
HOWTO: Get tenure (2015) - eitland
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/
======
dbcurtis
> (My Ph.D. advisor, perhaps the greatest and most passionate educator I have
> ever known, received the excellence in teaching award and was then promptly
> denied tenure.)

Wow. How to make your university Hell on Earth reduced to a single, easily
actionable sentence.

I realise that is the norm. Still, a sad comment on what academia has become.
As a parent paying tuition bills it particularly rankles.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> "*Still, a sad comment on what academia has become."

You are incorrectly treating academia as some kind of monolithic hivemind.

As I understand it, there's two broad categories of postsecondary
institutions: research and teaching. (See, for example, the discussion here:
[https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49911/how-to-
de...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49911/how-to-determine-if-
an-institution-is-a-research-or-teaching-university-in-the-u)) The prestigious
universities are research institutions and all incentives are aligned toward
doing research and getting grant money and that's why the author says what he
says. (The classic joke letter, ostensibly written by one "Prof. Hardass
Slavedriver", expresses well what the pressures are at a research university:
[https://lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/a-...](https://lifesciencephdadventures.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/a-demotivational-
letter/) .)

Teaching institutions focus more on the educational aspects but, having
neither prestige, grant money, or endowments, they cannot provide as
comprehensive a set of facilities, advanced courses, or the undergraduate
research opportunities that a research university does.

So, for the student, it's really a trade-off when choosing between the two. Do
I want to get a solid, middle-of-the-road education at a teaching school or do
I want to go for broke and try and take advantage of the advanced educational
opportunities at a research school?

------
abnry
Just a reminder to everyone that survivorship bias is a thing.

------
kkylin
One of the posters on the original thread asked if it was possible to raise
children and get tenure with both parents working. Answer is yes, but not
easy. If you are lucky to get an academic position near family who can help,
that is a tremendous boost. Othewrise, even though many (most?) US
universities have some kind of parental leave for either gender, it's
generally not as much time off as one would like -- and everyone I know
continues doing research while on parental leave; they just don't teach.

In our case, we had kids after I got tenure. (Didn't plan it that way, and
wouldn't recommend it for everyone.) That made some things easier, though
still not easy. Helps that we can afford good help, and even then it's hard to
maintain the two careers.

~~~
samth
I got tenure (last year) after having a kid (two years ago). We do have family
in town, which as you say is a big help. We both took leave, and I basically
did not do any research during my 12-week leave. I did meet occasionally with
my students (they don't go on leave, after all).

So it is possible, and I strongly encourage men (or anyone who isn't the birth
parent) who are on leave to do this -- the birth parent is much more
constrained and this difference has been shown to lead to measurable
difference in outcomes in the future for their careers.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10081136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10081136)

------
professoretc
At a community college: don't screw up too badly for four years. (And at least
in California, it pays better than university, too!)

------
adatavizguy
This path closely resembles the reasons Stephen Hawking gave to why he
succeeded when he only became serious after the ALS diagnosis.

------
graycat
Blank

~~~
hliyan
Doesn't this entirely miss the central point of this article?

This is what I took away:

-

 _Then it hit me: Life is too precious and too fleeting to waste my time on
bullshit like tenure. I didn’t become a professor to get tenure. I became a
professor to make the world better through science. From this day forward, I
will spend my time on problems and solutions that will matter. I will make a
difference.

I stopped working on problems for the sole purpose of notching up a
publication. I shifted gears to cybersecurity. I found a project on cancer in
the med school. I joined a project in chemical engineering using super-
computing to fight global warming.

Suddenly, my papers started getting accepted.

My grant proposals started getting funded._

-

I have always believed in the idea that success is an _outcome_. It cannot be
maximized/optimized directly any more than you can increase your car's speed
by grabbing and turning the speedometer needle. We need to focus on what
matters. Success will follow.

~~~
graycat
Blank.

~~~
pc86
The post wasn't a question about how to get tenure, it was sharing a specific
article with a specific argument. Matt and I spent thousands of hours on the
same IRC channels as early as the late 90's and he's always been a gifted
writer and his posts are well worth the time to read and critically think
about.

Given the context, a blog-post-length comment about how to get tenure is not
super relevant and a little odd. But then again, so is editing both of your
posts to remove the content (and presumably eliminate any further discussion).

------
helmutnewton
Autism is not a disability

