Tips for squandering tenure
It’s academic promotion season, which means many junior scholars are earning tenure, a form of lifetime security of employment in academic. (Congratulations to my former Ph.D student Mike, I’m so proud of you!)
With this security comes immense privileges and power: a freedom to share ideas without the chilling threat of employment consequences, a new level of respect and responsibility that comes from being senior faculty, and participation in tenuring and promoting other people.
But tenure has never been under greater assault. Many U.S. states regularly seek to dismantle the system in public universities, many are refused it on political grounds, and there are fewer open tenure-track positions than ever in most disciplines. In many places, the public seems to be deciding that the level of security that comes with tenure simply isn’t justified or necessary in our modern information-rich world. After all, why should professors have tenure when no one else does?
Rather than try to defend tenure, I’m going to offer some advice to newly tenured faculty on how you can help further erode the system, and eventually lead to its dismantling. This isn’t because I don’t believe in the institution—I very much do, because I think it affords unique opportunities that no other institution in society does. Rather, I’m just feeling snarky today. So if you’re not in the mood for sardonic, critical, sarcasm, there are lots of essays out there that defend tenure more directly.
Before we jump in, some context: I offer this advice after reflecting on six years as a Ph.D. student, six years as an Assistant Professor, six years as a tenured Associate Professor, and one year as a Professor. These are also the of an accumulation of advice over the years from faculty more senior than me, some passed to me through mentorship and coaching, and some I inferred from watching role models.
So you want to erode tenure in academia? Here are nine tips to accelerate it’s dismantling. If we each do these consistently and well, it should be gone in no time.
1. Don’t pivot
Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep publishing where you publish, keep studying what you study, keep citing the papers you cite, and try not to reconsider any of the premises of your beliefs, values, or ideas. You’re already good at it, and there’s no incentive to learn new skills. The path that you’re on is and always will be the most fulfilling one: keep walking straight down it at the same pace you always have and you will be rewarded with an ever longer CV. After all, you didn’t join academia to learn new things, you joined academia because you had finished learning, and were excited to meld into the academic industrial complex, maximizing its research output.
2. Don’t ever speak up
If there’s anything you learned as Ph.D. student and junior faculty member, speaking up only causes problems. If you complain about something, you’ll be labeled a whiner. If you demand change, people will call you a radical. If you contradict a senior faculty member, you might not be promoted. And look, you got promoted! Clearly the best policy is to stay silent, leave things just the way they are, and most importantly, ignore any harm, exclusion, or problems you notice. As any senior faculty member will tell you: if you speak out about something, it becomes your problem to fix—who has time for that when you’re busy publishing the same ideas you wrote about in your dissertation?
3. Don’t grow as a person
Now that you’re promoted, you’ve officially reached adulthood. There’s no more room for “finding” yourself, or “exploring” the world, or being silly. That kind of personal growth is for children and young adults, and you are no longer one. Rather, you are a very serious professor, with very serious expertise, who should be taken very seriously at all times. That means using the newfound freedom you’ve earned from tenure to be even less open to new ideas about yourself and others, because any embrace of change would threaten how seriously people take you. And if you aren’t taken seriously, how can you confidently stride down that path you’re on and raise your h-index?
4. Don’t use your power
Power is dangerous. It’s like a weapon of mass destruction; if it gets in the wrong hands, it will only devastate towns and ruin lives. Now that you have more power, the best thing to do with it is to hide it, locking it away somewhere safe where no one can use it or access it. In fact, an even better policy is to refuse to acknowledge its existence. If someone asks you to use your power for good, say “I am powerless. This is just the way things are.” This will send a clear message to your community because that power you’ve been given is deep in a vault, never to be used.
5. Don’t change how you work
Research and teaching are hard. It took many years to get even passably good at either, and you just barely made it through tenure and promotion. The only thing that helped you get there were the habits you developed, the practices you followed, the norms you set, and the culture you created around your scholarship. And they worked! You have tenure. That means that they are good, just, and effective, and shouldn’t be reconsidered or revised, because everything might break the delicate balance you’ve found. For example, if you hear through the grapevine that students find you hard to reach or unapproachable, don’t worry about that too much, since changing how students see you might change what they ask of you. Or if a colleague files a complaint against you for sexual harassment, brush it off. That’s clearly their problem; you have tenure, so the way you act and behave must have been good enough.
6. Don’t help
Senior faculty will often warn new tenured faculty that a major part of post-tenure life is service, including leadership in your academic community, as well as in your college or university. Know, however, that they only say this because they don’t want to do the work. The best way to think about service as senior faculty is as a kind of prisoner’s dilemma game: what kinds of creative strategies can you use to avoid service, so that someone else has to do it? After all, the point of academic service isn’t to make things better in academia, it’s to strengthen your ability to say no so that you have more time to raise grant money.
7. Don’t improve your teaching
Now that you’ve been validated as a great researcher and sufficient teacher, you no longer have to worry about education as much. It was clearly good enough for the university, and the university isn’t asking for better teaching, and students don’t know what they’re talking about anyway. And what’s wrong with the way your courses are anyway? They work for you, and it seems like people are learning. Focus your attention on ways to minimize your teaching load, minimize course preps and redesigns, and spend as little as time with students as possible. This will free you to publish more papers than you did last year, which will feel validating and impress your peers.
8. Don’t mentor
Academics talk a good game about mentorship, but the reality was that no one was there to help you, and you just got tenure, entirely by yourself. So why would anyone else need mentorship? And wouldn’t that just make junior faculty and Ph.D. students weak and dependent? Instead, focus on cultivating a reputation of rigor, status, and intimidation. The more that people junior to you see you as someone unapproachable, the less they will approach you for help, and the less you will have to do. You can use that extra time publishing that new theory three months sooner than you would have.
9. Don’t have impact
The primary purpose of the academy is to shelter researchers from the world. This is why we often have campuses in remote places and offices that are hard to find. This is why there are locks on our office doors and why we’re not expected to ever reply to emails. After all, the world is complicated, messy, and hard to understand. Worse, it often contradicts our most important ideas when we try to apply them. So in the spirit of academic life, find effective strategies to cloister yourself: stay disconnected from local communities, don’t talk to companies or government, and sever all ties with your alumni, and focus your travel on the academic conferences where all of your friends greet you, celebrate your amazing research productivity, and applaud the archiving of your latest PDFs.
If you can practice all of the skills above, we can accelerate towards a collective vision in which no one ever learns, no one ever grows, and nothing ever changes, but we will all feel very good about ourselves and publishers will make significantly more money on our discoveries. Congratulations newly tenured professors, and welcome to the club!
Okay, now that I have that out of my system, let’s get real. First, it’s hard not to do all of the above. Being senior faculty basically means doing everything you did as junior faculty, and all of the above, with no extra time. It’s simply not sustainable, unless you somehow get dramatically more efficient with your time, or start taking shortcuts in your work. And second, all of the above do have consequences: they might not be to your job, but they can affect your reputation, your ability to thrive in your job, and even your safety. And that’s often the real reason why tenured faculty don’t focus on impact, don’t mentor, don’t improve their teaching, don’t do service, don’t change their practices, don’t use their power, don’t grow as people, don’t share their opinions, and don’t study new things. Every single one of those, as important as they are, takes time and has consequences.
And yet, they all matter. We need impact, mentorship, great teaching, committed service. We need tenured faculty that grow, share their thoughts, opinions, and power, and expand their expertise. We’re in one of the few roles that has the privilege of such freedom, and doing anything less is squandering it. We have a responsibility, to the public, to our communities, and to humanity to make the most of the security that others have granted us.
If you just received tenure, celebrate for awhile, but then pick one of the above, and start slow. Get more efficient at some of your core responsibilities, to find some extra time. But then rather than using that extra time for doing yet more research, use it for the things above. That’s what it means to be a tenured professor.
