Today is an exciting day as I’m so happy to announce my latest book will be published in early July. “How to Get Tenure: Strategies for Successfully Navigating the Process” will be published by Routledge. I can’t wait to get this book out there for people to read and I hope it will help demystify the tenure process. Over the next few weeks leading up to the launch, I will share more details about the book. In today’s post, I want to provide some details of the book and my motivations for writing it.
Why Did I Write This Book?
Years later [after receiving tenure], I find myself directing my university’s teaching center and thinking about the current state of pre-tenure faculty. As part of my role, I spend a lot of time meeting with, mentoring, and discussing tenure issues with assistant professors across campus. Through these discussions, I hear about the many challenges pre-tenure faculty face today. Some of these are the same as those I faced, while others are different given the current context of higher education. In this book, I hope to bring together my experience as a researcher of higher education, as a faculty member who survived the tenure process, and as someone who works regularly with assistant professors. My goal is to provide strategies and information based on the most recent literature on faculty and higher education, in order for pre-tenure faculty to be successful in their pursuit of tenure. There are multiple books on tenure that provide advice and suggestions for pre-tenure faculty. These resources can be extremely beneficial, and I reference many of them throughout the chapters here. As a scholar of higher education, however, I also realize that many of these books fail to leverage the growing higher education research base to benefit faculty across a variety of disciplines on campus.
Book Description
Helping assistant professors and pre-tenure faculty balance competing obligations in teaching, research, and service, this comprehensive book explores the challenging path toward tenure. Drawing from research literature on faculty development, pedagogy, and psychology, How to Get Tenure covers topics such as productivity, research agendas, publication, service, and preparing a dossier. Whether read from beginning to end or used as a reference, this book provides clear, concrete, and accessible advice on the most effective and efficient strategies for navigating the inherent ambiguity of the tenure process, tackling the challenges and complexity of the tenure track, and building a strong case for tenure.
Book Review
“How to Get Tenure is a wise, generous, and informed book that will benefit not only pre-tenure faculty, but also all of those who support and evaluate them. I wish I had this book when I was undergoing the tenure process; I would have benefited enormously from both its practical recommendations and its clear presentation of what can seem like a byzantine, mysterious process to tenure candidates.”
―James M. Lang, Professor of English and Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence, Assumption College
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
eResources
Part I: Learning the Rules of the Road
Chapter 1: What is Tenure?
Chapter 2: The Basics of Productivity
Part II: Planning Your Route
Chapter 3: Scholarship and Academic Publishing
Chapter 4: Teaching
Chapter 5: Service
Part III: Arriving at the Destination
Chapter 6: Going Up for Tenure
Chapter 7: What’s Next
