. The students all get along really well with each other and appear to complement each other…
jane | February 15, 2009I don't normally ask you, my dear readers, for help, but this time I think I need some. You see, my motivation seems to have taken a loooooong vacation. (I mean, who can blame it, really---it's February, which is a really sucky month, so why not disappear until it's over? I hope at least that my motivation is sitting on a beach somewhere sipping Mai Tais and having some hot cabana boy rubbing sunscreen on its back.....but I digress.)
OK, so my motivation is gone, and my usual tricks----tricking myself into working, tricking myself into thinking things are not all bad, tricking myself…
jane | January 20, 2009
Text messages from numbers I don't recognize. One of them was creepy enough to put me on edge for the rest of the day. This is especially annoying because I don't have a text plan, so I end up paying for every one of these messages.* Hey stupidheads, stop texting me already!
Having to micromanage my tenure process. Oh sure, we have all of these nice checks and balances in place to make sure this doesn't happen and make life somewhat easier for the tenure candidate. Is anyone surprised that all of my senior colleagues are by and large ignoring all of these checks and balances? At this…
jane | January 3, 2009For a few years now, rather than making new year's resolutions, I've been doing new year's themes. I've found it more rewarding to go with the theme idea, which is more like a principle for living one's life and guiding one's actions overall, rather than choosing specific behaviors on which to focus.
So, it's time to assess last year's theme and pick a new theme for 2009.
The theme for 2008 was FEARLESS:
When I look back on what really disappointed me about 2007, the thing that jumps out at me is that I often stand in my own way. .... In light of this introspection, the theme really named…
jane | December 24, 2008In the midst of all of the end-of-classes and journal deadline and too-many-projects and holiday and general craziness around here, it was almost lost on me that I have inadvertently let a door close this year:
I apparently have decided, by my inaction, not to go on the market this year.
Now of course, it's never too late to do anything, and I suppose if I really wanted to, I could get some job materials together and track down some reccommenders and send out some applications by the first of the year, or at least shortly thereafter. I mean, that would be the smart thing to do, right?…
jane | December 18, 2008I have a number of friends at various institutions that are up for tenure this year. Every school is on its own unique schedule, of course, so some of my friends are finding out right about now, officially or unofficially (mostly unofficially) whether they will be tenured or not. I am going to concentrate on two such friends and their situations in this particular post.
Friend #1 is at a school where the tenure requirements are very vague, and where there is almost zero transparency in the tenure process. Junior faculty have to rely on what amounts to smoke signals from departmental…
jane | December 10, 2008No, really, I have been boring lately. No drama (well, unless you count the day one of my senior colleagues came into my office to announce that he had nothing to do....as I'm in the midst of slogging through my R&R and the other approximately 10 million things on my to-do list....I am really surprised that I didn't throttle him). No weird student stories (although I do have to say that this year, the grade-grubbers seem to be out in force. Does this have something to do with tenure? Does grade-grubbing increase the closer one gets to the tenure decision?). Just a lot of nose-to-the-…
jane | December 3, 2008
Prioritizing is good. Prioritizing is absolutely necessary in this job. But what do you do if you have time this month to do X projects, but X+1 projects are "high priority"? Is cloning legal yet?
Number of high priority projects = X+1 because a journal article I sent out for review before its time, which I thought would be a sure reject, just came back as a strong revise&resubmit. So that clearly needs to be fast-tracked. So yes, at least my plate is full for a totally awesome reason.
This is the first set of journal reviews that I've gotten back where there were no insulting/mean-…
jane | November 10, 2008Could somebody please explain to me why some senior faculty feel the need to treat the tenure process as a hazing?*
Possible hypotheses:
1. These faculty members never quite got over the teasing and hijinks aimed at them in junior high/high school and are exacting revenge on a powerless faction (junior faculty).
2. Lack of social skills (= not good at giving feedback in a constructive way).
3. Sick notion of a rite of passage ("My life was hell as junior faculty, so your life better damn well be hell too!").
4. Extreme need for milk and cookies/a nap/a glass of wine/a timeout.
* I'm not…