Are any of the astronomy people here on this blog able to comment on the quality of Gonzalez’s professional work ?

If Gonazalez’s professional work is regarded as good, would the Iowa State denial of tenure be most likely based on hostility to his religious beliefs ?

Should religious beliefs be relevant to tenure decisions in astronomy ?

I know that this is Mark’s post and that Mark and Sean have strong views against religion, but (from their point of view) couldn’t this be a case such as the ACLU defending the rights of the USA Nazi Party to expression of free speech ?

Tony Smith

I realized that there are certain set of criteria that I need to satisfy to secure money from an agency like NSF in either astronomy or physics divisions, though none of these are fully spelled out in some guide book. Over the years, I slowly moved away from what I used to do (mostly astrophysics theory) to start new projects within large groups and to analyze data. I have managed to publish more because of these new projects, but also supervise a large group of students and postdocs now. My third year as a faculty, I was able to go back to NSF again and lay out my whole research program in a new proposal and managed to secure one of the top grants for junior faculty. Beyond NSF, I now have funding from various other agencies to support multiple postdocs and students. Finally, I am up for an early tenure decision this year. While I regret not getting funds right away as a junior faculty, as some of my colleagues elsewhere did, I have no complaints of my experience so far. I believe it is challenging, but I never blamed neither diminishing research money at funding agencies, the politics in this country, nor the lack of knowledge of review panels to comment on my proposals as the reason why I was not funded. It is clear that best research will eventually get funded some way or another. The challenge is to figure out how to do best research, as we all know in a highly competitive field.

In some way, I am also glad that I didn’t get lots of research money right away since it allowed me to figure out on my own how to be an effective researcher. In my opinion, the tenure process is just right for somebody like me to adapt to changing research directions, funding priorities of national agencies, and to learn politics of doing funded research. I believe universities provide lots of freedom and large startup packages just because of these reasons. If you are a student or a postdoc reading this and are discouraged by the thoughts of troubles as a junior faculty in an academic job, I suggest you reconsider. For every person who is complaining, I bet there must be at least another ten to twenty who are happy with their research, funding, and the support they received from their department and university while a junior faculty. If you have a clear plan, it is hard to fail. If you do good research that impact others, I do not think funding agencies and your peers either at your institution or elsewhere want you to fail. There is a support structure, though it may be hidden. While I felt like I wasted two or more years writing proposals and not papers, at the end, I knew back then I had and I know now that I have the best job in the world and would not trade it for anything else.

If you want a different system, then persuade voters to vote for candidates who wish send more of their taxes to research funding. Except, of course, that would probably cause a further expansion in the number of researchers in the end, with institutions coming to enjoy and eventually expect the additional funds, the ability to attract which would remain as an employment and tenure criterion and, when funds again contracted, a bunch of people would end up being screwed (and that makes sense, in part because there’d no longer be money to support them all).

I don’t think that universities work the way that they do because of some misapprehension of how research works, or an explicit rejection of the ideals that many researchers have, but just because, one way or another, the system works in the majority of cases. If market forces change, maybe the system will, but unless researchers start working for free with donated equipment, there’s always going to be an eye on the money, both from the spending and the giving sides.

They are on some level like almost everything, and like most things that doesn’t mean they should be run like one (and not just that it should be run according to some non standard business plan).

The point of a University is not to generate as much research as possible per amount of money. The very way that statement is phrased is wrong and harmful. It suggests a completely wrong and unnatural perspective, that is fundamentally counterproductive!

Basically what I’m saying is that just because everything can be phrased in terms of economy doesn’t mean everything should!

The malaise of our time if there ever was one.

This is all part of that “universities should be run like a business” idea which I think is a bit of a cancer.

Professors are hired because of their ability to do research and (hopefully) their ability to teach. Universities are more than development offices. Bean counting the bottom line and valuing most the people who bring in the most money is missing what the real criteria ought to be.

Given that research is expensive, I don’t see any alternative to acknowledging that Universities are, in fact, a business. They don’t have to be run like WALMART, because they’re working on a substantially different business model, but they’re competing with other universities for employees and customers (and, additionally, putting a lot of effort into extracting money from alumni) and the more money they get, the better a university they can run, getting better employees and students by using some of the money to create a more attractive experience for those people. Yes, professors are hired to do reseach and teach; doing research with grant money benefits the university more than doing the same research without the grant money (even when it can be done without grant money); how much more valuable is the researcher who better attracts grant money, well, that’s going to be contextual, but it’s a decision that the University, at some level (down to Department or even research group, I guess) has to make.

It seems to me that one can easily be unhappy with the process by which grants are awarded without denying the fact that the funds skimmed for overhead are used to maintain or improve the university and, therefore, that bringing in those funds makes you a more valuable employee. At some level, universities do have to be understanding, because figures show that not everyone is getting the grants; it may be (although I am not making anything so bold as a claim to truth) that your institution has adopted an approach towards that funding that is inappropriate with respect to the chances of getting funding that their astronomy employees have (based, at least in part, on the amount of telescope access that they have arranged), in which case, yes, you are getting screwed for something that is statistically likely to be beyond your control.

Of course, they could just be talking it up because they want you out for some other reason (although I don’t see why they would do that, given that they have oodles of ways to refuse tenure to people if they want to), but otherwise, maybe you are in the wrong national system. You could always try, say, applying to UK universities, I suppose. Not the same tenure system at all, but neither is there the same focus on attracting big research grants (although, to be clear, a big research grant never hurt anyone’s research).

How many more people need to go through personal hell before “by and large” becomes not good enough, and we admit that there is something seriously flawed about the process?

If history is a guide, this will only happen after the system is replaced by a new and better system. Many Russian officials/politicians of today would have told you in the 1980s that despite some flaws, the communist system was “by and large” working reasonably well.

People tend to compare the system under question to no system at all, and not to a hypothetical better system.

“A frog in a well shaft seeing the sky” (chinese proverb).

If it serves as a consolation, we should realise that almost everyone go through some private hell at some period of their lives. So whoever you are, you are not alone.

Well, “it’s a simple equation”: too many (excellent) people for very very very limited positions. And what defines who is really the “most excellent” is given above by the simple counting formula. So that’s it and the game is over for almost everyone.

(A caveat: those who get high citations *tend to be* those well known in conferences and in the community: those who have a high social capital. So if you work your path with this in mind you might increase your chances. But still, it is not certain. There are many many many people better than you on this, who have very early realised the importance of social capital.).

What to do?

Try to be happy doing something else. And read the stoics. You have only one life and it is unwise to suffer for so long.

Best regards and good luck to all in the same boat.

Christine

Julianne, I hadn’t thought about the big projects - I am very familiar with the history and evolution of the Chandra x-ray telescope but not other big space projects. Chandra was all private industry at first, as was all of x-ray astronomy (late 1960s?), but there must be many more that were conceived of by tenured professors who were able to see them through. I do know that the Chandra people had to do all kinds of amazing things to keep the project funded, that might not be feasible if you were busting your chops to publish for tenure - i.e. printing out information sheets and running down to D.C. to talk to senators and committees and calling everyone and their mother to ask politicians not to cut funding (as they did over and over again). But also, Chandra was a 20 year journey. Most of the movers and shakers were research scientists or professors doing other things most of the time.

I’ll look into the big projects, I’m curious about who starts what and when, for my own edification…for instance I don’t even know how Hubble got started, I think COBE was Berkeley professors (although one junior guy, Lubin), the supernova project was professors and some younger academics (Rob Knop, appropriately enough)…anyway, it’s a very good point, grazie!

But drama is an important part of their game.
(And you will never experience road rage in Italy)

But no one needs to be told to “calm down” and “stop taking things personally,” it wasn’t a hysterical thing.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there has been a single moment in the History of Humanity when someone has calmed down or stopped taking something personally because they were told to.

To add to the anecdata, I had a painless tenure process. But, I was fortunate enough to have some good results in the previous years, a good funding situation (thanks partially to lots of how-to-write-proposal training from colleagues), a long history of great mentors stretching back to my undergraduate years, and a fair bit of equinamity that I’d land on my feet if it didn’t work out (i.e. husband with a job, supportive family, no health issues, etc). The whole undergrad+grad+postdoc+professor track worked just like it’s supposed to, with no egregiously unfair obstacles. However, I’m not ignorant that it’s not always like that, and that good people suffer mightily sometimes for reasons outside their control. In addition, the same set of circumstances can be more or less debilitating for different people, depending on background and temperment. Everyone deserves to have the process go smoothly, and I doubt that the system is yet optimal. Worse, the system often works in a nasty feedback loop, where unhappy people get less done (which has been one of Rob’s points about the tenure process destroying the productivity of young talented scientists).

As to Jennifer’s points about what tenure does, for me it’s allowed me to pursue larger multi-year projects that I couldn’t pull off pre-tenure. There are many important scientific advances that come after someone has spent years fighting to launch satellites, or build new instruments, or shepherd new telescopes/experiments. You can rarely make those kinds of critical investments before tenure.

Well, I suspect we’re thinking about a much larger sample - that of all the people we’ve known in the field. At least, that’s what I was guided by in my post.

How many more people need to go through personal hell before “by and large” becomes not good enough, and we admit that there is something seriously flawed about the process?

Just asking. Please do not interpret this question as a personal insult; I’m not sure exactly what I said earlier that was interpreted as a personal insult, but it’s clear that this is an amazingly touchy subject.

Bzzzt, wrong. To quote Rob, “REALLY pissed off, by the way. Hell with this place.”

Sounds pretty hysterical and calm-down-worthy to me.

There isn’t any need to patronize Rob for making that assumption. In fact I thought the same when I read JoAnne’s comment. Now it is clear that he and I were both wrong. But no one needs to be told to “calm down” and “stop taking things personally,” it wasn’t a hysterical thing. It was an incorrect assumption.

For what it is worth, I think the tenure system works in one way, which is that it tends to give the most productive people permanant positions. Productive is defined to be highest quantity of papers with high citations. Many papers without citations doesn’t cut it, and few papers with many citations usually doesn’t cut it (unless you’ve done something really groundbreaking).

If you want to know why a person did or did not get tenure, or was on the bubble, all you have to do is check their publications. Period. Did they write many papers every year with high citations. Sean took a year off from publishing to write a text book. No publications for a year at Chicago, no tenure. It’s a simple equation.

I think the tenure process weeds out some of the most creative people, who can do the groundbreaking work. It also can suppress creativity in the rest of the population. In my opinion that loss is very important, which is why I think there shouldn’t be any such thing as tenure.

People say that tenure gives faculty intellectual freedom and the ability not to be penalized for working on new ideas or ideas that turn out to be unfruitful. My guess is that just the opposite happens, that it is the younger scientists who come up with the best ideas, that go in totally new directions.

But I could be wrong. But I hope we can keep the discussion on topic, and try to be as sensitive as possible to people on both sides of the fence.

For what it is worth, I’m grateful to Rob for sharing his experience, and I’m sorry to JoAnne that he and I took her comment the wrong way. I really believe it was an innocent mistake (I’m never been in tenure-track academia, I’ve no axe to grind) and not a twisting or turning of words.

All the best,
Jennifer