Is getting tenure Mission Impossible?

Over at Galactic Interactions, fellow Scibling Rob Knop has announced that he’s leaving academia for a job at Linden Labs, the people who run Second Life. Even though that particular phenomenon leaves me a little bemused – I have enough trouble keeping up with life No.1 – they seem like they’re pretty cool people to work for, and it’s nice to see that he’s landed on his feet after finding out that he was almost certainly going to be denied tenure.
The rights and wrongs of that particular decision are not something I’m qualified to comment on, so I won’t. Likewise, at this stage of my career I don’t feel particularly qualified to discuss the rights and wrongs of the tenure system as a whole (for that, coturnix points to a lengthy and interesting discussion at The Scientist. I’m more interested in the message which once again comes down the ladder to us lowly post-docs: no matter how good you think you are, don’t count on getting tenure.


The fact is that by many metrics, Rob has had a pretty successful academic career up to now. In his own words:

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback at Vanderbilt. A few years ago, I won the Chancellor’s Award for Research (of which a handful are given out each year). After one faculty meeting when I spoke out in a manner few junior faculty would supporting a new curriculum we were trying to put forward, the Dean pulled me aside and said “you are going to go far.” Elsewhere, when I’ve gone to give talks, people have said that I would have “no problem” whatsoever with tenure.

A quick search over at Web of Science reveals a good number of well-cited publications; not to mention that he was involved with the ever-so-slightly interesting discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating over time. Work for which he has just shared the Gruber prize in cosmology.
Yet despite all of these big plusses on the CV, Rob still missed out – mainly, it seems, because of his difficulties in securing funding. Maybe funding shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of tenure decisions. But the bald fact is that there are far more people setting off down the academic career path nowadays than can ever be accommodated in permanent positions. Thus, it’s very much a buyer’s market – amongst the mass of striving junior academics, you don’t need to look too hard to find people who are not only well-published and involved in sexy and award-winning research, but have also won out in the grant lottery. And it is a lottery, again because of the sheer numbers of people competing for these things: in the UK, I know that even a top-rated research proposal has a good chance of failure. Given the availability of these lucky bastards, why should a University department settle for anything less?
Looking at this, you can only conclude that the chances of any particular young researcher being snug in a tenured position ten years from now appear to be very small indeed. Is front loading the system in this way an effective method of producing a strong academy? Even if it is effective, is it an acceptable method of producing a strong academy? I don’t know. But the present state of affairs needs to be much more openly and honestly acknowledged and discussed – by employers and aspiring professors alike. The prospect of a permanent position can be all-too-easily be used as a carrot to persuade people to put up with poor salaries and working conditions now, for alleged future benefits. But it’s a rather tasteless carrot if those benefits actually have little prospect of actually materializing.

Categories: academic life, ranting

Comments (8)