Tenure Chase

Pre-Tenure and Post-Hoc

drorzel — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 08:17:59 +0000

Pre-Tenure and Post-Hoc

I 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 phrased this as something like "How much of a life am I allowed to have outside of research?" I gave a slightly different answer to this than in the past, so I figured I'd post a version of it here.

Basically, what I said is that the whole work-life issue is ultimately a post-hoc explanation, not a clear requirement of anything. That is, what matters for success in academia is productivity. If you generate enough of whatever it is you're expected to generate, you'll pass the review.

In this light, work-life issues are less about an actual coherent expectation of time spent than they are a post-hoc explanation for an issue with productivity. That is, if you come up short of producing enough of whatever, time spent on outside interests is an easy thing to point to and offer as an explanation: "Well, he would've passed if he had spent more time in the lab, instead of blogging..." It's not a rational expectation, it's a post-hoc rationalization.

And, in a sense, it circles back to the question of luck that I mentioned at the start. Because, ultimately, a lot of career stuff comes down to luck. A chance conversation sparks a productive collaboration, a grant lands with a sympathetic reviewer, an experiment works out better than expected, and you've got tenure. Or a line of research could catch a bad break-- a flood in the lab, getting scooped by somebody else, or an unfortunate quirk of experimental parameters (a previously unmeasured property of some atom turns out to be in a range that precludes what seemed like a sure Science paper, say)-- and then you're screwed.

Psychologically, though, very few people like to admit that this is the case. So academics invent apparently causal explanations for things that really aren't-- the candidate spent too much time on teaching, or hobbies, or with family. In reality, though, most of those people are just unlucky-- had they spent the exact same amount of time on other interests, but had a few other breaks go their way, they'd sail through the tenure process, and people would come up to them six years later at conferences asking with a tinge of wonder how they managed to get tenure while having a life.

So my (slightly revised) advice to those on the tenure track is to focus on being productive, not appearing to be working hard. And you (hopefully) know what works to maximize your productivity, which may not be constant ostentatious labor in the lab. When I was a post-doc, I had a couple of arguments with my boss about hours, because he was very much of the opinion that there was no problem that couldn't be solved by just staying in the lab until it was solved, where I knew that after a certain point, I need a few hours of sleep to recharge. I can stay up all night taking data or doing other fairly routine tasks, but after 10-12 hours, my ability to find new solutions to problems is completely shot.

What settled the argument wasn't really a change of style on either of our parts, but a change in the lab. The stuff that was broken got fixed, and we started getting good results, that eventually became a Science paper. And productivity smooths over a lot of problems.

So, you do what you need to do to make things work. Which may include hobbies, and family time, and even occasional naps. Yeah, there might be some idiot who will hold non-research activities against even successful and productive faculty. But there's less of that than you might think, because at some point, that kind of behavior becomes an excellent way to lose a lawsuit.

Of course, that's easy advice to give from the far side of a tenure review. It's much harder to hear and follow that pre-tenure, when the criteria for what counts as "enough" are maddeningly vague. As junior faculty, you're often made to feel as if there's no real level that could ever count as "enough"-- a former administrator here had a real gift for making me feel stressed and confused.

This is, unfortunately, probably unavoidable. You'll never get a clear and unambiguous statement of what counts as "enough," because lawyers. Any system with clearly stated thresholds or the like is subject to gaming and thus fodder for lawsuits, so the standards will always be kind of nebulous, and Chairs and Deans will be impossible to pin down.

In the end, this kind of comes back to the Seven-Year Postdoc thing. At some level, you just need to give it your best shot: work as you work best, be as productive as you can be, and don't worry about appearances. (Obviously, if you're officially told to do something by people in power, you should do that. Especially if it's in writing. But odds are it won't be.) If that's not enough, well, that sucks, but on the other hand, if you need to make yourself utterly miserable to keep your job, at some point you need to ask whether that's a job you really ought to try to keep. (Also, it probably won't work...)

Of course, this also entails accepting the essential role of luck in the hiring and promotion process. Which also takes a certain toll, psychologically, at both ends of the process. But ultimately, it's healthier than a crazy system that views having a life outside of work as a character flaw.

drorzel Tue, 06/10/2014 - 04:17

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Tenure Chase

It would certainly be a huge mistake to do nothing else but research, when you are working for a tenure. Actually, many of the very best physicists have been very active persons with lots of hobbies and interests outside physics. I have read that Werner Heisenberg, for instance, was an almost professional-level pianist. When he made his major discoveries in quantum mechanics in his mid-twenties, he had very much outdoor activitiies: mountaneering, hiking, horse-riding and hunting. He was also an enthusiastic player of lawn tennis and table tennis.It has been claimed that one of the reasons for his great discoveries was his ability to relax completely from his efforts in physics by means of his hobbies.

Absolutely productivity over hours in the lab, or leaving the lights on so it seems like you are in the lab.

Your comment reminded me of a situation decades ago where there were two candidates with similar levels of productivity. When asked what else they did, one said he worked on physics 16 hours a day. They took the one that got that same work done in 10 hours, with time left to go hiking or whatever it was. They figured that the first one would burn out and become useless.

The Seven-Year Postdoc

drorzel — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:00:42 +0000

The Seven-Year Postdoc

I'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 tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

So with some humor to balance my fear, here’s goes my confession:

Seven things I did during my first seven years at Harvard. Or, how I loved being a tenure-track faculty member, by deliberately trying not to be one.

I decided that this is a 7-year postdoc.

I stopped taking advice.

I created a “feelgood” email folder.

I work fixed hours and in fixed amounts.

I try to be the best “whole” person I can.

I found real friends.

I have fun “now”.

This is really excellent, refreshing advice from somebody who got tenure at the rat-raciest of institutions. This ought to be required reading for everybody on the tenure track. Go thou and Read the Whole Thing.

I wish there had been something this clear-headed around back before I got tenure. I independently worked a lot of this stuff out on my own, in a less coherent fashion. I particularly agree with the second item-- around the time I was advised through unofficial channels that I needed to "be less visible" (that is, not go to lectures and other events on campus because people might think I wasn't working as hard as I could be), I made more or less the same decision to stop trying to follow official advice. I didn't pursue this job because I felt a burning need to drive myself insane trying to follow contradictory checklists-- I went to grad school and sought a professorship because I liked the atmosphere of a small liberal arts college campus, and wanted to work there. I decided that if I couldn't get tenure while being a part of the sort of community that I was seeking when I set out on this path, then it wasn't worth getting tenure. And I felt a lot better for it.

And while there are significant differences between our institutions, the "real friends" item also resonates with me-- one of the essential factors that helped me maintain sanity during my tenure-track years was lunchtime pick-up basketball. On the one hand, that was time away from the classroom and lab, but after a couple of stretches where I stopped playing to spend more time on work, I realized that I was actually less productive when I didn't play, because I was grumpy and irritable and out of shape without the stress relief and exercise. (It also got me a very nice letter in my tenure file from one of the student affairs folks who played with us; I doubt it carried much weight, but it was definitely something for the feel-good email folder (not that I had one of those, but I might create one...)). They weren't as professionally useful in terms of grant-reading and that kind of thing, but on a personal level, the friends I made through basketball helped keep me sane. And it's even more important to me these days.

A couple of these items I also discovered relatively late-- we waited to have SteelyKid and The Pip until after I got tenure (one of the harder sacrifices for the job), so I didn't need to be quite as strict about time management until recently. I'm taking a somewhat similar approach now, though-- I basically write the weekends off completely, and do my best to accept that nothing work related will get done between 5 and 10 pm. I do try to get some blog/book stuff done in night and weekend hours, but I've also blocked out whole days during the week when I refuse to deal with administrative stuff at work. And, of course, the family balance stuff wasn't necessary until very recently, but Kate and I have done some negotiation of who's responsible for what, when, in a manner that's sort of similar to what she describes.

I'll also say, since I have more years since tenure than she does, that very little has changed since tenure on these points, other than having more drains on my time. Ironically, I'm actually "less visible" on campus now, because of the kids-- I bring them to some home sporting events and concerts in the evening after day care, but they're not generally up for lectures and dinner discussions, so I've mostly stopped going to those except under exceptional circumstances. But I've mostly stuck to my goal of doing things on and around campus only when I find them personally worthwhile, not because they conform with somebody else's idea of what I ought to be doing. I suspect that there are some costs to this-- in particular, I'm not sure how writing popular-audience books will be considered when I come up for full professor, and that will likely delay my application for promotion a bit. But again, I went into this business because there were certain kinds of things I wanted to do, and I don't see the point in avoiding doing those kinds of things, or taking on unpleasant stuff that I don't want to or need to do, simply because it would better fit somebody else's idea of what I ought to be doing.

(This is not a totally absolutist position, by the way, as I'm more than willing to consider ways to shift the things I want to be doing anyway into channels that are more professionally valued, when/if I can find some. I'm not enough of a Zen master to avoid being irritated when the stuff I pour blood and sweat into gets looked at askance as not "serious" enough.)

Anyway, again, I wholeheartedly endorse Nagpal's post and the advice therein. Including the anti-advice bits, for what it's worth-- if you read that and recoil in horror, feel free to disregard it and go in another direction. The important thing is to do what works for you, not throw away whatever drew you to the job in the first place in order to follow somebody else's advice.

drorzel Mon, 07/22/2013 - 04:00

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Of course conditions will vary by department, but Harvard has a reputation for not awarding tenure to their junior faculty. So it is particularly impressive that Prof. Nagpal got tenure at Harvard. There is a lesson here: often, trying too hard at something can be counterproductive.

Conversely, since Harvard has a reputation for not awarding tenure to their junior faculty, an academic will very likely be able to find a tenured or at least tenure-track job somewhere else after being turned down there. This is not true many places.

What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?

drorzel — Wed, 30 May 2012 08:30:25 +0000

What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?

In 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 to tell us if it is still operating this way). Every teacher at BB&N was evaluated by peers as well as supervisor (in most cases, the supervisor was your Dept. Head at the Upper School where I worked). The person being evaluated chose a colleague within the department as well as someone outside of the department (along with the Dept. Head). It was everyone’s obligation to visit 3-4 classes and have pre- and post-observation conversations about what they saw, look at lesson plans and student work, then write it all up for consideration by the Dep’t Head and Headmaster. In addition, the person being assessed would write up a lengthy self-assessment as to strengths and weaknesses, and offer any commentary on the write-ups by the appraisal team. As I recall, there were no hard and fast criteria or rubrics that had to be used. The teacher being evaluated could actually propose some of the criteria and evidence to be used.

In my 3 part-time years at BB&N I was evaluated once and did one peer evaluation at the request of a colleague in the English Dept. I found it an uplifting, collegial and educational experience each time – more so, oddly enough, when I was a peer assessor than when I was being assessed.

Drawing on that, he proposes a formal accountability system that could be used to do an accurate assessment of teaching performance. Which does include pre- and post-test scores as one component, but also the sort of peer evaluation and comment that he describes above.

What really struck me about this was the way it mirrors the tenure-review system here. For example (re-grouping his points somewhat):

Peer review should complement supervisory review

Some portion of the evaluation should include a written statement by the “team” that the teacher most often works with (grade-level team, department) as to their abilities as a team player.

While our tenure system does incorporate comments from the department chair and administrators, the information-gathering phase also includes interviews with departmental colleagues. The final decision is formally up to the Dean of the Faculty and the President, but the recommendation as to whether to grant tenure or not is made by a faculty committee.

The teacher should be able to propose evidence of success beyond the ones proposed by the state, district and supervisors in order that the picture be rounded out and the teacher in question feel ownership of (at least some) of the evidence used in the decision

As part of the process, faculty up for tenure submit statements on teaching and research, which gives them exactly this sort of opportunity to describe what they're doing and why.

Teachers should be able to respond in writing to the draft evaluation

One of the most angst-inducing parts of the tenure review process is the infamous "second interview" with the information-gathering ad hoc committee. After the committee has completed all of their interviews and gathered comments from students and external reviewers, they send a list of questions to the candidate covering all the potentially significant issues that were raised in a negative way during the review. They then meet with the candidate, and discuss those points, after which the candidate can submit a written response to be included with the report.

It's probably not surprising that these systems mirror each other. Wiggins is interested in setting up a system for evaluation that is as fair as possible, and will generate as little controversy as possible (thus his concerns about teacher "ownership" of the results, and providing opportunities for response. The tenure system here is making the ultimate high-stakes judgement-- having passed this review, Union will never be rid of me-- so they have a strong interest in making the evaluation as accurate as possible, And again, they're trying to minimize controversy, so as not to get sued by candidates who feel they were done wrong.

What these systems are not is efficient. These are both very labor-intensive activities, both for the people being evaluated and the people doing the evaluation. Faculty and administrators need to spend time sitting in on classes, writing and reading statements, and combining all these different measures to reach some sort of final determination. Which is why this kind of review is a one-time thing at the college level (well, one-and-a-half-- there's a reappointment review in a professor's third year that includes most of the elements of the tenure review, but isn't quite as comprehensive), and why the sort of review he describes only happens at small elite prep schools.

This is why people talking about "teacher accountability" tend to default to things like test scores (maybe in a value-added manner), and why our more regular merit evaluations rely on simpler inputs (course evaluations, lists of publications, brief statements). Doing teacher evaluation right takes a lot of time and effort, much of it needing to come from the people who get to set the policies. And a system like Wiggins proposes doesn't make for a punchy sound-bite during a political stump speech, or provide an easy stick with which to bash unions. Thus, high-stakes testing, which is politically convenient but educationally disastrous.

It's important to have these ideas out there, though, to remind people that we do know what it takes to do the job. And while the system Wiggins proposes is unquestionably more labor-intensive than just punching test scores into a spreadsheet, it can at least provide a starting point for an effort to find a system somewhere between the extreme values of "horribly inefficient but fair and accurate" and "seemingly efficient but laughably inaccurate." Provided there's anyone willing to make a good-faith effort.

drorzel Wed, 05/30/2012 - 04:30

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Just discovered that you're not on vacation, that in fact the old RSS feed stopped working. Some time ago! I remember vaguely the prospect of a great blog upgrade, but I didn't notice that the RSS feed would just stop. Just installed the new RSS feed and now I'm catching up. Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, etc.

I am not sure I have so much to add, except:
1. I think this is an extremely important issue and one that needs more discussion.
2. A sane and valuable system may not seem "efficient", but it seems to me that we may not have the appropriate metric for measuring efficiency. If we could count all the (potential) benefits* of a good "peer-reveiw" of teaching, it might not seem so inefficient.

Thanks for bringing this up!
-Ian
*presumably, both the reviewed and those reviewing should learn through this process. On the other hand, maybe I am a bit too pollyanna-ish, and this will always end up as ticking boxes to save time for writing grant proposals?

Filtering Isn't the Problem

drorzel — Thu, 19 May 2011 08:15:38 +0000

Filtering Isn't the Problem

Via 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 matters. And impact can mean different things to different people. It allows for more diversity in how people produce and consume science. Thus, if you think we would be better if we stopped counting research papers, then you should reject conventional peer review and favor the publish-then-filter system.

The problem here is that countability isn't the real core of the issue. That is, you can count blog posts or arxiv preprints just as easily as you count journal articles and conference presentations. And if you shifted to a model where blog posts and arxiv preprints are the primary mode of publication, you will very quickly find that the system shifts to simple counting of blog posts or arxiv preprints.

The fundamental problem here isn't whether you filter pre- or post-publication. The fundamental problem that people have with the whole business of academic science is the existence of a system requiring some sort of quasi-objective comparison of scientists.

The problem is that the people who hire and promote scientists need a way to make those decisions, and in a world where there are vast differences between disciplines and even sub-disciplines, counting papers ends up being the default. Shifting to a social-media type publications system doesn't change the need for a way to compare scientists within an applicant pool or tenure cohort. And when you need to start making decisions about hiring and promotion using social-media type publications as your primary channel, the people making those decisions will drift toward simple publication counting for all the same reasons that people drift that way now.

"But it's impact that matters!" you repeat. Sure, but how do you measure impact? Page views? Citations? Those aren't anything new-- there are "impact factor" measurements for journals, and services like the Web of Science database or the Astrophysics Data System allow you to quickly and easily determine the number of citations of people's journal articles. That's part of the information that I had to supply for my tenure case, for example. If you like single numbers, there are even things like the h-index.

"But those are imperfect measures!" Yes, and? I haven't seen any suggestions of measures of impact in more social-media style systems that would be any better. Things like pageviews and links and retweets are essentially random-- if a big-name blogger links or retweets a link, that can hugely skew those measures. Citation numbers aren't any more useful in the electronic world than the paper world.

The paradigm publish-then-filter system in my corner of academia is the physics arxiv. It does some very minimal filtering to weed out the obvious cranks, but other than that, it's subject to the same vagaries of chance as traditional publications. Back at the Science in the 21st Century workshop a couple of year's ago, Paul Ginsparg's talk included a couple of really interesting graphs. The first showed the number of submissions as a function of time, with a gigantic spike at 4pm. The reason for this is that they send a daily email listing new submissions, in the order in which they were submitted, with the "day" starting at 4pm. As a result, people posting papers make a point -- sometimes involving automatic pinging of the arxiv servers-- of getting their papers in as close to the start of the new "day" as possible, so they're near the top of that email.

The second graph showed a measure of the number of citations papers received as a function of their position on that list, showing that papers that appeared near the top of their daily email received significantly more citations than papers that appeared farther down the list. So, this system is every bit as game-able as traditional publishing, just in a different manner-- if your citation total depends on the timing of your submission, is that really any better than having your access to a premier journal depend on the whims of a referee in the field?

(Assume, for the sake of argument, that we're talking run-of-the-mill refereeing, not tremendously unethical behavior like spiking papers from rival labs, or using the referee process to delay publication of a result until you can replicate it. That sort of thing is a completely different issue.)

The problem people have with the system isn't the timing of the filtering, it's the need for the comparison. People get outraged about the vagaries of traditional academic publishing because it doesn't seem right for careers to hang in the balance based on such an imperfect system. Non-traditional publishing looks like a huge improvement now, because the stakes are very low in that corner of the world. If it were to become the main channel of publication, then you would find careers hanging in the balance based on the slightly different imperfections of the new system, and people would become outraged over those.

And the thing is, in a world with limited resources, you will always need to make these kind of decisions. You can't hire everyone who applies, so you need some standard for evaluation that everybody in the department can more or less accept. That will always be a problem, no matter what method you use to sort publications.

Lemire's other points seem to me to suffer from similar problems, or even to contradict each other. For example, his first point includes:

While you will eventually get your work published, you may have to drastically alter it to make it pass peer review. A common theme is that you will need to make it look more complicated. In a paper I published a few years ago, I had to use R*-trees, not because I needed them, but because other authors had done so. When I privately asked them why they had used R*-trees, while it was easy to check experimentally that they did not help, the answer was "it was the only way to get our paper in a major conference". So my work has been made more complicated for the sole purpose of impressing the reviewers: "look, I know about R*-trees too!"

But his point 4 is a complaint about the problem of the Minimum Publishable Unit:

You know how you succeed in science these days? Take a few ideas, then try every small variation of these ideas and make a research paper out of each one of them. Each paper will look good and be written quickly, but your body of work will be highly redundant. Instead of working toward deep contributions, we encourage people to repeat themselves more and more and collect many shallow contributions.

These seem to run counter to one another. A common variant of the "you need to make your work look complicated" complaint in my corner of academia is that you have to pack so much in to get a paper in Science or Nature that it becomes all but incomprehensible. But that's the opposite of the Minimum Publishable Unit problem, which is stretching what is essentially a single measurement over several papers, usually in lesser journals.

Also, it's not at all clear to me how social media style publications make the MPU problem any better. Quite the contrary-- the lack of a referee-imposed threshold and the ease of publication would seem to encourage more incomplete publication, rather than less. That's one of the maddening things about science blogs-- too often, a blog post is not a complete working-out of an idea, but only a partial discussion. There are whole blogs that I've more or less stopped reading because they tend to be all teasers for more interesting posts to follow, only the more interesting posts never quite get here. This seems to me to map directly onto the MPU problem in academic publishing, so I don't think that shifting to a social-media publication model will make any real difference in this area.

And again, while there are good things published via social media, they mostly come from people for whom the stakes are low. To the extent that there are deep and thoughtful things published via new channels, they seem to mostly come from people who have the kind of jobs that are designed to do that-- either tenured academics, or people in think-tank sorts of situations where their whole job is to turn out deep and thoughtful analyses. They have the time and the security to publish that sort of thing, and to publish it anywhere they like-- their job doesn't depend on getting publications in time to demonstrate the qualities that will get them through a job search or a tenure review.

If we move to a world where blogs and preprints and that sort of thing are the basis for hiring and promotion decisions, I don't think we'd find a huge increase in the fraction of deep thoughts that get published. We might even see a net increase in the number of half-assed results thrown out there for the sake of a publication. But that wouldn't reflect a weakness of the medium, it would reflect the fact that people in early-career jobs need to produce something to get and keep jobs.

The problem isn't the filtering, it's the high-stakes evaluation.

drorzel Thu, 05/19/2011 - 04:15

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"...it would reflect the fact that people in early-career jobs need to produce something to get and keep jobs.

The problem isn't the filtering, it's the high-stakes evaluation."

Exactly, from a career perspective, publication, especially in glamour mags, is currency, a way of keeping score.

Good article.

"Too often, a blog post is not a complete working-out of an idea, but only a partial discussion. There are whole blogs that I've more or less stopped reading because they tend to be all teasers for more interesting posts to follow, only the more interesting posts never quite get here.â

I agree, and am guilty myself sometimes of quickly posting something that fascinates me to share with my readers. The allure of social media is the immediacy and the ability to inform and inspire; the risk is a relative lack of depth and time for reflection. The best bloggers are able to do both (Iâm still learning.)

With regards to:

âThe problem is that the people who hire and promote scientists need a way to make those decisions, and in a world where there are vast differences between disciplines and even sub-disciplines, counting papers ends up being the default.â

As an academic Dean of a college of the sciences and mathematics, I certainly do not count papers per se â I evaluate each paper on its merits of scholarship, and yes, using other considerations such as impact factor. I do not include blogs or other non peer-reviewed works. Similar to many Universities, we evaluate faculty based upon excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Blogs and other social media fit, I believe, well in the category of service in recognition of their important role in community outreach and public education â if well written and done responsibly. I hope that this addresses some of your questions.

I want the research papers I see to have been pre-filtered; I don't have time to do all the filtering myself.

Career Guidance

drorzel — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:52:21 +0000

Career Guidance

A 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 Wed, 07/18/2007 - 02:52

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Tenure Chase

Even though I didn't make it all the way, I figured that one out pretty quickly. It was bloody obvious in my case. My first year at Vanderbilt, several faculty members pulled me aside to talk to me about the department and my future, and it was clear that they viewed me as a political football who might be useful in advancing their own agendae. This was the year when my department was a huge, dysfunctional mess, mind you.

Even before I arrived at Vanderbilt, I had one astronomer telling me that what I did-- you know, that stuff that just got that Gruber prize thing-- was the "worst sort of astronomy," and he asked me if I would do any "rigorous" science if I came to Vanderbilt.

-Rob

A comment I heard after getting tenure was that I had ignored ALL the advice given to me by senior colleagues from P&T during the pre-tenure phase.
I think that is accurate, in terms of research direction and priority of efforts, and my strategy for applying for funding.

My graduate advisor's wife spelled out faculty hiring to me once: "To you, it's a job. To them, it's politics."

Unseemly Self-Congratulations

drorzel — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:35:15 +0000

Unseemly Self-Congratulations

The 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 Letter this week, and it is, indeed, Very Nice.

I can't resist a little unseemly self-congratulation, here, but I'll put the excerpts below the fold. And for those of you who find this just too cloying for words, the next post will be all about how I'm an idiot, so stay tuned for that...

There are three bits that I want to quote, because they make me particularly happy. Two are quotes from students (who were "overwhelmingly positive"). The first:

entering this course I did not have a positive attitude towards the material. It was only through the excellent teaching abilities of Prof. Orzel that I came to understand and appreciate this subject.

Really, in a discipline where the vast majority of the students we teach go on to major in something else, it just doesn't get any better than that.

The comments are anonymous, though I think I can probably guess the author of the alumni comment:

I have continued to be amazed by the impact Prof. Orzel has had on my life and career. For example, I have literally been on the phone with customers, with notes and textbooks from Prof. Orzel's classes guiding me along.

Again, that sort of thing is absolutely fantastic to hear.

There's also a section on research, with several quotes from the external reviewers who got sent my research portfolio to look over. I know that my work prior to coming here was good stuff, so the praise for those papers was not unexpected, but it's very cheering to hear that someone said of my current work:

The program he is pursuing is of [an] exceedingly high standard, and is probably [the] most ambitious program that is sustainable at a liberal arts college.

Really, there's no more effective motivational tool for getting me fired up to do research than hearing that other people in the field think I'm doing cool stuff.

In summary, then: I rule. Except, of course, when I'm a total idiot. See next post.

drorzel Wed, 06/27/2007 - 01:35

Tags

Tenure Chase

Congratulations! To celebrate, get a post-doc and crush his spirit :)

Congratulations!

To me, the cool statement is:

"... exceedingly high standard, and is probably [the] most ambitious program that is sustainable at a liberal arts college..."

I read that as "Chad Orzel has a large and positive value of the Work-Quality coefficient, which is asymptotic to the classical limit in this ambient environment."

Or something like that.

Is this like the scene in the film of "A Beautiful Mind" where the Princeton Math faculty set fountain pens on the Faculty Club table of John Forbes, Nash., Jr.?

If so, this gives Kate Nepveu a co-starring role as well, and forces you to praise her in your Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Or am I getting a little ahead of the chronology here?

Anyway, sincere congratulations again. Feedback can hardly be much nicer.

A very welcome break from the annual letters that say "you are doing fine, please do more....." that one gets from Deans and such! Congrats!!!

Congratulations!

Those are the kind of responses that make me believe people might know how to evaluate professors at liberal arts colleges. When I hear that someone from a liberal arts college has had a proposal reviewed with comments like "But Wolfgang Ketterle [or insert your favorite Nobel prize winner at a research institution ;) ] could do that before breakfast if he thought it was important" it drives me crazy.

Putting the positive comments from the former students first is also a lovely sign.

Congrats again.

Congratulations!

Congrats! Not only does the Very Nice Letter remove a significant bit of stress from your life, but it even gives you a positive boost of morale. Now, just hold onto that boost for the next thirty years, and you'll be fine!

"Congratulations! To celebrate, get a post-doc and crush his spirit :)"

If I were drinking coffee when I read that, I would have spit it all over my keyboard!

Officially Official

drorzel — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 10:29:55 +0000

Officially Official

In 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 good deal-- these things are ridiculously expensive...)

drorzel Mon, 02/19/2007 - 05:29

Tags

Tenure Chase

Now you have to change the blurb next to your picture.

Congrats! I'm glad to see you gave the offer full and considered thought -- one second is a loooong latency! :)

Congratulations!

(As for robes -- well, when I was at Queen Mary College in London for a semester, one of my history tutors would sometimes wear her robes when it was cold -- they were apparently quite warm and thus actually useful at times.)

One could do worse than require moral turpitude as an exit strategy. Frame the notice, quaff a dram of Lagvulin, start harvesting grant funding so the Department of Ilonggo can feed off your overhead charges. (There is no agreement whatsoever about where Ilonggo is a proper dialect of Hiligaynon. It's hot stuff!)

Congrats!

(One wonders, very slightly, whether the typo is original.)

Congratulations! Always nice to see these things in writing.

congrats! now you are "the man." Any nefarious plans to take over world?

Congratulations! Looking forward to seeing your photo with the robes...

Congrats! Now you'll have the academic security needed to dump this AMO experimental stuff and do superstrings!

Congratulations, Chad!

w00t!

Congratulations, Professor.

Now you have to change the blurb next to your picture.

I've thought of that, but I haven't come up with anything good to change it to...

Congratulations!

WOOHOO!!! Congrats!!

You can do either of the two obvious things:
1) Remove "on the tenure track"
or
2) Do 1) and add "tenured" in front of "physicist".
OR You can completely re-identify yourself without reference to physics as a person who likes to rant about life.
Congratulations, you are now a new person. Your whole world perception will change.

You could just remove all references to physics, tenure and SLACs. Admit the real truth. You are a slave to a canine intelligence forcing you to play with photons to produce dog biscuits.

Now the supply is permanently secured!

Congratulations

I'm a Physicist, not a lawyer, but...

That means that you get to keep you job until retirement, unless you do something unusally dreadful (leave that to your imagination), or --

or the Department or College dissolves, in which case you aren't losing your tenure or your job, they've just exponentially decayed to vacuum.

Or something. Low probability. Call it epsilon. But still.... Can't rest on your laurels. Have to plan for those contingencies. Publish, perish, or at least blog like crazy.

Congratulations!

Congrats!

Congratulations!

Now you can change the blurb to "That's Ass Prof Oilcan to you, punk !"

Statement on Teaching

drorzel — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:12:19 +0000

Statement on Teaching

One 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 the statement-- but I put enough time into it that I'm going to get some more use out of it, by recycling it as a blog post.

This has been lightly edited from the original text-- I converted the LaTeX formatting codes to HTML, and concealed some of the student names (I'm not quite sure why, as they'd be trivial to figure out, but it seemed like the right thing to do). I was advised after my reappointment review (in my third year) that I needed to make the statement more philosophical, so, well, here's what I sound like when I expound on my philosophy of teaching physics:

Statement of Teaching Goals

My main goal in teaching physics, whether in the classroom or in
the laboratory, is for my students to learn something about what
it means to think like a physicist. Physics, like any other
discipline, has a characteristic approach to dealing with the
world, and an important part of the process of education is for
students to see what this approach is and how it differs from that
of other disciplines. The aim is not necessarily for all my
students to become physicists (though it's always flattering
when some do), but rather for them to gain some appreciation of
physics as more than a collection of trivia.

Classroom Teaching

When I teach our introductory classes, I state this goal
explicitly on the first day of class. Most students who take
Physics 120 and 121 do so to fulfill a requirement for some other
major, and they often view physics as little more than a nuisance,
a collection of arbitrary formulae to be memorized for later use.
I point out to them that if the goal were only for them to
memorize a handful of facts, there would be no reason for the
class to be taught by a physicist. The real purpose of the class,
particularly at a liberal arts college, is to learn something
about the process of doing physics.

I give them a four-step outline of this process: 1) first,
identify some phenomenon in the real world that we want to
describe physically, 2) break that phenomenon down into simpler
processes, 3) find universal rules governing those simpler
processes, and 4) using those rules, recombine the simple cases to
describe the original phenomenon of interest. Following this
procedure not only allows physicists to describe the particular
phenomenon we started with, but also allows us to make predictions
about new and different phenomena based on the universal rules we
obtained.

To choose an example from Physics 120, if we want to explain the
behavior of an extended object flying through the air, tumbling
end over end, we can break that down into two separate behaviors:
the motion through the air, which is treated as if all the mass
was concentrated at the center of mass of the object; and the
tumbling motion, which is treated as if the object was fixed in
place and rotating about the center of mass. By considering only
the center-of-mass motion, we arrive at universal principles like
Newton's Laws and the conservation of energy and momentum. By
considering only the rotational motion, we arrive at the idea of
conservation of angular momentum. Putting those principles together
allows us to explain not just the original example, but any
combination of linear and rotational motions.

I try to organize my teaching around this process, especially in
the introductory classes. One way I do this is to introduce new
techniques by illustrating the need for them with some phenomenon
that can not be easily described with previous methods. For
example, when we move from discussing Newton's Laws to
conservation of energy, I show the class a toy roller coaster that
makes a loop. Using only Newton's Laws, it is extremely difficult
to predict the starting height required for a car to make it
around the loop; this demonstrates the need for a new technique
and leads the way into the development of conservation of energy.
At the end of the energy unit, I return to the roller coaster
example and show the students that what was a nearly insoluble
problem becomes almost trivial using energy methods.

I also make an effort to introduce new formulae by placing them in
a physical context. In Physics 121, rather than simply presenting
Ohm's Law as a new formula to be memorized, I explain how it can
be understood as the result of the microscopic motion of electrons
in a solid. Starting with the well-understood behavior of a single
electron in free flight, we can extend our model to the collective
motion of large numbers of electrons. Making a few simple and
easily justified approximations, we arrive at Ohm's Law with an
understanding of how it is rooted in simple physical processes. My
goal is to help students see physics as a coherent whole, rather
than a collection of arbitrary formulae to be memorized and
manipulated.

I try to carry this approach on through the major sequence, with
the level of complexity increasing in the higher-level classes. In
Physics 122, I assign several problems that require students to
make explicit approximations in order to describe realistic
situations. For example, they calculate the difference in time
between a clock at the equator and a clock at the North Pole, due
to the rotation of the Earth; the change is small enough that
students must make an approximation in order to solve it with a
normal calculator. I have also started using Mathematica to
explore problems that can only be solved with a computer, such as
finding the allowed energy states of a finite square well
potential. For this activity, students need to determine the
boundary conditions that allow the computer to solve the
Schrödinger equation for this system, and also develop a
procedure for determining which solutions are physically valid
wavefunctions. Successfully finding the allowed energy states
requires understanding not just the equations involved, but also
the procedure for finding solutions and the physical meaning of
the wavefunction.

For my module of our advanced laboratory class (Physics 300),
taught to junior and senior physics majors, I do not provide
detailed step-by-step instructions for the experiment. Instead, I
ask students to develop their own experimental procedure by
reading journal articles, as they would if they were working
scientists. Replicating and extending the work of others is a
critical part of the practice of science, and this lab lets them
start learning that skill.

All of these tasks are intended to give students a better
understanding of what it means to think like a physicist. Not only
is this good training for students in the major, it also helps
students outside the major see physics as an active and vital
discipline, and not merely a set of mathematical formulae and dry
facts. The best indication of success I have seen was a comment
from a student in Physics 120 in Winter 2005, who wrote, "I wish
I had taken physics earlier than this year so I could have taken
more."

Undergraduate Research

For students who do plan to major in physics, there is no
more important part of learning to think like a physicist than
participation in research. Learning to do research is an essential
part of the training of a physics major, and one of the chief
advantages a small college like Union offers is the chance for
students to work closely with faculty on research projects. My
experience working on research projects while at Williams was one
of the most important factors that convinced me to pursue a career
in physics, and served as excellent preparation for graduate
school.

I view student involvement in research as not only an important
part of the research program, but an absolutely essential part of
our teaching mission. For this reason, I have supervised fifteen
different student research projects in my lab at Union, including
five senior theses (with two more students doing theses this
year), and seven summer research projects. Three students have
worked with me in two different summers. I have co-authored one
publication with a student, Colin F., and two students
have presented their results at national meetings: Colin F.
at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in 2003, and
Mike M. at the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and
Optical Physics meeting of the American Physical Society in 2006.

Students have been involved in every phase of the construction of
my laboratory. The lasers I use were designed and built by Pat
S. and Eric G.. Ryan M. designed and
built a tapered electromagnet and assembled the main vacuum system
as part of his thesis research. Mike M. has assembled and
tested an entirely new system to develop a new type of atom source
for future experiments and will continue that work for his thesis.

These students benefit from their research experience not only by
learning specific lab skills, but also by learning the process of
doing physics. They learn how to design an experiment, how to
build apparatus (my student projects almost always involve some
work in the machine shop), and how to collect and analyze data.

They also learn to be more independent, as working on a research
problem is different than anything they experience elsewhere in
the curriculum. To paraphrase a colleague at Williams, the hardest
thing for new research students to learn is that research is not a
three-hour lab. Even in our advanced laboratory course, students
know that the experiment they are doing will work, if they
just follow the established procedure. With real research
problems, experiments are much more open-ended, and there is no
guarantee that any given experiment will ever work. This
requires a much more flexible and independent approach than a
laboratory class, teaching research students not just how to
follow a set procedure, but how to modify the procedure in order
to reach a desired goal, and even when to abandon the procedure
entirely in favor of a different method.

These are skills that are absolutely critical not only for careers
in physics, but for almost any career imaginable. Some of my
students have gone on to graduate school in physics or
engineering. Others have gone on to professional school in another
field, or directly into a career in industry. Whatever their
chosen career, I am confident that they are all well served by
their research experience. In the end, some of the most important
teaching I do takes place not in the classroom, but in my research
lab.

drorzel Thu, 01/04/2007 - 05:12

Tags

The thing about making a statement like "I get a little obsessive about written work" is that you inevitably will make a written error within the next sentence or so...

What should an educated person know? There exist massive libraries of religious studies, scientific socialism, law, Liberal Arts... whose contents are arbitrary in nature and not even self-consistent. This is the lubricative social mythos. Real reality - the productive machinery being lubricated - requires skull sweat and has wrong answers. An educated person should function in three broad venues:

1) Be usefully predictive in an uncaring universe - build, wire, and plumb a house; aim a bullet, make change of a buck, cook a decent meal. Know the difference between an umbrella and a parachute.

2) Recgonize crap for what it is - advertising, government propaganda; malicious fiction overall. Physical reality is not subject to majority vote, supplication, or political connivance.

3) Enjoy life and contribute to it. Crush the Officially Sad, lend support to the able and prodigious, cheat the tax man, grow flowers, and... if one meets the Buddha on the road, kill him.

A proper educational institution has an on-campus brothel - a BIG one. Males then spend their other time getting educated. It would be a vastly more efficient allocation of resources than anything now extant. Everything else is details.

chad, i'd like to thank you for your "absolutist" stance against censoring the comments on your blog. yours seems to be the only blog where i can find uncle al's provocative comments. yes, he trolls from time to time, but i'm always interested in and entertained by what he's got to say. the above is no exception.

p.s. i'm being serious.

very nice. makes me want to go dig up mine and revise it. (anything to avoid the grading!)

I have found that the physics profs I learn best from are the most enthusiastic about what they are teaching.

I took quantum mechanics 1 from a guy who does quantum optics/group theory. He is a decent lecturer, but tends to put equations in any place on the board (terrible for trying to copy stuff down), and quickly diverges from his notes, often spending 15 minutes chasing a negative sign.

I don't care

This guy is my favourite prof hands down. I would follow him to the ends of the earth if we could talk about physics along the way. The simple reason is, that he is enthusiastic about physics in general. If you ask him a question (about pretty well anything) he will get very excited and breathlessly show you why this corner of physics is absolutely amazing.

That being said, my least favourite prof is a semi-retired old man who obviously hates what he does. He has rote memorized every course he teaches (although never makes mistakes)

As part of my undergraduate thesis with the amazing prof I wound up learning a ton of class mech. I also had the terrible prof for class mech at the same time (though I learned most of my class mech over the summer, so I was quite a ways ahead).

If I didn't already know that classical mechanics was completely amazing, I would hate it after taking that course. I am now completely enthralled with hamiltonian mechanics and deterministic chaos. What a difference a prof can make.

Sheer enthusiasm will make up for alot

I am sorely tempted to steal your opening paragraph for my (regrettably late) Teacher Professional Growth Plan. Though I have been well served by "Students are Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination"...

The trouble I have with your Phy 120 example an "object flying through the air", is that for this particular case the rotational and translational motions are not particularly separable. The boomerang is of course the best example of this which has a beautifully complicated trajectory that can bring it back to where it started because of this coupling. Of course, in a vacuum no problem, and many objects moving through the air, they are at least nearly separable. Its just that to the extent they are separable I would suggest the object is traveling, catapulting, rocketing, or even just moving through the air but surely flying implies, at least to me, some stronger interaction with the air.

Just wanted to quickly say kudos for utilizing many of the teaching methods you described above. There are several lessons from school that I distinctly recall because of methods similar to what you use. For instance, your discussion of using a toy roller coaster to illustrate concepts - my calculus teacher used a similar example using a coke bottle. We discussed how many factors would go into determining the most effective and efficient shape, and the task seemed nearly impossible. The last day of the semester, she tied together all of the concepts we had learned and illustrated how they applied to the design of the soda bottle. It was truly an "ah ha!" moment.

All That I Want

drorzel — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 16:37:14 +0000

All That I Want

A 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 Tue, 12/19/2006 - 11:37

Tags

Tenure Chase

(OK, technically, I'm not officially an Associate Professor until the Trustees approve it in February, but the Dean said that worrying about that is sort of like worrying that an asteroid will destroy the Earth before then...)

Then read this comment in February:

Congrats!

Congratulations! That's most excellent news. You can now sleep at night (modulo asteroids).

All I want for Christmas is my NSF grant... but that would be more of a, I dunno, Spring Equinox present, or perhaps a Memorial Day present. Until then it's just stress.

-Rob

Woo-hoo!

Congratulations!

Sort of a nice Christmas present-- congratulations.

I think I may bring this up to my boss and ask him what I need to do to get tenure here. (Because, you know, I don't get enough mockery in the workplace....)

Oh, awesome! Now (February's version of now) is the time to smoke whatever you've got! Because they can't get rid of you! You've got TENURE!!

Please get wasted on the drug of your choice (sugar is acceptable), come the actual occasion, and then spend 45 minutes posting and attempting badly to spell the word "tenure".

Congratulations! Good job! Many happy returns!

Sweet! Now we can get the loony, controversial posts that you've been saving up.

Please get wasted on the drug of your choice (sugar is acceptable)

Wait... we're not supposed to get wasted on sugar until we have tenure?

Oops.

Anyway, I suspect few people are surprised that Chad got tenure. What this does also mean is that he can read all those tenure-track assistant professor applications without needing to feel threatened... :)

-Rob

Congrats!

Congratulations on having achieved the Quest of the Holy Grail!

Congratulations, best wishes, and godspeed. Today a place to stand, tomorrow a faster vacuum pump, and by next Thursday your own one-cup coffee brewer with Kopi Luwak and junior faculty in the grinder. "8^>)

Congratulations! However, now that you're a member of "The Man," the real question is:

Do you have any connections in the English department?

w00t! Congratulations on your next 40 or so years.

Congrats Chad, and well deserved!

Congratulations!

Most excellent woo and also hoo!

Congratulations! Not surprising, but great news. Union did good.

As I told your wife: happyhappy joyjoy!

Congratulations.

Congratulations!

Waiting until February is nothing. In my tenure decision, I was told the news in early November, and then informed that it wouldn't really be official until July. That's many more chances of a major meteor strike, you know, and by the time the letter from the Big Guys came, I'd pretty much forgotten to care.

So, yeah, celebrate on your time, and bugger whatever schedule the bureaucrats are on.

That's terrific! I'm sure you more than deserve it! Congrats!

Congratulations!

Dude, that rocks! Hearty congratulations!

Awesome! Congrats!

Yay, Chad! That is most excellent news.

Dancing Rodents! (AKA Conga Rats)

Many happy congratulations!!!!

Nicely done, Chad, congrats!

Happy Holidays indeed!

Congrats!!!

Congratulations! Thanks for proving that bloggers can get tenure. And now I start my pre-tenure leave, to prepare for the wringer next fall.

Congrats. Now if you can avoid attractive female undergrads, you are SET! Job well done mate!

Congratulations!

Congratulations! Well-deserved!

Congratulations!!! I guess you are no longer on the tenure track.

(Like PZ above, I will also have to wait till July for my official confirmation...)

Congratulations!

(professional lurker)

Followed the link from Scalzi to say Congratulations.

Congratulations!

You were amongst the first of us on rasfwr-j to earn your Doctorate (and coin the now-immmortal phrase, "That's *Dr* ____, to you, punk!"; among the first to earn a faculty position, and now among the first to earn tenure. Congrats again on yet another trailblazing moment. :-)

Congrats! Pretty sweet timing.

Congratulations. I'm so happy for you and Kate both. We're going to be at Boskone, let us take you out to dinner to celebrate. It may even be official by then....

MKK

Congratulations on your well-deserved tenure. I'll echo Mary Kay in hoping that it's official in time for Boskone celebrating.

Blogfather Scalzi said to come over here and whup a "Congrats" upside your head. I hear and obey.

Congratulations! Time to put that alarm clock where it really goes - the circular file.

Mazel Tov! It is weird how diffuse the process is. With your doctorate, you defend, people clap, and that's that. With tenure, you're told that later the board will do something so that at the start of the next fiscal year.... Anyway, congratulations again!

Most excellent well done !

Congrats Chad! That is awesome.

Congrats Chad! Kate too! Now go for that Nobel Prize...

Congratulations! What a great Christmas present.

Congrats!

Congratulations . . . PROFESSOR.

oh congratulations! well done!

Congratulations!

Wait, did someone say rasfwr-j?!
r-j!?!

Man, we better hope the trustees don't hear about this...

Enjoy the moment.

Wow.

That's awesome -- sometimes, the good guys do win....

Congratulations Chad!

Woooo!

Go, you!

Congrats!

Many happy returns!

Yahoo!! Next stop, sabbatical!!

Congratulations!

I tried to tell KJ about it this morning, and had to resort to saying tenure untranslated. There's no such thing here, and no appropriate translation.

Hurrah! Congratulations! May you never have to do anything harder (except for stuff you enjoy).

Congratulations!

Yes! And, like everyone else, congratulations.

Woo!

Congratulations, Chad. Annette and I are thrilled for you.

Wahoo! Congratulations, Chad. Never had any doubts you'd get it, but what a terrific Christmas surprise!

Fuckin' aye!

Congrats, congrats, and more congrats after that.

Congratulations!

Let me be among the last to confer congratulations...:)

Mazel tov!

That's great news, Chad. Congrats!

He shoots! He scores! The crowd, it goes wild!

Congratulations!

Hmm, how long to one congratulations? Who knows, but here's one more.

Cool! Congrats, Chad.

Awesome! I expect to see some hard relaxation over the next few weeks in honor of your achievement.

Belated congrats to you, Chad.

Now you can begin seriously cultivating your eccentricities with little fear of reprisal!

So, you now change the blog name to Certain Principals?

Congratulations!

So, next step = Curmudgeon?

Great news! Congratulations!!!!!

Congratulations!

Congratulations! To pass along what a sweet old lady said at the conclusion of an acquaintance's defense, "Congratulations, Doctor. No sonofabitch can ever do that to you again."

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me
Tenure on the Facultyyyyyyyy

Congratulations!

All the best! Celebrate now - they can't take it away from you.

Sweet! Congratulations!

Many congrats, Chad!

The day after one of my committee members got tenure, I answered the phone in his lab, thus becoming the one who took the phone call that informed him that a university vehicle had just accidentally crushed his car in the faculty parking lot. Now, this fellow could get more than a little stressed out, so I waited for him to finish giving some instructions to a new student at the bench, and then broke the news to him. Instead of blowing up, though, he just smiled and said that he knew the university was well-enough insured to handle the problem.

That's when I knew what a big milestone tenure was! :-)

Congratulations!!! WOOHOO!!! I'll down a Kiltlifter for you when I'm in Arizona in a couple weeks.

So you get tenure and promoted to Associate at the same time? (I got promoted the next year.)

Congratulations.

Brings back the memories of my horrid experience on the subject at an Ivy League university. At the beginning of the winter semester which was supposed to be my first sabbatical after six years there, I got the horrible news in the mail, even though I had two and a half years left in the contract and I did not even know that they were voting on my case.

Hurray!

Hey, congrats!

Congratulations. And may The Cabal be with you.

Congratulations, Chad!

But just for safety's sake, wait until February to start coming into work in your pyjamas and telling people you would like to be known from now on as Madame Pompadour.

Congrats!

Woohoo!

Tonight's party has officially switched from a "Day That Ends in 'Y'" party to a "Chad has tenure" party.

Note: While the Party Purpose variable is quantized, our hypothesis is that discrete variations in P.P. will not lead to discernable variation in empirical results (i.e. degree of hangover on the OMFG scale).

Heh! Was there any doubt?

[ducks]

Congratulations! Party time now.

Is it horrible that the title of this post keeps on bringing to mind a horrrible Ace of Base song?

Four paws up!

Wow! Congrats, Chad!

So, now you're in on the seekrit konsp1raC to reestablish the Soviet Union in America that David Horowitz keeps talking about. Excellent news! Please send reports!

"Is it horrible that the title of this post keeps on bringing to mind a horrrible Ace of Base song?"

No. Being reminded of a Spice Girls song, OTOH...

Is it horrible that the title of this post keeps on bringing to mind a horrrible Ace of Base song?

For you, probably. Since I somehow managed to miss the whole Ace of Base thing, I have no problem with it.

I had in mind the recently acquired "All I Want" by the Weepies, part of the Christmas Tunes Experiment. While the actual title lack a "that," there's one in the chorus.

Many thanks to everyone who has commented. It's a kick to have so many people chiming in. And, hey, the first triple-digit comment thread on Uncertain Principles...

Congrats to you. It is quite an accomplishment. I just found out the good news about my own tenure and promotion. It will be a very nice Christmas for me too.

Congratulations.

That's wonderful! Congratulations, and may more success come you way.

Congratulations!
Now you can blog all that nasty stuff and finally start working on the alien-warp-drive you always wanted to build ...

A Big Old British Congratulations and Merry Christmas! (I was tipped off by Kevin Drum of all people).

Hello. Your friend John Scalzi said to congratulate you on your tenure. So congratulations on getting your tenure!!
I'm not particularly sure what tenure is. I know it's pretty prestigious, I learned that from ER.
Anyway, that just proves I watch too much TV.
Congrats again on tenure!

The MLA on Tenure

drorzel — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 10:14:24 +0000

The MLA on Tenure

Inside 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 promotion, so that junior faculty members know what is expected of them and are not surprised by changing expectations as their tenure reviews approach.

Define scholarship broadly, including the "scholarship of teaching," scholarship produced by teams, and work that is not presented in a monograph.

Accept "the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media," ending the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don't know how to evaluate quality in new media, "the onus is on the department" to learn, not on the scholar using new media, Stanton said.)

Focus on scholarship, teaching and research -- and not collegiality -- as criteria for tenure.

Consider their missions in setting standards for tenure, and to consider whether they are adopting research-oriented missions that don't reflect the reality of the kind of institutions where they work.

Limit the number of outside review letters sought in tenure reviews, pay those who provide them, and limit the kinds of questions asked so that they are appropriate for the institution and the position.

Improve the process by which junior faculty members receive guidance on their careers.

This is a really mixed bag of stuff. What was really striking to me was how many of the things on the list are either not applicable to my discipline (the MLA only considered English and foreign language departments), or are already done by my institution. On the disciplinary issue, in science "scholarship produced by teams" is the norm, and almost nobody produces monographs.

As for matters of local policy, we have strict policies about the make-up of external review committees (three external reviewers, at least one from a small college, and at least one from a research university), we have standard language for the letters requesting a review, and we pay the external reviewers a small sum for their time. I'm frankly a little horrified at the idea that these aren't common practices-- I didn't know how good I have it...

Some of the other items are good, but subject to fairly tight constraints. Transparency is good, for example, but there's a limit to how clearly you can spell out the expectations for tenure. You can't really give junior faculty a checklist to work from, because there will inevitably be problems. If you say "You must publish at least three articles to get tenure," somebody will churn out three completely worthless articles in The Slovenian Journal of Things Nobody Cares About, and demand tenure. If you say "You must publish at least three articles in reputable journals," you'll get somebody who publishes three good articles in reasonable journals but is having sex with his students, and he'll demand tenure.

About the best you can do is to spell out clear procedures for how the reviews will be conducted, and make sure that the candidates coming up for review understand the process. As frustrating as it may be to the candidates (and believe me, it's mighty frustrating) the exact standards for what counts as "enough" research will need to remain somewhat nebulous. (I'm happy to say, by the way, that Union does a good job with this in general. They're spectacularly good relative to at least two other insitutions that I know of, but can't discuss.)

I would, however, enthusiastically support efforts to improve the guidance given to tenure candidates. If nothing else, it's good for junior faculty to have somebody to pester with questions about the process (and bitch to about the inevitable stress, but other junior faculty are good for that...). And it's definitely good for departments, colleges, and universities to think carefully about the standards they're applying, to make sure they're appropriate (though I suspect it's damnably difficult to get any sort of consensus).

The one suggestions that strikes me as a really bad idea is the suggestion to entirely remove questions of collegiality from tenure decisions. I don't think it should be a major consideration, but you're talking about making someone an offer of lifetime employment. They better be able to get along with the rest of the department, or you're looking at twenty or thirty years of strife and misery.

The concern here is probably that "collegiality" is used as cover for denying tenure to politically controversial scholars, and the like, but the thought of taking it out of the mix completely is pretty scary. But then, this may loom larger for me, given that I'm at a small college-- if you're at a huge university, with fifty faculty in your department, you can probably get away with having a few malcontents running around. When the total size of the department is ten or twelve people (or even less), it's really important that they be able to talk to one another.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. There are some good comments on the story over at Inside Higher Ed, and I'd be interested to here what ScienceBlogs readers think, as well.

drorzel Mon, 12/11/2006 - 05:14

Tags

Tenure Chase

The one suggestions that strikes me as a really bad idea is the suggestion to entirely remove questions of collegiality from tenure decisions. I don't think it should be a major consideration, but you're talking about making someone an offer of lifetime employment. They better be able to get along with the rest of the department, or you're looking at twenty or thirty years of strife and misery.

I agree with this.

Perhaps rather than congeniality, it could be phrased somehow carefully as being more of a plus than a minus.... The professor who causes too much pain, annoyance, and strife in the department is getting in the way of the department doing good science and doing good teaching, and that should be a valid reason to consider that this person isn't good for the college. But, yeah, it's touchy, because it's a criterion that's easily misused.

The whole "monograph" thing struck me as funny too. Indeed, I remember in my 2nd year being at a lunch meeting with a bunch of new faculty from across the University, and the Dean, and he said that "the book" was a big part of the tenure judgement. I knew I could safely ignore that....

There are issues in science. Different subfields of science have very different publication rates and publication types. What to a particle physicist is a "collaboratve" work than what it is to an atomic physicist, for example. We have this discussion at Vandy on the GPC when discussing how many papers a student ought to have published by certain milestones.

I know at Union that the "scolarship of teaching" is valued. At Vanderbilt, it's valued to a point. Really good teaching won't push you over the top, but really bad teaching will deny you tenure. Of course, given that, as far as I can tell, teaching is jusged completely from student evaluations, I'm not sure that they're really evaluating it right.

Re: transparency, it's amazing how much this differs from place to place. At Vandy, the tenure review committee membership is secret; that's in place to prevent lobbying. However, once the file leaves the department, it's a complete mystery as to where it is. You have no idea if it's passed various hurdles, if it's been sent back to various places for re-evaluation, etc., until you get the final word. And, based on recent tenures here, that final word doesn't come until April or May, after the end of the second term of the academic year. It makes me wonder if there are some ulcer docs at the Vandy hospital giving people kickbacks....

I do feel like I have a pretty good idea what is expected of me, although I suppose there's always room for surprises. I do have my differences with the validity of all the evaluation criteria, but at least I think I know what they are.

-Rob

I for one would pay good money for a subscription to The Slovenian Journal of Things Nobody Cares About.

Actually, I would probably write a monograph or three for SJTNCA, given the opportunity...

You mean people actually get paid to slag tenure candidates' careers with their letters?!? That seems awfully weird. I always thought that was just part of the service to the community, similar to peer review of grants and manuscripts.

Years ago (well, actually three decades ago) when I was retained, tenured, and ultimately promoted to full professor at a college not dissimilar to Union, there was a 'collegiality' sort of criterion. It was the third of three criteria, the first two being teaching and scholarly activities, the latter construed fairly broadly. The third criterion was spelled out in some detail, and included such things as service on faculty committees, advising student organizations, and the like. And that latter criterion even took into account (though at a low-ish weight) things like membership on the township volunteer fire department!

I should note that over the years that third criterion has lost considerable weight, and if I were up for tenure now I'd worry a helluva lot more about publications (even in SJTNCA) and less to responding to fire or EMS emergencies on the campus. At the time I got tenure we had five faculty members on the fire department; now there are none because 'professional' concerns have become more salient in the college's retention, tenure, and promotion procedures, and require more time and effort from junior faculty. (I don't count since I'm now merely an Affiliated Scholar teaching just one course, not a full faculty member any more). One result has been an sad erosion of faculty participation in 'community' affairs.

As a relatively new post-doc (2003), armed with a monograph with a reputable publisher and no job, I suppose I ought to be a little mournful that the MLA is asking universities are trying to move away from the 'tyranny of the monograph' identified in the report, given all the time I spent writing mine. But what really worries me is the way in which some real scholarship - the stuff that genuinely takes a decade or more in the making - is systematically being ousted out of our institutes of higher education.

The decade-long "Big Project" hasn't been a possibility for working academics for a long while now, but the MLA recommendations make it even less of a possibility for the future.

My next book is a Big Project. It will be 600 pages long, and involve all sorts of flammable chemicals, archives scattered across the globe, regular trawls on eBay for hard-to-find Victoriana, and nothing - not even a university - is going to stop me writing it :-)