Ah…tenure. The hope. The dream. The grail. And Stephan Pastis understands why:
Something to look forward to.
So I was intrigued last week to read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the move toward digital tenure files at Kent State University, Virginia Tech, and others. It’s a fine article about a practice that has been too slow in coming. Most of the discussion is with administrators, however, and I wish they’d had some commentary from professors going through the process at the moment, such as Cheryl E. Ball at Illinois State University, who not only has her digital tenure file posted for all to see (most of it anyway), but also has a video explaining why she is using this format.
How is your institution dealing with the physical products of tenure these days? How else can one simplify a process that is perhaps the most important (and time consuming) of one’s academic career?
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2 Responses to Simplifying Tenure
Jason B. Jones - August 17, 2009 at 8:40 am
On the one hand, I love Pearls before Swine, and I know it’s dumb to nitpick cartoons for failing to capture nuances, or whatever.
But.
This view of tenure is actually not satirical enough–that is, it’s one a lot of people believe–but it’s wrong in so many ways. (At the most basic, pigheadedly literal level, the idea that tenure inoculates you against discipline is just . . . wrong.)
Brian Croxall - August 17, 2009 at 10:03 am
I’m not so much thinking about the protection against discipline as I am in the permission extended by the public to professors to wear glasses, suit jackets, and have a shaved head.