A prominent cosmologist of our time,Sean M. Carroll mentionsthe worst thinghe personally did, amid a lengthy instruction to achievingtenure. Striking indeed, is the tone of his affirmation: Do…

Why should this be a joke? In no other environment does the person who receives an evaluation (be it a performance review or a grade) get to grade the person who assigns the evaluation. This situation in higher education creates an absurd conflict of interest. If you want inflated evaluations from your students, then assign inflated grades. If I’m doing my job as an instructor the students will learn, but they won’t like me. It should be the job of our departments and administrations to ensure teaching quality, instead we give that responsibility to the students.

Funding is very important as it *enables* you to do more and better science and research.

Nevertheless it is a crucial aspect of modern research life for both theorists and experimentalists.

Vision without funding is hallucination.

@brian137—

As a recently tenured sub-schlub, I think Sean’s list captures the essence pretty well.

The standard initial advice given to assistant profs is that research, teaching and service are all key for tenure. During the quest for tenure, one is criticized on all three. But, at moment of truth, there is a rank ordering. It’s no surprise that prestige and money are at the top. The points below relate to NIH/NSF funding, and so are probably off-track for those in the Humanities. And for those outliers that have lots of Science/Nature papers, perhaps this is irrelevant to them, too.

1. $$ first, please. If you do not land at least one major external grant (e.g. NIH or NSF), you’re in deep trouble. Preferably, you should have more than one, and they should overlap. While such expectations are falling out of touch with current funding realities, it sadly doesn’t change the expectation from the higher-ups.

2. Productivity: i.e. lotsa peer-reviewed papers. Not only in this key for tenure, but of course, for reviewers of grant proposals. “How productive has this investigator been? Is s/he a good investment? OK let’s count the peer-reviewed papers…”. The process isn’t really that brain-dead, of course, but it does seriously enter the equation.

3. Chest-thumping: Your tenured colleagues will review your package. Most profs are busy rolling their own Sisyphean boulder up a hill, many will have only superficial clues as to what you’re doing, or why it matters. Or worse, they think they know, but they really don’t. Such people can dismiss your research with an inaccurate caricature, and with political authority. So, you have to educate your colleagues, and help them advocate your case. Do everything you can to trumpet your work via website, posters, volunteering to give departmental seminars. This can burn time: you’d probably rather get real research done and train your graduate students and post-docs, instead of worrying about digital arts and crafts. But, it is time well spent. If slightly arrogant peacock strutting is not your first instinct, it may be worth learning.

4. H-index and impact factor. Your colleagues are probably unfamiliar with the details your sub-field. But now, they have to pass judgment on your science. How? What’s the basis? They could of course read your papers. But this takes time, and there’s very little of that. Enter the holy H-index and journal impact factor. These metrics are often faves of administrators for assessing quality and promise. All your effort and hours are two-components of a ‘quality vector’. Personally, I think this is doing damage. But, as a sub-schlub, what can I do? The Ueber-schlubs define the rules.

5. Teaching: great teaching cannot help you, but poor teaching can certainly hurt you. Our institution pays close attention to the student course evaluations. If you’re charged with teaching lots of beginning undergrads, you can be spanked severly. Understandably, many such undergrads do not understand just how damning those online nasty (possibly entertaining) comments can be to a tenure case. This is not to say that the evaluations are useless – they can certainly be useful for improving teaching technique. But there is a growing sense that these evaluations are weighted too heavily without careful consideration. Thus, the assistant professor has to work hard to resist the temptation to cater to the demands of a good Course Evaluation (“Everyone gets a new car!”), versus the demands of teaching well. The advice has been: be an adequate teacher, and spend no more than 2 hours a day preparing. For those of us that actually like teaching, this is wrenching.

5. Service is highly political. The usual advice is to go for Committees that also serve your interests. That’s very clever, but this may not always be an option. The goal is to show that you’re a team player. Faculty do much of the administration, and paper work. Good service means showing you’re just as willing as anyone else to sacrifice research and teaching to focus “passionately” on administration.

6. The outside letters for your tenure package: often, you have little control over this. And often, this list must exclude your PhD and Post-doc advisor. So, don’t count on help from them. Go out and give talks. Invite people to your institution that might be potential letter writers.

7. Managing the above can be tricky; for the assistant prof, doing all these things can mean working right past your graduate students and post-docs. You conceive and do the experiment, fit the data, and write the paper. Now do that all again. I don’t think that’s good for graduate education. But it is often necessary to get those papers and grants in a timely manner.

8. “small body of work”: Related to ‘chest-thumping’: I was told, to educate your colleagues, you should be able to point to a small body of unique and innovative work (backed up by papers and grants), that show promise and “sustainability” for the long haul. And you should be able to describe that “small body” succinctly, w/o buzzwords.

9. I do tell my graduate students most of these points. It can be hard to get them to rally for these causes, if they don’t understand the entire picture. Some students, without this information, will treat graduate school as 9-5 job. That attitude seems to be increasing b/c more people are going into grad school for economic reasons.

However, I see a counterexample: if you work hardly, do not bother anyone, do not write books, blogs, and so on, then your boss could think that it is better to keep you under temporary contract as long as possible, so you can continue working for him/her. Otherwise, if you have a tenure, then you could either stop working or work for yourself.