Women in Biology Internet Launch pages

Page 2a: Faculty Career Issues

If you just arrived, please start at the first page for an introduction to the site and an index (you can use the buttons at left to navigate all pages). The starting page also provides a special section for all recent additions to this site; these will eventually be moved to their appropriate category as new resources are added.

Links I consider to be of particular interest or use. Your mileage may vary.
Direct quotations are in color.

 
Section contents Faculty issues

Faculty career issues

• Getting an academic job: links are on the careers page. These include links about search committees: dealing with them, being on them.
• Offers and negotiating that first job (on the careers page)
• A chilly climate in academe for women, on the women academics page
• Reports and statistics about the state of the profession and the role of women have been moved to the reports/data page.
• Individual development plans are a useful took to evaluate where you are and where you want to go.

General issues

• What happened to the professoriate? We have lost a sense of commonality as professors, the sense that we are all in this together -- "this" being a dedication to undergraduate teaching and not just specialized research. We have lost a belief in the relevance of teaching undergraduates for the health of our democracy. We have lost confidence that what we do in teaching and research is inherently good, and not primarily a utilitarian occupation. We have lost the conviction that we have a calling, that as professors our duty is to profess.
• On the tenure track: a collection of articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education
• The realities of soft money positions, from Science's Nextwave.
• Non-tenure track faculty positions: pros and cons. These are commonly called "research track".
• Managing your time by establishing your absence.
• How to get what you want from academe
• The professorial entrepreneur, or, why running a lab IS like managing a KFC franchise.
• Shameless self promotion: no one else will do it for you.
• Should I move on? or, just get over it and seize the day. Ms Mentor counsels three people to whom life has given lemons.
• Keeping your research alive amidst other faculty responsibilities.
• Winning and retaining faculty through a culture of support
• Departmental politics as a foreign language
• The seven deadly sins of professors
• The American Association of University Professors, founded in 1915, defends academic freedom, faculty rights, and tenure. Publishes an online version of its print journal, Academe.
• Nice work if we can keep it: Confessions of a junior professor. Describing stories of junior faculty life and feelings, the author writes: "My conclusion after compiling these stories is that the anxieties of the junior professoriate fall into two categories: "Is this all there is?" and "What if we lose it?" .... These sentiments reflect the disappointment that comes from realizing that having a job means, well, having a job. But at another level they reflect the fear we have of losing that job, and of rejoining the ranks of the highly educated unemployed. Disappointment and fear. Detachment and paranoia. Disengagement and anxiety. These sentiments, working together, have a tendency to tear at the soul." The author, an English professor, calls for junior faculty to unite together to control their careers. This may work in the humanities, but in the sciences, I think that too many junior faculty are forced to compete directly with one another for resources.
• The Project on Faculty Appointments at Harvard will develop a national resource for academic policies. Studies described here address the role of tenure and governance in faculty lives.
• Fiscal realities in academe.
• A dissertation: The Fiscal Crisis of the American Public Research University and its Impact on Faculty: A Case Study of Factors Influencing Recruitment and Retention of Academic Personnel
• Attributes of effective and ineffective advisors
• To compete or collaborate in research?
• They will not comfort you, a realistically cynical column from Ms Mentor about dealing with those who are not honest. In academe, as in the real world, you need a public face of competence and cheer, no matter how much you're churning inside. Inotherwords, don't let them get you down.
• Surviving a professional slide. Didn't get the promotion? Paper got scooped? Some generally applicable strategies for how to get back on the horse.
• Faculty involvement with fundraising. It may be useful to participate.
• Asking for a raise: playing an odd academic game. Note; for negotiating a new job, see careers page. This is negotiating for more after you've had the job for a while.
  • Don't do it: offers and counteroffers in academia. What's a counteroffer? " When I replied that in the academy it was the practice first to solicit an outside offer and then to bring it to one's present institution in the expectation that it would be matched or bettered, my new advisers were incredulous. "
  • Why Can't I Get a Raise? from The Chronicle. The author wonders: "You want me to get offered another job when I don't want another job? ... Do you really want me to apply for a better job, go to interviews, meet campus officials, have lunches with people I'm desperately hoping never to see again -- to prove that I am valuable? Doesn't it prove, instead, that I am wholly unethical?". You'd think. One of academe's great peculiarities.
  • Counter offers: A loyalty tax
  • For how this ridiculous practice hinders women, see section on equal pay.
• Feeling stuck in academe? Small ways to make life better.
• Dual career couples and job sharing section on a separate page
• Search committees from both sides on the jobs page
• Publishing see also gender effects in publishing
  
  • Publish and perish?: an essay on surviving in science.
  • In defense of the least publishable unit: the role of small papers
  • Impact factors and the problem with them
  • The scientific paper mill from The Chronicle
  • authorship from Science NExtwave
• Small colleges and community college experience.
  • Publishing at the community college
  • Community college Scientist
  • Community college teaching
  • Community college teaching: Not a bad gig.
  • Community colleges and science from Inside Higher Ed
  • making a lab out of nothing when the budget is small or non-existant.
  • Also see the previous page (careers page) for job search tips.
• Small colleges or universities:
  • Also see the job search and search committee sections
  • Raising the bar for research at teaching-oriented universities.
  • Small colleges
  • Small scale science at small universities.
  • Women disproportionately choose small college environments--check out these links on the academic chilly climate page

What's wrong with academe?

• Careers and Rewards in Bio Sciences: the disconnect between scientific progress and career progression, a new report from the ASCB. This economics-based look at the academic biology makes you wonder why anyone chooses this profession, where career earnings are low, work hours are long, and tangible rewards are limited to a very few survivors.
• The mythical scientist shortage, from The Scientist (free registration required). For an academically astute American, better ways abound to make a living.
• Your faculty, reluctantly. Why would anyone want an academic career? The hours are long, the pay is poor, the stress high, the rewards few. The students drive better cars than the professors. What can be done to renew the profession?
• Attracting the best: Jan 2003 article about the attrition of the top students from science for more lucrative and supportive careers.
• A PhD and a failure?
• An alarm about the exodus from research. Although written about MD-PhDs, the same concern (stemming from the funding crisis) applies to basic scientists as well. From 2007.
• The real science crisis: bleak prospects for young researchers A MUST READ

Starting Your first position

• Navigating the Postdoc to PI transition
• Academic lingo: a glossary of terms particularly for aspiring science faculty
• Learning the lingo in academe: the jargon is defined in this glossary, and further examples described in the sequel
• The realities of How to swim with sharks. Essential advice for the aspiring academic.
• Microcosmographica academia: Being a guide for the young academic politician (ca. 1908)
• Ms Mentor gives the low down on how to get started in the new place and new heirarchy. Ms. Mentor also advises you not to say no to anything, unless it is illegal, toxic, or hopelessly lewd. Do not reject food, or offers of any kind of help, or invitations to social events. Being a good receiver is a social trait not widely practiced among awkward academics, and you'll be known as the one charmer who adored Professor Francophile's snail salad. (You may, of course, be fed that snail salad at social gatherings forever after, but think of your term as only six years. Once you get tenure, you can conveniently develop an allergy or an unspecified queasiness.)
• What they didn't teach you in grad school, from Inside Higher Education
  • academic responsibilities
  • career path
• Setting up your new lab, picking up skills on the fly, and a list of six common mistakes
• Managing your lab. Funny thing about science, you get rewarded for being good at the bench by getting removed from the bench.
  • Resources for lab management from HHMI From The Chronicle: The Scientist as manager.
  • From Nextwave: Managing people: tips for beginning faculty
• How to welcome new faculty members
• In service to talent : not yours, your students.
• Making a name for yourself
• Discretion, especially on matters sexual: faculty rules from Ms Mentor
• Academic fledglings: common sense for the junior professor. From Ms. Mentor. Managing your time pre-tenure
• The assistant professor's guide to the galaxy
• Advising students
• Treating graduate students with dignity
• Along those lines, minding the student client
• What to wear when you want a job or tenure. From Ms Mentor. Shouldn't matter. Does it?
• More about dressing the part
• Surviving faculty meetings
• The battle for good graduate students: essential for an academic lab.
• The wrong geography
  • We just don't fit in here
  • Place or profession?
  • No way to be in a small college town
• It's a job. Make the best of it!
• Also see section on leaving

Getting grants

• Guidelines for grant and fellowship proposals
• where to start looking for grants
• Chronicle grant writing series: The buck starts here, paired with Words worth their weight in cash.
• Budgeting your grants
• Grant writing, the science of getting money for science
• GrantsNet, a searchable database of funding opportunities for students, postdocs, and PIs
• Grantsmanship, a collection of links from phds.org.
• Pay attention to the safety rules
• From Science's Nextwave site: How not to kill your proposal. And, most recently, The Toolkit: getting an NIH R01
• Writing an NIH grant
• Grant writing tip sheet from the NIH
• In praise of small science: should investigators be limited to 1 or 2 grants? From Nature.
• NIH to tinker with grant system? What works and what doesn 't.
• Going after major money: Big, cross disciplinary grants.

Teaching

• Learning to teach: how to do it and why you want to, from Science's Next Wave. Also from Nextwave:
  • Teaching 101
  • Using portfolios to improve and evaluate teaching
• Academic scientists at work: to teach or not to teach? from Science's Nextwave.
• Teaching is good for research from the ASCB
• The problem with graduate students
• Rookies in the classroom from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Also: Teaching a big class
• A website to help faculty members assess their instructional goals to answer the question, How do you see your primary role as a teacher?
• I think this student has a learning disability....what to do about it.
• Coping with troubled students
• Good teaching strategies, from syllabus preparation to grading practices.
• Female Friendly Science teaching
• Women- and Gender-related Science and Technology Syllabi
• Gender Based Biology Courses, an article from The Scientist
• Providing academic support to undergraduate women science students
• Women and a chilly classroom climate from a Women in Mathematics discussion examines issues that face women in all sciences.
• Reducing stereotypes in the classroom
• Socializing with your students: the boundaries of the student/professor relationship from The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Of interest here: getting good teaching evaluations, which can determine salary promotions and contribute to tenure.
• Inappropriate [romantic or sexual] socialization is discussed on another page.
• Getting good evaluations. While directed at adjunct faculty, good teaching evaluations are also important for tenure-track and tenured university professors who want promotions and merit increases. This offers suggestions for connecting with your students.
• MOre about evaluations
• Teaching evaluations and tenure
• Of course, as you probably know, if you're good looking you'll get better evaluations. and they base tenure on this???
• Of course, gender matters in evaluations. Check out the chilly classroom section on our page about the chilly climate in academe.

Getting tenure

Getting there

• For aspects of tenure specific to women's experiences, see tenure in a chilly climate section on the academic chilly climate page
• Preparing for tenure
• Road signs to tenure: pay attention while starting out.
• Ten steps to tenure.
• Building your case for tenure
• Collegiality: The Pandora's box of tenure.
• Watch out for the hazers, from Ms Mentor.
• Tenure: a creature of our own making,, from The Chronicle. "Whatever the institution's specific criteria, the tenure process is really about (or should be) making an assessment of the extent and quality of an individual's contribution to the institution and discipline, and the likelihood that that contribution will continue or even increase."
• Think your tenure is a sure thing? Don't gloat : you may be wrong.
• The tenure chase papers, one professor's story
• The Truth about Tenure
• Transcript of a workshop from Penn State on getting tenure
• Tenure does not mean power.
• Statement on the renewal or nonrenewal of faculty appointments--procedural standards from the AAUP (American Association of Unviersity Professors)
• Alleviating the torture of the tenure track. "Junior faculty spend the most important years... in a state of uncertainty. The academy should nor accept this feeling as normal for anyone entering a new profession, field, or organization. The prevalence of concern, the depth of emotion, and the seriousness of the situation call for action on the part of institutions, especially department chairs and deans, to ease the situation. "   Don't hold your breath.
• Gaining tenure: rules your chairman never told you.
• The tenure journey: 10 routes to tenure.
• Tenure on the internet
• The random insanity of letters of recommendation. "Colleges should make their own decisions about tenure and promotion, doing the homework required and using gingerly the outside world's information."
• When tenure goes crazy: just who is writing those letters?
• A higher bar for tenure?, an article in The Chronicle describing how The bar for tenure is rising at major research universities and teaching institutions alike. Most departments demand more published research.... Some institutions even accelerate the whole procedure, sizing up young scholars years before tenure time and showing them the door if it looks as if they won't eventually measure up. In other words, you DO have to be better than the people who are voting on you!
• See this report from three higher-education associations called "Good Practice in Tenure Evaluation: Advice for Tenured Faculty, Department Chairs, and Academic Administrators." (.pdf version on line). Amongst the recommendations: clarity in standards and procedures; consistency in decisions; candor in the evaluation of candidates at every stage; and caring for unsuccessful colleagues. Send this to your department chairman.
• Institutions are not your friends in the tenure process; from The Chronicle.
• Do you have to be nice to get tenure?
• The Weasel Clause, or how tenure has nothing to do with research, teaching, or publication.
• Just what (or whom) is tenure protecting? from The Chronicle.
• Figuring out what counts in the tenure game " Ironically, the tenure process produces all the "evils" that tenure was designed to eradicate -- termination based on grudges, ideology, politics, or generic emotion. All too often, instead of focusing on teaching and research, untenured faculty members are devoting their energy to survival, trying to keep hidden any idea or accomplishment that may prick the ego of colleagues or initiate a feud."
• Tenure track anxiety at famous universities: when the odds of getting tenure are slim.

  When it works
  

• The plight of thte newly tenured
• Grateful for tenure, but...
• Winning tenure, losing the thrill, or, now that I've made it, what do I do next? (Would everyone had such problems...!)
• Life after tenure, and how to recover from a successful promotion.
• Thoughts on getting tenure
• Stuck in second place as a tenured associate. From Ms Mentor.
• Along the same lines: Immobiility of the associate professor. If you're thinking about leaving, see senior faculty changes , below.

  When it doesn't
  

• Tenure and termination, or how it can go wrong.
• negative tenure decisions and how to cope, from the Women-in Cell Biology committee of the ASCB
• Dead professor walking?
• Tenure denial
• Starting afresh after tenure denial
• What it's like to be denied tenure. "I was never offered a single reason that my record did not merit tenure -- for of course there really was none. At least none that could be defended. Such high-handed secrecy seems incompatible with the open debate and criticism so valued in academia. But the lack of any rationale for you to refute further encourages you to blame yourself. "
• Tenure denied, now what?
• No warning signs . Denied tenure at a small college despite doing it all right. How did that happen?
• Moving on after being denied tenure
• Creating possibility out of failure, from The Chronicle
• You didn't get tenure. Why it may not be wise to protest too much. And the sequel, What now?
• Reviving your career
• What happens to your students when you don't get tenure?

  It ain't over yet: post tenure review from The Chronicle
  

• What is it and does it work?
• What to expect.
• The afterlife of rejection: don't burn any bridges even if they do turn you down. You never know what may happen later.

Senior (or junior) faculty career changes . Also see the section on the wrong place

• Looking for a position when you already have one
  • Settling in, or just settling? Should you be looking for another job?
  • Tenured and on the market: what to say.
  • the tenured job hunt
  • And again, When they approach you: the tenured job hunt.
  • The deceptively simple senior search: The lesson here: Save that giant tenure file, and keep adding to it in the post-tenure years, because when the unexpected call comes, you will need to act fast..
  • Midcareer job search
  • Struggling for an honest search: How to get reference letters if you don't want everyone to know you're thinking of moving on.
  • Hold your tongue: junior people leaving bad situations need to be careful what they say.
  • A hold-your-tongue sequel: more ways to describe why you are moving, and why you want to move here; also some considerations specifically for scientists.
  • Spring, faculty thoughts turn to leaving (or staying)
  • LEft behind: your colleagues are leaving. What to do?
  • Be gracious on the way out from The Chronicle
  • Leaving gracefully can mean giving them a chance to keep you.
  • OR put another way,are you stuck as a tenured professor?
  Department chairs: how to talk to them, how to be one
  
  • Sharing inside information: when it's a good idea for a chair keep quiet.
  • Can department heads be trained? from The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
  • How first year faculty can help their chairman to help them succeed. From (of course) The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • If you're a little more senior: The not necessarily thankless job of department chair and how to be good at it.
  • Faculty behaving badly, from The Chronicle They say that 2% of the faculty take 98% of the chair's time.
  • How to have real meetings rather than administrativia.
  • From The Chronicle: In charge without tenure. Along the same lines: Is untenured untenable? Hard to believe, but some chairs are untenured.
  • A new chair's doubts, from Inside Higher Education
  • The accidental administrator: survival tips especially for those with interim appointments.
  • The toughest job on campus: department head.
  Administration: Leaving the faculty
  
  • Converting a faculty CV to an administrative one
  • Making the move to adminisration
  • The dark side: moving to administration
  • How are they treating you in administration?
  • Should you give up tenure to administer?
  • The golden rule for administrators: tell the faculty the truth. From The Chronicle.
  • Deaning 101
  • The divide between Admin and Faculty
  • Staying on campus and switching jobs
  • Behind the decanal door: a reality check
  • Just what is a provost anyway?
  • more about provosts. Hint; they are the senior academic officer of a university, essentially the boss of the Deans.
  • Vice President vs. Provost: the two hats.
  • And, if you go that route: Crisis management, when disaster strikes your campus.
  • Academic leadership: Think of those administrators attracted to the power of the position as "bureaucrats" and those whose first priority is to use power to move an institution forward as true "academic leaders." The former are easy to spot: They just want to be in charge. They have no real vision.... little investment in change and are quite comfortable with the status quo........ In contrast, true academic leaders are all about change. They want to lead their departments and colleges to new levels of prominence. ...... A common trait distinguishing those two administrative types is that genuine leaders tend to surround themselves with the best talent available. They .....often will appoint someone with substantially more knowledge and experience than they possess. Bureaucrats, in contrast, often feel threatened by especially capable colleagues, interpreting the presence of such individuals as somehow diminishing their authority or ability to be in charge."
  Leaving academe
  
  • For specific info about women departing the sacred grove, see the women leaving section of the page on the Chilly climate in academe. This section discusses general considerations about leaving one academic position for another, or moving to other sorts of positions.
  • Moving out
  • Maybe you aren't cut out for this
  • So why are you really leaving?
  • You start your faculty position and discover you hate it.
  • Along the same lines: leaving a faculty position.
  • Senior scientists not so retired....
  • Feeling stuck in academe? and what to do about it from The Chronicle

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Go to page 1(History, Education, Organizations)
Go to page 1a (Reports and Studies)
Go to page 2 (Careers)
Go to page 3 (Chilly Climate)
Go to page 3a (Chilly climate in academe)
Go to page 3b (Personal life)
Go to page 4 (Books, Miscellaneous)
Go to index

Standard disclaimer: Any opinions are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.