Let’s move on to tenure. Granted Dr. Cham’s “Game of Tenure” is funny (and irritating). In a strange way, it is funny because it is brazenly wrong…II think…but I’m open to learning something new here though.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1574
My first reaction is that I don’t want to be a professor at this university. Where is this? Why? Do they just not get grants? This is very different from anything I saw in my PhD program.
Where I did my PhD (Michigan), the number of faculty getting tenure was closer to 90%. It was hard to know when faculty didn’t get tenure. They’d just leave to a university that was just as good…and this wasn’t all that common for people to leave. I used to bring in faculty guests for a student organization to give takes from other universities too. I would take them out to dinner and talk to them. Often tenure came up. Again, in applied engineering fields, I regularly heard the 80%-90% percentage of tenure-track faculty getting tenure at other universities. These professors would specifically say that there was a common misconception that getting tenure was hard. So, what is going on here?
I will say the following. I’ve heard MIT’s engineering has a bad reputation for not giving tenure-track faculty tenure. In my undergrad, a good liberal arts school, tenure was no joke. The number of tenure track faculty getting tenure was more like 70%-80%. At one point it was a major issue on campus (there were many articles written on it in our school newspaper), but there was not an engineering program on campus though.