<p>Sakky, Disagree…if a candidate for a position can’t supply recent references or if she can only supply references that are tangentially related to here work, it is a red/yellow flag. As I read the news articles on this story, many are questioning the University of Alabama’s background check on this woman. One would think these types of incidents are , to some degree, preventable by a good background check.</p>
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<p>…ughhh…I actually believe in tenure. Granted there are abuses, but there are abuses of power/privilege in many areas of the US (ie corporations, Start-ups, government). While tenure does give a high level of job security, all professors continue to face demands even while tenured. At major universities, it is harder to do a crappy job a tenured professor.</p>
<p>I would hope people would not blame the tenure process for this tragedy(I’m not saying you are sakky), and look towards other issues in the hiring and managing process of this woman.</p>
<p>Tenure is dying. According to one writer in the Chronicle only 1/3 of those who teach English at the University level are in tenure track positions. Many PhDs wind up in the academic equivalent of a sweat shop teaching introductory level courses for a barely living wage.</p>
<p>I’m afraid I have to disagree. Nobody said anything about not supplying recent or related references. The truth is, in academia, you work with many people, and so you have the choice to determine which subset among that large group from whom to procure references. Furthermore, you can choose, to some degree, with whom you want to work closely. If somebody is your enemy, or likely to be, you simply choose not to work closely with that person, and hence never have any need to obtain any references from that person. </p>
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<p>And as I said before, it’s doubtful that such a background check would have found anything. Again, she was never charged, and people are rightfully loathe to peddle in unsubstantiated scuttlebutt, not least because she might have sued for defamation for hindering her job prospects, which happens routinely in the private sector. {This is also why most professional job references will tend to include only objective information that exclude any sort of gossip.} </p>
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<p>I wish that were true. Although, granted, I suppose it depends on what we mean by ‘crappy’ and specifically, ‘crappy’ to which audience?</p>
<p>Suffice it to say that there are plenty of tenured faculty at the top universities such as Harvard and MIT who, frankly, haven’t published a single academic paper in years, nor do they really intend to do so in the future. Granted, they clearly published quite a bit before they landed tenure, but afterwards, not so much. Nor are their teaching evaluations particularly impressive. Nor do they have significant administrative responsibilities that absorb much of their time. In short, it’s rather hard to do determine exactly what they do with their time that benefits either academia or the students. Many of them, frankly, are engaged in widespread private consulting or other personal endeavors.</p>
But, come on, other people saying someone’s work isn’t up to snuff isn’t a priori evidence that the person is an underappreciated genius. It’s certainly true that there have existed people whose work was not appreciated in their lifetimes. But I think overall, if your peers think your work is not worthy of tenure, in the vast majority of cases, they are right.</p>
<p>What’s that saying – they pointed and laughed at (insert underappreciated genius), but they also pointed and laughed at Bozo the Clown?</p>
<p>“i worked for a prof who was denied tenure…he was then given tenure at another arguably better university with better pay within the year.”</p>
<p>Yes, it can happen that way.</p>
<p>However, for most people being denied tenure means that they either have to find another college/university job and work their way through the tenure process again, OR they have to give up hope of an academic career entirely.</p>
<p>I know several “recovering academics”, and the transition is not pretty. Almost all of them are happy now with their new lives away from the college/university environment, but a few remain horribly embittered. Giving up a life that one had worked toward for 15 to 20 years is a hard thing to do. To be truthful, the only surprising thing is that so few decide to shoot the people from their tenure committee!</p>
<p>I had a class with a professor who had been denied tenure. Word had gotten around pretty quick and we were all pretty nervous showing up to his next class. It was also a pain in the butt when he would miss a week at a time because he had to travel for job interviews. :(</p>
<p>i know of one case where a professor was denied tenure not because she was unproductive, but because her research fundamentally and philosophically disagreed with many of the professors reviewing her tenure application. she produced one book, which is the standard for tenure in my field, but no articles and not that many conference presentations. she was denied tenure despite heavyweights in her field and the head of her department going to bat for her.</p>
<p>found tenure at another school, and that book her committee hated so much? it won the largest prize for her subfield and was very well received by academics across the country. the only reason she didn’t get the job was politics, and that’s bull if you ask me.</p>
<p>If she wound up with tenure elsewhere it was probably for the best. Sticking around there for another 40 years would have been a pretty corrosive atmosphere.</p>
<p>very true. i only mention her case because being denied tenure isn’t always about low productivity or low recognition in your field. sometimes you’re just saying things the individual personalities on your review board don’t like.</p>
<p>Wow…I may be the only one here that posted on this thread that supports tenure. I mean…I know it is hard to get, very political, and there are abuses.</p>
<p>It’s just that the academic freedom aspect that tenure provides is worthwhile. Many feel that adjucts have no connection to the Universities where they teach, and that the tenure track and tenured faculty build the university. A tenured professor is often a true secure middle/upper middle class job in the US…for most professors, it is not a path to riches.</p>
<p>There are so many stories about beloved assistant professors who get denied tenure. I heard it all the time at the LACs I was at. I know one professor personally who was denied tenure after 6 years of working towards it. She came out from a top 10 history program and was a dynamic lecturer. She was quite popular with the students. When she told me that she was denied tenure, she was obviously still in pain from the shock. She had been unanimously supported by her department but once her application reached to the Dean of Faculty, she got the big fat no. People tried to find out why and the Dean gave no answer. Some students theorized that perhaps she wasn’t done enough in the community. Who knows? </p>
<p>And the big kicker? She won a national book award in her last semester. (and found another job) and my school would’ve liked to brag about another professor winning a national book award.</p>
<p>Sometimes there are just no explanations. And the best thing a professor can do is just accept it and move on to another university.</p>
<p>I’m somewhat aware of the tenure system, although I would never presume to understand what the pressure feels like. Probably no one can understand it unless they live through it. This thread had done a good job of conveying the enormous pressure an aspiring academic feels during the tenure process.</p>
<p>What I don’t understand about the story, and I have been riveted by it, is how someone can lose their way like Amy Bishop did. Isn’t there some point, when she was buying a gun or when she was at the shooting range, where she would have woke up and realized what she was planning to do and said to herself, nothing is worth this, nothing is worth what I am planning.</p>
<p>That is the part I don’t get. She was so accomplished educationally and she had four kids, she had everything to live for. Given her field, it seems like she would have had a lot of opportunities in the private sector. She didn’t have the profile of the usual shooter that we hear about who had already lost everything and had nothing else to lose.</p>
<p>Now her life is ruined, maybe the lives of her kids and her husband also. And the other faculty’s lives that she took whose only crime was that they were doing their job. It’s such a tragic story.</p>
<p>Having shot her brother and been a suspect of mailbombing (both amazingly went off public record), she might have got her accomplishment with devious tricks. Also, she probably would’ve killed her kids and/or her husband if they were the cause of her tenure deny any way.</p>
<p>That’s not the question I was answering. I was simply pointing out that there have been famous cases in history where seminal scientific ideas were initially neglected, even ridiculed, and anybody who is a serious scientist, or at least a historian of science, should know about.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that the progression of science is not characterized by the ‘truth’ per se or by data, but rather by paradigms as famously described by Kuhm, however much we might like to believe to believe otherwise. To paraphrase the eminent Physics Nobel Prize winner Max Planck: ‘Science advances one funeral at a time’ - meaning that science doesn’t actually progress by convincing established scientists, but rather by having those established scientists die off and be replaced by newer blood. Whether we like it or not, that is indeed how science actually progresses. </p>
<p>None of this is to say that Bishop necessarily was advancing an idea that was rejected by the established scientific community. I am simply saying that we should appreciate that the progression of science is far messier than the idealistic image that was taught to use in high school, and there have indeed been imfamous cases of ingenious scientific ideas that were rejected by their contemporaries.</p>
<p>And frankly (which was the point of my post), anybody who has never heard of any such cases isn’t particularly well educated in the history of science. I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but if you’re a serious scientist, you should know that such cases do exist.</p>
<p>Jack63, I think nobody here is arguing that the academic freedom it bestows isn’t worthwhile, by itself. The real question is, whether that freedom is worth the problems that it engenders, particularly regarding the unmotivated attitude that it fosters among tenured faculty. Frankly, I believe the most corrosive attitude that tenure generates among the graduate students who see tenured faculty who don’t haven’t published academic papers for years (sometimes decades) and then wonder why they have endure the pain to publish academic papers. The situation inevitably fosters an attitude of cynicism that the academic publication process is a cynical game in which the goal is to simply obtain tenure, after which you can then stop publishing, which then begs the question of what exactly is the true value of trying to publish in the first place - is this all just a game? If the tenured faculty don’t really care about publishing, then why should the students (or junior faculty)?</p>
<p>Here is another way to look at tenure: it pushes young scholars to be inventive and productive during the early stages of their careers, a time when most have their most original ideas that they can later build upon. While some professors will indeed slack off later, having exhausted their ideas, others will continue to publish/research. Those without research will teach more than their more productive colleagues, thereby allowing the active researchers to teach less. These tenured teachers have more experience and knowledge than the junior faculty and can be valuable assets to the department. </p>
<p>Tenure is not free job security. It is given because the university wants to keep the individual for many years.</p>
<p>Sakky, it is undeniable that there is wide spread cynicism about the tenure process. I just think abolishing it would be like banging in a nail with a sledgehammer. Abolishing it would do far more harm than good.</p>
<p>I’d like to see the tenure process fixed. I do think some universities are taking the right steps in that direction.</p>
<p>you are consistently highly negative on the entire academic enterprise in your many posts on multiple topics. Have you had a negative encounter with this enterprise yourself? I ask because of the emotion and cynicism of your multiple posts on multiple academic topics.</p>
<p>Well, aside from pure politics or religion (e.g. Copernicus and the heliocentric theory), I still do not believe very many groundbreaking ideas were ridiculed and rejected by a majority of scientists, although you have cited some interesting counter-examples. What, to me, is much more likely is that obscure work is done and then many years later is revisited due to advances in technology.</p>
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<p>This is true. I would even go so far as to say that the scientific method, as taught in grade school, does not begin to account for how many important results were obtained. Many discoveries were only tangentially related to what the researchers originally set out to do (i.e. “accidents”, like the discovery of the cosmic background radiation).</p>
<p>“Still, as a new professor with recommendations from Harvard and two other universities, Dr. Bishop did not attract scrutiny.”</p>
<p>Weird…I thought recommendations would have shown something. The only thing I’ll say is that she worked 10 years at Harvard before this, but had to go to other universities to get letters of rec. This might be considered a yellow flag.</p>