Tag Archives: tenure

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Developing a research agenda

Your research agenda plays a critical role in designing and planning your scholarly research and publication activities. Establishing your research agenda means deciding which research areas you will explore and the methodologies you will employ, then letting these guide your research activities. As we have all probably heard from our own graduate school professors, it is impossible to study everything in your field, and you must focus on topics that prove interesting to you and present solid publishing opportunities. Tenure committees generally like andriol bodybuilding to see assistant professors establish a consistent line of research or a few complementary lines of research, comprising their research agenda. Because of this, you should avoid a scattershot approach to research by developing a clear agenda and following it in your scholarly activities. In today’s post, I will describe the value of a research agenda and how to go about developing a research agenda.

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The Tenure Decision Process

The tenure decision process varies from university to university. However, there are some general guidelines and levels of review that you will frequently find at many institutions. In today’s post, I provide a broad overview of what you should expect from the tenure decision process at most universities.

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Types of Academic Service for Faculty

There are two primary ways to categorize types of faculty service (Fear & Sandmann, 1995; O’Meara, Terosky, & Neumann, 2008; Ward, 2003). First, there are service activities that take place on campus at the departmental, school, or institutional level. These local activities tend to focus on operations necessary to getting things done on campus. Second, professional service activities include those with professional organizations, scholarly journals, and other activities that support the work of the discipline. In today’s post, I want to share the two types of service that are critical for higher education and playing the important role as academic citizen.

 

Types of Academic Service for Faculty

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How to Get Tenure Preface

The initial reaction to my new book, How to Get Tenure:  Strategies for Successfully Navigating the Process, has been enthusiastic and I am excited for its publication. Several people have asked me about the purpose of the book and what all I discuss in it. The tenure process can be such a mysterious black box that there was a great deal of ground to cover with the book. For today’s post, I thought it would be helpful to share an excerpt from the Preface that gives some more details about the book and what I discuss in the various chapters.

How to Get Tenure Preface

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The tenure process can vary dramatically based on the type of institution (i.e. a teaching or research university), the nature of the discipline, the culture of the academic department, and personal circumstances. I have written this book to be broadly applicable to faculty pursuing tenure in any college or university. Where differences may occur based on particular circumstances, I note these and provide some ideas for the reader to determine what is most appropriate in a particular case. The examples used throughout this book are drawn from research conducted in many different contexts, as well as from my own experiences. As the reader, you will be best able to apply the ideas in this book when considering your local context and the peculiarities of your own path to 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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