4 ms·

Serious question: Why don't tenured professors take more risks with their papers and research, as opposed to seeking more prestige in the form of quantity of pa

Serious question: Why don't tenured professors take more risks with their papers and research, as opposed to seeking more prestige in the form of quantity of papers? Aka why the quantity over quality? Or do they not do this? Ostensibly once you have tenure at most institutions you really don't have to do anything except teach one or two classes a semester - that's what tenure is; no real duties and you can't be fired. Once you're tenured you don't need the reputation afforded by lots of papers that take little risk... That's what you do to GET tenure, I thought. The above is restricted to fields where progress doesn't require boatloads of monetary grants (thus requiring reputation, inevitably in the form of citation counts and paper counts).

linguae 6y ago
My understanding of academia is that even tenured professors can still be subject to the same publish-or-perish pressures that non-tenured faculty have. My understanding of tenure is that you cannot be fired without cause, but you can still be fired for not fulfilling the obligations of the job, and maintaining the department’s and university’s expected levels of research output counts. Ultimately it depends on the university.
- djoldman 6y ago
  I'd be very interested to hear more on this. It's my understanding that you really don't have to do much more than teach a few classes in most cases.
  - zoolily 6y ago
    In the sciences after tenure, you have to bring in grant funding to keep your lab running and your postdocs and students paid. Summer salaries for faculty and teaching load reductions are funded from faculty grants as well. While conditions of tenure vary from university to university, there are institutions where tenured faculty could give up all research and retain their jobs, but they will never get promoted beyond associate professor, get a raise, etc.

linguae 6y ago

My understanding of academia is that even tenured professors can still be subject to the same publish-or-perish pressures that non-tenured faculty have. My understanding of tenure is that you cannot be fired without cause, but you can still be fired for not fulfilling the obligations of the job, and maintaining the department’s and university’s expected levels of research output counts. Ultimately it depends on the university.

djoldman 6y ago
I'd be very interested to hear more on this. It's my understanding that you really don't have to do much more than teach a few classes in most cases.
- zoolily 6y ago
  In the sciences after tenure, you have to bring in grant funding to keep your lab running and your postdocs and students paid. Summer salaries for faculty and teaching load reductions are funded from faculty grants as well. While conditions of tenure vary from university to university, there are institutions where tenured faculty could give up all research and retain their jobs, but they will never get promoted beyond associate professor, get a raise, etc.