Tenure Committees Seek Out Science Faculty `Better Than We Are'

To many assistant professors, the tenure process is something of a mystery--a black box, waiting to be opened at the end of the probationary period, generally after six years. But while the determining factors may seem out of reach to some, senior scientists and others who have long experience reviewing candidates for tenure say it is hardly necessary to walk on water to win tenure at most colleges and universities. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all that's necessary, according to physicist and dean of science Robert Birgeneau, is to have "established yourself among the leaders in your field." At Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., chemistry professor Jerry Mohrig says faculty need to demonstrate "first- rate teaching and continuing intellectual vitality." Princeton University's physics department is merely trying "to find people who are better than we are," says professor David Wilkinson. No matter how they evaluate candidates, faculty who sit in judgment emphasize the need to guess correctly about a candidate's future, since tenure is lifetime job security. The tenure decision "is an attempt to discern the trajectory that a faculty member is on," says Elizabeth McKinsey, dean of the college at Carleton. "We want someone who is not only vital, creative, and effective, but who will remain so for 30 years." In theory, science departments across the United States are searching for faculty members who excel at universities' threefold mission of research, teaching, and service. In practice, however, most departments settle for something less than that, depending on their needs, their mandate, and the fashion of the day, say those who have served on tenure review committees. What They're Looking For * "We're looking for not just a string of papers, but recognition as having made a distinct contribution."--Jane Lubchenko, zoology, Oregon State University * "If a person is well-liked, it contributes to a positive vote in a marginal case, especially if the person contributes to the department."--Edward Loechler, biology, Boston University * "I ask, `Will this person be intellectually alive? Can this person come up with ideas of his or her own?'" --Jerry Mohrig, chemistry, Carleton College * "Are graduate students making progress? Do they move along well with well-designed projects?" --Penny Gilmer, chemistry, Florida State University And What They Hope Not To See * "The bias, if any at all, is against people with too many publications."--Robert Birgeneau, physics, MIT * "Meeting classes and going home is not evidence that you'll be an effective teacher."--Mohrig * "If a lot of students leave disgruntled from a faculty member, that's not a good sign."--Gilmer * "Papers that take incremental steps are much less important than papers that take leaps."--David Wilkinson, physics, Princeton University --B.G. Service, in the form of professional activities and departmental duties, usually weighs least heavily in tenure decisions. Indeed, some schools and departments require little in the way of service from untenured faculty members. The geology department at Texas A&M University, for example, traditionally shields its untenured faculty from committee duties, says John Spang, its chairman, "so they have no excuse" for not being productive researchers and teachers. Penny Gilmer, associate chairwoman of the chemistry department at Florida State University, says her department exempts only first- year faculty from committee duties. After that, she says, "we like to see how they will interact with the rest of the department if they do get tenure." The relative values of teaching and research are constantly changing. More than 100 years ago, the president of Harvard University, Charles William Eliot, said during his inauguration: "The prime business of American professors in this generation must be regular and assiduous class teaching." Teaching remains the prime business for some professors, especially at liberal arts colleges without graduate programs; but teaching is no longer confined to the classroom. In fact, an assistant professor who simply conducts classes and goes home would have trouble gaining tenure at Carleton, where many students work in labs. "Undergraduate research," Mohrig says, "is the best teaching tool I know." Undergraduate teaching plays a role in the tenure decision even in some departments with world-famous research reputations. In Princeton's physics department, for example, all seniors undertake year-long research projects under the direction of a faculty member. The willingness of an assistant professor to advise senior theses is an indication, notes Wilkinson, "of whether the faculty [member] is paying attention to undergraduates." Nevertheless, he acknowledges, spectacular researchers who are poor teachers could probably receive an offer of tenure. "They would end up teaching graduate courses," he says. One of the problems of basing a tenure decision partly on a candidate's teaching ability is the difficulty in evaluating teaching properly. Teaching is gauged mainly through student evaluations, and, for one thing, popularity frequently masquerades as good teaching, according to Lionel Lewis, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Another issue that should be examined critically, Lewis believes, is that while students are usually generous in evaluations, they are more critical of larger classes. "Scientists are probably more devoted to the principle of merit than humanists are," says Lewis, who has studied how merit is considered in faculty advancement, "but there is no evidence that teaching is central, or that when it is evaluated, it's done properly." Nevertheless, sometimes faculty members can help control their own destiny. At Miami University in Ohio, David Gorchov, an ecologist with several years remaining in his probationary period, says he realized that the best way to get good teaching evaluations was to give good grades. But Gorchov teaches large lecture classes and is an opponent of grade inflation. After discussing the issue with his dean, Gorchov has opted to have his colleagues attend some of his classes each term, write a review of his teaching, and add the memos to his file. Carleton College serves as an example of a small school that takes great care in its teaching evaluations. Every student, whether still on campus or not, who has taken a course taught by a tenure candidate is polled with a detailed questionnaire, says McKinsey. The students are asked to list their criteria for effective teaching and then rate the candidate with those criteria in mind, comparing him or her specifically to the best teachers they've had. Because of the difficulty of defining good teaching and then identifying it, many research-oriented departments will settle for superior researchers whose teaching isn't cause for complaint. In the mathematics department at New Mexico State University, home to teaching programs nationally recognized for their innovation, professor Douglas Kurtz puts it this way: "We say, `If your teaching doesn't cause friction, we'll base [the tenure decision] on research.' We don't expect innovative teaching" from everyone, he says. But to up the odds of promoting at least competent teachers, Kurtz says tenured faculty regularly observe and evaluate the teaching of their untenured colleagues. The usual probationary period of six years might seem like plenty of time to demonstrate research proficiency and promise, but that's misleading, say tenured faculty. In order to have a paper included in your tenure file at the start of the sixth year, you would have to submit it for publication up to a year or more earlier. In order for a scientist to have a paper to submit, data have to be collected, analyzed, and written up, a process that can take several years. "And unless you're very lucky," says biologist Edward Loechler of Boston University, "you don't have a laboratory set up when you start the job. You don't have people to do the work, since graduate students don't commit to an adviser until the end of the first year. The point is, you need to be productive early in your career." In some disciplines with limited time for field research, such as experimental ecology, the time constraint is more of a problem. An ecologist up for tenure may have fewer papers than an organic chemist, who can do a publishable benchtop synthesis in weeks. While such differing research traditions are probably taken into account automatically within a department, they need to be highlighted when a university-wide committee reviews the tenure file, suggests Jane Lubchenko, chairwoman of the zoology department at Oregon State University. Most scientists interviewed for this article cite a candidate's publishing record as playing a preeminent role in judging research ability, so it's natural to wonder whether those same scientists, when judging a candidate for tenure, count the candidate's papers. "No," says MIT's Birgeneau, who goes on to recall a case of a mathematician who had solved a hard problem but had yet to publish any papers. The mathematician received tenure, Birgeneau says. "We count papers and then try to ignore that we counted them," says Kurtz of New Mexico State. The mathematics faculty, he says, like to see a consistent record of publishing, averaging about one paper a year. They'd much rather see fewer papers published in important journals than too many superficial papers. Boston University's Loechler counts papers, but says the number he is looking for is "very fuzzy." He and colleagues on review committees have actually made tables of candidates' papers, distinguishing them by, among other things, the quality of the journal in which they're published and the contribution made by the candidate. Papers published in premier journals such as Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences count highest with tenure review committees. Papers in which the candidate is senior author count for more than papers coauthored with a faculty member's former adviser, notes Loechler. Methods papers don't receive as much weight, he says, nor do book chapters, which are not peer-reviewed. A book chapter "is not totally discounted," says Loechler, "but counted in a different way--as an indication of how the scientific community views you." As important as the publishing record to the tenure decision is the esteem in which a scientist is held by colleagues here, as demonstrated by the five to 15 or more letters of evaluation solicited on the candidate's behalf by the department or dean. Spang of Texas A&M notes that a good letter "draws comparisons and is several pages long. Just saying, `So and so is the best student I ever had' is not very helpful." Better, Spang says, is for an evaluator to "take a paper or two and say what the really salient points are and why it's important to the field." Such letters, he says, take on added importance when university-wide committees weigh in with their tenure recommendations. FSU's Gilmer says, "The farther outside your field a person is, the greater reliance there is on outside letters." When the MIT physics department solicits letters on a candidate's behalf, Birgeneau says, a list of eight or 10 peers of the candidate is sent to the evaluators, who are asked to compare the candidate to them. "I don't mind one or two negative letters, because if a person is good enough it's likely they've offended somebody," Birgeneau says. The ability to secure outside funding for research plays a large role in some departments and none at all in others, according to scientists interviewed. James Maher, chairman of the University of Pittsburgh's physics department, notes that scientists can expect to receive a more critical review in a grant application than they might in an outside letter to a tenure committee. "Grants used to be a stamp of approval," says Lubchenko, "but now that funds are lacking, lack of a grant no longer means the same thing"--and thus is no longer quite as damaging to a candidate's tenure status. Prestigious grants, such as an award from the National Science Foundation, are a "good indication of ability, that the community thinks the recipient is doing cutting-edge research," says geologist Spang. But, he cautions, "you can't put too much emphasis on grants, or you're letting NSF determine tenure decisions." Almost unanimously, the scientists interviewed for this story say that they tried to ignore a tenure candidate's personality when making a decision to support the candidacy or not. Some acknowledge that a person who hinders the work of the department would have trouble getting tenure. But "one of the reasons tenure exists is so people can be obstreperous," Spang says. On the other hand, as MIT's Birgeneau puts it, "If a person has a very annoying personality, he or she had better be very good." Billy Goodman is a freelance science writer based in Upper Montclair, N.J.

Tenure Committees Seek Out Science Faculty `Better Than We Are'

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