Rob Knop is blogging about the difficulties in getting tenure — his difficulties in particular, not the issue in some vague degree of abstraction. Very worth reading for a candid look at the kind of thing that goes on.
On a meta level, it’s interesting to contemplate how hiring and tenuring will ultimately be effected by blogs. Scott Aaronson is blogging at least some occasional facts about his job search. The proliferation of online rumor mills has already taken a lot of what used to be quasi-private information, shared among the old-boy network but invisible to outsiders, and put it out there for everyone to see. I can imagine a similar kind of effect if we ever get to the point that a critical mass of job- and tenure-seekers are blogging about their progress.
In the short term, I worry that the most obvious effect will be a deleterious one for the bloggers. For the most part, I don’t think that hiring/tenure committees care if you have a blog, occasional anonymous scare-mongering notwithstanding. (It might even help.) But blogging about the process might be the kind of thing that makes committees nervous. Personally, I would never blog about a major occupational transition while it was going on; when it’s all set up and the ink is drying, it makes sense to let people know, but in the middle of the process I would be (with good reason) worried about stepping on people’s toes. (Same thing with getting engaged.)
So, blogging about tenure and job searches: crazy or courageous? Or is there a difference? I guess we’ll see.
molishka:
I’m just finishing a DPhil (that’s oxonian for Phd) and have just gone through the process of looking for a job. My blog was never brought up in any of the interviews, and I doubt if anyone really cared. Unless you go off on stupid rants aimed specifically at belittling people (particularly by name), I don’t think there is likely to be a problem. Strangely enough I got to job offers on the same day, and spent a week in the happy position of choosing where I wanted to go.
Of course, this could all come back to bite me in the ass in 3 years, but I doubt it.
Hey, I once heard a young colleague SEVERLY criticized for not showing up at a high energy physics workshop. It turns out that his wife had just given birth, but this was NO excuse. We have a real problem in science…We have to break this cycle. The reason many of the people on these committees are such bastards is that they went through hell themselves & now they’re taking revenge on the next generation.
Instead of REALLY remembering what that hell was like for them & sympathizing with
the candidate, as perhaps a normal person would, they go to the other end of the
spectrum…they learned the wrong lesson from their experiences. I have always told students and postdocs not to forget how they felt going through all these early stages of their careers so that when it is THEIR turn to have students and postdocs to treat them with understanding.
If you think Rob is having a hard time, imagine how Norman Finkelstein feels. He’s been hounded by David Horowitz and may not get tenure because of Horowitz’s ability to round up far-right wingers to pressure the university not to give him tenure because he is a principled anti-Zionist (who also wrote a great book destroying Horowitz’s poorly-researched and dishonest book about Israel).
Here’s the thing re: professors being exploited and all of that.
I don’t buy it.
Bad pay? Well, it is true that many people with the number of years of education that I have are paid a lot more than I am. It is true that the engineers straight out of college were getting job offers with salaries that would match what I got six years later straight out of a PhD program.
However– we’re pretty well paid. We’re above the median. So many people live in poverty that I can’t claim that I live in poverty. Yes, my wife and I struggle with money sometimes, largely for medical reasons, but also because we have a standard of living that’s more than a lot of people in this country. I’m not in this for the money, and I’m paid enough, no question about that.
Second, it’s a really nice job. I get to spend a good fraction of my time doing what I love. I get to go to telescopes, take data, analyze that data, and think about and explore in detail the implications for galaxies and the Universe. I get to share my enthusiasm for physics and astronomy with college students– some of whom, frankly, are lumps in the mud, pains in the ass who couldn’t care less, but a huge fraction of whom are bright, intelligent, and curious. It’s a blast to be able to interact with those people, and to help them learn about physics and astronomy. I get to travel and share my enthusiasm with popular and high school audiences across the country.
It’s a damn good job, and I don’t buy this “professors exploited” thing.
Alas, one of the key parts of the job is getting funding, and I hate it and suck at it so much that it (literally) is going to ruin the whole rest of the job for me. It’s too bad that that is such a key part of it, but realistically, it is. It’s too bad that, despite what I believe are substantial skills and performance in the parts of the job that (to my perspective) really matter, I’m going to be booted because of failure in this one area.
But to turn that into a portrayal of professors as an exploited class: that just doesn’t make sense. Yes, the selection criteria are going to select out a subset that may not overlap the best set of selection criteria, but the simple fact of the oversupply means that the academy has the freedom to set whatever potentially arbitrary criteria they want. They are still going to get quality people. There are so many of us that there are good researchers and good teachers who *also* know how to get funding. Do I make contributions that aren’t being made as well by some who will get through? Yes, I definitely think so. But to be honest, my scattering out of the system probably isn’t that great a loss, because there are 20 hotshots who are at least as good as me at the junior level lined up and ready to replace me.
This proposal business is extremely, extremely soul-killing to me. The only reason I haven’t left academia altogether already to escape it is because I love all of the rest of it so much that, at least until now, it’s been worth fighting the battle to try and stay in. Alas, as the disappointments stack up, and as I make a realistic estimate of my chances of succeeding next year, this whole thing is poisoning all of the positive aspects of the job for me.
-Rob
I’m working on my third grad degree and have come to realize that there are lots of stupid “rules” in academia. In my case, “Part-time PhD students aren’t dedicated to their field.” That’s crap. I work 40hrs a week at my job, raise an infant son and still find time to do just as much work in physics as the full-time grad students (while getting only a small fraction of the sleep).
Other stupid rules: “Woman shouldn’t get pregnant since it’ll hurt their career.” and now this blogging crap (there are a lot more, I just can’t think of them all on the fly).
From what I gather, it sounds like the big problem Rob is facing is that the requirements for tenure aren’t concrete and known to all. If 7 years ago someone had said “You must do X,Y,Z to get tenure,” I’m guessing we wouldn’t be discussing this right now. My sense is that going for tenure is a lot like running for political office. You need to put the right image forward, conform to what your audience expects from you, etc.
My advice to Rob is this: bust your ass over the next year and make yourself the perfect model of what a tenurable prof should be. (if you have any contacts on the tenure board (either at your school or elsewhere) find out what they’re REALLY looking for.) Even if it doesn’t work out there, this will make you more attractive to other schools if you were to transfer.
-EDT
PS if Sagan were alive, I’d bet he’d have one HELL of a Cosmo blog.
“You must do X,Y,Z to get tenure,” I’m guessing we wouldn’t be discussing this right now.
I knew I needed to get funding.
A quick look at the vast list of “declineds” in my NSF fastlane shows that I knew this since the beginning.
I just haven’t figured out how ot od it.
Well, to me this screams two things: since I believe your scientific goals are as sound as anybody else’s, and you have an excellent pedigree and qualification, either you’ve politically offended someone way up the food chain in NSF, or something about the way your proposals are written is off. You’ve probably already done this, but having someone who’s either gotten proposals in observational astronomy granted or worked on an NSF committee look at your proposals is a great idea.
Your connections with the supernova community should be ripe with people like this…
“Some years ago, one of my undergraduate advisers wrote a column for a well-known science magazine. In one controversial edition, he argued that tenure should be granted in 10 year terms. His main point was that lifelong tenure makes the one-and-only tenure review a contentious, political process, and that older professors who are slacking piggyback on their untenured, overworked colleagues for both institutional prestige and funding.”
I’m just a grad student, so I’ll have to beat the odds to ever even make it to the point of being reviewed for tenure. So I don’t speak from experience, but . . .
It seems to me the main problem with the tenure process isn’t that you have older professors hanging onto their jobs after they’re no longer productive. The problem is that you have competent people being fired from their jobs because they weren’t sufficiently outstanding. Most careers aren’t like that.
For example:
My parents are lawyers. No one’s ever going to say to them “Well, you won 60% of your cases this year — that’s pretty good, but we really can’t afford to keep on anyone who’s winning less than 90%.” Because everyone knows that sometimes you’re going to lose a case due to circumstances beyond your control — like the fact that your client is guilty — and it doesn’t mean you aren’t a good lawyer. Maybe an amazing superstar lawyer like Johnny Cochran would have found a way to get the guy off, and maybe that guy is the guy who gets the big promotion or the massive bonus. But no one’s going to fire you for just being a competent lawyer and consistently presenting a good case.
But in physics (and perhaps in academia in general) that is the way it works — at least, that’s what everyone says. You can even be a great teacher, or a great researcher, but you have to be damn near perfect at everything to have a chance at tenure. (Actually, so far as I can tell you don’t have to be that great a teacher — I’ve had some tenured profs. who were truly outstanding, and some who were largely unintelligible to much of the class.)
I can’t even begin to imagine how the problem would be fixed, but I can’t see how firing competent people after 20 years as well as 10 would make things better. Sure, there’d be more positions available for newcomers, but ultimately it just means that many more people going to work every day with an axe hanging over their heads.
There’s also the fact that, practically by definition, on average, lawyers “lose” 50% of their cases.
Well, this is pretty depressing to me, as a grad student currently working in experimental cosmology. Maybe I should get out while I can…
TimG,
If you’re at an institution that is counting on your research grants to support you and your students, that’s the way it’s going to be. At a university, your chances of tenure will depend on your funding prowess, and at national labs the ax is indeed always hanging over you.
There are two alternatives. First, be badass enough to obtain a position at a prestigious university with a large endowment (in which case there is argument for having periodic tenure reviews to gently push out older faculty who aren’t as productive as their younger colleagues). Or, move to non-PhD-granting institution where you are supported by your lecturing, and you can get a little research work done with exceptional undergrads.
This is why I think Rob Knop’s point that society is only willing to support a certain number of researchers is so important. There just isn’t enough cash to go around, and the good “businessmen” will survive. Would having a larger funding pool, say $500 billion, help? Probably.
There’s also the fact that, practically by definition, on average, lawyers “lose” 50% of their cases.
True. You can have the world’s two greatest lawyers going up against each other, and one of them still has to lose (unless you count a settlement as a win for both sides). Of course, you can also have many excellent scientists competing for the same funding . . .
I would imagine that one’s win/loss percentage in criminal law depends on whether one is a prosecutor or a defense attorney, as much as lawyer quality. Even in other areas of law, whether you tend to mostly bring, or defend, cases is probably correlated with victory percentage.
Rather aside from the point, of course.
Well, this is pretty depressing to me, as a grad student currently working in experimental cosmology. Maybe I should get out while I can…
Don’t do it on the basis of this, or on the basis of my story.
Talk to a lot of people, and talk to them frankly.
If you went into grad school so that you could become a physics faculty member, a fast one was pulled on you. On the other hand, if you went in to grad school so that you would have a chance to become a physics faculty member, you’re doing the right thing.
The key thing is, at all stages, to have your eyes open. Is what you are doing right now enjoyable enough that it would still be worth if if you have to change careers at the end of this stage? If no, then get out. If yes, then great.
I have always been in that state, at least until a few years ago. Right now I’m wondering if I didn’t make a mistake not getting out a year or two ago, and may get out right now. But my first several years of being an assistant professor were well worth it, even if it was a dead end with no future for me in research astronomy.
-Rob
I went to grad school mostly because I was interested in learning more about physics and doing some sort of higher-level work. From what I see around me, to even have the chance to become a faculty member, you really must be dedicated completely and totally to what you do, not only to the exclusion of interests outside physics, but even to the exclusion of other interests within related fields. I don’t feel passionate enough about physics to commit myself to such a course, which means that I don’t really have the chance at a faculty position to begin with.
Plus, it’s just a numbers thing. When so many smart people are graduating with more publications from better departments and still can’t find the kind of work they thought they might find when they got into the business, what chance have I got?
That’s pretty much been my strategy. So far, it’s interesting enough, but I suspect that I would do better by bailing past a certain point (Ph.D.) than I would if I let the system winnow me out.
This is one particular story at one particular university. Universities and departments within universities vary greatly in how they handle tenure.
In my field (Computer Science) in most places at least 80% if not more of assistant professors get tenure. The biggest problem is that most people will have to be *very* flexible geographically to get a job in the first place, and might also have to be in a place that’s not as high quality as where they got their Ph.D.
All it takes is looking at a department and noting that nowhere is the faculty-to-grad-student ratio 1:1 to know that not all who enter grad school wind up with professorships. It’s not that a “fast one” has been pulled on anyone; it’s just an obvious fact.
I went to grad school mostly because I was interested in learning more about physics and doing some sort of higher-level work.
That’s about the best reason there is to do it.
Rob Knop is in good company 🙂
Oh, this is just the tip of it… I’m not sure how many people know how the funding game works, but Rob Knop might as well blame his university for not getting staff in position inside the NSF.
It’s standard practice at the University of California to get a few retired professors to take jobs at federal funding institutions in order to guide proposals through the first few hoops. Bad proposals won’t get funded at the NSF (the NIH appears to be a different story) but this ‘guides’ the proposal to the top of the stack.
However, just try and do work on renewable energy and see if your proposal gets funded by ANY institution, other than ‘private partners’. I recall reading about the Director of Sandia National Laboratories taking a job in Australia because he wanted to work on solar photovoltaics, and “there were just no opportunities available here”.. Getting the job of Director at Sandia is no mean feat – and the guy still couldn’t get funding.
I still recall the most eye-opening thing my MS advisor ever told me: ‘Look’, she said, ‘Science IS politics’. What she meant, of course, was that getting the opportunity to do science is all about politics… merit is a secondary concern. What a bummer, huh?
I’d say that the scare-mongering is not completely off-base. Quite often, a department will run into difficulties if they try to promote all their tenure candidates, and so there may be professors in the department that are “out to get” you in order to promote a different candidate. If so, they can try to find things in your blog to use against you. I can’t think of anything in Sean’s blog that might be easily used against him, but I would imagine that a determined adversary might be able to find something to take out of context.
On the other hand, blogging about science and research topics is an activity that can be a part of NSF and NASA funded research as a public outreach activity. So, CV could help a proposal that is otherwise “on the bubble” to get funded. Presumably, using the blog to say nice things about your colleague’s research might also help, but in departments in which the politics are particularly nasty, it could hurt to say nice things about the “wrong” colleague.
Dear Rob:
Join the club, my NSF proposal was not accepted either. Since I’m currently living on an unliveable salary, and all of my financial support will soon (as possible) be derived from my grant proposals, a rejected proposal has a serious impact in my life. My suggestion for you is to dive deep into the writing, edit it like crazy, and get as much (painful) criticism on the proposal as possible from your bosses and colleagues and write, write, write until your fingers are exhausted.
After six months (and continuing) of me doing just that, I think that the writing style of proposals deserves its own category. It is not a research paper, it is not a business proposal, it is not a popular science essay.
A scientific proposal is a type of of played-down marketing and sales brochure, but extended to a story, that amplifies your special insight and enthusiastic curiosity, of a phenomena that can explain, predict, and possibly link other physical phenomena in your field. The style is a formula. It must be written boldly, concisely, with the boldest parts up front to grab the reviewer so that he/she doesn’t get bored on page 3. You must read all of the fine print on the NRAs and make sure that your margins and font sizes are exact, that you’ve precisely identified which NRA points your proposal addresses and with their lettered reference. You must prove to the reviewer with every shred of documentation that you have that you have the experience to do the job, that you have colleagues who support your idea, and that after a well-defined and described work plan, that you can produce for the government agency a particular valuable ‘product’.
So that’s the conclusion I have, so far, but I think it is worth repeating what Julianne wrote on your blog too, as it seems right to me:
“Writing proposals is a somewhat orthogonol skill to producing good science. A good proposal has to be pitched at just the right level — where it’s understandable, but still reeks of expertise. It has to be compelling and seem novel, while at the same time being obviously feasible. It needs to have an “angle” which hooks it into broader science themes, without seeming gimmicky. It has to seem both exciting and practical, but must also rise above simply seeming “useful”. It’s a small sweet spot that’s hard to hit, and aiming for it is not a skill for which one is consciously trained. It’s nearly impossible to write a winning proposal if you’re not a good scientist, but it’s more than possible to be an excellent scientist who has not yet figured out the formula. The only way I learned was by getting examples of good proposals from others, by having my proposals visciously edited by others who were better at writing proposals than I was, and by serving on panels to learn the many ways in which good proposals wind up sinking. Once you get it down, the positive feedback loop gets started where you can afford students, so you write more papers, so you have more results, which makes your next proposal look more compelling, and so on.”
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Its no different in the “real world” ™ The higher you ascend, especially on the technical track, the more of this “soul-killing” work you have to do. The tenure track is just academia’s equivalent of a ‘management’ track in the corp. world.
There are very very few companies that actually reward ‘individual contributors’ on a level comensurate with management. Many companies claim to have a ‘technical track’ but very few actually deliver on those claims.
The overall underlying themes are:
a) ability to communicate, written, verbal, presentation.
b) know your subject backwards, forwards and sideways.
c) ability to articulate the value that your expertise can bring.
d) positioning yourself for success, how to make your skills relevant to the times, task at hand.
and finally.. did I mention the ability to communicate? 🙂
It seems that I have to re-invent myself nearly every year.. it’s a lifelong learning process for sure! There is nothing wrong with being a “jack of all trades.. master of none” although this thinking may not get you tenure, it just may be one of the keys to having a happier/healthy life.
Be true to yourself, do what you love and the rest will follow.
Be true to yourself, do what you love and the rest will follow.
That is one of the most egregious lines of bullshit that has ever been uttered.