I do not know how many times I have given advice to new faculty, or been given advice, so I have numbered this with a series of functions and variables. I am rebelling by giving anti-advice, as there are so many faculty proffering the kind of advice one gets in graduate school.
I dislike re-hearing old advice because it is not as though we did not have it in graduate school. When the old tales don’t apply and people just repeat them, I would like to deck those people, to be honest. Today I would like to know one thing: is there one PhD candidate or new assistant professor who really and truly believes that a good teaching record and a poor research record will get them tenure?
I doubt it. Why is it that professors are so obsessed with repeating this to them, again and again and again? Where do they get the idea that advanced graduate students and PhDs are not primarily interested in research? I am at a research university — not a top research university, but a research university, and our freshmen assume the faculty are involved in research. Why do professors who advise graduate students and new PhDs imagine that these advisees do not know what the freshmen know?
My hypothesis is that it not true younger people don’t know that research is first. I think it is just convenient for older people to imagine they do not, because
(a) it gives them an easy way for them to put someone down, as well as an easy way to sound wise;
(b) exhorting with the tired old mantra, you do not get credit for teaching, is an effective way of evading any kind of actual engagement;
(c) it means you can give “kind” and “good” “advice” without revealing any professional secrets.
I dislike hearing that “phone in your teaching” advice as well because it so smacks of privilege. People who believe that plan to be universally applicable and also feasible, do not know what it is or how it feels not to have the means to consider implementing it. I am reminded of the professor who thought it pushy of a job candidate to ask exactly what kind of assistance the university would or would not give with visas, and the one who brushes aside the low income student’s proof that their financial aid award will not cover study abroad. “Oh, of course it is enough, don’t be silly! Just live on hard-boiled eggs, as I did! Buy used clothes!” As though the job candidate, and the student were not doing those things already.
The experience of listening to these privileged innocents giving sage advice reminds me, actually, of those prefaces I have talked about before, where people describe their idyllic lives, the wonderful colleagues and libraries and wives with home cooked meals, without all of which nothing would have been possible. I want to hit them back and ask why they have not gotten more done, then, given their lives of ease.
Yes, I would like to be doing research right now. But I am preparing five classes and writing an external grant to fund the purchase of really basic books. And I was shamed throughout graduate school for thinking one should do an adequate job teaching, and throughout two or three assistant professorships for thinking I might be smart enough and well trained enough to continue to do research. And I have thought about it and observed quite a lot of things, and it is not true that if you just manage things right and “strategize” right, you will win a golden ticket.
In any case, what do you think — is there one PhD candidate or new assistant professor who really and truly believes that a good teaching record and a poor research record will get them tenure?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I think it depends on the institution, BUT I think the message as it is transmitted is a bit more subtle: the lie, for me, was that teaching mattered at all. No one said, teaching can save you, but they did say, excellent teaching is also necessary. This was a distraction because it made us care at all whereas we could have not cared at all and that would have been fine. What they didn’t say was, in a situation where we’ve decided that your research is insufficient (in whatever way, for whatever reason), we will use your teaching to hang you — either as an explanation to you for why you were unsuccessful, if you are a good teacher (you spent too much time on teaching!), or as a noose, if you are a poor teacher (your research may be acceptable according to some standards, but your teaching is substandard).
I had a traumatic first job where a good research record was proof of poor teaching and service, since it must have taken time away from these.
My R1 traumatized father believes a good teaching and service record was proof of insufficient dedication to research.
Really, of course, it’s that they play the one against the other and make it your fault. I think it’s really important to resist this.
I also resent, today, all the advice about strategizing so that bad things don’t happen to you. I mean, I’m all for getting it as right as one can, but what I’m against is the implication that it’s all on you and the refusal to look at the labor issues involved and the mainpulation.
From a Labor point of view, it having been a Labor Day, of course the bosses want to up production and lower pay, and keep you in a state of fear, and so on, and so forth. That professors won’t say this, or that they’ll keep saying “don’t spend too much time on teaching” but not “watch out because they’ll play teaching and research records against each other as they see fit,” should not surprise me, yet it does because they do know it (they do it themselves, and they do it well).
The advice I heard from my departmental mentor had to do with service instead of teaching. He told me about his own experience of how he thought he had to undertake every service obligation that came his way. He said that whenever duties were distributed, the Chair would look at him first as a new hire, and he felt he couldn’t say no. So the committees piled up. And the language lab also became his responsibility. And advisement. And more committees.
And then when the tenure review came by, he was told that all this service was “great and we are very thankful” but that’s not what he needed for tenure. “Didn’t anybody tell you that you weren’t supposed to have any service obligations at all in the first year on the TT?” he was asked.
Of course, nobody told him. Why would they if it was so convenient to have him around doing all the work?
This story was very helpful to me.
Well, he hadn’t been well educated in graduate school, then … or else he was bullied at that job … who knows, if he’d said no to all that service perhaps they’d have thrown him out at third year review, they do that.
Early on I was assigned a huge service project that was also very expensive — needed a lot of paper, postage, long distance phone calls, etc., and would have taken a lot of research time, too. So I said no and it was cited among the reasons for denial of tenure.
What I learned — better to have said yes and then not done it, or done it badly. At the time, though, I thought I was being set up to fail (I was) and thought it safest to get out of that service task.
My point in this post, though, isn’t to repeat the standards advice about not getting overloaded with teaching and service. It’s to question the validity of the mantra like repetition of those standard pieces of advice. Because they are true, but they are also well known.
What people won’t talk about is the nittier-grittier logistics of it all. (Servetus and I have worked in some really difficult places.)
“What I learned — better to have said yes and then not done it, or done it badly. ”
– That’s the feeling I’m getting, too. Also, developing a chronic disease that can be brought up at every opportunity seems to be an asset.
I think we are about to develop a much more inventive set of suggestions right here. 🙂
Yes I’m sure it’s true. The chronic disease or other problem does help in certain ways but it has to be a prestigious one.
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I think they set your mentor up. They would have told him all that service wouldn’t count if they had been interested in keeping him. It sounds as though his fate was sealed before he even walked into that job.
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The other illumination I’ve had today, reacting to this blog, is that perhaps those graduate students who annoy their advisors by not believing them on how the profession works, are right. The students may have studied at the kind of institution where most people end up, and know what it’s like, whereas the advisors may only know, say, the world of Princeton and Berkeley.
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Part of my general funk about academia isn’t even about my actual working conditions and situation, but about the difficulty of explaining and justifying them to my Michigan style superego. I should be able to rise above, and so on, no matter what — but that is unrealistic. What one has to do to do well here includes a lot of things that would be unwise elsewhere.
I lack the material means to do what I am trained to think I should, but due to all the exhortations about errors one can make I am downright phobic about doing what’s right in front of me, since it is supposed to be a career breaker.
Struggling with all I’ve been taught about how to be in the profession really holds me back. … I had a related flash of illumination while out walking just now and I’ve lost it, maybe it will come to me again.
You are so right. It is very difficult to distinguish between what one gets drummed into one’s head and what one can intuit by observing reality.
There is a realization that I begin to arrive at – and I really resist it but it isn’t going away – that both finding a TT position and getting tenure have to do, first and foremost, with whether people like your personality. The rest kind of works out on its own depending on what people feel about you personality-wise.
My sister is a job recruiter and she says it’s like that in most fields. But it’s hard for me to accept that this is what it’s all about in academia.
P.S. “Michigan-style superego” is very funny. 🙂 This is a cultural phenomenon I wasn’t aware of before. 🙂
The thing about personality really is true. Academics like to tell you it’s not but they lie to themselves and others. They call these lies advice but it is almost one hundred percent ideology. They have to believe they got where they are on “merit.” That you can be saved by hard work and strategy is only partly true, and only in some circumstances.
Yes, and the thing is, I like that superego, even though having it kills me in places where it’s not welcome / has no appropriate environment / cannot thrive. I’m totally comfortable at wicked places like Michigan Madison UIUC, and not in supposedly sweet little places.
One piece of advice that is missing is that science and research is thriving, creative and engaging but like everything in life it has also the potential to be felt oppressive and undignifying when the effort goes beyond the limits of human sensibility and prudence. Love for science and its entourage might end up DEAD…. it is like this
Yes – the idea that if you just work harder and adjust further it will all be OK is another lie of management.
As for adjusting further, one has to ask oneself at what point further adjustment will transform into psychological and emotional self-mutilation.
That is precisely my question.
Just a general comment, since I’m really not in this game. I was struck by your comment that you might as well say you will do things and then not do them well. I have found that I get more credit for things poorly or in a half-ass way than I do for the work I put real effort into. When people get a whiff of earnestness and dedication it gets their backs up. They would rather you would not upset them by being serious about your undertakings.
That’s very interesting!