“There
is no other job that allows you to pursue questions that interests you, and
then pay you to do it. But, there are tradeoffs.” –Chuck Carver
In
the second morning symposium session at SPSP this year, three hugely influential
scholars in our field discussed some challenges that new faculty members must
contend with early in their career. Having just started an academic job of my
own at the University of Illinois, I found this symposium to be of particular
interest. My hope was to get a bit of help and support regarding the murky
waters of Assistant Professorship. I wasn't disappointed.
The
first speaker was Chuck Carver, who discussed the challenges of navigating
tenure decisions. The take-home point of this talk is that the expectations for
tenure are murky, tenure is a moving target, and most people can’t pin down a
concrete answer for when someone has earned tenure. What accounts for the murky
tenure process includes that tenure decisions are determined by many people
(e.g., faculty, the Dean, the Provost), change based on the context (e.g., the
rock-star 40+ publication professor who was tenured last year), and depend on
multiple markers (e.g., quality of publications, grants, teaching, service).
Though Carver didn't offer any solutions for how one could obtain tenure, he
did stress the importance of gathering information about the kinds of things
that one’s university or department values more than others.
The
second speaker was Douglas Kenrick, who spoke about rejection. Kenrick pointed
out that academic life is interesting because it is full of “A” students who
get nothing but positive feedback about their brilliance as undergraduates.
Then, when these students move into the academic world they are faced with
constant rejection from gatekeepers (e.g., grant reviewers, journal editors).
Some researchers are unprepared for the rejections that they must face in
academic life. To deal with rejection, Kenrick quipped that whereas in sexual relationships,
“No means no,” in academic life, “When a journal editor says no, it isn't the
same thing.” Kenrick stressed how researchers should take the feedback from
hostile reviewers, set aside the anger or depression that comes along with
those reviews, and address the important questions raised by the review in a
revised manuscript.
The
third speaker was Patricia Devine, who discussed her perspective on mentoring
young scholars in the field. Mentoring, Devine argues, “is also something that
is an enormous responsibility,” and I think it’s hard to argue with that.
Devine discussed the sticking points in any mentoring relationship—including
the power differences inherent in a mentoring relationship. I thought the most insightful
point from her talk was that new faculty cannot assume that graduate students
are identical in expertise, passion, drive, and interests. Instead, each
graduate student has slightly different strengths, and in Devine’s wording,
“yet to be developed strengths.” A realization that all students are not the
same, I think, can help new faculty members to individuate their graduate
students, and to focus on helping them develop more skills and positive
attributes.
This
was a very helpful symposium, and for me, it was nice to see that some of the
questions I have about academic career life are shared by many!
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