How to Get Tenure
matt.might.net
matt.might.net
The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this. Perhaps you can't get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author didn't have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and so his professional career was unaffected.
When I was a PhD student, I asked everyone about this, but I could find no role model. Almost every male professor had a stay-at-home wife who cared for the kids, and female professors often had no kids. Even with my fellow PhD students who became parents, it was always the mothers who took extended maternity leave, and the fathers who advanced their careers.
(I eventually gave up the PhD programme; as a self-employed software developer I now have the freedom to take as much time for my kids as I want, and I can take an equal part in caring for them.)
1. Paternity leave 2. Child care facilities
Paternity leave is important to break the stereotype that mothers are the ones who have to sacrifice their careers to stay at home and care for the family. Widely available child care allow both parents to work as much as they need.
Anecdotal evidence from the senior staff I know here at the University says that male professors don't have stay-at-home wives, and female professors have kids (with no noticeable difference compared to the rest of society).
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum
Maybe you don't consider founding and running a 501(c)(3) non-profit like http://NGLY1.org/ a career for her, but I do.
And, more importantly, she does.
Because if you answer yes, you are full of it.
I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.
Very few people get to their thirties without realising that a marriage is a partnership and that having a family is a demanding project which requires a lot of work.
Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received all of this was always male.
The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother.
When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture becomes extremely complicated, of course.
But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?
> The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner.
Though it appears he did so after being prompted by a (female!) questioner asking what his wife's up to; he wrote the original Quora answer without mentioning anything about how her career was altered.
I see no comments below where that crucial detail was relevant to mention, only a number of a comments that express that they found the post interesting and enlightening?
http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum
And, in fact, an extended family story -- of my parents, my brothers and her sisters that all help out on a daily basis.
All of us know that the main takeawy of the story is about you. Your desperate disclaimers don't do anything.
>At first, she gave up a promising career in start-ups to care full-time for Bertrand
Emphasis added on at first. While jt doesnt sound like she went back to that career, he then goes on to list a lot of achievements that were way beyond simply being a full time mom.
So, the true bottom line of this story is that he made a very shrewd political move (in the process compromising the privacy of his disabled child) in order to ensure tenure.
IIRC if you match childless single men and women by educational attainment and job experience the gender pay gap is about 3%. But most women downshift or exit their careers after having children and most men don't. Anyone with a really dedicated support staff or person is at a massive advantage when competing against those without. The only single people with support as dedicated as a competent spouse have butlers. Even corporate executives with personal assistants don't have that kind of always available, for all tasks help, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Couples in other countries with working child care systems do not share this experience.
"I stopped working on problems for the sole purpose of notching up a publication. I shifted gears to cybersecurity. I found a project on cancer in the med school. I joined a project in chemical engineering using super-computing to fight global warming."
The truth is that you can't serve two masters of "chasing success" and "solving a problem." Pick hard problems to solve and run them down. That says way more about you than any sort of resume buffing you might do.
I mean it's certainly believable that he moved to those areas because he's personally interested in them, rather than just following the money. If so, he had the good fortune that his personal interests aligned closely with the current priority areas of major U.S. funding agencies. There are plenty of cases where that isn't true, so I think it's a bit dangerous to take it as the normal outcome. If your passion is something people with money are not currently interested in, the odds that everything will just work out fine if you focus on your passion are much lower. So my modified advice would be: to get tenure, follow your passion and solve problems rather than micro-optimizing citations, but first macro-optimize research area by choosing problems that the NIH, NSF, and/or DARPA are pouring money into. :-)
This is hypocritical and heartless to those who are now starting their careers as scientists. You spent a decade of your life to get to a tenure-track position, and now that decade and the rest of your life are on the balance. You can bullshit all you want about making the world a better place, but you'll be teaching Java Programming 101 in Podunk state college unless you deliver publications and grants.
This isn't even uncommon in today's academic environment: many of the most successful professors run these business-structured research labs, producing amazing results they oversaw the people overseeing. I think it's a lousy way to treat academia, but hey, it gets you tenure.
I mean, that's great for the people for whom it works (if there are any), but, guess what, when "the rest of us" want to "emulate that person", we get a few steps and realize we can't be that person because all of us are imperfect.
It'd be more inspiring if these kinds of posts also included existing "skeletons-in-closet" to make the person seem more mortal.
And not the interview answer "I'm too much of a perfectionist" skeleton. What does it really take? "My wife resents my success." "My kid doesn't even like/know me." "My grad student actually did all the work." "I'm sleep deprived and suicidal most of the time." "Half my statistics are lies."
Seriously, nobody has a perfect life. What does it really take to make (at least) a "successful" one?
This is a great takeaway for ambitious people who worry about the impact of having kids on their career.
I've always wondered how people derive the internal strength to do amazing things in the face of severe personal adversity. This post addresses this in some ways.
"Applying the cold logic so common in computer science to the cell biology of the disorder, we’ve started predicting therapies, some of which have since come to bear fruit and improved my son’s quality of life beyond measure."
I curious to read his research on this, but I haven't been able to find it here:
It's mostly security/GPU/Static analysis stuff.
I'm just about done writing a blog post on this topic too.
Ugh I don't know why we force so many researchers to teach. My university was filled with very smart and passionate professors who had absolutely no interest in talking to or teaching another human being.
excerpts from "'Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!' Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman, Bantam Books: New York, 1986
I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological.
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm teaching my class."
If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.
down vote and deny all you want.
note how all the accomplishments are a result of staying at home. and the only big effort listed was raising funds for his research.
not saying it was right or wrong. I'd probably have dropped my career in similar situation. but trying to spin it is weird.
And yes, intelligent women are the worst in that respect. Until that changes, who is in denial?
"Doing a good job with teaching is perversely seen as a cardinal sin in some departments."
Name one. Give some examples. If you're going to play this game of taking the obviously popular side of "ethical enough to do your job" then you need to be more forthcoming. The part about teaching is self-promotional BS.
Perhaps in the very best departments, where they have so much money that good researchers rarely teach, tenure decisions are not based solely on research. There are very few institutions for which that is true though. You don't have to be a star teacher, but claiming that anyone not entertaining the students at a level to win university-wide teaching awards means they are "Torturing a captive audience every semester with soul-sapping lectures is criminal theft of tuition" is quite a jump.
This is one of the most arrogant blog posts I've ever read. He did what most faculty members do to get tenure. He did research, teaching, and service at an acceptable level.
He also founded the entire field of static analysis for higher-order languages (like Scheme, Python and Haskell). His long-term research impact has been extremely significant.
It's hard to figure out any surface reasoning on which to deny him tenure, except that he refuses to thin-slice his work into many tiny papers.
He operates on the model of "one paper = one major idea."
Denying Olin tenure (after an overwhelming faculty vote in favor of tenure) seemed to me to be the tipping point that led ultimately to the ouster of the Dean.