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The three processes of tenure

While we often refer to the tenure process as if it is a single process that assistant professors undergo, the reality is the tenure process constitutes three interrelated streams that work both together and at cross purposes. The tenure process is comprised of a legal process, a peer review process, and a political process. This idea is foundational to understanding tenure and how I approach the subject in How to Get Tenure:  Strategies for Successfully Navigating the Process. In this excerpt, I discuss the three processes and how they influence various aspects of the pre-tenure years.

The three processes of tenure

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Why we have tenure in higher education

If you’re going to write a book entitled How to Get Tenure, you are going to get a lot of comments about how tenure is ruining higher education. Even among faculty and certainly administrators, there is this sense that tenure is the cause of many of the problems facing higher education. While tenure is no doubt imperfect and I don’t need to rehash the criticisms here as they are well-known, there are numerous important aspects to tenure. In the excerpt below, I address these benefits and how they influence higher education.

Why we have tenure in higher education

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My tenure origin story…

Hero origin stories are all the rage these days. It seems the prequel is the most popular genre for Hollywood these days. As I began working on How to Get Tenure:  Strategies for Successfully Navigating the Process, I thought back a great deal to my time on the tenure track. I begin the book by discussing the day that I found out that I was receiving tenure. It not only seemed appropriate to begin here, but in many ways the book comes directly from my own experiences. I have tried hard in the book to merge my own experiences with the higher education scholarship to provide a practical guide for pre-tenure faculty. My last day as a pre-tenure faculty members is the origin story for How to Get Tenure.

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Exciting Announcement!

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.

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What is unit of analysis and why is it important for qualitative dissertations

All researchers must deal with questions related to their unit of analysis and the related idea of unit of observation. Unit of analysis helps the researcher define what is being studied as well as what aspects are being studied. For dissertations, the importance of this concept is that it provides guardrails to know what is in the scope of your dissertation and what is outside the bounds of what you are examining. More specifically, the unit of analysis describes the level at which you are conducting your study. Are you researching states, universities, schools/colleges, departments, presidents, deans, professors, or students just to name a few levels. If you determine that you are studying universities, this leads to a different focus than if you are studying departments. In this post, I will describe unit of analysis and why it is important for qualitative dissertations.

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