With the fall semester imminent, Tenured Radical offers some sage advice for tenure-track faculty newbies on how to succeed on the job without succumbing to work overload and burnout.

Her first tip is know where your job begins and ends:

Knowing your appropriate load allows you to know your overload. In consultation with a senior colleague, figure out what are the minimum number of bodies you are expected to manage, and what the department average is for each category and at each rank of the faculty. In the category of "body management," I am counting major advisees, non-major advisees, enrolled students, honors students, and any other person you need to manage (postdocs, graduate students, other faculty.) These categories can overlap—but count them twice when they do (for example, a thesis advisee who is also a major advisee = two bodies, as these are distinct activities that cannot...

Everyone, it seems, is talking about tenure, or rather its demise. This month an article in The Chronicle suggested that the academic tenure system may be on its last legs. The reporter, Robin Wilson, cited stark statistics from an upcoming report by the U.S. Department of Education, which is expected to note that ...

Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell below 30 percent in 2009. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors.

Wilson goes on to ask and attempt to answer the big question.

What does vanishing tenure mean for higher education? For starters, some observers say that college faculties are being filled with...

E-mail may be a useful tool, but academics are drowning in it, thanks in large part to a growing tidal wave of silly student messages, the Berkeley law professor Mary Ann Mason observes in her most recent Balancing Act column. It's "not just e-mail messages from professional associates, friends, family, and spammers that demand our attention," she writes. "Students, sometimes by the dozens, e-mail their instructors daily, seeking an immediate response" to "trivial or inappropriate questions, like 'Sorry I missed class today, can you send me the lecture notes?'" (Sound familiar? If not, check out this 849-page thread in The Chronicle's Forums in which professors share their "favorite" student e-mail messages.)

Gems such as this one ...

It has come to my attention that you have an attendance policy for our class of which I did not know because I did not read all of the syllabus before now....

According to a report released this week, tenure-track faculty members in the physical sciences at research universities are happier with their jobs than their tenure-track faculty peers are, an article in The Chronicle says. Tenure-track humanities professors also gave their jobs high marks, found the study, by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, or Coache, a research project at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education that is supported by the Ford Foundation. Those in education and the visual and performing arts said they were least satisfied with their jobs, the report said.

The survey, which was based on responses from 9,512 tenure-track faculty members at 63 institutions, also examined satisfaction levels along gender lines, with women reporting less satisfaction than men when it came to the tenure process, hours worked, amount of time for research,...

Over at Historiann, an anonymous guest blogger—an assistant professor in a humanities department at a large, public university—tells the hair-raising story of her months-long (and, at eight-months pregnant, still unresolved) struggle to secure paid maternity leave. She describes how her chair first attempted to deny her leave on a weird technicality, even though she was told that her university had paid maternity leave, and then tried to make it conditional on her continuing to do service work while she was out:

The chair listened to my request and then said that he would mention it to the dean during their next meeting. Shortly thereafter the chair came back to me and said: "There's a problem!" Two problems, actually. The first "problem" was that my child is due in the late spring or early summer, so there was a question about whether or not I qualified for leave in the fall, since...

Perhaps you have heard the apocryphal story about the aged professor who accidently drops his well-yellowed lecture notes and watches them disintegrate into dust. In the version I heard as a graduate student, he slumped to the floor and wept like Alexander the Great over his final conquest, finally being led from the room and into retirement.

When I heard that tale, I thought about one of my own history professors, "Dr. Charming," who used the same lecture notes for our class that he had used for students of my father's generation. After class one afternoon, I stopped to ask a question and saw that the pages of the loose-leaf notebook he used were yellowed, crinkled and spotted with age and coffee stains. Since the course was on ancient history and he was fairly curmudgeonly, I'm sure that he would joke that not much had happened to update the subject lately. As a point of fact, though,...

Lesboprof says she's fed up with "artful dodgers" — senior straight white men who don't pitch in at faculty committee meetings and leave mundane tasks to their female colleagues — and she's putting them on notice.

No longer will she tolerate scenarios such as this one:

As we wrap up the first meeting of new committee to change the world, we start to review and assign the list of tasks we identified to complete before the next meeting. Of course, a few people step up to take on tasks, but those few are women. I suggest that one of the senior white men take on another task, which I swear to God was something as mundane as "ask someone for a document," and the Artful Dodger quickly passes it off to a junior white man. As a result, Dr. Dodger has no responsibilities as we walk away. I am irritated, because I realize that this happens in almost every damn meeting I attend outside my...

A literature professor teaches John Donne's infamous poem, "The Flea," each semester and asks his undergraduates, "How many of you find this argument to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh to be effective?" The unfortunate young ladies who raise their hands or their voices in affirmation thus find themselves on his radar for what he calls "a bracing game of cat and mouse between the male and female." As one of his colleagues observed about the habit of this libidinous professor, "Only an aging professor would use Donne as an opening line to get dates, but, unfortunately, only an emotionally needy, barely 20-year-old woman would fall for it."

I thought of that story (which is true, of course) when I read this Tweed post about a controversy in England in which an aging professor advised his colleagues to enjoy leering at students. "Look but not touch" is, simply put, advice that is both...

It's obvious to anyone who has been around the academy for 20 years or more that the roles of faculty members at all types of institutions are changing quickly and radically. Faculty duties and expectations have diversified and become more complex, but there clearly has not been a concomitant change in the traditional expectations for faculty performance.

To take one example: at many institutions, assessment programs have added substantial burdens to faculty members, who must both plan and execute them. I suspect, though I do not know, that such additional burdens are heavier at teaching-oriented colleges and universities that also have higher standard teaching loads than more research-oriented institutions. There's also increased pressure on faculty members to involve undergraduate students in research, an initiative that takes various forms at various institutions but that is prevalent ...

Kudos to Female Science Professor for refusing to hide the fact that she is both a science professor and a mom (as some academic parents feel they must):

Rather than hiding the fact that I am a mother, I want to show students that women are mothers and professors. Or are professors and not mothers. Whatever. Just like real people not in academia.

Furthermore, I think that others in academia (faculty, administrators, postdocs, and students) should be more, not less, aware of the issues faced by faculty with young children, particularly those faculty without a stay-at-home partner.

Amen. If we ever hope to end the stereotype that women (and men, for that matter) can't simultaneously have successful careers and be active parents, and get universities to adopt more family-friendly policies, then more academic moms and dads need to come out of the parental closet and be upfront about the...