I'll chime in here and say that it's rarely possible to quantify tenure standards. In my experience it's often those who try to quantify it who have problems. How many books? How many articles? It's a holistic decision.
I would actually disagree with part of this. Sure, not everyplace is a "tick off the boxes and collect your prize" institution, but I think most places have a pretty specifically quantified and widely known minimum standard for tenure: there has to be one book, or one book plus a set of articles, or two books, to the degree that you can generally categorize any one institution as a "one-book school" or a "two-book school." Now, beyond that minimum standard, questions of the quality and impact of the research come into play in a less easily quantifiable way, but if you've written one terrific book at a two-book school, you're probably SOL. So from that perspective I'd say it's absolutely possible to quantify tenure standards in a meaningful way and indeed that pre-tenure faculty and job candidates need to find out what those quantities are at the institution in question!
but I think most places have a pretty specifically quantified and widely known minimum standard for tenure: there has to be one book, or one book plus a set of articles, or two books, to the degree that you can generally categorize any one institution as a "one-book school" or a "two-book school."
This sounds like bs to me. Would someone with tenure, who has been on a tenure review committee care to comment?
It is bs. People with no books are sometimes tenured at places that are allegedly one or even two book places, and people with perfectly good books are denied tenure. It's disheartening, perhaps, but tenure is a game with few rules and courts that are loathe to intrude on the academy except in really clear cut cases of discrimination against those in protected categories (and even then, nothing's ever a slam dunk).
This sounds like bs to me. Would someone with tenure, who has been on a tenure review committee care to comment?
It was the comment of someone with tenure who has been on tenure review committees.
When I was first looking for a job, I had a choice between two t-t offers (this was back when things like that were less rare). One of them was from a school that was very clear that the floor for tenure was a book plus some articles/chapters/whatever. The other department had to admit that their administration had recently moved to a two book standard in an effort to raise the university's prestige. It was extremely helpful to me to have this information, and it basically made the decision for me.
People with no books are sometimes tenured at places that are allegedly one or even two book places, and people with perfectly good books are denied tenure.
I'm not sure why you think your second point is incompatible with anything I said. On the first point, that a thing "sometimes" happens doesn't invalidate the idea that different institutions have different but identifiable patterns in their expectations for tenure.
Tenure standards can change, and even if you were hired under one set of ill-defined guidelines, you can be held accountable to an entirely different set of ill-defined guidelines. Mid-point reviews are supposed to help gauge what might be required in the year you go up. Personally, I just tried to get out as much as I could, worked as hard as I could to present my case strongly in my portfolio, and let the chips fall. I got tenure; I also saw others who relied on colleagues' bad advice get denied tenure. And as June 3 12:36 implied, you can get denied tenure for reasons other than scholarship - "bad fit" can cover a lot.
Tenure standards can change, and even if you were hired under one set of ill-defined guidelines, you can be held accountable to an entirely different set of ill-defined guidelines.
Or they remain the same, and are well-defined. Focusing on what "can" happen vs. what generally does is a direct route to panic.
as June 3 12:36 implied, you can get denied tenure for reasons other than scholarship - "bad fit" can cover a lot.
Well, I would hope that someone could be denied tenure for something other than scholarship. Shitty teaching would be one really good reason. Another would be blowing off administrative work: do you want to have a colleague for the next thirty years who expects you to do this stuff because it's beneath her/him?
Regarding other reasons, though, in general opaque and poorly standardized tenure processes are very bad. People who don't get tenure should be able to receive some sort of coherent and substantial explanation of why they didn't get it (which isn't to say that they should also have to agree with this explanation).
job teaching one course in ancient Greek http://umjobs.org/job_detail/56466/leo_lecturer_i but unfortunately you need to own a T.A.R.D.I.S. because they want someone with near native proficiency, preferably from an immersion experience in the country.
That's awesome: a job both approved and advertised without the matter ever crossing the desk of anyone who had even the vaguest clue of what the fuck they were talking about.
DANGER DANGER (Sirens): call from Aquila Theater at the Center for Ancient Studies at NYU states "ideal candidate will be someone with a love of ancient drama/literature and a passion for bringing the classics to a wider public audience" with a whopping salary of 20,000 and the opportunity to work with one of the most narcissistic and delusional pseudo-directors in NYC (independent reports claim). Good luck to the poor soul who gets chosen for daily exploitation. Remember: you were first warned here.
Anyone care to comment on the Yale University position in the department of coins and medals (this is a recent posting on the APA website)? What if you have no prior experience in this material? Do you have any chance?
Somebody should really invent a fast and convenient way of looking up information on the Internet. Like a website where you could just paste "t.a.r.d.i.s." into a box, hit "search," and get an answer.
If anybody ever comes up with a site like that, they are going to make a TON of money. Till then, though, I guess we're just stuck asking each other questions in blog comment threads.
What a stupid idea. We already have this, it's called a reference librarian. This is why we support our public library system so well, and pay those reference librarians such big salaries -- they are literally sitting at a desk with phone just waiting to tell you what a T.A.R.D.I.S. is.
It's a great system -- one that relies on highly trained people delivering esoteric knowledge to the public in person, funded by all of our tax dollars, and private philanthropy. It'll never go away and we don't need to invent a different system.
Who has this secret to making TONS of money in the Humanities? Please advise.
I think maybe you didn't understand that comment. But, as it so happens, I do have a secret trick for cashing in on the humanities, and for 3 easy payments of just $199.99 I'll send you the VHS cassette and booklet describing in clear and simple steps this AMAZING SECRET TO SUCCESS. Act now and I'll throw in as a free gift this attractive set of steak knives: you'll need them, because once you've learned my AMAZING SECRET TO SUCCESS you'll be having steak at every meal!
ABD Horror Story (in case anyone's still interested)
So, we offered our new-line t-t job at this SLAC to an ABD candidate. Our job ad specifically said PhD in hand by time of hire -- i.e., when contracts are issued this summer. The candidate and his/her diss. advisor swore themselves blind that the diss. would be defended in May. We believed them.
Now -- of course you see this coming -- the candidate has NOT finished the diss. The contracts are being issued this week; our new hire will receive a one-year contract with no guarantee of renewal. IF s/he finishes the diss this coming year, s/he MAY be allowed to take up the t-t for which we originally wanted to hire him/her, but there's no guarantee. All s/he has, at this point, is a one-year contract.
If s/he DOESN'T finish the diss (and I doubt that s/he will given our 3-3 teaching load here), then s/he is out of here. We MAY be allowed to advertise again, if the administration doesn't decide to reallocate the line elsewhere. But then again, we may not. In short, horror story all around, and perfectly avoidable horror story had we but offered the job to someone with PhD already in hand.
This was my first experience on a search committee. From now on, I am going to be VERY hard to persuade that an ABD is worth the risk. And the "no ABDs need apply" wording of some job ads suddenly makes a heck of a lot more sense to me.
P.S. to my post just now on our ABD horror story -- maybe I should add I'm not a classicist and this isn't a classics job, but I read this blog. Maybe ABDs in classics are more reliable . . . ? Y'all can hope so, anyway!
Well, I, for one, can name a full handful of people who applied for jobs as ABDs this year, finished the dissertation as promised to every committee that interviewed them, and are now sitting (un?)comfortably in 1-year positions all around the country. So ABDs do, in fact, sometimes finish their dissertations. And the ones I'm talking about are about to make a lot of PhD-in-hand candidates with whom they were in direct competition look pure shite. Having the dissertation done is really only one variable, and hopefully the responsible search committees out there see it as just that.
Well, I, for one, can name a full handful of people who applied for jobs as ABDs this year, finished the dissertation as promised to every committee that interviewed them, and are now sitting (un?)comfortably in 1-year positions all around the country. So ABDs do, in fact, sometimes finish their dissertations. And the ones I'm talking about are about to make a lot of PhD-in-hand candidates with whom they were in direct competition look pure shite.
But of course you see that that's not the commenter's point. The point is that, even if most ABDs hired will finish before assuming their position, the consequences of hiring one of the smaller number who won't are so bad as to make the risk of hiring an ABD not worth it.
Think about Russian roulette as an analogy: your perspective is "5 in 6 people are totally fine after pulling that trigger, so why not do it?" while the previous commenter is saying "actually, you know, I'd rather not take a 5 in 6 chance if losing means I blow my own brains out".
I've heard about three TT jobs that have not been announced, for lang/lit/culture types, one approved at a state school that you'd have thought was short on money, another close to approval at a state school, another I think approved at a small private U.
1,431 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 1401 – 1431 of 1431I'll chime in here and say that it's rarely possible to quantify tenure standards. In my experience it's often those who try to quantify it who have problems. How many books? How many articles? It's a holistic decision.
I would actually disagree with part of this. Sure, not everyplace is a "tick off the boxes and collect your prize" institution, but I think most places have a pretty specifically quantified and widely known minimum standard for tenure: there has to be one book, or one book plus a set of articles, or two books, to the degree that you can generally categorize any one institution as a "one-book school" or a "two-book school." Now, beyond that minimum standard, questions of the quality and impact of the research come into play in a less easily quantifiable way, but if you've written one terrific book at a two-book school, you're probably SOL. So from that perspective I'd say it's absolutely possible to quantify tenure standards in a meaningful way and indeed that pre-tenure faculty and job candidates need to find out what those quantities are at the institution in question!
but I think most places have a pretty specifically quantified and widely known minimum standard for tenure: there has to be one book, or one book plus a set of articles, or two books, to the degree that you can generally categorize any one institution as a "one-book school" or a "two-book school."
This sounds like bs to me. Would someone with tenure, who has been on a tenure review committee care to comment?
It is bs. People with no books are sometimes tenured at places that are allegedly one or even two book places, and people with perfectly good books are denied tenure. It's disheartening, perhaps, but tenure is a game with few rules and courts that are loathe to intrude on the academy except in really clear cut cases of discrimination against those in protected categories (and even then, nothing's ever a slam dunk).
This sounds like bs to me. Would someone with tenure, who has been on a tenure review committee care to comment?
It was the comment of someone with tenure who has been on tenure review committees.
When I was first looking for a job, I had a choice between two t-t offers (this was back when things like that were less rare). One of them was from a school that was very clear that the floor for tenure was a book plus some articles/chapters/whatever. The other department had to admit that their administration had recently moved to a two book standard in an effort to raise the university's prestige. It was extremely helpful to me to have this information, and it basically made the decision for me.
People with no books are sometimes tenured at places that are allegedly one or even two book places, and people with perfectly good books are denied tenure.
I'm not sure why you think your second point is incompatible with anything I said. On the first point, that a thing "sometimes" happens doesn't invalidate the idea that different institutions have different but identifiable patterns in their expectations for tenure.
Tenure standards can change, and even if you were hired under one set of ill-defined guidelines, you can be held accountable to an entirely different set of ill-defined guidelines. Mid-point reviews are supposed to help gauge what might be required in the year you go up. Personally, I just tried to get out as much as I could, worked as hard as I could to present my case strongly in my portfolio, and let the chips fall. I got tenure; I also saw others who relied on colleagues' bad advice get denied tenure. And as June 3 12:36 implied, you can get denied tenure for reasons other than scholarship - "bad fit" can cover a lot.
Tenure standards can change, and even if you were hired under one set of ill-defined guidelines, you can be held accountable to an entirely different set of ill-defined guidelines.
Or they remain the same, and are well-defined. Focusing on what "can" happen vs. what generally does is a direct route to panic.
as June 3 12:36 implied, you can get denied tenure for reasons other than scholarship - "bad fit" can cover a lot.
Well, I would hope that someone could be denied tenure for something other than scholarship. Shitty teaching would be one really good reason. Another would be blowing off administrative work: do you want to have a colleague for the next thirty years who expects you to do this stuff because it's beneath her/him?
Regarding other reasons, though, in general opaque and poorly standardized tenure processes are very bad. People who don't get tenure should be able to receive some sort of coherent and substantial explanation of why they didn't get it (which isn't to say that they should also have to agree with this explanation).
So just how many searches failed this year? I count at least 5.
Those weren't "failed" searches, they were just "extra picky."
job teaching one course in ancient Greek
http://umjobs.org/job_detail/56466/leo_lecturer_i
but unfortunately you need to own a T.A.R.D.I.S. because they want someone with near native proficiency, preferably from an immersion experience in the country.
That's awesome: a job both approved and advertised without the matter ever crossing the desk of anyone who had even the vaguest clue of what the fuck they were talking about.
DANGER DANGER (Sirens): call from Aquila Theater at the Center for Ancient Studies at NYU states "ideal candidate will be someone with a love of ancient drama/literature and a passion for bringing the classics to a wider public audience" with a whopping salary of 20,000 and the opportunity to work with one of the most narcissistic and delusional pseudo-directors in NYC (independent reports claim). Good luck to the poor soul who gets chosen for daily exploitation. Remember: you were first warned here.
On Aquila: Sounds like a Pasha with insider's knowledge.
Re: Aquila -- What is there to complain about? It's a job, is it or is it not, people?
What does T.A.R.D.I.S stand for?
Anyone care to comment on the Yale University position in the department of coins and medals (this is a recent posting on the APA website)? What if you have no prior experience in this material? Do you have any chance?
T.A.R.D.I.S:
"Time and relative dimensions in space"= Doctor Who's spaceship/time machine.
@5:37: thanks for the clarification. Does T.A.R.D.I.S require that phone booth, too?
What does T.A.R.D.I.S stand for?
Somebody should really invent a fast and convenient way of looking up information on the Internet. Like a website where you could just paste "t.a.r.d.i.s." into a box, hit "search," and get an answer.
If anybody ever comes up with a site like that, they are going to make a TON of money. Till then, though, I guess we're just stuck asking each other questions in blog comment threads.
What a stupid idea. We already have this, it's called a reference librarian. This is why we support our public library system so well, and pay those reference librarians such big salaries -- they are literally sitting at a desk with phone just waiting to tell you what a T.A.R.D.I.S. is.
It's a great system -- one that relies on highly trained people delivering esoteric knowledge to the public in person, funded by all of our tax dollars, and private philanthropy. It'll never go away and we don't need to invent a different system.
Not only a "stupid idea", but dare we say a "reT.A.R.D.I.S" one?
Who has this secret to making TONS of money in the Humanities? Please advise.
Who has this secret to making TONS of money in the Humanities? Please advise.
I think maybe you didn't understand that comment. But, as it so happens, I do have a secret trick for cashing in on the humanities, and for 3 easy payments of just $199.99 I'll send you the VHS cassette and booklet describing in clear and simple steps this AMAZING SECRET TO SUCCESS. Act now and I'll throw in as a free gift this attractive set of steak knives: you'll need them, because once you've learned my AMAZING SECRET TO SUCCESS you'll be having steak at every meal!
And if you order in the next two minutes, you will get not ONE, not TWO, but THREE ShamWows!
ABD Horror Story (in case anyone's still interested)
So, we offered our new-line t-t job at this SLAC to an ABD candidate. Our job ad specifically said PhD in hand by time of hire -- i.e., when contracts are issued this summer. The candidate and his/her diss. advisor swore themselves blind that the diss. would be defended in May. We believed them.
Now -- of course you see this coming -- the candidate has NOT finished the diss. The contracts are being issued this week; our new hire will receive a one-year contract with no guarantee of renewal. IF s/he finishes the diss this coming year, s/he MAY be allowed to take up the t-t for which we originally wanted to hire him/her, but there's no guarantee. All s/he has, at this point, is a one-year contract.
If s/he DOESN'T finish the diss (and I doubt that s/he will given our 3-3 teaching load here), then s/he is out of here. We MAY be allowed to advertise again, if the administration doesn't decide to reallocate the line elsewhere. But then again, we may not. In short, horror story all around, and perfectly avoidable horror story had we but offered the job to someone with PhD already in hand.
This was my first experience on a search committee. From now on, I am going to be VERY hard to persuade that an ABD is worth the risk. And the "no ABDs need apply" wording of some job ads suddenly makes a heck of a lot more sense to me.
P.S. to my post just now on our ABD horror story -- maybe I should add I'm not a classicist and this isn't a classics job, but I read this blog. Maybe ABDs in classics are more reliable . . . ? Y'all can hope so, anyway!
Well, I, for one, can name a full handful of people who applied for jobs as ABDs this year, finished the dissertation as promised to every committee that interviewed them, and are now sitting (un?)comfortably in 1-year positions all around the country. So ABDs do, in fact, sometimes finish their dissertations. And the ones I'm talking about are about to make a lot of PhD-in-hand candidates with whom they were in direct competition look pure shite. Having the dissertation done is really only one variable, and hopefully the responsible search committees out there see it as just that.
Well, I, for one, can name a full handful of people who applied for jobs as ABDs this year, finished the dissertation as promised to every committee that interviewed them, and are now sitting (un?)comfortably in 1-year positions all around the country. So ABDs do, in fact, sometimes finish their dissertations. And the ones I'm talking about are about to make a lot of PhD-in-hand candidates with whom they were in direct competition look pure shite.
But of course you see that that's not the commenter's point. The point is that, even if most ABDs hired will finish before assuming their position, the consequences of hiring one of the smaller number who won't are so bad as to make the risk of hiring an ABD not worth it.
Think about Russian roulette as an analogy: your perspective is "5 in 6 people are totally fine after pulling that trigger, so why not do it?" while the previous commenter is saying "actually, you know, I'd rather not take a 5 in 6 chance if losing means I blow my own brains out".
e
Anonymous said...
e
A big hand for the Fonz, everybody!!!
http://www.archaeological.org/news/aianews/5920
I've heard about three TT jobs that have not been announced, for lang/lit/culture types, one approved at a state school that you'd have thought was short on money, another close to approval at a state school, another I think approved at a small private U.
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