Re: [asa] DI Professor: 'Religion' behind tenure dispute

 
In a message dated 7/14/2007 9:40:39 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
alexanian@uncw.edu writes:

1)Faculty members are hired with tenure, which means what you have done
prior to the present appointment does indeed count and it should.

Faculty members are only hired with tenure if they already have a good
record as a faculty member somewhere else (or occasionally a distinguished record
in industry). At least that is the way it works at "research" universities
which is what a place like Iowa State would consider itself.
The relevant point here is that *pre-faculty* work, like papers as a grad
student, is not generally a significant factor because for tenure they want to
see research *leadership*, and work done under others who are providing the
intellectual leadership does not demonstrate that.

3) To me the main thing is to do scientific work and not necessarily bring
in money. I would rather have a faculty member who does good research without
getting grants rather than have someone that may get grants but administers
them or gets little accomplished with that grant support. Of course, I am a
practicing scientist and not a greedy university administrator.

May your tribe increase!
Unfortunately, the "greedy university administrators" have a lot of say. My
faculty friends tell me that, at most mid-level universities, the pressure
to bring in external funding is heavy. It isn't just greed; the bigwigs want
to enhance their university's reputation and pull themselves up to the level
of Berkeley and MIT, and external funding is easily measured ("what gets
measured, gets rewarded"). How big a factor the pressure for external funding is
at Iowa State I don't know, but if they are typical for a mid-level state
university, it is probably significant.

 
Allan (ASA Member)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Boulder, Colorado | SteamDoc@aol.com
"Any opinions expressed here are mine, and should not be
attributed to my employer, my wife, or my cat"

************************************** Get a sneak peak of the all-new AOL at
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Jul 15 00:16:20 2007