21 ms·

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-track-faculty Life

158 points by hiteshiitk 13y ago

rogerchucker 13y ago
I think the key to nailing this her way is to become a time management nazi and to be profoundly efficient and productive in every category. And that is where most of us fail unfortunately.
jforman 13y ago
This strategy would quickly lose its merit outside of Harvard. Failing to gain tenure at Harvard is the expected outcome, so a) the sense of rejection is less, and b) your remaining job prospects are good because this is generally recognized (and it's Harvard). Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a failed career, on the other hand. (it's worth noting that Harvard has actually changed tack recently, such that they're increasingly promoting junior faculty...the above is still true regardless, at least for the time being)
- rogerchucker 13y ago
  Agreed - would love to see this coming from a second-tier grad school faculty.
  - impendia 13y ago
    Okay, that's me. I more or less endorse the article. Seven years is a lot of time. I'd only give someone new a little bit of advice. (1) Do a good job of your teaching, but economize on the effort you put into it. (2) Be civil to everyone, from the department head on down to the janitor. (3) Do your service/committee work as asked, and do it cheerfully, but for the most part don't go the extra mile. (And when you do go the extra mile, do so because you believe it's important, not because you believe it will win you brownie points.) But above all: (4) Kick ass in your scholarship. There are plenty of sources that purport to break down and explain (4), some of which are worth reading, especially if caught in a rut -- but if you are successfully kicking ass, and paying at least minimal attention to career advice when it comes your way -- then I'd only worry about continuing to kick ass. That is my perspective anyway.
- mdwelsh 13y ago
  This isn't true in computer science at Harvard - I speak from experience, having gone through the tenure process there myself. Being denied tenure in CS at Harvard is about as bad as being denied tenure anywhere else; people don't usually end up in very good jobs afterwards. In my 8 years at Harvard, we awarded tenure to 5 junior faculty, and denied tenure to two.
  - sidww2 13y ago
    By good, do you mean faculty positions elsewhere or is it hard in general to even get say senior jobs in the industry after being denied tenure?
    - mdwelsh 13y ago
      People denied tenure in CS at Harvard have gotten senior (tenured) jobs elsewhere, but not in my opinion at places anywhere near as good.
      - scott_s 13y ago
        You and I may have different views of what "anywhere near as good" means, so it's hard for me to accept your judgement at face value.
      - ISL 13y ago
        A difference is that people denied tenure at Harvard have gotten senior (tenured) jobs elsewhere. My subjective sense is that there are only a few schools where denial of tenure isn't the end of the line for research professorial dreams. OP's notion of the 7-year postdoc is an interesting one.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    How does Harvard CS even work in the shadow of MIT and its own very strong liberal arts program? I mean, it is a good department, definitely a top 20.
    - 13y ago
- mathattack 13y ago
  It would seem like anyone worth their salt in computer science could get a corporate job after 7 years at any school, especially Harvard. It seems like the concept of having a failed career is much less than if the Phd was in Philosophy.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Transitioning to a corporate job after 7 years in academia would be a culture shock for most people, to say the least.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      It would, but people pull it off. Here's one example, also from Harvard. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... I think it's much easier in Computer Science than other fields - say the humanities, or biology or chemistry.
  - RogerL 13y ago
    I honestly don't know what the job market is like for a CS PhD, so I can't rebut this statement. On the other hand, we interview a lot of PhD.s, and by and large they have little clue about how to provide value. They want to sketch out ideas in Matlab, and throw it over the wall to a bunch of programmers (which in the academic world are postdocs and grad students) to deal with the "implementation details". Many can't write a simple for loop. That's sweeping, overstated, and unfair of me, but the job skills are quite different. Applied, directed research aimed at producing tangible and sell-able results is very hard, and by-and-large not what they do, at least based on who applies and interviews (which is of course a terribly biased and perhaps non-representative selection).
    - mathattack 13y ago
      Based on personal experience (small sample size), Phds in Computer Science can find homes at consulting firms (hired for "being smart"), and software and hardware firms that utilize their speciality, and even hedge funds. It can be hard to unlearn habits over 6 or 7 years, but I've seen it happen. The real point though is it's a lot easier than many other fields.
maglos 13y ago
On a side note, I hear suicide is legal in japan.
mdwelsh 13y ago
The author of this article is a friend and former colleague (I had the office next door to hers at Harvard, when I was on the faculty there). Many of the reasons she cites for being "miserable" as a faculty member reflect why I left a tenured faculty job for industry. Nearly all junior faculty I know describe it as a survival process. Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.
- spartango 13y ago
  What's scary is that this represents a fairly luxurious set of pain-points relative to the ones I've seen junior faculty members in the biological sciences exposed to at Harvard. The conveniences and cultural differences of the CS community are a stark contrast to academic biology. Considering the author's observations: First, the opt-out options are often fewer and further between; making the jump between basic science work and industrial biotech/pharma can be very difficult depending on your area of interest. Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die. Beyond the unpredictable timing, there's more uncertainty around whether experiments will physically work, and it can be nigh impossible engineer your way out of certain failures. Further, the benchmarks for "contribution to the field" in biology can be extremely unforgiving; publishing papers in journals outside of Nature, Science, or Cell fails to paint a compelling picture. These things are added on to the things pointed out in the piece. Extra hurdles. That's not to say that biological science fields are evil or that faculty paths are never worth considering. But having worked in the lab of a junior faculty member, you can see the pressure and challenges.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    >Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die. That's where personnel management comes in. I've got an undergrad intern at the moment, who has only a modest amount of lab research experience. In a month and a half, I've taught him molecular biology from scratch (beginning with the fundamentals of PCR) and from what i taught him, I gave him a list of 48 mutations. He designed primers to make those mutations, does the molecular biology, checks the sequences, then does the biochemical experiment on the enzyme that's being mutated. He's finished about half of the mutants. We are able to get this done because the experiments were planned out to be paralellizable and scaleable, and if something is finishing up when it needs to be picked up at the end of the day (like a transformation recovery), I do it, because he comes in early and I stay in late. I also drop in on the weekends to start cultures- but usually only briefly -, to make the most efficient use of his and my time. He is in usually around 9:00-9:15 and I make sure he leaves at 5:00 and I really get angry if he's around past 5:15 except in exigent conditions. Bottom line: Even in Biology, you can restrict your working hours if you're a team player if you have good management skills. If you're overworking. Since science entails failure that you cannot engineer your way out of - you will wind up burning out, since the working hard followed by failure is exactly an optimal way of conditioning laziness.
impendia 13y ago
At Harvard it really is easy to stop worrying, if you have an open mind. As a mathematician, I know excellent academics who narrowly missed getting tenured at MIT and Princeton. They were highly in demand, and are now happily working at other top-20 universities. (ed: I am in math, and described what I observed. I see elsewhere in the thread that mdwelsh observed the opposite.)
- mdwelsh 13y ago
  You are right that being a mathematician at Harvard, it hardly matters if you get tenure or not. (In fact, for a long time you basically had to win the Fields Medal to get tenure in math at Harvard). Harvard is nowhere near as well known in Computer Science, and is more of a "top 20" rather than "top 5" school.
eykanal 13y ago
Awesome. On the "stop taking advice" idea: when I was a grad student (and postdoc), I kept notes in a personal wiki. I had a page entitled "Things Other People Have Suggested I Do". I didn't do most of them. Even more so, it was such a liberating feeling to look at it and tell myself, "I don't have to do any of that crap, I have my own research plan."
- dnautics 13y ago
  I have to say, that my graduate degree was salvaged because I took the advice of a grad student, a postdoc, and an assistant professor (and totally blew off my advisors/committee). So, not all advice is bad.
dkrich 13y ago
Not to sound overly critical, but is it just me or does this come off as a somewhat selfish point of view? My father was a tenured professor and growing up I heard enough horror stories from his department to know that a career as a professor at a research university is no easy career. But at the same time, isn't a major part of your job instructing students? I understand the importance of grants, conducting research, etc. as it relates to getting tenure, but if your only focus is jumping through hoops with the end goal of getting tenured there are probably a lot easier ways to get job security and at higher pay. My point is that I would hope that those who go into a career in academia as a professor have a major interest in teaching and aren't just there to get the next promotion.
- mdwelsh 13y ago
  The problem is that no promotion = no job. So if you care about teaching, you need to get tenure.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    What about all the non-tenured professors who teach? Are you honestly accusing those who are not chasing tenure of not caring about teaching?
    - mjn 13y ago
      In the U.S. at least, you don't usually have a choice to opt-out of chasing tenure if you want to continue teaching. Barring some unusual situations, there are either non-tenure-track fixed-length jobs, like a two-year visiting professorship; or tenure-track jobs where you have six to seven years to get tenure in order to stay. Non-tenure-track but permanent positions are quite rare, and in a tenure-track position you can't choose to simply remain at the untenured Assistant level indefinitely—you'll be fired after six or seven years if you don't successfully go up for tenure. It's a classic "up or out" style job in that sense. Once you get tenure, then the advancement ladder does become somewhat optional; an Associate Professor can stay at that level for the rest of their career, with no requirement that they ever seek promotion to full Professor. Some universities are starting to put pressure in various ways on insufficiently productive tenured faculty, but there is at least more insulation from the advancement ladder at that point. But before then it's non-optional if you want to stay.
electronous 13y ago
Another thing to take away from this article: people with kids have less time to spend doing their jobs.
- rwallace 13y ago
  Another thing to take away from that: hire someone with kids if you have the option. Maximum output of intellectual work is achieved with a 30-40 hour working week. The author settled on a 50+ hour working week, which is higher than optimum, enough to degrade her judgment and productivity - but only somewhat, not catastrophically; she was still able to get good work done. It's clear that without children, she would have settled on a substantially longer working week, probably enough to destroy her judgment and the quality of her work.
startupstella 13y ago
This article is great because the author has an authentic voice and explains how she achieved a measure of success without succumbing to outside pressures or norms. It's a good framework for thinking about any high stress, competitive career track. Ultimately, stress/pressure greatly affect performance and peoples' perceptions of you, both of which are paramount in ascending hierarchies.
dnautics 13y ago
It's unbelievably easy and condescending for someone who has a tenure-track junior faculty position at harvard to call it a "seven-year postdoc". However, the advice is generally good. I do however take issue with this: "I guess my hope is to add one more option to the list, which is covering your ears and making up your own rules." No... That shouldn't be a hope. You should just do it.
patio11 13y ago
Relatedly: Philip Greenspun, on why it's difficult to convince women and other sane people to enter an academic career in the sciences. http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
- Dewie 13y ago
  Larry Summers really didn't play his cards right. If he had just used this reasoning and concluded that it was because men are stupid, he at least wouldn't have been fired.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    Larry Summers was forcing faculty members to show up for work. Worse than that, he was forcing some of them to change offices and move to the other side of the river! They would have gotten him somehow, it's only a question of how.
    - kaitai 13y ago
      Hey, if we have to show up we'll never get anything done!
grundprinzip 13y ago
Even if not all of the aspects that she wrote about may related to everybodys problems, it's a very good read because it allows to relate to her situation. Being a post-doc in CS myself and having two kids I exactly know how hard it is to juggle everything. In addition, I think that many of the comments here try to interpret the article as a list of advices and treat them as such. But If you read carefully you would have seen that this is especially something she didn't want to. My key take-away from this post is that: Yes, the system is designed for young, childless PhDs who are willing to put 80hs/weeks into work and robot-like follow the advice of others. But, it does not have to be like that. It's paramount to remember everyday why you are doing this job and why you love research and teaching.
read 13y ago
First off, it's inspiring and courageous to write candidly about such a topic. Including the epiphany: That what I can do, is try to be the best whole person that I can be. That mindset would be helpful outside academia too. But the more I read through stories like this the more I become convinced it's important to fool yourself: to convince yourself there's no pressure. As if the act itself unblocks some kind of neural pathways that allow you to do things you wouldn't have let yourself do otherwise. The author might be a lot more courageous that they think, even if they hadn't realized it at the time: "But its not because I have extra courage. Rather, by demoting the prize, the risk becomes less." Anecdotally, a professor once told me (when they look back on their tenure track) that it now seems irresponsible to them that they were devoting such little time to revising journal papers or writing such few grand proposals. (I got the feeling they were doing things that don't scale). Another said they were sure upfront they'd fire them at the end, so they tried to enjoy they ride while it lasted. Both of them got tenure. Another thing this story shows is how logistics become manageable if you try. Like the approach to give the other person a weekend day off as counter-balance to you going on an extra trip is probably what prevents you from going astray. It's the right sort of tension. You pay twice for a workday like that (one for the trip, one for parent duty), so you now have a concrete measure to make that decision rather the vagueness of "it will help my career".
mathattack 13y ago
I like the idea. When you free yourself from undue external pressure creativity comes out. This doesn't work for everyone. You have to be very prescient to avoid all advice. Being smart and in computer science allows one great backup plans. (Tell the 7th year English professor not to worry)
lettergram 13y ago
I highly recommend reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. The essence of the book as well as this article are interesting in that the more relaxed you are the higher your productivity and interestingly enough you can only learn/do so much in a day. The point being, likely not pursuing the tenure track made her more productive and allowed her to form better relationships, making her one of the better junior faculty (or at least one of the more pleasant).
cafard 13y ago
Excellent, but I question how far it can be generalized.
vsbuffalo 13y ago
As someone headed into academia, I ponder how the tenure-track process filters out folks. Simply put, I think many of the best scientists have been nerds, and many smart nerds really don't see the utility in playing the political tenure game. I'd argue that the competition is fiercer now than it's ever been in the sciences, so these selectionary forces against nerd-types are getting stronger. We end up with the situation where scientists in academic jobs are enriched for those good at politics and playing the game, and we lose brilliant minds to companies. Companies also do their part, and offer alluring salaries and job security (I've had quite a few recruitment attempts for wonderful companies, and almost left academia on several occasions). With the folks in academic positions being political (and sometimes downright manipulative), it's no surprise that some make terrible mentors. Their success quite often relies on extracting work from postdocs that will never have their success. Sadly, there's no incentive for symbiotic relationships sometimes. Luckily, finally, I have met mentors that are exceptions to this, and are nerds like me (and quite frankly, keep me in the sciences). But it took a long time to find such mentors, and other very smart people are not so lucky as to find these types of mentors and they leave the sciences. Sadly, this enriches for more bad mentor types. I think the role my mentors' mentors had is huge too; often my mentors talk about how important their mentors were.
- dnautics 13y ago
  >I think many of the best scientists have been nerds, and many smart nerds really don't see the utility in playing the political tenure game. I think this is 75% of the "problem". It gets worse because the smart nerds who do like to play the political game are often so solipsistic and selfish that they are really spectacularly atrocious managers, many of whom take a scorched earth attitude to solving their scientific problems. This becomes a vicious cycle as that becomes the percieved way to act within the culture.
willsun 13y ago
For those interested in the Harvard tenure process, this article detailed some of the history and statistics: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/11/scrutiny-tenure-harvard/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/11/scrutiny-tenure-...

158 points by hiteshiitk 13y ago

I think the key to nailing this her way is to become a time management nazi and to be profoundly efficient and productive in every category. And that is where most of us fail unfortunately.

jforman 13y ago

This strategy would quickly lose its merit outside of Harvard. Failing to gain tenure at Harvard is the expected outcome, so a) the sense of rejection is less, and b) your remaining job prospects are good because this is generally recognized (and it's Harvard). Asking somebody at a high-tenure-rate, second-tier school to treat their tenure track position as an extended post-doc is essentially asking them to have a failed career, on the other hand. (it's worth noting that Harvard has actually changed tack recently, such that they're increasingly promoting junior faculty...the above is still true regardless, at least for the time being)

rogerchucker 13y ago
Agreed - would love to see this coming from a second-tier grad school faculty.
- impendia 13y ago
  Okay, that's me. I more or less endorse the article. Seven years is a lot of time. I'd only give someone new a little bit of advice. (1) Do a good job of your teaching, but economize on the effort you put into it. (2) Be civil to everyone, from the department head on down to the janitor. (3) Do your service/committee work as asked, and do it cheerfully, but for the most part don't go the extra mile. (And when you do go the extra mile, do so because you believe it's important, not because you believe it will win you brownie points.) But above all: (4) Kick ass in your scholarship. There are plenty of sources that purport to break down and explain (4), some of which are worth reading, especially if caught in a rut -- but if you are successfully kicking ass, and paying at least minimal attention to career advice when it comes your way -- then I'd only worry about continuing to kick ass. That is my perspective anyway.
mdwelsh 13y ago
This isn't true in computer science at Harvard - I speak from experience, having gone through the tenure process there myself. Being denied tenure in CS at Harvard is about as bad as being denied tenure anywhere else; people don't usually end up in very good jobs afterwards. In my 8 years at Harvard, we awarded tenure to 5 junior faculty, and denied tenure to two.
- sidww2 13y ago
  By good, do you mean faculty positions elsewhere or is it hard in general to even get say senior jobs in the industry after being denied tenure?
  - mdwelsh 13y ago
    People denied tenure in CS at Harvard have gotten senior (tenured) jobs elsewhere, but not in my opinion at places anywhere near as good.
    - scott_s 13y ago
      You and I may have different views of what "anywhere near as good" means, so it's hard for me to accept your judgement at face value.
    - ISL 13y ago
      A difference is that people denied tenure at Harvard have gotten senior (tenured) jobs elsewhere. My subjective sense is that there are only a few schools where denial of tenure isn't the end of the line for research professorial dreams. OP's notion of the 7-year postdoc is an interesting one.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  How does Harvard CS even work in the shadow of MIT and its own very strong liberal arts program? I mean, it is a good department, definitely a top 20.
  - 13y ago
mathattack 13y ago
It would seem like anyone worth their salt in computer science could get a corporate job after 7 years at any school, especially Harvard. It seems like the concept of having a failed career is much less than if the Phd was in Philosophy.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Transitioning to a corporate job after 7 years in academia would be a culture shock for most people, to say the least.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    It would, but people pull it off. Here's one example, also from Harvard. http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvard.html http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar... I think it's much easier in Computer Science than other fields - say the humanities, or biology or chemistry.
- RogerL 13y ago
  I honestly don't know what the job market is like for a CS PhD, so I can't rebut this statement. On the other hand, we interview a lot of PhD.s, and by and large they have little clue about how to provide value. They want to sketch out ideas in Matlab, and throw it over the wall to a bunch of programmers (which in the academic world are postdocs and grad students) to deal with the "implementation details". Many can't write a simple for loop. That's sweeping, overstated, and unfair of me, but the job skills are quite different. Applied, directed research aimed at producing tangible and sell-able results is very hard, and by-and-large not what they do, at least based on who applies and interviews (which is of course a terribly biased and perhaps non-representative selection).
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Based on personal experience (small sample size), Phds in Computer Science can find homes at consulting firms (hired for "being smart"), and software and hardware firms that utilize their speciality, and even hedge funds. It can be hard to unlearn habits over 6 or 7 years, but I've seen it happen. The real point though is it's a lot easier than many other fields.

maglos 13y ago

On a side note, I hear suicide is legal in japan.

mdwelsh 13y ago

The author of this article is a friend and former colleague (I had the office next door to hers at Harvard, when I was on the faculty there). Many of the reasons she cites for being "miserable" as a faculty member reflect why I left a tenured faculty job for industry. Nearly all junior faculty I know describe it as a survival process. Given this I fail to understand why being a professor remains such an attractive career path.

spartango 13y ago
What's scary is that this represents a fairly luxurious set of pain-points relative to the ones I've seen junior faculty members in the biological sciences exposed to at Harvard. The conveniences and cultural differences of the CS community are a stark contrast to academic biology. Considering the author's observations: First, the opt-out options are often fewer and further between; making the jump between basic science work and industrial biotech/pharma can be very difficult depending on your area of interest. Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die. Beyond the unpredictable timing, there's more uncertainty around whether experiments will physically work, and it can be nigh impossible engineer your way out of certain failures. Further, the benchmarks for "contribution to the field" in biology can be extremely unforgiving; publishing papers in journals outside of Nature, Science, or Cell fails to paint a compelling picture. These things are added on to the things pointed out in the piece. Extra hurdles. That's not to say that biological science fields are evil or that faculty paths are never worth considering. But having worked in the lab of a junior faculty member, you can see the pressure and challenges.
- dnautics 13y ago
  >Then, as a biologist, it can be incredibly difficult to restrict your working hours, as experimental (e.g. cell culture) work can operate with delays or intervals. Stepping out at the wrong time means your cells die. That's where personnel management comes in. I've got an undergrad intern at the moment, who has only a modest amount of lab research experience. In a month and a half, I've taught him molecular biology from scratch (beginning with the fundamentals of PCR) and from what i taught him, I gave him a list of 48 mutations. He designed primers to make those mutations, does the molecular biology, checks the sequences, then does the biochemical experiment on the enzyme that's being mutated. He's finished about half of the mutants. We are able to get this done because the experiments were planned out to be paralellizable and scaleable, and if something is finishing up when it needs to be picked up at the end of the day (like a transformation recovery), I do it, because he comes in early and I stay in late. I also drop in on the weekends to start cultures- but usually only briefly -, to make the most efficient use of his and my time. He is in usually around 9:00-9:15 and I make sure he leaves at 5:00 and I really get angry if he's around past 5:15 except in exigent conditions. Bottom line: Even in Biology, you can restrict your working hours if you're a team player if you have good management skills. If you're overworking. Since science entails failure that you cannot engineer your way out of - you will wind up burning out, since the working hard followed by failure is exactly an optimal way of conditioning laziness.

impendia 13y ago

At Harvard it really is easy to stop worrying, if you have an open mind. As a mathematician, I know excellent academics who narrowly missed getting tenured at MIT and Princeton. They were highly in demand, and are now happily working at other top-20 universities. (ed: I am in math, and described what I observed. I see elsewhere in the thread that mdwelsh observed the opposite.)

mdwelsh 13y ago
You are right that being a mathematician at Harvard, it hardly matters if you get tenure or not. (In fact, for a long time you basically had to win the Fields Medal to get tenure in math at Harvard). Harvard is nowhere near as well known in Computer Science, and is more of a "top 20" rather than "top 5" school.

eykanal 13y ago

Awesome. On the "stop taking advice" idea: when I was a grad student (and postdoc), I kept notes in a personal wiki. I had a page entitled "Things Other People Have Suggested I Do". I didn't do most of them. Even more so, it was such a liberating feeling to look at it and tell myself, "I don't have to do any of that crap, I have my own research plan."

dnautics 13y ago
I have to say, that my graduate degree was salvaged because I took the advice of a grad student, a postdoc, and an assistant professor (and totally blew off my advisors/committee). So, not all advice is bad.

dkrich 13y ago

Not to sound overly critical, but is it just me or does this come off as a somewhat selfish point of view? My father was a tenured professor and growing up I heard enough horror stories from his department to know that a career as a professor at a research university is no easy career. But at the same time, isn't a major part of your job instructing students? I understand the importance of grants, conducting research, etc. as it relates to getting tenure, but if your only focus is jumping through hoops with the end goal of getting tenured there are probably a lot easier ways to get job security and at higher pay. My point is that I would hope that those who go into a career in academia as a professor have a major interest in teaching and aren't just there to get the next promotion.

mdwelsh 13y ago
The problem is that no promotion = no job. So if you care about teaching, you need to get tenure.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  What about all the non-tenured professors who teach? Are you honestly accusing those who are not chasing tenure of not caring about teaching?
  - mjn 13y ago
    In the U.S. at least, you don't usually have a choice to opt-out of chasing tenure if you want to continue teaching. Barring some unusual situations, there are either non-tenure-track fixed-length jobs, like a two-year visiting professorship; or tenure-track jobs where you have six to seven years to get tenure in order to stay. Non-tenure-track but permanent positions are quite rare, and in a tenure-track position you can't choose to simply remain at the untenured Assistant level indefinitely—you'll be fired after six or seven years if you don't successfully go up for tenure. It's a classic "up or out" style job in that sense. Once you get tenure, then the advancement ladder does become somewhat optional; an Associate Professor can stay at that level for the rest of their career, with no requirement that they ever seek promotion to full Professor. Some universities are starting to put pressure in various ways on insufficiently productive tenured faculty, but there is at least more insulation from the advancement ladder at that point. But before then it's non-optional if you want to stay.

electronous 13y ago

Another thing to take away from this article: people with kids have less time to spend doing their jobs.

rwallace 13y ago
Another thing to take away from that: hire someone with kids if you have the option. Maximum output of intellectual work is achieved with a 30-40 hour working week. The author settled on a 50+ hour working week, which is higher than optimum, enough to degrade her judgment and productivity - but only somewhat, not catastrophically; she was still able to get good work done. It's clear that without children, she would have settled on a substantially longer working week, probably enough to destroy her judgment and the quality of her work.

startupstella 13y ago

This article is great because the author has an authentic voice and explains how she achieved a measure of success without succumbing to outside pressures or norms. It's a good framework for thinking about any high stress, competitive career track. Ultimately, stress/pressure greatly affect performance and peoples' perceptions of you, both of which are paramount in ascending hierarchies.

dnautics 13y ago

It's unbelievably easy and condescending for someone who has a tenure-track junior faculty position at harvard to call it a "seven-year postdoc". However, the advice is generally good. I do however take issue with this: "I guess my hope is to add one more option to the list, which is covering your ears and making up your own rules." No... That shouldn't be a hope. You should just do it.

patio11 13y ago

Relatedly: Philip Greenspun, on why it's difficult to convince women and other sane people to enter an academic career in the sciences. http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Dewie 13y ago
Larry Summers really didn't play his cards right. If he had just used this reasoning and concluded that it was because men are stupid, he at least wouldn't have been fired.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  Larry Summers was forcing faculty members to show up for work. Worse than that, he was forcing some of them to change offices and move to the other side of the river! They would have gotten him somehow, it's only a question of how.
  - kaitai 13y ago
    Hey, if we have to show up we'll never get anything done!

grundprinzip 13y ago

Even if not all of the aspects that she wrote about may related to everybodys problems, it's a very good read because it allows to relate to her situation. Being a post-doc in CS myself and having two kids I exactly know how hard it is to juggle everything. In addition, I think that many of the comments here try to interpret the article as a list of advices and treat them as such. But If you read carefully you would have seen that this is especially something she didn't want to. My key take-away from this post is that: Yes, the system is designed for young, childless PhDs who are willing to put 80hs/weeks into work and robot-like follow the advice of others. But, it does not have to be like that. It's paramount to remember everyday why you are doing this job and why you love research and teaching.

read 13y ago

First off, it's inspiring and courageous to write candidly about such a topic. Including the epiphany: That what I can do, is try to be the best whole person that I can be. That mindset would be helpful outside academia too. But the more I read through stories like this the more I become convinced it's important to fool yourself: to convince yourself there's no pressure. As if the act itself unblocks some kind of neural pathways that allow you to do things you wouldn't have let yourself do otherwise. The author might be a lot more courageous that they think, even if they hadn't realized it at the time: "But its not because I have extra courage. Rather, by demoting the prize, the risk becomes less." Anecdotally, a professor once told me (when they look back on their tenure track) that it now seems irresponsible to them that they were devoting such little time to revising journal papers or writing such few grand proposals. (I got the feeling they were doing things that don't scale). Another said they were sure upfront they'd fire them at the end, so they tried to enjoy they ride while it lasted. Both of them got tenure. Another thing this story shows is how logistics become manageable if you try. Like the approach to give the other person a weekend day off as counter-balance to you going on an extra trip is probably what prevents you from going astray. It's the right sort of tension. You pay twice for a workday like that (one for the trip, one for parent duty), so you now have a concrete measure to make that decision rather the vagueness of "it will help my career".

mathattack 13y ago

I like the idea. When you free yourself from undue external pressure creativity comes out. This doesn't work for everyone. You have to be very prescient to avoid all advice. Being smart and in computer science allows one great backup plans. (Tell the 7th year English professor not to worry)

lettergram 13y ago

I highly recommend reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. The essence of the book as well as this article are interesting in that the more relaxed you are the higher your productivity and interestingly enough you can only learn/do so much in a day. The point being, likely not pursuing the tenure track made her more productive and allowed her to form better relationships, making her one of the better junior faculty (or at least one of the more pleasant).

cafard 13y ago

Excellent, but I question how far it can be generalized.

vsbuffalo 13y ago

As someone headed into academia, I ponder how the tenure-track process filters out folks. Simply put, I think many of the best scientists have been nerds, and many smart nerds really don't see the utility in playing the political tenure game. I'd argue that the competition is fiercer now than it's ever been in the sciences, so these selectionary forces against nerd-types are getting stronger. We end up with the situation where scientists in academic jobs are enriched for those good at politics and playing the game, and we lose brilliant minds to companies. Companies also do their part, and offer alluring salaries and job security (I've had quite a few recruitment attempts for wonderful companies, and almost left academia on several occasions). With the folks in academic positions being political (and sometimes downright manipulative), it's no surprise that some make terrible mentors. Their success quite often relies on extracting work from postdocs that will never have their success. Sadly, there's no incentive for symbiotic relationships sometimes. Luckily, finally, I have met mentors that are exceptions to this, and are nerds like me (and quite frankly, keep me in the sciences). But it took a long time to find such mentors, and other very smart people are not so lucky as to find these types of mentors and they leave the sciences. Sadly, this enriches for more bad mentor types. I think the role my mentors' mentors had is huge too; often my mentors talk about how important their mentors were.

dnautics 13y ago
>I think many of the best scientists have been nerds, and many smart nerds really don't see the utility in playing the political tenure game. I think this is 75% of the "problem". It gets worse because the smart nerds who do like to play the political game are often so solipsistic and selfish that they are really spectacularly atrocious managers, many of whom take a scorched earth attitude to solving their scientific problems. This becomes a vicious cycle as that becomes the percieved way to act within the culture.

willsun 13y ago

For those interested in the Harvard tenure process, this article detailed some of the history and statistics: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/11/scrutiny-tenure-harvard/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/4/11/scrutiny-tenure-...