Saturday, October 9, 2010

The Tenure Issue

Tenure is an issue mostly associated with academic freedom, and the achievement of tenure in an American university is often associated with the ability to teach and do research on topics that, prior to tenure, may have negatively affected one's academic career. The question of whether or not tenure remains an appropriate system for the United States is not one we're addressing here. Instead, we will relate a few ways in which the tenure system affects the progress of science through government funding. Even though the US Government has no official position on tenure in relation to reviewing proposals or getting research funding, there are still strong relationships to be recognized between tenure and the overall progress of science.

Prior to being awarded tenure, junior faculty seek to publish as much as possible in order to build a strong case for being awarded tenure. This effect of the tenure process is good for the progress of science for all the obvious reasons already mentioned earlier in this blog. What someone publishes is also of critical importance as well as how much they publish. If a junior faculty member publishes too much out of scope of the discipline of their potential tenure committee, this will likely negatively affect their tenure case. Tenure committees normally seek to strengthen the field they represent rather than have it change or even evolve by accepting for tenure someone who may be considered to be on the "fringe" of the field, or worse, outside the field. In this respect, the tenure process reflects the political reality of how it proceeds. Tenure committees are actually not unlike small political parties in this sense, seeking to increase the influence and direction that they already represent. For funding programs seeking to diversify a field or to generate interdisciplinary fields, this is a strong negative influence. Rarely will you find a junior faculty member willing to step outside the bounds of their potential tenure committee to seek funding for a revolutionary interdisciplinary idea. When this does happen, it is usually a natural combination, such as a combination of the field with teaching, with computation, or with the collection and sharing of large data sets. Rarely is it a combination involving two core sciences. Bioinformatics is one major exception, being a combination of biology and information science. Even in this case, however, it wouldn't have happened had it not already become obvious after the genomic era that biology is an information science anyway.

There are also influences on government funding of science after the award of tenure. While one would expect a newly-tenured faculty member to begin to diversify and take more risk in their approaches, that is not normally observed. Possibly the reason is that, after spending 7 years keeping tightly within the bounds of a field, they have become fully enculturated in the field and no longer aspire to change. Innovation becomes more of a challenge when a faculty member already has PhD students to supervise, classes to teach, and now service on the tenure committee that keeps them focused on the field.

One outcome of tenure that has to be mentioned because it is so noticeable from the point of view of government funders is that of ego. Achievement of tenure is a difficult and highly political process. When successful, the faculty member is treated differently both by those within the University as well as by those in the field. Such treatment is almost like that of royalty. That may seem overly strong a label, but the actual fealty shown by junior faculty, not yet tenured, can be a strong and potentially negative influence on one's personality. A tenured faculty member is not only going to serve on a tenure committee in their own university, they will be asked for letters of reference by other tenure committees in other universities representing the field. They will serve as either editors or reviewers of major journals in the field. And, unfortunately, they also tend to serve more often on review committees for funding. While program managers should try to include junior faculty as much as possible to teach them how to write fundable proposals, program managers like to "score points" with the field by selecting reviewers who have recognition in the field, and those people are likely to be tenured. For tenured faculty with weak egos to begin with, all this recognition can create an egotist. I have worked equally in industry, academia, and government, and I have never encountered stronger egos, in the negative sense, than I have in academia, and this should be of concern for government funders.

Government funding of science is aimed at progress in the field, but achievement of progress can be hindered by not only the inertia effect of the tenure process, but even more by the influence of very strong egos. Big names in a field are likely to influence outcomes just because of their name rather than because of reasoned argumentation. Ego-tainted, big names tend to make matters worse by influencing outcomes to increase their own standing and entourage in the field. Only the competitive nature of government funding can control this since, having tenure, faculty are protected in their university position. Program managers must immunize themselves to these processes when they direct funding.

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