Getting Tenure

Charting Your Progress Toward Tenure

When Rachel O'Brien was writing her self-evaluation for her "pre-tenure review" at Allegheny College, she created a chart to help her to track her professional activities and identify her strengths as well as her weaknesses. This helped her to prioritize her short-term goals as she prepared for tenure review. Check out her chart and use it as a model for your own.

Tenure FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

In our workshops for early career geoscience faculty members, some questions about tenure come up frequently. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to any question about tenure, the answers given here are our best attempts to summarize general practices in academia in the US.

Taking an Active, Strategic Approach to Tenure

Magali Billen offers advice on how to think and act strategically as you prepare for tenure, sharing what she learned from her own experiences along with the best advice she received.

Other Resources

Books

Getting Tenure (Survival Skills for Scholars) , by Marcia Whicker, Jennie Kronenfeld, & Ruth Strickland. The authors demystify the tenure process, describing steps you can take to ensure your success. Read an excerpt, published on Rick Reis' Tomorrow's Professor Mailing List.
Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus , by Robert Boice. Based on years of research, Boice describes the habits of new faculty members who quickly and efficiently set themselves up for success, and includes simple suggestions to learn those habits.
Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year , by James Lang. Read an excerpt, published on Rick Reis' Tomorrow's Professor Mailing List.
"Promotion and Tenure," a chapter in Good Start: A Guidebook for New Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges, includes a set of twenty questions designed to help you assess your own progress toward tenure.

Articles

Stalcup, Apryll, 2006. The Mechanics of Getting Tenure. (Acrobat (PDF) 96kB Jun1 06) Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, v. 385, p. 1-5. While this article is written primarily for an audience of chemists at large research universities, it is relevant for most scientists at such institutions, and includes some advice relevant for anyone in academia.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
- Tenured Twice, by Amy Jones. One woman's story of recognizing that her first department/institution was not a good fit -- just as she received tenure there -- and her decision to pursue a position somewhere that would be a better fit.
- Road Signs to Tenure, by Miguel Mantero. Compiled advice from six tenured professors. Also, Were the Road Signs Wrong? Miguel's retrospective article as he comes up for tenure, written two years after the previous article, analyzes and responds to the earlier advice.
- Shameless Self-Promotion, by James Lang. "Given the unsupervised nature of much of what we do in this business, I am really in the best position both to describe and to evaluate my work most effectively," explains the author.
- How First-Year Faculty Members Can Help Their Chairmen, by Gene Fant, Jr. Suggestions for being proactive, from a department chair.
- Keeping Your Research Alive, by Rick Reis. How to make your research a priority, in the face of other, more urgent (but not necessarily more important) demands on your time.
From Rick Reis' "Tomorrow's Professor" Mailing List
- Collegiality: the tenure track's Pandora's Box. These simple tips can help you to develop collegial relationships with your colleagues -- an important, and perhaps underappreciated, aspect of getting tenure. After all, in deciding on your tenure case, your colleagues are voting on whether they want you around for the foreseeable future.
- How do you handle rejection? On the road to tenure, doing research is usually not enough -- you must also publish your results. But the road to publication is often paved with rejection letters. How you deal with rejection affects your productivity; this article provides advice for dealing with rejection constructively.