The Best Way to Not Get Tenure

Agree with that.

He set out to improve things, which is a good goal. Improving means criticizing the status quo at some level. In case of academia, with tenured people lingering there for life, status quo is probably the result of their work (for better or for worse). Wanting to "improve" that was probably perceived as an insult something like "what you did before sucks, I'll make it better". Unless he was dealing with unusually rational colleagues, that stuff is never forgotten and surfaces at voting times.

But also playing devil's advocate here. It could also be that this is a "well the grapes are too sour anyway" type story. That is, maybe his research wasn't seen as very good, innovative or interesting to deserve a tenure. Maybe he knew it too so set out to instead focus on teaching and other aspects. I've seen people do that. Can't code so they become really strong proponents of documenting everything, or they look for other busy work to justify their salary. That is not necessarily all bad or wrong, but it is interesting to consider here. We haven't really heard from other side so to speak.

Some people simply aren't politicians and will NEVER have any "tact", nor could they look themselves in the mirror if they faked it.

My suggestion to them is to start their own business or find one to work for (with a willing owner) that needs its core rocked or is full of straight-talkers.

We shouldn't typecast ourselves for a paycheck of it leads to misery.

I wonder if there is any professional psychology on this kind of thing (link me!) but my layman observation is that most organizations tend toward median smoothing at best or lowest common denominator at worst for performance. That is of course not how you achieve high performance. But high performance scares lower performance, the conflict is bidirectional. From the article it's pretty obvious he was a high performer. High performance means having opinions. Opinions are contestable, and create conflict. Conflict is part of a high performance organization. Lower performers are terrified of conflict with higher performers. Therefore median and lowest common denominator organizations force high performers out. It's kind of ridiculous to think about that happening in academia, but today I learned!

When you switch to the arts and sports we LOVE to see extreme outliers and go to great lengths to assemble and prop them up. It's visceral excitement to see 320lb freaks of nature face off on a line of scrimmage in an NFL game. It would be cruel to have them face off against a highschool team or even just mix them in on the same line. Yet that kind of disparity happens all the time in other types of human assembly.

So I look at this from the other side. He did his deed at the University, made a mark, and got rejected for having high impact good, neutral, or bad. Some people were uncomfortable with high performance for reasons which could range from pettiness to valid criticism.

What you would call lack of tact I might call integrity. I am sure he will land somewhere else and do great things. Industry is more fluid and amenable to assembling high performance, especially in startups.

> the key to getting stuff done in a hierarchical organization is tact. I think he was a poor politician

> Rocking the boat publicly (as this post clearly shows he is OK with) is not the mark of good political skills.

You're not wrong.

However shouldn't we be asking ourselves why we are requiring such skills?

The truth is that being a good politician has an inverse relationship with being a geek.

Peter Thiel has been pointing this out for many years. He asks, do we really have scientists anymore? Or are they really bureaucrats and politicians pretending to be scientists?

I am convinced it is the latter. I think we have whole universities filled with cargo cult science.

This relates neatly with some awkward facts about the modern education system.

For all the extraordinary efforts and feats of intellectual prowess it is also extraordinary how little they practically achieve. The number of breakthroughs has dramatically declined. Once you get past the PR bullshit and backslapping there is very little actually happening in many places in the 'innovation economy'.

Take nanotech. I am not aware of any advances that make their appearance in a consumer's home. I can think only of a handful of niche applications like expensive hydrophobic coatings. If the advances were occurring in the factories we should be seeing more refined low cost goods on a massive scale. Is that actually happening? I don't know that it is. We've been promised a lot and been waiting for long time.

Take biotech. Nothing. Just nothing. I think the last biotechnology I interacted with was a yogurt. Can anybody name a single biotech invention or innovation that actually exists in people's houses? In the 50s and 60s we had the Green Revolution, that counts. However the price of food has been rising considerably for several years now. There is certainly no food product that I consume that has become much cheaper.

The discovery of DNA is at least half a century ago. Despite much fanfare about CRISPR, why should we be sure that this time biologists are bringing home the bacon? Is anybody willing to bet that in ten years time there will be GM cool pets, much cheaper food, much cheaper quality wood for building from GM trees? I would not take that bet.

What about energy? Willing to bet your energy bills get much lower in the future?

tldr; Maybe a whole lot of people are totally full of shit. The basic metric of progress is that things get cheaper, but they're not, so it isn't happening. If you're not willing to bet that prices decrease then maybe your confidence in the future of invention/innovation is misplaced.

" I think he is a poor politician, and is clearly very unhappy about being denied tenure."

Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

There's a book about this: Leading Quietly.

I'd agree that the way to appeal to management is to build relationships & grassroots support in the organization. But the way to appeal to the market (which seems to be his current situation now, since he seems to be looking for a new job) is to make a big splash, take credit for all the things you've done, define yourself in terms of what you'd most like to do, and then wait for the calls to come in.

The difference is on whether the set of people you work with is mutable or immutable. If it's immutable, you better preserve relationships, because you'll be working with them in the future, regardless of what happens, and you need them to implement your plans. But if it's mutable, then when people dislike you, just find new people. Stake out a territory in idea-space, and then just adjust the set of folks you hang out with until everyone agrees with you.

Voice or exit. If you want voice, you've got to speak to what the people around you will hear. If you're willing to exit (or going to anyway), you can say what you want and swap the people out until you find the set who hears you.

Interestingly, the current U.S. presidential race is a perfect example of this. Trump is following the people-are-mutable, if-they-don't-like-you-fuck-'em strategy. He's burning bridges with everyone who criticizes him. And he's probably doing this because it has worked for him in business - when he stiffs a contractor, sexually harasses an employee, or loses an investor's money, there is always somebody else willing to get in line behind them. Clinton, however, is the consummate relationship builder. She's carefully worked across the aisle through decades of experience in Washington, such that she's got all the really important people supporting her. Trump's strategy works great at rallies, where he can speak only to the people who agree with him, but fails across the entire electorate, where he has to deal with a pre-existing composition that isn't going anywhere.

Your point is sound. So is his.

A change requires orientation, energy, and whatever RoI. This guy - as he describes himself subjectively - is all about engaging his own energy. Orientation is essential and is expected to come from managers (dynamics). Managers also choose a strategy that improves the RoI (kinetics). Engagement is nevertheless absolutely essential to make change happen IRL (work). That's a pity an agreement couldn't be found with his managers. It seems there's kinda misunderstanding going on here, that should have been managed appropriately.

You know it seems obvious to you but I spend the last 10 years on the job knowing absolutely nothing about this. I'm a programmer and I have good social skills. As a trainer, talking in public comes naturally, as a team leader, I'm also quite good in conducting meetings and driving the team efforts.

But I have ZERO political skills, and I couldn't understand why.

Reading your comment is like finally getting the missing link. I never realized this was the basics of politics. I mean, I knew good politician did it, I saw them doing it among other things, but I could not comprehend it was the essence of it. No joking. Now I understand many things much better.

It may seems nothing to you, but you actually made my day.

And this is something that should be explained to more technical minded people, because otherwise, you can get very frustrated when you can't manage to influence things with good intentions in mind and a detrimental approach, while others seems to make it happen naturally.

Well, I guess now I have to practice a lot to get better at it. Seems a lot of work.

You are absolutely correct.

The fact and reality that you are absolutely correct is a HUGE PART of the ENTIRE REASON why software startups so frequently outperform large incumbent companies with greater resources, support, investment, and time. Because while the software startup is messily, irritatingly, often horribly dealing with its people issues, it creates pods of productivity, small, coherent groups that work well together and make things happen without the need to wait until the lunch next Tuesday to gauge incumbent X's support for proposition Y before presenting proposition Y at gathering Z five weeks from now. In a successful startup, someone screams, "EUREKA!" summons one or two other minds from the team to a rickety little conference room, elaborates the idea to make sure he/she isn't missing anything obvious, and then starts working on it, possibly being finished by the end of a two-week sprint. What takes the incumbent organization MONTHS of political angling happens in these small, fluid organizations in WEEKS - or less!

I'm really quite glad your analysis is correct, because it creates massive opportunities for guys like me, who trend a bit on the abrasive side now and then, but it also discourages me as to the correct course of action to get any already-existibg institution into fighting shape. Is it potentially literally impossible under average circumstances? I worry it genuinely might be, and that creation of new institutionsay be the only answer, but that answer makes me very sad for some reason.

Plus, the academic job search/ tenure process is supposed to be a two-way thing (as any job search, I suppose). The university thinks about whether they want to hire you, and you think about whether you want to work with/ will get on with the people in the department. Tenure then comes down to being an accepted member of the community (among other thinngs).

Absolutely! And to be really good at this you need to learn to be tactful and diplomatic in all aspects of your life. Live and brief this philosophy towards all of your interactions with others. Become a politician.

While you're 100% right, the key word to me here is "hierarchical organization" - and I remember my history teacher, the best I've ever had. She was demanding, on fire all the time - and most of other students and teachers hated her, but she was just extremely passionate and uncompromising, teaching from first principles (I've never learned as much from a teacher while in school). This tends to set mediocre people off, and she got really bitter in the end. All the skills OP is showing make him a bad fit for large places full of B and C people (i.e. all of academia and corporations) - while his healthy self-esteem, passion, a learning and teaching spirit, great writing, aspiration and the drive for simplicity and good UX (like in his courses) make him a perfect fit as a founder or early startup employee. He should be prepared to fight an uphill battle if he tries to stay in academia full time. If I were him, I'd try to do an industry career first before returning to teaching, I'm going down that route as well. Even my all-time hero of academia Feynman helped build the atomic bomb before returning to teaching first semesters.

We can carry this a bit further. How does someone lacking these skills deal with students? I don't know all the details of his case, but I wonder how he handled grading inquiries and disputes with students, and how willing he was to adjust his teaching to meet the needs of the students.

And just to be clear, I'm well aware of claims (right or wrong) that teaching doesn't matter, but this is different from student evaluations of teaching.

I had a boss years ago who said it best.

Never ask a question of decision maker type people when you don't know the answer already.

Does not the requirement to match the politics of a workplace raise the bar too high, for a profession like university professor?

I am not saying that it is incorrect; but in the background of demands by multiple people inside a university, his actions - as described by him - do not seem to be so significant.

Corporate analogies don't really translate well to academia.

There's no corporate equivalent to "Tenure" whereby a company says "We guarantee you a position for life" (Fellow roles excluded).

That's very good insight. Do you know of any good books or resources on this topic?

"I interpret as .. doing things that might piss off people on the committee."

Sounds like obedience to me.

There's a great HBO tv show, "The Wire". It's all about how an institution can consume personalities of those who belong to it. I'm pretty sure tenure is the same way. I see this happening to people who work in corporations for a long time. Their personalities change as they become the sort of person who can succeed in such environments.

That being said, I suspect standout researchers get tenure and get to be themselves, just as talented people can succeed in corporations and still be themselves.

They are generally the exception rather than the norm, however.

I agree with this. But research isn't everything. And there are at least some hints and signs that this person doesn't know how to get along with colleagues.

> I worked really hard to bring an exciting and rigorous operating systems class to UB.

Why did this effort require working "really hard"? Was it because of obstructionist, jealous, or stupid colleagues? Or people who wanted a boring and unrigourous course instead? Or were there perhaps legitimate reasons why others didn't want to change the existing course?

> I led a complete overhaul of our department’s undergraduate computer science curriculum. It includes two new exciting introductory programming courses that I spent a great deal of time designing.

Let me guess: the existing curriculum was terrible, boring, not at all rigorous, and there was no reason to keep any of it, and the author made sure everyone knew it. And why did the author have to spend a great deal of time? Because no one else in the department was capable of doing as good a job? Because nobody else could comprehend this grand vision?

Everything listed under "speaking out" gives me the same vibe. It doesn't seem to have crossed this person's mind that there are reasons why other people have different approaches to teaching, research, administration, hiring, etc., beyond others being obstructionist, brainwashed, or just stupid. I'm reminded of the parable reminding us [1] to not take down a fence until we have truly understood why the fence was erected in the first place.

And really... bringing a dog to work in violation of a clearly stated campus policy, repeatedly, even after having been warned, then encouraging a student petition and getting your name in a local paper about the incident? That's just asking for trouble.

(Full disclosure: I'm coming up for tenure myself, and one lesson it has taken me 5 years to understand is that people who disagree with me on campus aren't doing so out of spite, stupidity, or carelessness, they often just have different priorities than I do. Just because our department absolutely needs more resources to do a good job handling our rapidly growing student population, doesn't mean the college should make this a priority over other things.)

[1] http://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

>What the author interprets as proving obedience, I interpret as not wasting time on things the committee can't measure objectively, or doing things that might piss off people on the committee.

I'd be astonished if any academic committee in any university anywhere in the world had any idea how to measure the value of research objectively.

As for not pissing people off - I'd imagine it's impossibly hard to do truly original research without pissing at least some people off. There will be petty jealousies, back-biting, gossip, and all the usual nonsense. Too much, too soon, and hackles will be raised.

It's very sad. Academia seems to have become stifling rather than expansive.

My working definition of organisational dysfunction is when politics and status become primary motivators, and quality of output - and pride in that quality - become secondary.

From the outside, that seems more true of academia now than it should be.

> I see academia as somewhere where people can make immense contributions to human knowledge

The problem is just like the industry (or even more so), academia is plagued with infighting, personal vendettas, skewed incentives and lots of politics.

I think many believe academia is more pure, more rational and calm environment where it is all sharing, and peaceful pursuit of knowledge and so on. The reality is very different from it.

> but they have to jump through certain hoops to do so

The hoops are part of the problems. It seems he cared for focused more on teaching and administration instead of sucking up to other faculty or just cranking out publications like crazy.

The most important bit is probably him trying to improve things.

Improving things mean undoing something that is already there. Due to tenure and length of time people with tenure hang around in academia, the status quo was established by many of the tenured people there. Saying "I want to improve that" was read as, "what you did sucked, I will make it better". That stuff is never acknowledged publicly but come voting time, it won't be forgotten either.

Since hardly anyone has firsthand knowledge of what happened, everyone is extrapolating (it's all anyone can do really). You are extrapolating that this is a case where individuality is getting crushed by The System and this guy's only crime was speaking the truth and not conforming to this or that soul crushing norm of professional life.

For the most part the less sympathetic comments I've seen are extrapolating that there may have been issues with maturity, professionalism, self-awareness, "reading the room", etc. Of course those comments also come from people extrapolating about what really happened based on the account of one person.

The truth is unknowable to almost everyone here, so all people can do is compare what was written to their own experiences. I don't think you're any more right or wrong than anyone else here, but I think your interpretation is based on a different reading of the situation altogether, rather than everyone reading it the same way but having different notions of what was just or unjust about what happened.

I think it's mostly just me. It's not so much "get in line", but "before you complain about getting in line, maybe consider why there is a line in the first place".

Getting burned by pissing off one or two people in your department is unfortunate. Pissing of more than half the people in your department? Plus lots of people in other departments? And the administration too? And even the local newspaper?

Either he is the only good guy in a sea of jerks, or maybe he's not quite the good guy he thinks he is. I don't know the which it is, and the article doesn't tell us either.

I'm not sure why this story upset me so much. I think it is because when I started in my department, I saw things I thought were terrible -- courses that hadn't been revised in years, the wrong languages being taught, outdated exercises, poorly-written web pages, cumbersome processes, etc. And I said so, frequently. Thankfully, I had some great mentors to help teach me to slow down and listen to others, and work with others. We've now made lots of changes, updated the curriculum, and done it all together. And some things I thought were terrible I know realize are actually elegant solutions to problems outside of our control (e.g. finite money and time and expertise, and a college administration that needs to think about public perception, alumni, gifting, athletics, other departments, and lots of other things besides "what will make the CS department awesome").

But, on the other hand, if one person around is a jerk, they're a jerk. But if everyone around you is a jerk, maybe you're the jerk.

The world has enough of those kind of people. It needs more iconoclasts.

The just world hypothesis*

It's not a fallacy if it's a tenable argument.

I can't be the only high school age lurker here that thought your comment came straight out of an AP DBQ.

He obviously pissed off his department, and so they voted with an aim to punishing him. He's a fool not to appeal it, though. If he appeals then the decision will be made by people outside of his department who won't have the same emotional stakes in the decision. Rage quit after you win your appeal, if you must!

$3,000,000 in funding, most of it still active is astonishing (https://blue.cse.buffalo.edu/proposals/), and his DBLP (http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/c/Challen:Geoffrey) is pretty awesome (note: he's in DBLP as Geoffrey Challen, Geoffrey Werner Challen, and Geoffrey Werner-Allen).

But he DID keep his dog in his lab, against university policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20151002100639/http://www.buffal...

I hope he changes his mind about not appealing. The grass ain't greener anywhere else. All university departments are filled with miserable gossips.

What kind of professor is he?

As my gran used to say - "we don't bake 'rather' cookies here". I mean, I'd 'rather' lay in my hammock sipping pina coladas, but here I am on a Sunday afternoon waiting for my project to compile. Every job has aspects to it that aren't much fun, that's why it's a job.

Assuming he is indeed "brilliant in his field" and simply not very good at politics, there are tons of places who will happily hire that combination.

I've seen so many professors I loved, especially the tougher ones, given crappy ratings by stupid idiots who choose to use that site.

...And if said spirit was apparent to the people voting, and if they factored that into their decision.

That's not how tenure works. Up or out -- you get tenure or you hit the road. So this is actually fairly common in academia. Sort of a parting shot, if you will.

Speaking cynically, the motivation of the essay (and in particular stuff like his thin-gruel attempt to wrap himself in the flag of social justice) seems to be recruiting an internet brigade to harass his colleagues into reversing their decision, or simply as retaliation.

He's trying to get attention so he can get a job somewhere else:

https://blue.cse.buffalo.edu

Couldn't have said it better! They want to place stupid games? Then watch their relevance dissipate into nothingness. Science doesn't need the current research system in order to survive and thrive.

If any of those items were true (and I highly doubt that), his colleagues should have simply mentioned it rather than stay quiet, passive aggressive, and butthurt.

I've had it happen before, what's likely happening is that you're scrolling an element behind the article due to a bug in safari with z indexes.

They were published this year. They'll be cited next year if they are useful. There's a 6-9 month delay between paper submission and publication.

When he says they are groundbreaking, he is just announcing to the world that he thinks well of them. hyperbole seems to be the norm for this young fellow...

Most times, grants stay with the department and they have the discretion to use the remainder however they want.

Tenure is just an employment contract that can only be terminated with just cause. (And the number of tenure-track positions is going down as far as I know)

Professors are also thinkers and researchers. Thinkers should be free to explore different positions, without fear of being ostracized for their ideas. Researchers should have some sense of longevity, so that they can undertake grand projects that require years of continuity.

Your third point is not always applicable, in my understanding. At-will employees in New York can be fired for any non-protected reason, or even without cause. Contracts and unions elevate the burden of the employer to justify a termination, but outside of that, it's not easy to fight a wrongful termination without having hard evidence of some kind of implied contract.

Another part of the argument is that the security of tenure somewhat offsets the low salaries of academia relative to industry.

> employees in most (every?) jurisdiction are protected by laws that mean they can't be fired without just cause.

The United States is not one of those jurisdictions. Employees can be fired for any reason other than certain protected reasons (race, etc.) One can literally be fired for supporting the wrong political candidate, for example.

I don't think it's the underlying reason for tenure, but it's my guess that if you eliminate it, the faculty will simply unionize. For instance, K-12 teachers have tenure as a benefit written into their union contracts.

Tenure also allows the researcher to keep digging that rabbit hole that he/she is specializing in without fear of one day having to work in "the real world", where that very specialized knowledge is essentially useless.

(That came out like it's a bad thing, but it's not.)

This is in line with the tenure cases that I have seen (across US) -- the department votes tend to be in early Fall, and the case makes its way through the rest of the univ over the next 5-6 months.

Academic job markets get started around this time of year, depending on the discipline and affected by the dates of their big conferences, for jobs to begin in fall of the following year. So by giving him the decision now, he has enough advance notice to prepare his CV and apply for jobs.