How to get tenure

No good very bad advice about building a tenurable case

Hello darlings!

How the hell is everyone. Did you know it is almost September? What the fuck??

This one’s for all you academic bebes out there!

This is my annual “How to be an assistant professor” missive. But let’s do something a little more… aggressive this year, yeah?

If you want some general advice that is a little more touchy-feely-everything-is-going-to-be-okay, here’s some general positive upbeat advice:

Advice for (new) assistant professors

But if you are someone who wants more… uh… direct advice about how to actually fucking get tenure (especially how to figure out what the standards are for tenure), (ESPECIALLY especially if you think you can’t do it), this is for you!

Let’s talk today about what you need to do if you are a new(ish) assistant professor at an institution that requires a robust research portfolio to get tenure. This probably doesn’t apply to institutions without research expectations for tenure, nor does it apply to people in teaching streams or administrative appointments.

As with all advice ever, some of this will work for you and some won’t. It’s good advice, it’s bad advice. Ignore it, listen to it. Whatever! I’m far from the first to offer advice here – there are whole ass books about this! There are a whole bunch of advice columns too! As with all my advice, absolutely no guarantee that this works and no I’m not talking about YOU (yes I am).

My perspective is very much from a social science discipline where the tenure standards have increased substantially in the last fifteen years and can also vary a lot across kinds of institutions. I’ve gotten tenure at three different institutions (a directional state school, an R1, a policy school), written ~30 tenure letters, and observed a lot about academic life. BUT ALSO EVERY PLACE IS UNIQUE AND YOU DO YOU, BOO.

Further caveats: this advice is aimed at helping people survive the neoliberal academic world. It is aimed at helping you meet the research components because that’s how you get tenure at most universities. You can reject any of these pieces of our life! Cool! Again, go do you! Go for a walk, bake a pie, plant a tree, punch a nazi, yada yada.

What’s the least you can do?

The very first thing you need to do is to figure out what the actual standards are for getting tenure in your department and university. Cool. Straightforward, right? NOOO. Two problems: people lie, standards shift.

Problem 1: people LIE ALL THE TIME.

People will lie to you. A lot. Any chair and a lot of senior people live in a fictional world where they imagine that they will tell you that six articles will get you tenure, you write six articles, and then you don’t get tenure and sue them. To be clear, this is a walking nightmare invented by the neoliberal state, but it encourages them to LIE TO YOU about how tough the standards are. Colleagues won’t pay attention and will tell you standards consistent with how they got tenure a bazillion years ago. Other people will tell you what they wish standards were. All of it is fucking LIES.

Problem 2: standards shift.

Across time. Across individuals. Across groups of people (particularly for different groups of people!) Any department, letter writer, committee can make a fat file look thin or a thin file look fat. I’ve been in the room when a dude who was barely scraping by was talked about as “very promising” with his “best ideas yet to come” (not true!). I’ve also been there when a woman’s coauthoring is a signal that she doesn’t have her own ideas and is a freeloader. (also, not true!)

Where does that leave us?

In order to go through the lies and the shifting sands, you need to figure out what the ACTUAL minimum is. For me, that minimum goal was the average + 1 standard deviation over of recent tenure cases / a slightly higher level of impact than the last fool. Plus more if the dept has only tenured white guys. If you want to apply qualitative standards, go for it. But come up with some standards.

If you don’t have enough information from your own dept / unit, then look at aspirant peer departments. Yes this may be unfair (those people got more resources, teach less, go to the beach more, have better sex, waaahhhh) but this process helped me think clearly about what a number of publications would be that would get me above the minimum. I then upped it a little bit because I’m a loud feminist bitch that can’t keep my mouth shut and SHOCKER old white sexist dudes haaaate that.

Get tenure in the discipline (AND your institution)

One more wrinkle: you may (/ will) want to leave your institution at some point. Maybe that’s today! Maybe that’s in 3 years. Maybe that’s in 20 years! So you will need to figure out not just how to meet the criteria of your weird ass colleagues who all SWEAR that foreign language translations of work are the most important signal of your reputation or that the Journal of Beyonce Studies is the best journal, but also all the weirdos who work at any other university where you might possible want a job.

AND when it comes to asking for external letters, those letter-writing- motherfuckers are going to apply their own standards to your file. I certainly do! I explicitly state “my general expectations for productivity for someone at this stage in their career at an institution like yours is to produce X articles a year for a total of Y articles, fewer if the scholar writes a monograph.” X and Y are adjusted for the kind of institution. So – if I’m writing a letter for you (and it seems like I will probably be writing a letter for all of you – JOKING just whining about all these fucking letters), you need to not just meet the random standards from your dept, but mine as well.

ABC / Build a pipeline, fast

In order to get over that minimum, you are going to have to get to fucking work. Like, today. Stop fucking dilly-dallying and write! But even more important than writing the stuff is actually submitting it. Get it OUT there. Submit submit submit. Always be closing (/submitting).

Mike Munger’s rule is 3 under review at all time to build a tenure-level case in 6-7 years. My adaption for this is to say you need to have a 3:1 ratio, so three things under review for every one thing you want published that year. So if you need to publish 10 articles to get tenure, you need to publish 1.67 articles per year, so I would have 6+ articles under review at all times. Maybe your turnover is faster in your discipline, maybe acceptance rates are higher, whatever – figure out what your ratio is and then the number of things you’d like to have out is at any point and get to fucking work.

Here is my pipeline board at the beginning of AY 2024

No one is going to save you

Maybe you are going to have great mentoring where you are. Maybe you already do! Maybe you re-read MHAWS because I’m the only person who ever talks about any of this (I hope not! I’m NOT great at this!) Wherever you are on that spectrum, you are the only one who can actually save you. You are the one you are waiting for.

So what? We are all alone and isn’t that sad? NOOO. This is empowering. You get to do whatever the fuck it is that you think you need to do to get where you want to go. You pick your goals. You make a pipeline. You think about how to get there. You pick your projects. And you get to fucking work.

This also means: you need to figure out routines that work for you so that you actually fucking write regularly. Maybe that’s writing first thing, maybe that’s external accountability. Maybe that’s hiring an editor. Whatever. YOU FIGURE IT OUT. You need to figure out how to trick yourself into getting shit done. You need to fail yourself and succeed despite yourself. Get comfortable being alone. Get comfortable disappointing yourself. Get comfortable impressing yourself. Blow your fucking socks off, my bebes.

Stop being a whiny little baby 

I just really want every new faculty member on the planet to stop fucking whining about how hard your life is and how much your job sucks. No, it probably doesn’t actually suck. If you definitely aren’t going to get tenure, treat it as a 6 year post-doc. Or if it really that bad, you should get a different job! This is a job, not a life. Shit or get off the pot. Love to all of you.

XOXOX

Mirya