SECTION 8. How to Get Tenure
The first concept you need is deep tenure -- the kind of tenure that derives from an extensive network of relationships within your field. People who are starting out in their first job as a professor often misunderstand their relationships with the other faculty in their department. They are looking for some kind of community among equals, and they are often surprised to find their colleagues investing most of their attention in the outside world. The junior faculty feel that they need to work closely with the senior faculty who will decide their tenure cases, or at least they will invest effort in politicking those senior faculty in an attempt to influence the eventual decision. Much of this effort is misdirected. Of course, senior faculty do exist who ignore junior faculty or treat them callously. But you should understand that a department of a research university is not the sort of village that Tocqueville idealized. Instead, it is more like an alliance of entrepreneurs, each of them moving and shaking in the larger world as well as within their departments.
Once you understand your department in those terms, the question of tenure changes. Getting tenure in your department is good, but more important is getting deep tenure: a thoroughgoing integration of yourself and your career into your field as a whole. I have already explained most of the process, which is nothing but publishing, articulating commonalities, networking, identifying emerging themes, organizing activities, and so on. Once you obtain deep tenure, your university would be foolish to lose you. And if your university does in fact fumble your tenure case, deep tenure means that you are nearly certain to have another good job waiting for you somewhere else. If you put enough effort into networking, and if you shift your psychology away from your department and toward your field as a whole, then the process of getting tenure will be much less distressing. You will be less likely to engage in excess politicking of your immediate colleagues. And you will be able to relate to your colleagues as fellow movers and shakers rather than as neighbors in an idealized village. In particular, your independent standing in the field, because of your widespread network, will increase your autonomy and make you less open to manipulation by others.
The best news of all is that getting tenure and getting deep tenure are more or less the same process. Here is how it works. When you come up for tenure, or for any other career review, your tenure case will be decided by people who lack deep knowledge of your research area. Therefore -- and this is a basic mechanism of the university on all levels -- they will necessarily seek out evidence of your research accomplishments other than your own estimate or theirs. One common measure is where and how much you have published in peer reviewed venues such as refereed journals and scholarly publishers. So of course you should publish a lot, with your main emphasis on those kinds of outlets as opposed to nonacademic publications and unrefereed chapters in edited books.
More important than publication, though, will be the letters that your department will get from senior people in your research area. For that reason, your tenure campaign should be very much organized around those people. This means networking, very much as I have described it above, but with a more systematic approach. It couldn't be simpler. Make a list of the twenty people whom your department is most likely to get letters from. These will be senior people whose work is widely known, and who are known themselves as the leading figures in particular areas. Make sure that every important aspect of your work is covered by this list. Then set out to build strong professional relationships with every one of those people in the ways that I have been describing in previous sections. This is easier than it sounds. By the time you come up for tenure, you may have had three or four conversations with each person on your list. That may not sound like much. But if you have been working the process in the right way then that will be plenty. When your tenure case approaches, your university will probably ask you for a list of suggested referees, and you should discuss with your colleagues which names would work best on your list. You can also ask the individuals involved whether they would be willing to write a letter if they are asked. (You don't have to ask them, though. They understand perfectly well how the institution works.) The specifics can be complicated here, depending on how your university's tenure process works. For example, your department might be obligated to write to several people who are not on your list, in which case you might want to restrict your list to the people whom your department finds less obvious. But the relationships with likely letter-writers will be the most important element of your tenure case in any event. And as you do develop relationships with the twenty people on your list, make sure to explain those people to the people in your department who do not know your field well.
Getting a distinct identity
Closely related to deep tenure is a second element, which is getting a clear and distinct professional identity. When your university is deciding whether to give you tenure, they want to make sure that they are evaluating you, as opposed to evaluating your thesis advisor or the people you have collaborated with. If you have worked closely with your advisor, or if your dissertation and related work will sound similar to your advisor's work, then you will need to get a distinct identity. Start research projects in different areas from your advisor, explain your work in different language than your advisor uses, and find ways to clearly mark off your work from your advisor's, for example by explaining your new work as a clear step beyond the work that the two of you published together. You don't just want to have different research results than your advisor -- you want a clearly distinct research agenda.
Establishing a distinct professional identity also means limiting the amount of work that you coauthor with your peers and with other people who are more senior than you. This is unfortunate, of course, but the institution needs to evaluate you as an individual. Work that you coauthor with your students is not a problem, since the committees will assume that you were the intellectual leader in the project, and you can coauthor some work with senior members of your department, since they will be able to explain your distinct role to the people who review your file.
To have a clear and distinct identity, finally, you need to be able to explain your research agenda. Your explanation should not sound like anyone else's, and it should convey a clear sense that a great deal of useful research can be done by following that agenda in the future. To explain your agenda in a clear and distinct way does not mean that you should devalue the work of others before you. To the contrary, you should articulate a historical narrative of the research that you are building on, so that everyone can understand precisely how your work is different from what has come before. Giving credit to others should not detract from your own identity.
Organizing around an emerging theme
The most basic way of getting a distinct identity is to articulate an emerging theme in your field. In other words, you don't just want to set an agenda for your own research -- you want to catalyze a social movement within your field by organizing activities among the people whose research fits the theme. I have already discussed the basics of this process in Section 3. Now, however, organizing around emerging themes has become crucial to your career. So let me explain the process in more detail.
When you are conducting and writing about your research, and especially when you are writing about how your work complements that of others, you should continually brainstorm emerging themes. Work them out in your notebook, and in your conversations with others in your field, until you find one that works. Let us consider an example. Suppose that you are conducting research on a group of biologists who use the Internet to collaborate in new ways. If you are not thinking clearly, you might assume that the particular group you are studying is unique, and that none of the themes you are identifying in your research are relevant to the research of others. After all, the people you are studying probably are unique in many ways. If you have developed the custom of searching for emerging themes, though, and if you are networking and reading other people's work, then you will notice that other researchers are also studying groups who collaborate over the Internet. You might then coin a phrase such as "distributed collective practice" to describe the larger category that your own project shares with these others. More precisely, you might fill your notebook with dozens of phrases, one of which, in this case "distributed collective practice", will sound especially felicitous.
"Distributed collective practice" happens to be a real example of an emerging theme, and you can find the proceedings of a workshop on distributed collective practice by searching the Web with Google. As emerging themes go, "distributed collective practice" is especially well-designed. It has several properties. First of all, it sounds good. It has a nice poetic gallop to it. Just as importantly, each of its words -- "distributed", "collective", and "practice" -- has a meaning for the researchers, so that grouping the three words together combines things that are deeply familiar in a way that is striking and new. The phrase is also quite general. It brings together the community you want -- that is, a community whose members, while diverse, share a substantial number of ideas and values. For example, you may have been studying biologists in your research, but in devising your emerging theme you have chosen to reach out toward all collective practices, not just biology and not just science. Likewise, you may have have been studying people who collaborate on the Internet, but you have chosen to generalize your emerging theme so that it applies to all distributed activities, not just ones that happen on the Internet. And so on.
Of course, you could have articulated your emerging theme differently. You could have said "Internet knowledge production" or "information technology in science" or "social networks and institutional change". Each of these formulations could very well identify an emerging theme around which a new research community could coalesce. But you chose the formulation that identified the particular community that you found congenial and that was ready to be identified. How did you know that a community was ready to be identified using that particular phrase? Because you know many of the people individually. You have conversed with them, read their work, perhaps participated in joint activities with them. You have worked to articulate commonalities with them, some of which may have grown directly into potential emerging themes for a larger group. You have internalized their thinking to some degree, and you can anticipate to some degree how they will perceive things. Having articulated your best guess at the theme that is emerging in their work, you have also consulted with them in the manner that I described in Section 3.
You should try to generalize your emerging theme as much as possible -- "distributed collective practice" as opposed to "biologists working together on the Internet". This is crucial. In articulating an emerging theme, you are claiming a certain territory, and you might as well claim as much territory as possible. I have already mentioned that your research papers resemble patent applications, and the same thing goes for your emerging themes, whose claims should stretch out in every direction until they collide with the claims that have already been made by others. The point is not that you actually own all of the resesarch in that territory. You are not claiming intellectual property in any official sense. Other people will get credit for the results of their own research within that territory. You are, however, claiming credit for noticing the general theme, articulating its significance, mapping its issues, organizing the people who are working within it, and setting the agenda for future research within it. Having done this, you will be identified as a leader. And being a leader is the best, most reliable way to get deep tenure.
Organizing activities around emerging themes teaches you a deep lesson about the profession of research: research means doing something new, and the research community, when it is functioning at all, is thoroughly dynamic, always changing, always fluid. In getting tenure, your job is not to break into an existing network. If some existing institution tries to exclude you, ignore it. Your job is to build the new institutions that will organize the research community for a new generation of researchers. It's not hard. You just have to do it.
Your department's tenure process
Having discussed deep tenure on the level of your field as a whole, it is now possible to think clearly about the tenure process within your own department. It is entirely reasonable for you to ask your departmental colleagues what are the criteria for tenure. Go ahead and ask several of them, preferably ones who are both closest to you and central to the department's social networks. When you do this, you will discover the phenomenon of folk theories about tenure. For example, you might be told that you need to publish two books, or that you need to place an article in such-and-such journal, or that writing for nonacademic publications actually counts negatively at tenure time rather than counting as zero or as a slight positive under the heading of service to the community. You might get well-meaning advice to postpone this, that, or the other aspect of your professional life until after you have gotten tenure. You will be torn: half of you will find these folk theories to be ridiculous, which of course they are, and the other half of you will start frantically rearranging your whole career to conform to them. Once you gather these theories and start pondering them, ask around about whether, when, and how they are applied in practice. You may find that every one of your senior colleagues has a different folk theory in mind. Or you may learn that faculty meetings to discuss tenure cases are actually organized around one or more of these folk theories, so that they have become institutionalized. In my view, you should only change your plans slightly to accommodate the folk theories. The most important thing is to publish high-quality research in refereed journals and book series, the second is to get deep tenure in your field, the third is to build professional relationships with the faculty in your department, the fourth is to teach reasonably well, and the fifth is not to stress out about it. That's it.
Whatever you do, ignore the folk theories that you hear from untenured faculty members. Untenured faculty members simply do not have the information that they would need to theorize the process. Don't get into any alcohol-fueled sessions of mutual sharing of uninformed theorizing about tenure. Don't discuss tenure with people who say things like, "there is a hierarchy, and you need to recognize it and be deferent toward it". Don't validate anyone else's negativity. Don't overinterpret stories about the reasons why other people failed to get tenure -- you will probably not be hearing the whole story. And don't take sides in factional politics. Just calmly articulate commonalities with everyone and have pity on people who project their psychological dramas onto the professional world around them. If powerful people in your department try to force you to join their clique rather than someone else's, your answer is always the same: articulate commonalities. They more they lean on you, the more you should work with them to articulate commonalities. Articulating commonalities is always a useful activity. It builds your intellect, and it builds relationships. It cements political alliances without precluding equally strong political alliances with everyone else. And it is perfectly honest.
If you are going about it right, then, the process of getting tenure is basically the same process as building a community for yourself by networking and organizing activities. You should be able to explain clearly to yourself how every action you perform in your daily work life is part of the process of getting tenure, in addition to the more direct and immediate benefits that it provides to you and others. As a faculty member, you will find that your life has more moving parts than it did when you were in graduate school. You will laugh as you look back on all the times you complained about not having enough time to read. The key to managing all of your diverse involvements as a faculty member is to make every action serve multiple purposes. Get assigned to committee work that helps you with your teaching. Do your teaching in a way that helps you get necessary reading done. Organize workshops that help you to write grant proposals. Supervise student projects in ways that fill in pieces of your own research agenda. Travel to meetings where you can do several kinds of business, as well as letting you advertise your work in the field. Don't automatically say yes to everyone who wants you to do work, and don't jump at every opportunity that comes along. Get used to the idea that your networking and organizing activities will cause numerous opportunities to arise, and get used to the feeling of calmly declining opportunities that don't fit with your long-haul plan. This may all sound self-serving, but it's not. If you define your intellectual agenda in an expansive way then lots of people -- students, colleagues, other people in the field -- will be happy to work with you in ways that directly benefit your career. Once you do establish this positive pattern, you will be able to work with everyone on the basis of mutual benefit.
Departmental politics
In giving you all of this positive-sounding advice, I do not mean to imply that the tenure process is entirely apolitical. Nothing that involves human beings is apolitical, for the simple reason that politics is the practical art by which people get along. So, for example, remember to consult with your colleagues on everything you do. I have already introduced this concept of consultation back in Section 3, in the context of how to organize a workshop. The principle generalizes, and much of your time as a junior faculty member will be spent consulting with people whose plans may be affected by your plans.
Let us consider a commonplace example. You decide that you are going to be a hero by organizing a seminar series. You do a lot of work to invite speakers, publicize their talks, show them around campus, introduce them to people in your department, tell them about all of the excellent research that you and your colleagues are doing, and so on. From your perpective, you are helping the department by bringing in all of these outstanding people. But other people do not share your understanding. They are not aware of your plans or the reasons behind them. What they see is not a good citizen helping everyone to be better networked in the field. What they see, instead, is an endless, random series of requests for money, room bookings, claims on people's calendars, logistical details, A/V equipment, and so on. They will try to explain this randomness as best they can, most likely by imagining you to be a selfish taker. Instead of being a hero, you have become a goat.
What happened? The answer is that you did not consult. At the very beginning of the process you should have made a list of the people who were affected by your plans, and then you should have run your plans past each of them individually. Get their ideas, concerns, relevant information, good and bad precedents from the time before you arrived, and so on. At a minimum these conversations will cause others to be informed about your plans. More likely you will also find your plans changing as your colleagues raise good points that you hadn't thought of or heard about. You may even find that your plan is a bad idea, or that someone else is already doing something closely related to it. By consulting with people, you will get more career benefit from the activity than you would have simply by organizing it on your own. Furthermore, nearly all of the potential downsides of the activity will go away.
The principle of consultation generalizes much more widely. For example, you should never raise an issue at a faculty meeting, much less bring a major conference to your campus, without having consulted about it beforehand. With whom? With the people who are most affected by it, and with the people whose central location in social networks will enable them to anticipate responses you will get and what buttons you should avoid pushing. You should not think of consultation as a kind of arbitrary homework, or as an obstacle you are required to jump before you can get the things you want. Consultation is itself the most direct way to get what you want, and its relationship-building benefits are often more important than the benefits of the activities you are trying to organize. It is one more way that you are knitting yourself into the community.
In my opinion, consultation and articulating commonalities are the only two principles you need to participate effectively in the politics of your department. Consult and articulate commonalities with everyone in your department and you will be fine. It will be helpful, though, if you understand some of the pathological patterns that people get into. One of these is mistakenly called "loyalty". It is quite strange. The faculty in a department are basically stuck together on an island. Most of them have tenure, and relatively few of them will ever change jobs. So they have to get along. The right way to get along, as you know by now, is to work continually at articulating commonalities. But some people don't know how to do this, or else they choose to invest their effort in other things. So instead they create a kind of false solidarity. Let us say that one faculty member holds a strong opinion that a certain technology is ineffective. The other members of the department may not care very much about the matter, and so for the sake of "loyalty" they will adopt that strong opinion as well. Through this process, the department will evolve a peculiar belief system that consists of the idiosyncratic beliefs of its members. The effect will be especially striking when a new senior faculty member is hired: everyone will adopt a strange new opinion overnight, corresponding to the idiosyncracies of their new colleague. Please do not join in to such dynamics. Just articulate commonalities with everyone involved. Say "we" and "us" when you explain those commonalities to others, and perhaps your colleagues will develop more constructive ways of signaling their solidarity to one another.
Enough about departmental politics -- what about campus politics? If you want to get tenure at your university, doesn't it make sense to cultivate a widespread network in other departments, and especially among senior administrators? Probably not. The process of getting deep tenure might lead you to network with people who happen to reside in other departments on your campus. Certainly those people might be easier to reach, face-to-face anyway, other things being equal, than people who live on different continents. But if people in other departments don't fit into your campaign for deep tenure then, almost by definition, you have little reason to contact them. The same thing goes doubly for senior administrators. If you are involved in university governance activities then you will probably want to choose specific governance issues that concern you, network around them, identify emerging themes that pertain to governance of the university, organize activities around those themes, and so on. Those activities certainly will bring you into contact with senior administrators. If you really want to be involved in university governance before you get tenure, go ahead. But most people wait until after they get tenure, for obvious reasons.
If you do want to build intellectual networks around campus, here is a very straightforward way to do it: organize panel discussions. The process should make perfect sense to you by now. First, find a few people in other departments whose work relates to yours in some way. You can identify those people by asking your colleagues. Articulate commonalities. Choose one of those commonalities to be the topic of a panel discussion. Consult with everyone involved about both the theme and the logistical details such as time and place. Sign up a half-dozen speakers including yourself, three per panel plus a discussant. Consult about who the best discussants might be. Confirm everyone's participation. Prepare a neat, legible, plain-text e-mail announcement. Put a phrase like "please forward this to everyone who might be interested" at the top. Send the announcement to your department's general-interest mailing list. Ask the other speakers to do the same. Rehearse the daylights out of a simple, low-key fifteen minute presentation of your work. None of this is hard, and yet most campuses have a shortage of people who are willing to do it. It's probably not crucial to your tenure case, though.
