Registered: Nov 2001
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oxsan
The World About Me

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harumph harumph

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No tenure at research universities and you'll lose all the best researchers. Tenure is what makes it possible to perform some of the best research, because it gives the time to pursue it. Furthermore, in fields where there is a commercial demand for the skills that the researchers have, eliminating tenure would then simply force everyone out of the universities; why work for less with the same lack of job security?

The other thing to mention is that a precondition of keeping the tenure is that you fulfill your teaching obligations. That's why academics do, in fact, eventually retire. Furthermore, it's not a matter of 'may be submitted to the tenure committee'; when you take on a Assistant Professor's job, the tenure clock starts. After a fixed period of time (normally 5 or so years), your tenure is voted on, usually by all the faculty in that department. One vote against you and you're gone. To get tenure, particularly at a good research university, is extremely difficult. At Princeton or Harvard or MIT, say, the tenure acceptance rate is 20%. 80% of the Assistant Professors there will be looking for other jobs after their tenure review comes up. Other Universities have higher acceptance rates but achieve that by making the decision to employ an Assistant Professor extremely laborious and only appoint someone that they are very convinced will make the grade.

Lesser universities, obviously, have to lessen their requirements but then, the rewards of being employed there are consequently not so great. In any event, getting tenure is an extremely tough task at a decent university and requires a considerable amount of talent and very hard work. Tenure is decided on research excellence, your ability to cover your overhead (you're only paid for 8 1/2 months or so a year, and have to get Summer salary by attracting reseach grants and, more importantly, cover your overhead costs from those research grants) and your teaching. You also have to find research grant money to fund the postdocs and PhD candidates you have; doing that will improve your research and tenure chances, but getting funding is a laborious process and you're only as good as your last couple of projects, as you'd expect.

Tenure is offered because without it, you wouldn't get the same quality of research. As a research institution, research funds are the lifeblood of the university and the best researchers get most of them. It's just business logic to offer something that the competing commercial enterprises can't, to attract the very best staff.

Last edited by Smug Git on 02-22-2006 at 02:17 PM

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So, the fact is, while you might end up with people that irritate you holding permanent positions, that's the price of getting brilliant people from around the world to perform research tasks that a very small fraction of the world population can perform. As for whether or not they love America, well, that's personal taste. Most in my experience do, or at least they don't dislike it enough to take a paycut, or they probably would go somewhere else; it's a lot easier for academics to move to other countries that nearly anyone else (although it's still not easy to get into the US that way, particularly not for a permanent position; you have to convincingly demonstrate, now at least, that you are a world leader in your field if you want to give yourself the best chance to get your permanent residence in time to beat the tenure clock).

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Registered: Mar 2004
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Just make sure you are researching the right stuff or they will never give you tenure.

Oxsan has my vote.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Smug Git
... In any event, getting tenure is an extremely tough task at a decent university and requires a considerable amount of talent and very hard work. ...

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He said decent university, Mug.

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having attended four universities over the last 20 years, I would have to say that standards seem to have come up a bit from the 80's. Furthermore, so what if some loon wants to give TX back to mexico? So what if he's teaching it in a class; how does that impact anyone? It might make some people think about things in a slighlty different way, but I doubt it's going to end in TX becoming part of Mexico. I have also never seen a class on basket weaving listed in a university catalogue. Although, as a student of human evolution, I have spent a fair amount of time studying about Africa. I am on track for a career in academia. I want very badly to do research, and to teach, but without the carrot of tenure at the end of the stick I would probably not bother. I could stay in high tech and make far FAR more money.

Last edited by loser on 02-22-2006 at 04:25 PM

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you should really go back to posting about rivers and trees, oxsan.

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rivers and trees is my deal. Dad's always been about this stuff. It's not supposed to appeal to the Euros.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mugtoe
unless you can get some tribe to make you an honorary member

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I agree with loser that having professors espousing odd and unusual points of view is part of the point of universities. It was in another thread here that someone said something along the lines of "If you haven't been offended by the time you graduate, you should get a refund".

Companies justify HUGE salaries/bonuses/retirement packages for CEOs as being what is necessary to attract top talent. I'm not suggesting that universities should be run like companies, but there is a market for faculty, and tenure is one of the things that makes academia appealing to smart people.

Plus, I think that removing tenure so that one could fire faculty who propose unpopular viewpoints would be a very dangerous precedent.

Whether tenured faculty should be able to get out of teaching obligations is an issue where I agree with oxan a little more. They should be spending a lot of time on their research, yes, but the point of the university is to educate students. I wouldn't mind seeing it be obligatory that *all* faculty must teach at least X number of units per year. Having the illuminati focus on upper-division and graduate courses is probably fine, as they are often not particularly skilled at teaching large undergraduate lecture courses. But they should be teaching someone.

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At this university, you can escape teaching (not unless you had a named position that specifically excluded teaching, in which case fair enough, your wages are being paid by someone else). And research brings in significantly more money than student tuitions do, incidentally, at decent research universities.

It seems to me that Universities can be about researching or teaching or both, depending on how their business model works. Students pay for at least a decent-sized part of the teaching expenses and research grants pay for research. You don't by any means need a world-class researcher to teach undergrads, or even postgrads, but the system tends to use them to teach anyhow, and most of them like it. There are other positions that are research-only, but they generally aren't tenured.

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So far as free trade is concerned, I think that it's a great thing. If the US and other Western nations lose some of their manufacturing industry that's because they lose on the cost/quality calculus for those items. If you want decent clothes pins, don't buy the cheap crap in WALMART, I guess. Some people presumably want those pins at that price and so the market provides them. You want better pins, you're prepared to pay more, but maybe you have to buy elsewhere. That's the beauty of the capitalist system. No one has a right to anything, no nation has a right to produce any set of goods, but rather competition for good of quality X at price Y rules the market, apart from where nations restrict free trade, the pinko swine. America, in particular, has benefited from a historical enthusiasm, on average, for free trade and hasn't feared change in market conditions but rather tried to expoit them. You can try to stop change but in the end you're pushing water uphill; eventually you'll collapse and it'll run back down the hill right over you.

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Registered: Feb 2003
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Yeah, that's an interesting point. I have heard many people complaining about the poor quality of the items they but at Walmart/Target/etc. However, if one suggests that they buy better items at a smaller store, they object to the cost and inconvenience. You see the same thing with complaints about customer service at the big stores.

Good items and good service cost money.

NOTE: I am not suggesting that you are the sort of person who couldn't figure this out, oxsan.

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I don't think you have to want change to stop in order to point out its downside. You can accept the inevitability of things without giving up your opinions on them.

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Registered: Aug 2001
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Change is only a downside when people can't react to exploit it. The slow and the old will join the dead.

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as will we all, actually

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Yes, because we will by then be old and slow.

Perhaps the US Government should declare a 'War on Death'.

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And once that's over, take care of your powder, for we shall be storming Heaven.

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Smug=Lord Asriel.

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All your innocent daughters are belong to me.

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Registered: Nov 2001
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I fail to worship at the al