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I've heard through the grapevine that MIT is notorious for hiring more assistant profs than they plan to even consider giving tenure to.
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<p>Well, that's not just an MIT thing. A LOT of schools do the same thing - hire far more assistant profs than they will ever give tenure to.</p>
<p>For example, I have it on good authority that over 75% of the new assistant profs at Harvard Business School will never get tenure. Granted, a lot of that is due to self-selection. For example, some will just quit in order to take jobs in industry (i.e. usually high-level positions in consulting or investment banking). Some will take tenured positions at other universities rather than wait for a decision from HBS. Yes, in case you are wondering, you can be offered tenure at a school that you're not actually working at - this usually comes from lower-ranked schools. For example, Boston University and NorthEastern sometimes offer fully tenured positions to HBS assistant profs who are doing well, and if they are risk-averse, they might just take that rather than wait for a possibly negative tenure decision from HBS. </p>
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe associate professors, more often than not, are tenured.
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<p>Again, this depends on the department and the school. Some departments run a system where tenure decisions are decided while you are an associate prof. So the first hurdle you have to clear is the promotion from asst prof to assoc prof. If you clear that, then you still have to get tenure. Hence, a strong dichotomy separates associate profs with tenure, and associate profs without tenure, even though they all hold the rank of associate prof. </p>
<p>So the point is, it varies from school to school and department to department. </p>
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Because if they fail to get tenure and leave the university, I will have to go wherever they go, find a new adviser halfway or more through my research. Even worse, I may find no one and have to drop out because of inadequate support or financial reasons.
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<p>I agree this can be problematic. But what may somewhat mitigate the issue is that often times you can still have that prof serve on your dissertation committee, regardless of where he ends up (even if he is out of academia completely). In fact, it is generally perfectly valid to pull your final committe from multiple schools. I know one guy at Harvard whose doctoral committee will have only a single Harvard prof - the rest will come from MIT and BU. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they're all within a few miles of each other. </p>
<p>But it can indeed be problematic to have your main advisor have to leave halfway in. Hence, it is certainly safer to be in a group with a fully-tenured prof. </p>
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for tenureship - what specifically does the committee look at when deciding who gets tenure. do they look at ONLY</p>
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<li>the work done by the candidate during their time as assist. prof?</li>
<li>does it include whatever publications/work that came out prior to their hiring e.g. their PhD work?</li>
<li>would it include anything they do PRIOR to PhD? (suppose they worked in a lab for several years and produced 2-3 quality publications.</li>
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<p>i.e. during tenure review, is it the ENTIRE CV, or just the work done since they were hired?
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<p>This seems to be highly specific to your department and your field. I can immediately think of certain fields that will look at your ENTIRE C.V. - so much so that many doctoral students are actually * disincentivized * to graduate early, because the moment they do so and take an assistant prof job, the tenure clock starts ticking. Hence, it actually makes sense, strategically, to actually delay your graduation so that you can publish more papers so that you look even better when your tenure review is up. </p>
<p>The other aspect is simply getting a tenure-track job in the first place. I know a woman in her 40's who is finishing her doctorate at Harvard right now. But she has basically spent the last 2 decades working as a researcher, and has published a huge stack of highly regarded papers. So in her last year, she didn't even really need to go on the standard job talk around the country - as basically every single department in the country knew who she was and wanted to offer her a tenure-track assistant prof position, and she's probably going to stay at Harvard. Now, one could say that she had an 'unfair' head start over everybody else who was trying to get a tenure-track job, as, unlike most doctoral students, she had already been publishing for decades. But the schools didn't care about that. They just saw her highly impressive total list of publications and offered her the job immediately. In fact, frankly, she has more publications right now (as just a finishing doctora student) than do a lot of Harvard associate profs who just got tenure. Hence, that means that, presuming she maintains her pace and does all of the administrative tasks the school wants her to do, she's probably a shoo-in to ultimately get tenure, just based on the strength of all her past work. Again, one could say that that's not really 'fair', but hey, 'fair' has nothing to do with it. </p>
<p>Don't get me wrong. I don't blame her. She's worked hard and she deserves success. I'm just saying that a system like this does perhaps tend to create perverse incentives - i.e. students who decide to slow their graduation just to delay the tenure clock.</p>