This is the third in a series of posts inspired by a three-year term of service on a university-wide promotion and tenure committee. After discussing why lifetime contracts make more sense than you might think, and providing a pan-disciplinary, pan-institutional guide to landing said contract, this post discusses the first-world problem of what to do once you have it.
I know what I want but I just don’t know how to go about gettin’ it
Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it
The transition from junior to senior faculty member resembles the transition in attitude between the first and second lyric quoted above (and the timing is about right, too). The junior faculty member is motivated by pursuit of a single objective. While there may be some uncertainty about what it takes to achieve the objective, there is no doubt about what it is.
The tenured faculty member has no such well-defined mission. While it is possible to keep on doing the same things – publishing and teaching – for the remaining 30 years of one’s career, a number of other alternatives pop up. More than anything else, the tenured faculty member will have opportunities to play a leadership role not only in their own program of scholarly inquiry, but in their institution or discipline more broadly.
You can do a wide variety of things. And unlike earlier stages of your career, you face real decisions about which of them you might like to do. In an economy marked by rampant unemployment and job dislocation, this is a luxurious problem to have. But it’s a problem nonetheless. On the APT committee we often spoke of the need for professional development opportunities for newly tenured faculty. Here are the main lessons we spoke of conveying.
Lesson 0: It’s time to take on those risky projects.
I’ve already mentioned that one basic rationale for awarding tenure is to encourage faculty to conceive and execute projects that have both the promise of Earth-shattering advances in knowledge and the possibility of complete failure. So obviously it’s time to do that… if you don’t find yourself swamped with other things to do. Which brings us to…
Lesson 1: You Can Say No.
As your academic reputation grows, you’ll be presented with an expanding array of opportunities. We’ll talk about some of them in a moment. As an untenured faculty member, these opportunities came infrequently enough, and the importance of increasing your name recognition high enough, that the rough rule of thumb “say yes to everything” would not get you in too much trouble.
When opportunities arrive more frequently, and the importance of building name recognition declines (because you’ve already got it – maybe even too much of it), the decision rule should change. You needn’t say “yes” to every request to serve your university or discipline.
Those who have trouble internalizing this lesson will witness the following phenomena occur. First, the time available to do your own research and teaching – the things you’ve demonstrated a talent for – will dwindle, eventually to nothing if you let it. Second, once there is no more of your research or teaching time left to cannibalize, your service will eat itself. Every time you say “yes" to one more activity, the quality of service you provide to every other thing you’ve said “yes” to will decline.
The “say yes to everything” rule of thumb, in short, will prove harmful not only to you but eventually even to those people to whom you say “yes.” You can throw family and friends into this category along with all the work-oriented folks.
What rule of thumb ought you substitute? Once you've had a chance to try a few different roles and responsibilities, the old "do what you enjoy best" applies. But it's hard to know whether you enjoy certain things unless you try them first.
A colleague of mine at Duke once suggested the following: imagine what would happen if you said “no.” The person who has made the request most likely has a list of possible candidates – on which you might very well not be the first name – and would proceed to the next name on the list. Is that next person likely to do about as good a job, if not better? If so, then say “no.” If you apply the rule correctly (not that there’s any guarantee that you can), then you will end up focusing your efforts in the places where you’ll make the most difference.
There can be a drawback to this strategy, if you are the sort of person who is conscientious, punctual, and otherwise competent at accomplishing things. You’ll end up being asked to do a lot, and by the above rule of thumb you’ll end up doing a lot of it. For this reason, I’ve been advised by more than one colleague to demonstrate “strategic incompetence.” I think that works best if you can get over the “conscientious” part.
If you are conscientious and competent, then your rule of thumb should be to stop saying “yes” when doing so will do harm to others that you’ve already said “yes” to. And do your best to say “yes” to collaborators, conference organizers, or other people whose requests involve getting your research done. That way you'll manage to reach this threshold before your research efforts have been completely cannibalized.
Lesson 2: The things you might do
The possibilities here are too numerous to list in a post of finite length, but I’ll offer a few reflections on some things I’ve said “yes” to over the past few years.
- Journal editing. This is a valuable form of service to your discipline. It is an honor to be nominated, and is a nice accomplishment to highlight at the time of your next promotion (more on that in a moment). If you want to do a good job, though, it can be quite a lot of work. Many of the editors I’ve known – though not all – cut way down on their manuscript reviewing once they take on editing responsibilities. If you say “no,” the next best person is probably still pretty good.
- Administrative roles in the department. Some of these do not involve much work, others – department chairpersonships and the like – are close to a full time job. The difference between “good” and “bad” departmental leadership, though, can be the difference between a cohesive and congenial unit and one that falls apart. If you say “no,” the next best person may be quite a step down, particularly in a small department.
- Search committees. Your service on a search committee can make a huge difference to the future of your department, particularly if you’re hiring a tenured colleague. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not much work – presuming that you are successful in hiring somebody. Again, the next best person may represent a significant compromise in fit, particularly if the hiring is to be done in your subfield.
- Reviewing colleagues. Whether writing a letter for a younger scholar at another institution or a report on a colleague in your own department, this form of service almost certainly tops the scales in terms of importance-per-unit-of-time invested. I’ll cover this topic in more detail in a later post.
- University-level service. Serving on a committee or in a role that takes you beyond the confines of your discipline or subfield will remind you of what it was like to be an undergraduate – whereas most of your career is based on being a specialist in a narrow area, on one of these committees you’ll have opportunities to come up to speed in areas you know very little about. There can be a lot of personal edification involved. The flip side is that this is another scenario where the “next best person” is likely to be just about as good as you would be.
- Serving on discipline-level or public-oriented committees. It can be very invigorating to be given an opportunity to shape the future of your discpline, or to spearhead the translation of research into policy or practice. In some cases, these commitments are not very time-consuming, but when it comes to real influence the old adage relating what you get out to what you put in applies.
- Public intellectual-izing. You can blog. You can tweet. You can write op-ed pieces for newspapers. You can write a less-than-scholarly book. If the inspiration lies within you, let it out. Don't plan on quitting your day job.
The typical academic scholar will possess tenure for decades – enough time to dabble across a range of these activities, plus others I haven’t mentioned. You may discover some of them to your liking; if you don’t mind the work and are reasonably competent at doing it, the odds are you’ll have a chance to spend an increasing proportion of your time on that activity. If you hate each and every one of them, it might be time to demonstrate “strategic incompetence” if you are lacking in actual incompetence.
Lesson 3: The Next Promotion
At Duke, and many other institutions, a newly tenured scholar receives the title “Associate Professor.” The process of ascending to the next rung, a “full” professorship, is often shrouded in mystery. For many, the route to securing your next promotion involves receiving an external offer at full rank from a peer institution. That isn’t always necessary, however. Once you’ve been promoted to associate, it is worth having a discussion with your department chair regarding the typical criteria for promotion to full.
Generally speaking, if tenure and promotion to associate professor is a statement that a university believes in a scholar’s potential, promotion to full professor is closer to a recognition that this potential has been realized.
In book-writing disciplines, promotion thresholds are fairly straightforward. To receive tenure, you need to publish your first book and make headway on a new project (in some cases, a contract on the second project may be expected). For the next promotion, you need that second project published and progress shown on a third. The exact placement of the threshold may vary; some letter writers will want to see published reviews on that second manuscript, others will be content to see it in pre-publication form.
In journal article-oriented disciplines, the threshold is a bit fuzzier. I’ve seen letter writers in more than one discipline refer to the h-index in defining a threshold. The h-index is a number h such that you have at least h articles that have garnered h citations each. And the magic number I’ve seen quoted is 20. While that might seem like a bright line threshold, it oversimplifies the process. To start with, there are different ways to calculate h (Google Scholar, ISI) which can give you very different answers. Suffice to say, if you’ve got an index number way above that and are still an associate professor, it might be time to bring up the subject with your chair.
If you received tenure on the basis of a strong research record coupled with a poor or below-average teaching record, your colleagues might expect you to show improvement on that score before promoting you again. A similar statement applies to service.
Some fields may state expectations about the length of time a scholar should spend in associate rank, but in general this is not a clock-driven process. In some cases, the criteria for promotion evolve over time. Scholars promoted on a quick timetable typically do so primarily on the basis of their publication records; with a consistent track record of strong teaching and service some universities will award promotions to those with a less consistent research record.
There’s one other factor that determines why some faculty earn their next promotion earlier than others: they ask for it. There is little downside risk to sitting down with your chair and discussing whether your time has come. In a surprising number of cases, this type of discussion is what sets the process in motion. If the answer is “not just yet,” you’ll nonetheless walk away with useful feedback and a clearer sense of what the expectations are in the department.
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