The recent discussion over the academic tenure system has sort of wound down, or at least, those parts of it that I feel I can contribute to have wound down. I really ought to note the posts by Bill Hooker and the Incoherent Ponderer, who correctly note that the biggest problem with the academic system is not so much what happens to assistant professors (save for a handful of insitutions with deeply insane policies, most people who come up for tenure reviews pass), but what happens a step before that. The big drop-off isn’t between assistant professors and associate professors, it’s between post-docs and assistant professors.
One striking thing about the recent discussion, at least to me, was that it reminded me just how compartmentalized the blogosphere is. At around the same time that Rob Knop posted his original article, there were two posts at the Reality-Based Community on tenure that struck me as interesting, particularly the latter, which includes this paragraph:
On the other hand, defenders of tenure need to confront how horrible the tenure process currently is. I’m not talking about the deadwood problem, as demoralizing as that is. I’m talking about the horror of spending six years right out of graduate school worrying that offending a colleague or having a delay in a research project at the wrong moment might force you to start a job search with no financial cushion and with a black mark on your record. Tenure as it now exists is a process that gives academic freedom mostly to those two beaten-down and emotionally exhausted to use it well, while denying it to young scholars at the peak of their creative powers.
Mark’s talking about law school there, but that material could perfectly well fit in the discussion of tenure in science. And yet, I didn’t see anybody making reference to it in the recent discussion on various science blogs, nor did Mark Kleiman or Steve Teles take any note of the science discussion.
(I’m not trying to cast specific aspersions, here– you’ll note that I didn’t manage to tie the RBC posts into my contributions to the recent discussion, either…)
It’s like I was saying to the dog– there are these different branches of the blogosphere that behave in many ways like separate and inaccessible universes. There are the science nerds, the law school geeks, the Invisible Adjunct crowd, and I’m sure there are a few others. And there’s almost no contact between them– they’re all concerned about tenure and its effects, but they all talk about it as if they were the only ones having the conversation.
It’d be interesting to see what would happen if we could actually get these conversations to connect.