HOWTO: Get tenure (2015) | Hacker News Reader

HOWTO: Get tenure (2015)

matt.might.net

54 pointseitland16 comments

> (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.

> "*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...) 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-... .)

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?

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

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.

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.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10081136

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

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

Blank

Good luck being a human

Being able to devote yourself to one thing like that is not only uniquely human, it’s a unique characteristic of relatively modern humans.

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.

Blank.

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).