Does tenure need to change?

dear sir
i have written a new contemprory theory on cosmo physics. i want to send to you.

I think tenure track looks like insured box, once you get in, you don't have to work hard.
Not every scientist works for science, some work for money, life,or personal desires. I called them a pseudoscientists.To have tenure track is good for these pseudoscientist. For real scientists, having tenure track or not is the same.

It would benefit the scientific community as a whole to see financial and career incentives offered for good mentoring (getting your postdocs into jobs they keep). Additionally, the younger members of the scientific process, hit hardest by the tenure structure, require more support than the system currently offers to thrive without the conflict of interest attached to industry money. This may mean creating staff positions for the brunt of the research workforce and developing realistic projections of the number of PI level scientists accepted into training positions. In my estimation, we are training far too many PhD level researchers because this provides a number of people who work hard, suffer long hours, write their own papers and don?t get paid well under the guise of ?training?. However, this creates a real bottleneck that is exacerbated by the current tenure structure, since postdocs and junior faculty are most affected.

I think that the idea of tenure is a great idea, and, in most cases, works well. However, I have had a few professors who have told the class, point blank, "I can do whatever I want - I have tenure. I can ignore the departmental rules because I have tenure". Mind you, these have been the cases in just a few of the professors that I've had in undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. I think that the best possible change would be to limit the idea that tenure allows anything to happen. The stability aspect is great, but professors should not feel as though they are immune from the University's or college's rules.

I was tenured and, sadly, left for personal reasons. It was a great feeling to know that I had job security. Further, let me relate tenure to the peer review process. Tenure helps to keep peer review standards high. It gives the reviewer the needed security to fairly and strictly judge others' work without the pressure to accept a manuscript whose findings may constitute a basis for corporate ventures that are increasingly important to academic institutions...

Anyone who wants to get rid of tenure should remember the days of Joe McCarthy who was trying to get into the University system to "get rid of all the communists there". Tenure thus saved our best scholars.

Even before McCarthy, anyone who was suspicious of being a communist was reason enough to fire a Professor. In fact the tenure system was initiated throughout the U.S. because a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh was fired because he was believed to be a communist -- and he was not.

Every University then inaugurated the tenure system as a safeguard for free speech by the academic community.

It is bad enough that a government can rewrite EPA documents to please industry before distribution. Think what fun they would have if tenure was not present in the University system.

Some high impact factor journals are somehow lobbistic in publishing articles of unknown scientists. Thus, it is difficult for a young scientist to enter the pathway for publishing their papers in certain journals, unless they come from a scientific school that already has an opened way to those journals.
Moreover, certain journals publish mainly the results of a very expensive kind of research, and at present in some nations, the scientists have very good research, but very low funding. Thus this good research remains undiscovered by the scientific world, because it is published in scarcely diffused journals

it is more and more difficult to meet the approval of referees: why?
The evaluators seem to become lesser and lesser tolerant, and very often reject paper cause of their own basic errors. This is because science has at present so many branches that it is very easy to be completely ignorant about some of them, and completely unable to understand the work of people dealing with similar (but not same) topics

Thank you to everyone who posted comments on this subject, we've been amazed with the response and the many interesting issues that you've raised. Please do keep the conversation flowing, and stay tuned for our September issue where you can read, and of course comment on, the feature that you helped to create.

Thanks and best wishes,

The Scientist staff

It is a great problem when so many prople in positions of power in academia routinely find a way to add their names to work where they had almost no input of intellectual product. It is a greater problem when students and new graduates routinely offer intellectual input into research projects, only to find their name left off of the published paper.

Placing such a high value on citations provides the motive for that practice to be perpetuated. The qualities that make someone a good teacher and mentor take a back seat to abilities that can make a person look good on paper.

What has happened to the concept that teachers should primarely be in learning institutes in order to teach?

Tenure cannot be made to depend on the importance of a scientist's discoveries, simply because that importance is often fully realized only many years later.

Hi,

Tenure is one way to help honest people to work hard (academic) without worrying about the next year employment.

We need to ensure that a professor that has one or more grants has also the time to do her/his research. We need an academic standard for the basic level of the teaching load in our Canadian universities (which is very different from one university to other) with additional release proportional to her/his grant level.

Regards,

First tenure should only be granted to those who have proven and documented track of research and scholarship. It should not be granted by a committee that grants tenure through back door (No dossier ever submitted, No peer evaluation ever considered).
Impact of a scientist / teacher should be measured by the product (students/graduate students trained) and their honest evaluation of their mentor
Of course good publications / scholarly reviews and other regional/national/international recognition should be considered.
Impact of work done by the researcher should be considered not just the volume of work. We see hundreds of papers written on insulin resistance for instance. But not a single work has translated into any revolutionary treatment for diabetes that is superior to any existing old therapies. To me therefore, impact factor for research in insulin resistance would be zero.
On the other hand research that has yielded newer insulin analogues have had huger impact on diabetes management. Its impact factor would be 5 on a scale of 1-5.

While citations and grants are quantitative measures that university administrators and faculty committees may use to evaluate scientists for tenure decisions, they skew the view of what a true scientist and faculty member worthy of tenure should be.

Should a university give tenure to a scientist who develops an important method used and cited by others, but who does not care about the careers of graduate students and post-docs in his/her lab and makes them compete against each other for his/her own benefit?

Should a university grant tenure to a scientist who brings in lots of grant money, but does not interact collegially with fellow faculty members, and does not care about the quality of his/her lectures to
undergraduates?

If bringing in grant funding is a criterion for tenure, the majority of tenure-track scientists would be in trouble. The former president of the National Academy of Sciences, Bruce Alberts wrote in the February 2007 American Society for Cell Biology Newsletter: ?Even the best peer-review system cannot reliably distinguish between a research
proposal in the top 10 percent and one in the top 15 percent. Thus, the careers of outstanding researchers can be terminated through bad luck in a chance selection process-one that resembles a game of Russian roulette.? Under these conditions, it would be absurd and not in the best interest of universities to base tenure decisions on grant funding.

I would suggest the following criteria for tenure for research scientists (not in any order of significance):

1. Consistent productivity in terms of presentations at meetings and primary publications

2. Publication of reviews and book chapters

3. Pursuit of significant research topics

4. Dedication to mentoring undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and fostering their careers

5. Taking undergraduate teaching seriously and inspiring undergraduates

6. Funded grants and grant applications with favorable and improving reviews

7. Citations

8. Fostering a collegial atmosphere of collaboration and learning at the university, and being respectful of faculty and students

9. Pursuing collaborative work with other scientists if possible

10. Reviewing manuscripts from journals and grant applications from granting agencies

A combination of these criteria are likely to identify scientist who are truly dedicated to their science and to the well-being of the university and the next generation of scientists. Mere attention to citations and grants will not identify such individuals.

I would also suggest that tenured faculty be reviewed every 5 years to provide constructive feedback and to express the expectations of the university in case the faculty member is perceived as being non-productive.

Tenure is a good idea if exceptional. At present, it supports a lot of tenured scientists who do not contribute to scientific discoveries and, even worse, to good teaching.

Metric is inevitable and there are enough metrics (papers, citation, funding, ?) to guide evaluation. Now, I should not add more metric. On the contrary, I should strength the rational analyses of the claimed discoveries and the reliability of the results. Excess of metric shadows the need to assume the responsibility of arguments and probably contributes to the lost of scientist confidence on the power of reasoning.

Yes. The evaluation of a scientist must be exclusively the evaluation of his discoveries and/or his contribution to one discovery. One reviewer must decline evaluation responsibility if he does not find himself competent to discuss reported discoveries in one specific field.

Yes. Truly, reviewers must focus on citations but that is not their main role. Within each field, everybody can today identify the most cited papers. The main role of reviewers is to identify new fields and new ideas within a field and discuss them critically.

Why cannot we include also the contribution that every scientist does to the well-being, the quality of life and the human development? The science must reach the general public and not to remain only in the academic area... the problem is how to do it...

Over the last 40 or so years in the UK at least I have seen the terms and conditions of employment of scientific staff become more onerous and tenure become a more and more distant dream.
On the other hand the administrative staff in scientific establishments have enjoyed significant improvements in their employment conditions. They have increased their pay, carreer prospects and status. It seems sometimes that the function of a research institute is to provide employment for more and better paid administration staff.
Research, by its very nature needs to be done by the brightest and best. The carreer structure for researchers is lilkely to be:- Degree, PhD, three year Post Doc, three to five year extension followed by rejection for tenure. Unemployment and carreer change at age thirty or so then follow. No wonder promising researchers opt. for accountancy and other highly paid and safe occupations and are lost to science.

From Osher Doctorow Ph.D.

In my other two postings, I've expressed opposition to tenure and suggested that it be replaced by fixed unrenewable 5-year contracts because of the lack of Creative Geniuses and the over-abundance of Ingenious Imitators.

If we must have tenure, however, then I would suggest making it very difficult and based on research Creative Genius as follows, using as examples my fields of mathematics/statistics and physics.

1. The vast majority of scientific papers make small modifications to somebody else's theory and should not be grounds for tenure.

2. Tenure should only be granted for Original Theories with at least considerable experimental and/or observational support, at roughly the level of Creative Genius of the Nobel Prize in physics or the Nobel Prize in economics which several mathematicians have won.

3. Only a few USA universities (roughly 10) consistently produce works of Creative Genius in mathematics and physics, including Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, U. Texas Austin, U. Florida northern branches (including Gainesville), CalTech, MIT, U. Virginia, George Mason U. of Fairfax Virginia, West Point. Three universities are close behind, namely Johns Hopkins U. and U. Maryland, both of Maryland, and Rutgers U. of New Jersey. This is not based on "popularity" or "reputation" among mathematicians or physicists but rather my analysis of published papers in arXiv and Front for the Mathematics ArXiv.

4. No USA university other than those in 3 above should have tenure for faculty in mathematics or physics, though the Institute for Advanced Study for Princeton (located on the Princeton campus but independent of it) definitely meets the criteria for tenure.

Osher Doctorow

I am one of these few scientists who has actually pioneered an area - anaerobic bacteria, human intestinal microbiota - which is now becoming very fashionable. The problem for young scientists is that it is not just the emphasis on the number of publications but the identity of the journal. I never submit to Science or Nature because I don't like country club science, but even if I had it is unlikely that my articles would have been accepted because the field was not yet "hot". Now it is, and the second generation is publishing in Science and Nature. I am concerned that young scientists are being pushed into fashionable areas to the exclusion of the pioneer areas. If no one is out there in the tents and mud, where are the Hilton hotels of the future going to come from? So, I would like to see some consideration given to what the young scientist is tryiing to accomplish, not just to the "impact" of the journals in which they publish.

In the 1660's Isaac Barrow resigned from the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Cambridge U. because he saw that one of his pupils would make more glorious contributions from that post. Namely, ISAAC NEWTON.
Maybe we need an Isaac Barrow Society whose members will pledge to retire and make room for a successor as soon as they see one on the near horizon..
If oil companies can force top managers to retire at 62 and senior airline pilots are subject to similar rules, maybe tenured professors should follow similar rules--maybe do a more relaxed and informal sort of research after 62 -as long as they can still cut the mustard. (at ANOTHER VENU?)

No.

As scientific research is scientists' profession, I believe that the citation rate is a fair tool to evaluate scientists' tenure track. The question is what is the realistic standard. Not every one is competing with the same resources and in the same level.

Tenure should be reviewed every five years to ensure value for money for the organization. If scientists do not perform research, they will not be up to date teachers. If they want to slow down they should be willing to accept lower salaries.

Tenure is a great idea and prevents an administrator who has a problem (personal or profesional) from capriciously firing a productive individual. On the otherhand, periodic reviews (every 5) years are absolutly necessary to keep that small minority of faculy who might choose to "coast" for 10 to 20 years from doing so. Such individuals will be much more productive as a result of periodic tenure reviews.

I think thorough 7 year review after getting tenure should occur. The process would be similar to the tenure process

One problem with raw citation counts and grant money is that these over-reward "me-too" research at the expense of really original stuff, which may take a while to be recognized.

The classic example is the work of Gregor Mendel, on classic genetics. This only picked up a dozen or so citations in its first three decades. Another example is the discovery of highly conductive oxidized polypyrrole by Weiss and his co-workers in the early 1960's. This was so poorly cited that its rediscovery with oxidized polyacetylene in the 1970's won a Nobel prize.

ref: R McNeill, R Siudak, JH Wardlaw and DE Weiss, Electronic Conduction in Polymers. I. The Chemical Structure of Polypyrrole. Australian Journal of Chemistry, 1963 16: 1056-89.

One of the great challenges for many Universities in the 21st Century is to become "Engines of Economic Change" for their respective States and regions. It is impossible to do this without signicantly modifying the tenure system to include a heavy weight on the generation of usable patents. While citations further the advancement of science, patents further the advancement of inudstry and are most directly related to altering the economic competitiveness of a region, state or the country. It may be that two tenure tracks are needed, one with an emphasis on citations and one on patents to both encourage the furtherance of basic knowledge and putting that knowledge to practical use as quickly as possible.

I feel that tenure necessary in order to enable faculty to deal with administrators in setting college and departmental policies. Departments can remove nonperforming tenure faculty if they have developed clear performance standards and the will to enforce them. I think it is a common misconception to think that tenured faculty can't be fired. All that is needed id due process and just cause.

A scientist purely judged according to his publication record is not acceptable anymore, since all science needs to deal with social issues, since we are producing lots of wicked problems with some social components. There are many ways of measuring social competence, but the best one is a good talk with the candidates on science AND their personal believes and views. Another possibility to get a clearer picture on a candidates social competence is the quality of his own teaching - ask the students!!
This does not mean that a brilliant science record with a focus on innovative papers should not play the primary role.

Yes if persons using the citations are outside the discipline.

The number of citations is very important, if nobody cited your work, it proved to be nearly useless, well, nearly, not totally, simply it was not so important to be included in your paper, like many other uncited papers, which also helped you, e.g. to avoid some research direction, some mistake, or simply such that did not so much to deserve citation. Probably finally citation is more important than the impact factor itself. Nevertheless, none of these should be the only criterion for evaluating a scientist, like is often done. And the dynamics of the number of citations is dependent on topic, in e.g. insect, environmental or plant research it can show a maximum 5 years after publication, while in some fields already 2 years. So the time range for evaluation is a factor that must be carefully selected. And especially the IF depends on the number of scientists employed in the field. The evaluation is never totally fair, but unless each paper is evaluated in comparison with the proper cluster of journals, in the same field (median of impact factors, upper 30 %, or so), it may be highly unfair.

Tenure problems are the tip of the iceberg. The entire structure of "higher" education is now in question. The enormous time lags and "make work" academics have made higher education so unresponsive to changing technology that it is fast becoming irrelevant.
An example is the Cisco Academies. They had to be developed because universities insisted on a four year program taught by Phd's who knew nothing about networking. With an average career life of 18 months, a four year degree is an oxymoron.

The whole idea of tenure from the beginning was to provide protection for academics (i.e. teachers and scholars) who might have opinions and arguments that do not suit those in power. There are many and some unpredictable areas of sensitivity that may bring public pressure on institutions as well as on the individual academic. I remember one local event involving research on the relative intellectual capability of various races of mankind; there was much trouble even if the work was well respected. Modern-day scientists seem to be less inclined to speakout on matters of general butcontested import but those that do need and deserve protection. Informed public discussion and debate is important to the maintaining a place for man in natures world. T enure may embarass some and seem irrelevant but they should be persuaded that it has its place and it is a necessity.

Several years ago, I worked at a new university that was founded without tenure. They considered it an "experiment" in building a university that would be more flexible in meeting the needs of the community it served. You know... if a major business moved out of the area and there was a sudden glut of grads in that field, you could simply cut the program and reallocate those resources.

As a young, idealistic, inexperienced scientist, I felt relatively immune to this. After all, I thought... If I do a good job, they'll want to keep me. More to the point, *my* field will always be needed since it's biomedical in nature.

Shortly after we opened, however, the effects of non-tenured contracts became obvious. The administration suddenly started "discontinuing" various positions, and thus the people in those jobs were let go. They said we didn't need that position any longer, though the growth rate in those areas was off the charts. To attentive observers it was obvious that there was a strong correlation between discontinued positions and disagreements with administrators. In other words... stand up for yourself, your students, or your research, and you're likely to be sent packing.

Over a very brief period, our new, idealistic university had become a haven for croneyism. Faculty members who supported administrators in disputes with the collective faculty were granted favors, prime lab space, larger labs, reduced teaching loads, and more! While faculty members who fought to ensure quality teaching, equitable work loads, and so on were... ahem... discontinued. I managed to leave before being "discontinued," but it was clear to me that I would not likely survive the expiration of my contract after a dispute errupted between me and a colleague who'd been a better yes man than I had been.

It's the integrity of the institution that tenure protects, not the jobs of a few lazy slobs. Absolutely there will be people who abuse the system, but there are also those that do not, and they play a role in the instiution that is **critical** to the integrity, the success, and the future of each institution. The few abusers are a small price to pay for that.


Lastly, I'd add that evaluation of tenure-track faculty members across fields of science... even just within *biolog* requires an appreciation for diversity within science that's often lacking. When you start to compare the productivity of say a molecular biologist to a behavioral biologist, you really encounter don't have apples and oranges, but apples and... lichens. Their only similarity lies in being biologists. The funding available in theif fields is so vastly different as to not be comparable, the number of journals isn't comparable, the lengths of their papers, the expectations of their peers, etc.... I could go on and on with this. They simply are not the same things.

When we leave the tenure decision to administrators, they tend to boil things down to either grant money or number of publications. In either case, the behavioralist is in trouble and no measure of her work's significance is attempted. That has to be evaluated by peers, and institutions need to recognize that with increasing frequency... some of us have no actual peers within our institution.

How many hours per week does the average scientist work? Let's say, for the sake of argument, 60. How many years does it take to get tenure? Let's say, again for the sake of argument, 10. If the average working week is supposed to be 40 hours, then this means the average scientist, at the time of tenure, is owed about 5 years of either overtime pay or holidays. It's only fair that they take a bit of vacation when tenure finally arrives.

It is my humble opinion that anyone who seriously believes that genius can thrive under conditions where it must be continually distracted by the mundane worries of "bringing home the bacon", has never been touched by the slightest spark of genius.

There is no doubt that for many, tenure is nothing other than a means to "bring home the bacon". But, for the rare genius, is is the means to fully apply his genius, while being spared the inevitably destructive distractions caused by mundane worries.

In the current climate of publish or perish, the number of publications and grants is far too important, and the quality of the work not valued. Numerous scientists in my fields (psychiatry and genetics) have published things that turned out to be false positives and wrong, often knowing at the time of publication that the results are not clear-cut. Yet, currently it is better for a young scientists to have 10 publications of which several are wrong, and others contradict each other, than two solid publications in which more data have been assembled and in where the results stand solid.

I should have mentioned that the Strausses were in waltz music rather than in Classical Music, but the same ideas applied and also in Romance Music (Chopin, etc.).

Shakespeare, arguably the greatest Creative Genius of the English language, wasn't tenured in anything.

Michael Faraday, the old-time Physics Genius in Electricity, was not only untenured but an apprentice without a formal education in Mathematics.

Let's take a look now at some of the possible criteria for evaluating Creative Genius, and why none of them in standard use can really justify Tenure.

Most of the papers in physics and mathematics and astrophysics research, together with large numbers in computers and quantitative biology among others, are found on the internet in arXiv and Front For the Mathematics ArXiv (access them by those keywords).

I've been using arXiv and Front For the Mathematics ArXiv for years and trying to figure out among other things which papers involve Creative Genius, which I've rather frequently reported on the usenet group sci.physics.

Almost all the papers are slight modifications or slight improvements on somebody else's original ideas. If we call that Ingenious Imitation for brevity (ignoring the slight improvements, which obviously add up in the long run), then at least 95% of the papers are productions of Ingenious Imitation. Less than 5% are Creative Genius papers in the almost literal sense of creating a new field, a new subfield, a new discipline, a major new discovery, etc.

Of the Creative Genius papers, only a few universities persistently produce a high percentage of those papers: Princeton, Chicago, Stanford, U. Texas Austin, U. Florida northern branches including Gainesville, U. Virginia, George Mason U. in Fairfax Virginia, CalTech, MIT, and one or two others (U. Maryland and Johns Hopkins U. and Rutgers U. of New Jersey aren't far behind).

Since everybody can't be hired by those few universities, even on the basis of Creative Genius research there are insufficient grounds for Tenure.

The Nobel Prize is also an unreliable criterion. A number of western USA universities tend to hire Nobel Laureates in their departments, but surprisingly enough those Laureates tend to have relatively little influence on the bureaucracies and structures of the departments. Once Tenure sets in, ossification tends to be the rule.

If Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Bach, or even the Johann Strausses had waited for tenure, then there would have been no Classical period of Music. Einstein didn't have tenure during his introduction of Special Relativity, his first of his two important Relativity theories. Pierre de Fermat, who co-discovered Probability theory with Pascal and pioneered in Number Theory which resulted in modern Cryptography, was not only untenured but an amateur Mathematician who predated Sir Isaac Newton in discovering Calculus equations.

The usual explanation of Creative Genius in young people (although it was surprisingly common in old or older people too - Erwin Schrodinger of Quantum Theory, Socrates of Philosophy, etc.) is that their energy and even hormones are active, but an arguably much better explanation is their financial and career instability rather than stability. They are motivated to Create, especially when they have Talent. Tenure tends to eliminate this key factor, both for young and old. And for the less Creative members of Academia and parts of Industry, it tends to create Bureaucracy and Ingenious Imitation in attempting to rise in the tenure ladder.

Shouldn't people like Nobel Prize Winners be rewarded for their efforts by Tenure? Probably not. Most Nobel Prize Winners would arguably continue their research regardless of whether they are recognized or rewarded or not - they have a Knowledge-Orientation which is refreshingly contrary to the usual Materialist Security-Financial-Power-Orientation.

So how will Academic people survive financially if they don't get Tenure? They can still be hired by colleges, but until somebody comes up with a foolproof method of evaluating Creative Genius, they are probably best off being hired with a limited contract such as 4 years or 5 years and then looking for another position. And similarly in Industry.

Basing tenure and/or grant allocations with a heavy bias on citations/journal impact factor is, in my opinion a major influence on the output of exaggerated or even falsified data, which I believe is now becoming an insidious problem in the biological sciences. This is a direct result of putting too much pressure on scientists, who become desperate to publish. It also has a negative effect on the moral of all scientific staff. Many scientists work extremely hard and for long hours (for no extra pay) to try and produce data of high enough quality for good publication. If no publications result, there is currently no mechanism whereby this work can be credited.

A second point that I wish to make is that not all post-doctoral scientists have the skill and/or inclination to become tenure-tracked team leaders. They do however have many valuable skills in the laboratory. Too many of these skilled scientists are being lost and replaced with PhD or post-graduate students - a form of low payed labour that now has a firm root in much of science. A mechanism needs to be put in place whereby a route is opened to post-doctoral staff that would allow them permanent positions without the requirement of becoming team leaders.

The best compromise is renewable contracts. Rather than tenure as a "lifetime employment award", it could be instead a guarantee that (barring gross negligence) a faculty member will at least be employed for the next 4-6 years. This seems fairest to graduate students and postdocs who could use a bit of stability in terms of their mentor staying around to help them finish. Not to mention funding agencies that are considering whether or not it's a wise idea to give you funds to carry out a 3-year project. Mid-term job stability is key, in my opinion, to many different aspects of scientific research. But the idea of lifetime guaranteed employment without requiring and evaluating faculty performance with respect to the people who are paying their salaries is perverse.

Change will only happen when the payers of salaries demand it - students, state regents, federal agencies, etc. In fact, just to play devil's advocate, perhaps we should ask whether or not there really is a problem with the tenure system if there is no outcry from these people to change it. I mean, we all have stories of some professor that (in our opinion) was "deadwood" within a university system, but are these the exception rather than the rule? It seems that this isn't really something that should be left to opinion & anecdote, someone should do a study on how prevalent and costly faculty "deadwood" is.

In a capitalistic society, such as ours (in the USA), all successful endeavors will eventually become an industry. This is now the case for science. For this reason (and out of necessity), in most medical schools and universities money has become of greater importance than scholarly endeavors. Therefore, the tenure process now allows institutions to identify the most productive people (production based on income from grants and contracts). This is especially important for "soft money" institutions where the PIs must bring in most of their salary. For many of these schools tenure provides no protection for scientists that fail to maintain this income. I don't agree with the practice, nor do I think it is necessarilly productive for science in the long run. However, it is most likely here to stay or will be removed altogether in the near future. It's not a matter of what is right, but what the industry demands.

Teaching is a very overlooked merit. If there is no one to teach students, fewer students will go into science.

From my personal experiences, funding is held above all else in academia. Bringing in big bucks guarantees tenure and promotion regardless of teaching ability.

Anyone who thinks that tenure has to go has not read their history. Tenure began at Berkeley during the Senator McCarthy years. If the politicians did not like what you said you were at risk.

Anyone who thinks this is still not a problem should read newspapers. Particularly at State Universities State legistlators would quickly get rid of acacdemics who did research or took positions that they disagreed with.

In the State of Michigan two years ago a State senator discovered that a course on human sexuality and sexual diversity was being taught at the University of Michigan. He proposed a State law requiring that every faculty member turn in their syllabus for approval by the State legislature.

Without tenure faculty positions would be determined, in part, by your political, religious, and ethnic category.

A second reason to preserve tenure is to preserve faculty. Without tenure salaries would drop and faculty would be replaced by new Ph.D.s (the cheaper ones) every 5-6 years or so.

There is an alternative to "TENURE-OR NO TENURE." After six years a tenure evaluation would lead to a tenure contract taking someone to age 62. After that term contracts would be written for useful faculty.

Finally, only a small number of faculty at any institution are "dead wood." The majority are honest, ethical, teachers.

Doug Whitman, Ph.D., Wayne State University

For those who wish to abolish tenure because it leads to laziness among tenured scientist/teacher, I would like to bring out the fact that "tenure" itself is not bad ;if the tenured individual has a passion for research/teaching, he or she will continue to be productive. For scientists, take away the tenureship, there is zero finacial security to continue to do what they do best. I would say, keep the tenure, make the selection process fool proof with periodiacal performace reviews built in to the contract. Let there be different tenureships for teaching and for research because the criteria for evaluation are different for these two disciplines. For translational research scientists who normally work in clinical departments, let us introduce research tenureships, without having them beg for an affiliation in an academic department. I had to opt for an early retirement because, I was affiliated with a clinical department; my research had to be curtailed short of going to a larger scale clinical evaluation (pilot studies were completed), a crucial stage for bench to bed side research, because there was no continued support, eventhough the research was in a very important area of breast cancer research-hormone therapy resistance and was suppported by the NCI and ACS during its developmental stages. I am positive that mine is not an isolated case, there are plenty of them. For translational scientists to get into establishing small business is not easy. They need business mentors to walk with them. The final result is, no tenure, no bench to bed side translation, most importantly, no use for the patients suffering from the disease being studied.

I see three major issues with using publication metrics.
1. They are not, but need to be, based on and corrected for discilpine level output
2. There seems to be an arbitrary cutoff for considering publications at somewhere between 3 and 5 years. This precludes work that may be seminal but was done earlier. (Especially is this significant in disciplines like ecology where the work itself may take 5 years or more to complete).
3. This leads into the problem faced by researchers returning to academia after some absence - their publication record may be 10 to 20 years old and cannot be counted - but is still a valuable indicator of their intellectual capacity.

Academic institutions everywhere suffer from mediocrity
and irrelevance, and tenure is a major part of the reason. A century ago, it was probably true that the best and the brightest were in academia, while today the best, the latest, the leading edge of science and technology are usually not in academia. The very idea of spending ones life cloistered behind the walls of ivy is increasingly ridiculous and downright counterproductive. Tenure has become a system to protect the ineffectual, and provide impediments to the bright, young minds that are moving the world forward. It is time to take down the gates of tenure and put revolving doors on our universities, colleges and high schools. The academics need to get out in the "real world" and gain experience in relevance, while the institutions need to be cross pollinated with
the bright minds of science, business, government,
manufacturing, technology, finance, etc.

The one place academia got it right has been in medicine, where learning by doing and real world
experiences are core to the cirriculum. That kind
of pragmatic approach needs to become the norm.

Tenure should be replaced with 5 year contracts, renewable for a maximum of 10 years, then a stint
of at least 3 years outside of academia is mandatory,
before one is eligible for another academic contract.
Meanwhile professionals from other walks of life should be openly encouraged to teach and do research.

The result would make academia relevant once again, would increase the ability of students to join the real world and perform, and improve the standing of the academic community immensely.

1. Is research money the only form of income? In a 7,000 student institution where the students pay $20,000 a year, tuition accounts for 140 million dollars each year. That is the equivalent of more than 700 grants. The payers of that money do not expect it to go to research, as the researchers salary and overhead is largely covered by grants.

As a parent and and academic I expect that money to buy me professional education from serious, thoughtful, creative professors. If that is not why the institution exists, then it is a research institute and should not try to pass as an educational institution. When that institution tries to attract students/parents to pay the tuition, the faculty/student ratio is often an important metric. An honest repesentation of that metric would be "educator faculty"/student ratio that would exclude faculty members time not involved in classroom education.

2. It is absolutely necessary to define the setting for a discussion of tenure. In a university medical center where many are already putting in >60 hour weeks covering clinical and teaching responsibilities, tenure is a largely meaningless throwback to a bygone day -- derived, perhaps, more on a model of humanities than science. The time inefficiency of the granting process is possible only for those with mostly protected time.

There is hard work, lots of responsibility, creativity, and constant education of students, other health professionals, patients and peers. We need to update our ways of recognizing these important contributions and the ways they contribute to income, alumni giving, and reputation.

3. At approximately 100 university research/medical centers, many faculty cover both VA and University duties with teaching, management, clincial and research duties at both institutions. As these individual are hired by the university to serve dual roles, their total efforts for split duties should have academic value in any evaluation process. Too often, the VA contribution is ignored. Too often the VA duties are treated as some how less, as if the responsibilities for students, residents and patients in the VA setting are somehow less than they are when they are next door in the university setting. The university gets faculty salary and residency slots paid for from VA, often makes disproporionate use of those faculty and counts them in their faculty/student ratios. Those faculty serve on many regional and national committees in the VA advancing the reputation of their university, but those contributions are not given consideration as they would be if associated with a society membership.

While I have no opinion on the specific issue in question, as a person who has been severely victimized by the US university tenure-system, I believe that universities should be required by law to make the tenure-status of all professors openly known to graduate students, and that universities should also be required to openly, and clearly advise graduate students, that if they accept an non-tenured professor as major adviser for PhD work, they are risking the possibility that he may not be there to see them through the completion of the requirements for their PhD, because once his contract expires, (usually at the end of the year), it may not be renewed.

PhD candidates have the right to make an informed decision!

I was repeatedly denied that right, as a foreign student-scientist, and a grantee of the Prime Minister's Office of a friendly foreign government, (by now an official ally of the US). My own Government could not even believe that such problems could arise in US universities, and demanded that I make sure they never occur again. But once I was able to prove to my Government that such problems are, indeed, liable to occur in US universities, and that I had nothing to do with that, my Government turned around, and advised me in so many words that it would place considerations of political expediency ahead of anything else. All This has caused severe problems in the advancement of my scientific career.

I was advised by officials of the US Government that the principle of "Academic Freedom" does not allow them to interfere in such matters. I consider this none other than giving professors and universities in the US the freedom to victimize the naive and the defenceless, while also insuring that those set up for victimization would not even know about it!

Fie for shame!

As long as the funding mechanisms keep the same way, I don't think tenure needs to or can be changed. Most of scientists here are forced to play the funding game instead of focusing on their research. In my opinion, each of independent investigator should get a baseline funding for his/her research in the United States. Research itelf should be not driven by fund money, but by interests and public needs.

Without tenure, risk taking might become lessened. With tenure secured, a scientist is free to pursue ideas or experiments that can have a high chance of failing, but a good chance of yielding useful information. Moreover, tenure ensures that faculty become active participants in shaping a university. Tenure protects faculty from losing their jobs for speaking against administrative or other decisions that faculty feel adversely impact the mission of the academic university. Lastly, tenure is required to attract top talent. Obtaining an academic research position takes well over a decade and seriously cuts into the overall earnings and savings of individuals on the academic track when compared with their peers who pursue other careers. If tenure were eliminated, how could you convince somebody to stay the course and wait until their mid to late 30s for a job that has about as much security as something in the private sector? I'm not sure that many people would remain on an academic track given that situation.

While some permanence is necessary to ensure continuity of research through difficult times, I think that renewable tenure of defined period might be superior: for example, ten years at beginning of career, five years in the middle, and after age 60 every two years. The criteria would be the same but the weighting might differ as the person matures, i.e. less research, more teaching and mentoring. It is all a question of the value of the person to the organization.

Truly inventive activity, except in very specific cases, needs a long time. Hence tenure is in principle an excellent way to support innovation and discovery. However this is in an ideal world, where people would not be influenced by the fact that, whatever they do, they would be paid at the end of the month. Hence, tenure can only work if there exists a very strong social pressure in which the feeling of shame would be meaningful: people would simply be ashamed not to work while they are paid. Of course there is absolutely no need for pressure for enthusiastic people, but from time to time people may get tired, and they need to be reminded that somebody is supporting them. I am very much afraid that this type of social pressure no longer exists in the Western world (it still exists very much in Asia, with its confucean ethics); quite often, unfortunately, cheating is the rule. And I think that this is what has killed the excellent idea of tenure... Incidentally, this has nothing directly linked to Academia: you find practical tenure in all kinds of private structures, for a lot of reasons, and the reasoning goes for there as well.

Conclusion: developing the idea of tenured positions goes together with restoring teaching of moral thought (yes! ethics is a basic component of human dignity) to very young children (this needs to be taught at primary school), together with the idea that the ego is not the ultimate value but that we are a social animal, who has duties associated to its rights. The French Revolution had a triple motto, and people tend to forget its most important component: Fraternity, which qualifies both Liberty and Equality, by stating Equality in rights, not equality in fact, and Liberty checked by the equivalent liberty of all other people... Just a final caveat, to avoid misinterpretation: I do not believe in any god, and this is precisely why I think that morality is so important: no divinity will rescue and repair the wrong things we will have done, and we need to think about the future of our grand grand children.

I have written pretty elaborate comments on bibliometrics at

LINK

The basic idea is that discovery being what it is, it usually needs time to be cited. While citations are excellent to evaluate professionalism (and this is an important feature when recruiting people), they are highly sensitive to fashion, and often miss the point (at least on the short run) when innovation is at stake. Of course this also heavily depends on the field. Furthermore, of course, as citations are involved in a recursive process (citations cite citations that cite citations etc) they can have weird outcomes and favour highly unethical behaviour, such as inflation in the number of published papers. Believe me, I have found authors (?) who have signed more than 150 articles in one year...

Citations are only as good as the source being cited. Pseudo sciences such as psychiatry and others often cite non existent science to back it up. Those responsible for the integrity of the field of Science should step forward to protect the field from such charlatans. If tenure in any way protects those that degrades science for money or any other personal advantage over the purpose of science which benefits mankind by delivering PREDICTABLE results and reliable information.
Charlatans often have tenure and Ph D's. Scientific principles MUST be protected.

The number of graduate students under a candidate's supervision may be one of the metrics currently used. However, an interesting number to examine would be the number of undergraduate students for which the candidate advised have pursued further graduate studies at the Masters, Doctorate, or professional degree (MD, DDS, VDM, JD, MLS, etc.) levels. It would be a metric to determine not only how successful a faculty member stimulated students' interests in a discipline, but also how that interest was sustained through subsequent graduate education. Perhaps his metric would be more meaningful for faculty in the four-year liberal arts milieu.

Scientists who work hard in a competitive environment make incredible discoveries. Tenure tends to remove competition and causes the hunger for discovery to wane. Add to the equation an unlimited supply of enslaved graduate students who practically work for free and tenure does little more than encourage careers based on the hard work of others.

Since it is virtually impossible to get rid of tenured non-performers, it is also impossible to clear a path for the entry of aggressive young scientists. In the face of funding cutbacks, it should be no surprise to universities that they can?t support important research programs when they operate under a tenure model.

Decades ago, we left behind a world of pure research in which scientists could sit around and think great thoughts while graduate students did the hard work. Today we live in a competitive applied research world that should be based on just that-- competition and research, not on political self-preservation.

?My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.? -- Indira Gandhi

Citations in the peer-reviewed journal literature are no longer the only measure of scientific or scholarly achievement. It is possible for scientists to be engaged in very scholarly research and maintain extensive, comprehensive, data-rich compilations (descriptive, qualitative, quantitative, etc.). These data-rich compilations may be the source data for subsequent publications, but the data sets or compendia can be and should be rigorously reviewed by external evaluators called to make comments on the scholarly nature of such works, just as they would a peer-reviewed article.

I have recently finished my PhD and am currently trying to decide if I am going to take a university instructor position or a postdoc. In conversations that I have had with other young faculty members, I have found myself discouraged by the thought of tenure based solely on the number of papers you push out the door. At least at my institution, even professors with huge teaching loads, are still evaluated mostly on the number of papers and the dollars of grant money they have brought in. Although universities give lip-services to good teaching they don't follow through. I love to teach and have aspired to be a college professor, but I know that no matter how much I succeed in the classroom it will all come down to whether I have paper ten in press when tenure comes around.

Tenure procedures are long over-due change, our department is full of scientists that are tenured and no longer publishing!! Most seem to be content to cruise towards retirement (10 years away in some cases), blocking positions for other scientists that are extremely efficient and publish in high quality journals.

Tenure has to be treated as just any other way of evaluating progress in one's profession. annual or biannual assessment of tenured scientists is equally important for maintaining high scientific standards

Mentorship and communication of Scientific Ideas to public should be prioritised as they are the most effective means for Scientific progress in any field.

Tenure is good so that more focus can be directed toward research, however, I do think that once tenure is established there need to be some minimal requirements to maintain it such as publications and grants. If that does not fit with the job focus, then good teaching/mentoring credentials ought to be maintained. This minimal requirement should be discussed before hiring the scientist and can be negotiated down the road since the job role of the individual may change over time due to age, government funding status, institutional changes, etc.

Yes. A lot of emphasis is placed on citation to evaluate merits of scientists.

I have heard a lot of people grouse about tenure and "dead wood", but in my experience, professors tend to be work-a-holic types. I'm not saying there are no tenured faculty who take advantage of their position, but most that I know are very hard-working and dedicated. They may not be as dedicated to teaching as to research, but they are certainly not lazy. In fact, I think industry is more respectful of work/life balance than academia.
PS I am not a professor, tenured or otherwise.

One of the unfortunate problems that has evolved out of the current tenure situation in America is the development of caste systems at some universities ( especially the smaller teaching universities). Many universities have moved to a two track system ? a tenured group (a minority actually at some institutions) and a large body of temporary faculty who work at the ?Will of the Administration?. Often this leads to faculty that is divided against its self. ?At Will? employees lack a sense involvement with the institution and often become resentful of protected tenured faculty ? they teach as many or often more courses and students than tenured faculty do yet get few, if any of the benefits. The current tenure system is actually becoming dangerous to education in America. Using the current system rather than evaluating each individual continuing contribution to a university leads to the formation of a caste system, internal dissent, and the eventual phasing out of tenure at smaller predominantly teaching universities.
If tenure is to continue it must be re-thought. It should not be used as a budget balancing tool or as a method of fragmenting a faculty into opposing, mutually exclusive constituencies.

Having just gone through the tenure process I am well aware of the criteria used to judge a scientist's worth. The reality is that objective measures are essential and patents, papers and quality of papers are the best measures. Outside referees are used but in reality they are using these same measures as their guide. Additional measures such as talks, invitations, quality students generated are usually just surrogate measures of patents, papers and quality of papers. There is no good way around this.

the problem isn't just the tenure process--that's a symptom of the disease.

The disease is the crazy system of making us sacrifice our whole life, 60+hrs/week, to doing science.
I walked away from my tenured post, and I've never regretted it.

In industry we are at least told what we're being evaluated on, and given goals for the year and 5 year mark. What were we evaluated on in Academia?
Guess! It's all invisible, moving goal posts.

The funding crunch has just made it all nastier and more cutthroat.

To remove the possibility of tenure, however qualification is measured, would deal a significant blow to academic research, in that it would remove a driving socioeconomic motivator of production.

In the business world, the most talented and successful drive toward a day when they can live free of the need to work, and can instead work as it suits them. This draws an increasing talent pool into high risk, high return occupations characterized by enormous early productivity, high burnout rates and the promise of early semi-retirement for the lucky few.

The current tenure system sets up a similar risk -reward scheme. To remove this would be to eviscerate the productivity of the young, and would push even more intelligent and dedicated people into industry, at the cost of basic knowlege creation, which would result in a loss to society as a whole.

The problems with tenure are just symptoms of a research/educational system that is undergoing multi-organ system failure. The gladiator model of advancement does not work to advance science or understanding. Corporate control of academia is the terminal phase of decay of the academic ideal of a search for truth.

herb

The idea of tenure was originally developed to protect faculty from the whims of administrators and to provide of form of protection to "free-thinking individuals." At present it is more of a stick used to keep younger scientists in line until they have somehow paid their dues. One must please the status quo or face expulsion from the "club."

Often there is an inverse relationship between the size of the grant and the impact of the science both in terms of fundamental insights and scientific merit. While the trustees like to see the funds rolling in, are they the ones scientists should be most concerned about pleasing?

We live in a time when the NUMBER of citations is the overwhelming metric of a scientist's impact. Such simple number crunching is the refuge of small minds and small mindedness. It does not speak well of the current state of science nor its capacity to make significant contributions of value to society in the future.

Sirs,
I think that no-one peer-reviewer is able to assess Biophysical Semeiotics advances, such as "microvascular remodelling" characterized by newborn-pathological, type I, subtype a), oncological, and b) aspecific, INHERITED Endoarteriolar Blocking Devices, Biophysical-Semeiotic Constitutions and Real Risk of most common and severe human disorders are based on. See www.semeioticabiofisica.it
Fortunately, there are, serious, honest, skilled, farsighted Reviewers like those of the following famous Reviews, who prefer to study such as original advances rather than immediately rejecting them!
Fro the Bibliography in above-cited website:
140. Stagnaro S. Newborne-pathological Endoarteriolar Blocking Devices in Diabetic and Dislipidaemic Constitution and Diabetes Primary Prevention. The Lancet. March 06 2007. LINK
141. Stagnaro S. Bedside biophysical-semeiotic PPARs evaluation in glucose-lipid metabosism monitoring. Annals of Family Medicine 2007; 5: 14-20. LINK
142. Stagnaro S. Without Oncological Terrain oncogenesis is not possible. CMAJ.
23 March 2007 LINK
143. Stagnaro S. Bedside biophysical-semeiotic PPARs evaluation in glucose-lipid metabosism monitoring. Annals of Family Medicine, 2007; 5: 14-20. LINK
144. Stagnaro S. Rimodellamento Microvascolare, Costituzioni Semeiotico-Biofisiche e Reale Rischio Semeiotico-Biofisico. Ruolo dei Dispositivi Endoarteriolari di Blocco neoformati-patologici www.clicmedicina.it, 10/4/2007, LINK
145. Stagnaro S. Polymyalgia Rheumatica and Giant Cell Arteritis: First of All, Early Diagnosis! Ann. Intern. Med. 2007; 146: 631-639 LINK
146. Stagnaro S. Assessing NK cell compartment in individuals with CAD Inherited Real Risk.Immunity & Aging , 14 Mat 2007, LINK
147. Stagnaro S. Pivotal Role of Liver PPARs Activity Bed-side Evaluation in Monitoring glucidic and lipidic Metabolism. Lipids in Healt and Disease. 02 June 2007, LINK
148. Stagnaro S. Biophysical-Semeiotic Constitutions play a pivotal role also in age-related diseases. Immunity & Aging. 12 June 2007 LINK
149. Stagnaro S. Bedside diagnosis of osteoporotic constitution, real risk of inheriting ostoporosis, and finally osteoporosis. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 21 June 2007. LINK
150. Stagnaro S. New bedside way in Reducing mortality in diabetic men and women. Ann. Int. Med. LINK

151. Stagnaro S. Old Age and Therapy for Coronary Artery Diseases. CMAJ.
28 September 2001. LINK

152. Sergio Stagnaro GPs , Biophysical Semeiotics, and bedside cancer diagnosis.
08 July 2007, International Seminar of Surgical Oncology, LINK

A drop in productivity following award of tenure is a reality in some cases. But I think in the majority of cases, people who achieve tenure are driven to be productive through more than just the desire for tenure - it's an inherent trait maybe.

The main case for tenure is that members of a faculty should not be inhibited from expression of their ideas by fear of job loss.

In light of this, good research, when supported by the department head, and when funded by the usual sources, should not count for very much toward tenure. A person who does this is probably in no fear of job loss, and does not need this protection.

It is those who do what is discouraged, those who invalidate universally accepted dogmas who deserve and need tenure. If a faculty member proves the correctness of an unconventional view, despite entrenched opposition, despite a lack of funds from the usual sources, then tenure is appropriate.

Even in this case it may be argued that while tnure has been earned, it is no longer needed. Perhaps junior researchers should be offered a ten or fifteen year guarantee of a job, to protect novel thinking by those who have the best chance of actually pursuing new ideas.

It will be a good idea to include in the tenure analysis process, the quality of the grad students trained by the professor. Everybody forgets about students and in fact they are one of the main reason that sustains University Life.

From the point of view of academic quality, economy of scientific activity, and the basic characteristics of human nature, the concept of tenure is flawed.

However, at the time of unprecedented growth - in size and power - of administration, at every single academic institution, tenure does provide (some) degree of freedom and personal and professional integrity.

Though the focus of your report is apparently on top research academic institutions I wish you would, sometime in the near future, address the concept - and the practice - of tenure granting across the thousands of "other" academic institutions, that play a significant role in the science education of our next generation.

I teach and do science at a small liberal arts college (undergraduates only) and have served on our university tenure committee for two years. Here, teaching ability and quality of our scholarship are foremost in the evalulation for tenure. Scholarly work (research, in the case of scientists) is evaluated on quality only. Is the science done well, is it above average for the standards of the discipline, does it stand up to peer review, and does it provide training for future scientists, are the relevant questions. Quantity of work and of citations are not relevant to the issue of quality and are not really considered.

Particularly in new fields such as stem cell research, a scientists should be evaluated on how well they can communicate and translate their science. When so much hangs on public and political approval, the quality and accuracy of communication from the laboratories will be the greatest asset in terms of future funding and legislative support for any institution. No amount of citations in niche journals will influence public approval in this field of research

At small institutions, where teaching is the primary focus, I would like to see more credit given to faculty who mentor students and involve students in our research. I believe that scholarly research is valuable and needs to be a part of the tenure review process. But many small institutions often do not have the resources to support research the way major research institutions can. Small institutions sometimes seem to try to require both excellence in teaching, advising and interacting with students and significant research. It is difficult or impossible to do both well, particularly with limited resources and heavy teaching schedules.

Big money goes to big players, who may turn it into puclications with high impact.

This can be a circle, which may exclude those with good ideas, but weak connections.

However, there should be a measure of efficiency, e.g. productivity in relation to available funds which may point to researchers who might do very well, if they had some better funding.

More funds for pump priming these groups/researchers would be desirable

In most research universities (at least the ones I know of), too much focus is put on research and money getting while education is unfortunately sidelined. I have heard tenured or tenure-track faculty members saying 'everybody can teach and who cares about it, it won't help you'. Unfortunately, it has some truth in current system. Young students, sitting in classroom, eager to learn, but they get half-cooked or half-hearted lessons because teaching is not that important to the person that is teaching. I sometimes find it is very sad for the students and our society. Good teachers are hard to come by, it is almost impossible if faculty members are ignoring or not paying attention to teaching.

Yes. It becomes an accounting exercise, where the competence and judgement of the evaluator becomes negligible. A better balance could be achieved, if one would start by considering for what purpose (kind of job, kind of grant, kind of award, etc.) each individual is being evaluated. This is necessary to establish the criteria for evaluation. Once such criteria have been established, the CV of a person should not only be evaluated on the basis of number publications and citations, but also under which conditions this has been achieved. Comparing the development of a person against that of a plant: did that plant grow in a green-house, pampered by optimal temperature, humidity and nutrient conditions, or under stress? In the former case, the person may not be up to the demands of a given job, and in the latter it may respond better to increased demands. Many other aspects should be considered, but I admit that it may be difficult to find evaluators whose competence, authority and integrity are sufficiently high.

I am tenured at a predominately undergraduate institution, and I hate it. In order to get tenured and promoted, I had to divert time, energy, and other resources away from improving my teaching, mentoring students, doing applied research with my students, and bringing in money to support undergraduate research - in other words, all the things I came to the university for - in order to jump through some artificial hoops to satisfy a bunch of people who were only looking for a few simple boxes to quickly check off. So, now I am tenured and have a de facto license to become incompetent. Where is the value to students, the region, or the profession we claim to serve? Of course, I have gone back to doing what I think I should be doing, but only after having much of my enthusiasm beaten out of me by a foolish system.

Grant funding needs to be weighted on heavily. Think about if they the PI cannot propose the best project to fund their goals etc, and reviewer input has suggested that their work is not worth the funding requested, then there is adequate pressure put on PI's to work more diligently, review their current and proposed future projects more in depth to assess significance. As with tenure, funding shows progress, significant questions being addressed, and will keep PI's busy writing and publishing, for no lab can have funding without enough consitent publications that show progress.

I have been in the system long enough to see that tenure only assures security to the PI but not the lab, nor future contributions to science as a whole. PI's regardless of how great they are and how much stature they have and the great contributions they have made do become complacent and content too frequently. Its as if tenure equals catch up with everything I have not been able to do in life prior to tenure and lots of vacation. Many times there is no longer an incentive to work as hard and not only is science cheated of progress but so are the students who rely on their PI's input, their constant progress and paper publications are also affected, even to a point that may threaten their potential worth for Post Doctoral and other future positions.

Evaluating teaching for reasearchers is a challenging task. Doing so if the faculty member is going up before the promotions committee with education as a part of his or her portfolio is all the more of a challenge. I think the comments already posted related to teaching are great.

How is teaching measured, how is that measurement vetted, what is credible to the committee - all these questions and more must be addressed. We have done some work on this at Baylor College of Medicine and I would encourage reader to check our web site on the topic at LINK This site references a unique set of education awards and the criteria for those awards. They are determined based on a submission of a portfolio which is reviewed by a panel of internal and outside faculty. The portfolio process may give you some extra ideas on how to present teaching efforts effectively. If you are interested more detail, each of the (4) award categories has portfolio examples for different faculty tracks including research Ph.D. track that includes teaching. These awards have been recognized by our A&P committee as a credible measure of teaching performance.

In the words of our former A&P chair, Dr. Arthur Beaudet, receiving the award will be viewed positively in promotions decisions. "Given the central role of peer review in the process of selecting recipients of the Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. Faculty Excellence Award, receipt of the Award will inform the promotions process in a positive manner. It will provide a third party, 'disinterested' evaluation of educational skills for the education portfolio similar to what peer review by NIH and Merit review study sections provide in the area of research."

Stephen Pierrel

I favour making promotion decisons, particularly for tenure, on the basis of a limited number of examples of a scientist's best work, say 5-10 depending on rank. This could be expanded to include more than just refereed papers. This might also help to slow the current explosion of least publishable units in the literature, which re-inforces the tendency for promotion committees to focus on a few high-impact journals.

I am a retired scientist devoted to translational research. This area is my forte' and all my contributions are in cancer research. One of the questions relates specifically to the evaluation process of scientists who are in translational research. When I evaluate myself as a scientist what yard sticks do I use? Should I be given a tenure ?
1) Publications: Do I have publications in journals of high repute? Often in translational research, life time work results in one or two major publications. So, quality and not quantity is to be given a priority.
Citations are sometimes hard to come by, if the results are in a very controversial area and specifically if it ivolves a paradigm shft in thinking.
2) Quality and tenacity: In translational research it is very important to have tenacity of purpose. A cancer researcher who wants to find out why certain tumors resist a certain class of therapeutic agants, he/she needs to continue with the research until an answer is found, contribute through research that helps to get that answer.
3)Grants: Skill in obtaining grants is required especially if the translational scientist works in academic or non-profit institutions. Tenacity is important; and the institution should support during dry times especially when the research project is moving towards attainmnet of its goals.
4) Teaching, communication skills: Teaching could take a variety of forms,for a translational researcher. being a project advisor for graduate students of various departments; arranging workshops and conferences for updating the knowledge of medical students, interns, residents and professionals.
Tenureship should be based on all of the above and leadership qualities that an individual exhibits. Lots of confusion could be avoided, and fairness could be maintained it seems to me by following this protocol: Let the institutions have separate categories of tenureships, for teaching and for research. Teachers tenured should be evaluated heavily on their contributions as teachers and they must spend more time on teaching and not on their individual research. Their graduate students should be trained as teachers. Researchers who are tenured should be responsible for training graduate students in being independent researchers. A graduate student, a Ph.D.candidate should have training under both a teacher and a research professor. This way, he /she is well equipped to choose a career in either category.
Tenure ship or no tenureship, a good scientist, doing good work needs the support of the institution when the grant money runs out, and the research project is delivering results. A creative and productive mind should never be destroyed and the light put out by cutting funds. Translational research is important for the mediacal community and for the patients and for the advancement of technology. Translational researchers are a special breed of investigators and they need all the support they deserve. They can never lay back and be content, because there is always a riddle to solve that would help the patients.

A good metric would be an assessment of what ALL the grad studuents and post-docs are doing 5 and 10 years later. If 25% are succesful....and 75% have left science....it was NOT a successful lab.

A PI should be a mentor, so if they can't name everyone in their lab....or describe what each is doing....it is NOT a good lab.

It is not really about Tenure. Wrong topic. In this world, everything needs money to survive, just say it, aloud. Others are just, like scientific progress, side effects.

To my opinion, the main problem is that scientist evaluation is based on quantitative criteria. I think on the contrary that novelty and originality in science (and arts) can not be measured by numbers.
However, qualitative evaluation is time consuming and needs a deep knowlege in history of sciences and epistemology.
I think that in consequence, the actual system for evaluating scientists and their papers does not encourage them to take risks and to propose new ideas. This pushes scientifics towards conformism and sterility.

Should granting agency paylines dictate the tenure clock, i.e. should the clock be longer if the success rate is 10% or less?

An interesting topic, with many interesting offshoots. I commend The Scientist for raising this debate.

Clearly there are good and bad things about tenure. It provides a measure of security and isolation that allow a scientist to work through the ups and downs of scientific research. However, it also provides an ability to escape from responsibilities. The good scientists benefit from the former, the bad from the latter, and accepting this as "just the way it is" is certainly the ugly.

I'm sure that everyone reading this article can point to examples of the good and bad things they've seen resulting from the presence of tenure. However, why should we accept this as "just the way it is?"

As someone else already noted I find the measures used to establish tenureship (and to some degree the concept of tenureship itself) to be remarkably lacking in scientific rigor. Is the current tenure system really supportive of how we want scientists to behave?

If we just focus on the research area, scientists today need to be collaborative, they need to be team players, they need leadership and management skills, they need to be mentors and yes they need to be scientific experts. Citations are perhaps a measure of the last point (although only a partial one at best), but where are the measurements of the rest and how are such activities rewarded in our current tenure system?

For that matter how does our current system train scientists to be good in those areas when we don't acknowledge or reward them for being so in a meaningful way? Add to this the other roles that other readers have pointed out for scientists and clearly our measurement and reward system (and our underlying training system) is out of sync with the expectations we have of what a scientist should be doing.

Does this mean that everyone should be capable of doing everything well? That would be nice, but a tad unrealistic. The system should acknowledge and support all the things that scientists need to do, and recognize that some will be better in some areas and weaker in others.

As another reader pointed out the current system is ripe for abuse by those who are inclined to do so. If the system only rewards citations and grants, then the abuser need only focus on those areas and everything else can be given lip service at best. Of course my belief is that the vast majority of scientists do try to do their best to meet all of their responsibilities, but in the current system they sometimes do so to their own detriment.

So is tenure a good thing? In many ways our current tenure system is an idea who's time has passed. It has too much of an ability to shelter the abusers and potential to punish those who seek to meet all their responsibilities. Certainly no system is perfect, but why should we be happy with a stagnant imperfect system when we have the ability to revise and revitalize it to be better? Let's turn our scientific process and rigor onto the problem of putting together a system which provides the right environment to grow and support good science and scientists, and pushes out those who would abuse the system.

I believe that there should not be "Tenure" track. All of us should be treated equally throughout our career based on our continous performance. In most instances tenure curtails competition, for some of us almost stop working.
YES! if there has to be tenure, mentoring should be seriously taken into account.

The recent article on which factors weigh most heavily in applications for tenure reflects an emphasis on money in academics that extends far beyond the careers of untenured faculty. I believe that research universities increasingly rely on the indirect costs in research grants to maintain their infrastructure, including areas that have little if any direct impact on the funded research. These funds instead become an important general revenue stream for an academic institution. And because money makes the difference between paying salaries or not, providing competitive startup packages for new hires, improving facilities or not, etc., untenured faculty are asked to not only support their own costs with research grants, but to chip in a sizable amount to the general operating costs of the institution as well.

Viewed from this perspective, selecting and weighing tenure criteria is quite straightforward. When I asked what three criteria weighed most heavily during my tenure application, the reply was "money, money, and money." While I'll admit the reply was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it reflects a disturbing reality for many untenured researchers. Those who bring in the most money have also made the greatest contribution to the bottom line at the institution and hence, it seems, should be retained in hopes that they will continue to so. The likelihood that they will continue to bring in money is reflected by their relative standing among other well-funded peers in their field, thus the emphasis on publications, support letters, and citations. Other activities that contribute a great deal to the advancement of scientific fields and education of the general public (teaching effectiveness, speaking at conferences, etc.), but bring in no immediate revenue, count far less.

But for me the most troubling aspect of this entire process is the uncoupling of a faculty member's ideas from their funding performance. If the point of awarding tenure is to reward effective faculty members who have contributed to their field, then money simply is not the best measure. Great ideas do not always translate into large amounts of money, as any experienced NIH reviewer can attest. And not all fields have equal costs, of course: is a computer scientist who has $100,000 in grant funds less valuable to an institution than a translational biologist who receives $1,000,000 simply to perform the experiments? Technically, yes. But from an intellectual standpoint, the numbers don't say much, if anything.

This then leaves the obvious question: why do institutions award tenure? When I chose a career in academia, I did not do so in hopes that I would win more grant money than my peers. My interest in teaching and learning is what motivated me. While research and grant writing are an integral part of my job, even after being awarded tenure, I do not think that my value as a scientist can be counted in current funding dollars alone. By this measure unfunded faculty, at any level, are useless. Worse, they do not even bring in their own share of the institution's cost to keep them, and thus are a drain on important resources. So, tenure affords me the freedom to explore new ideas, and allows me time to obtain funding, but it also shifts the burden of maintaining the revenue stream onto the junior faculty, who by definition have the least amount of experience in winning grants.

It therefore seems that tenure is simply an economic decision, not a professional one. Because academic institutions have a difficult time keeping pace with the industries that thrive on their graduates, and soaring tuition rates cannot fill the gap, research institutions must find other sources of revenue, and the obvious choice is research grants. If we strip away any sense that tenure is about intellectual contributions, and tell this to new faculty early in their careers, we can at least meet the "truth in advertising" standard that academics, and the general public, have come to expect from institutes of higher learning.

But to admit this in public is also to admit that research institutions are *always* looking for more money, and thus are not that much different from any other entity that engages in costly activities. Whereas companies are clearly and unapologetically in the business of selling product to make money, academic institutes struggle to maintain the appearance that they care more about education and exploration than the bottom line. It is not likely that any research institute will include "raising revenue" in their mission statement, though "increasing research funding" (effectively, the same thing) is a high priority everywhere. Time and time again, my students are surprised to hear how much effort my colleagues and I put into raising money rather than teaching them, be it in the classroom or the research laboratory.

One thing that could improve the evaluation of scientists is to discount self citation and add a metric that somehow examines the citations of a scientist's students both graduate and undergraduate after their independence. This would be difficult, but a scientist who helps facilitate other scientist's doing quality science better than their peers, should be counted when evaluating their contributions as much as their own publications citation rates. This would help measure the effect of teaching and mentoring on the flow of science a metric currently ignored or undervalued by most.

Tenure should be about all aspects of being a professor, with teaching at the top (and not the bottom) of the list.

Like Sarah above, I'm in a cancer research & treatment environment. Here we have a divide between clinicians who are working hard - treating patients, dealing with the stress of their dying, etc. - and academic researchers who appear very disconnected from the battle lines against cancer.

From the academic research standpoint, it appears many choose this track for lifestyle reasons.

Newly hired researchers from industry see a snail's pace in research compared to their previous jobs.
(Then again, the lifestyle of 40 hour weeks is alluring.)

The clinicians see the relaxed research environment & get frustrated, since the profits of treatment get allocated to more research.

I don't know where tenure fits into all this, but it certainly doesn't help the divide we see here.

Clearly evaluation on the basis of grants and papers only is complete nonsense. Could Fred Sanger have survived in the present climate, absolutely no way. He would have had to waste his time in the paper/grant chase. All it does is favour criminals like the physicist Schon (umlaut needed).
Furthermore, nobody can go against the accepted dogma of the establishment. If one does then your papers do not see light of day. Meeting this in the field of muscle physiology I have had to spend my own money to publish a series of papers as a book with an ISBN number in order to nail my colours to the mast. I am old and in no need of more papers as no doubt I will be forced to retire at the "maximum age allowed". A young researcher dare not go down that path as no papers-no grants no job.

Considering the importance placed on reviewing academics with regard to promotion and tenure, it is remarakble that the process remains so unscientific. Ranging from vague, arbitrary or questionable metrics of productivity, to the reliance on flawed databases, it is astounding that the same individuals that evaluate their peers would never rely on such an unscientific process or methods in the practice of their science. It is disheartening that when confronted about the obvious disconnect, such individuals may state "...Get used to it, that is the way it is always done..."

I have been disappointed by the way the scientific community has reacted to Boyer's four categories of scholarship (discovery, integration, application, and teaching). The insistence on discovery scholarship as the only valid means of demonstrating scholarly credentials seems too narrow. The Scholarship of Teaching has been the most ignored category. Teaching is a legitimate category of scholarship and work in this arena should count toward promotion and tenure, especially at institutions where faculty teach undergraduates. Discovering knowledge is important but so is dissementation of that knowledge to students. When the pedagogy of science is ignored all that remains are anecdotal stories about what works best in the classroom. Research has shown that teachers change the way they teach by talking to a colleague rather than relying on evidence (articles, conference presentations, etc.). Imagine if scientific thought tried to progress in this fashion! I have seen positive changes toward a broader definiton of scholarship (ala Boyer) but progress is happening far too slowly.

Speaking specifically of cancer research, the technologies and resources required today are found very infrequently in a single group. Without teams composed of multi-disciplinary laboratory research groups and clinical researchers, we will not be able to tackle the big challenges in the understanding and control of cancer. However, our model for attributing credit and 'measuring excellence' is based solely on the individual. It is imperative that we find a way to credit team members and not just note the names at the front and the end of an author list.

What about teaching? Anyone ready for tenure should have their teaching abilities and contributions considered. Even if they are just in a lab and not a formal course, they should still be teaching or how do we past our knowledge on to the new scientists.

I do believe that tenure is not a major concern for good or innovative research. It often depends only on mankind diversity and how each scientist need to work to reach optimal stimulation. My opinion is that free scientific thought requires a quiet "sustainable" environment. In counterpart, it is obvious that reasonnable evaluation of how grants and tenure are used is necessary to avoid position abuse and others. Indeed, our job is a kind of Passion and has definitely nothing to do with fast and glittering, disposable trial only based upon citations and other irrelevant parameters commonly used. It is striking that the scientific community rules perfectly fits that of the showbizz system both from virtual reality and money maker point of views. Major papers gradually switch to people magazines to keep their impact factor. Virtual reality: huge amount of data impossible to control or to validate
Money: easy to stack when you are rich.

A simple solution: to restore Man authority (with his ancestral lacks, no matter!) on stupid systems.

Mainly No but in some cases yes. I have been a researcher in the Federal Government for over 30 years and have had adjunct appointments at two major research universities for over 25 years; and from my viewpoint, SCIENTISTS at RESEARCH universities should be obligated to have a good publication record. Without the publication of good science the work is not complete, has no value to science, provides no product for the sponsor, and most importantly provides no goods and/or service to mankind in general. Properly published works show that the scientists conceived, executed, analyzed, and interpreted the work properly -- a summation of their efforts. However, both the university and faculty member must understand the contractual basis for the faculty member. If the faculty member is to be primarily a scientist, let him/her be a scientist who is judged with the first priority being citations. If the faculty member is to be primarily an instructor, let her/him be judged by the ability to inspire and teach students. We need both -- let's not confuse one with the other.

One of the most important roles tenured scientists perform is teaching and mentoring younger minds. Yet many scientists perform this role with some reluctance, preferring to interact with graduate students rather than undergraduates. Consequently, those scientists whose talents include teaching are invaluable to the world of science and should be recognized on EQUAL footing for tenure consideration as those with more articles but less ability (and interest) to teach.

I believe current trend of evaluating scientists is not totally outdated but it may need few changes to account for modernization of routine techniques and translational impact factor "Bench to Bedside".

Assessing worth of scientist by his/her quality of publications and funding is fine but tenure committees have to take into consideration as to how a particular scientist has done in terms of mentoring the next generation of youngsters and the future pipeline ideas 'Patents" that s/he envisions for next 5-10-15 years.

I've worked in labs that were flush with cash, and labs that were running on fumes. In my experience, bigger budgets beget more waste; tight budgets place a premium on logic, efficiency, and creativity. While I think America needs to invest substantially more money in scientific research, given a fixed amount of money to invest in science, public funding agencies would get far more return on investment if they funded a greater number of labs with smaller grants. Institutions tend to evaluate researchers based on how much grant money they obtain (partly because the institution gets a percentage), but a more logical measure of a researcher's scientific ability is how much he or she can accomplish with a given amount of grant money.

The original idea of tenure was to protect those with "contrary" views and ideas. After being a graduate student in physics and biochemistry at two different institutions, what I observed was the majority (certainly not all), of the tenured individuals were in "early retirement" as one of the other posts put it. One fellow spent more time working on his sailboat than in the lab or teaching.
I have worked for 21 years for industry and if I had followed work habits of the majority of the professors I observed, I would have been fired the first year.
In my humble opinion, other methods could be used to protect people with differing views etc. No job should be tenured, all should be based on performance.

No wonder the kind of research that emanates from colleges is so bland, merely extensions of work done by others for which it is easy to get funding. Funding agencies want to know so much about what you are going to do and expect to find that it no longer become research, but no search.

The interesting problems lie at the so-called fringes of science, but professors are afraid to go there for fear of not gaining tenure. In my own research I managed to uncover things that mainstream science overlooked because they just swallowed what they were taught by their professors without question, never suspecting that it might not be correct.

Conventional science is afraid to investigate the work of Cleve Backster on primary perception, except in an effort to discredit it. Even Backster missed the fact that slowly varying magnetic fields can penetrate the Faraday cage that he used to see if the signals fell within the electromagnetic spectrum. It is what explains the entanglement mystery.

At fault was science's use of linear continuum models to explain phenomena that are largely quantum in nature. By looking at the paranormal and the unexplained as back door entryways to understanding mainstream physics mysteries I was able to solve much of both, but I had to wait until chaos theory and quarks made their appearance.

To fund my research I plan to use network marketing sales of various products that help people get healthier, save energy, and save the environment.

Is it any wonder that Einstein said that he would never have been able to do the work he did on relativity and the photoelectric effect had he gotten a job in academia. They would have kept him too busy on other things, and would not have appreciated his going against the conventional wisdom of his times.

I am a graduate of MIT with two degrees in electrical engineering (we understand what a model is) and several years of PhD course work in physics (they don't think that methods of mathematical physics involves possibly inadequate models).

I had sensed things that were wrong with what we were being taught in physics as early as my freshman year, but did not fully appreciate how right I was to challenge what I did until many years later when I began studying the unexplained and realized that the models that we studied were over idealized - ideal gases and ideal crystals. No work on liquids - where the interesting things lie. When quantum mechanics was discovered and developed, no effort was made to go back to classical physics to see what had to be modified. Einstein did it with specific heat, but Feynman still thought that fluid turbulence was the most important unsolved problem of classical physics - It turned out to be a problem in quantum mechanics. Heisenberg, Feynman, and Lev Landau, who all tried to explain turbulence, won their Nobel Prizes for their work on quantum mechanics, but they all missed this possibility.

Looking at what colleges look at now to decide tenure is as insane as looking only at resumes for employment or test scores and grades in evaluating students' suitability for college admission. Our whole education system expects us to answer questions posed by teachers. Research involves questioning the answers offered by the conventional wisdom of the day, and even questioning the questions to be sure that they are the questions that need to be asked about the problems at hand.

I hope that these ideas and comments are useful and will shed a new light on the whole problem of tenure and science education in general.

Those interested in learning a little more about my work can go to Infinite Energy magazine Issue #22 The Quirks and Quarks of Physics and Physicists on page 22. There are some confusing sentences there caused by an editor who didn't like my use of twisted sentences to make my points and add a little humor to the discussion. By untwisting them she managed to kill the humor and the physics points I was trying to make. Life has its ups and downs, but now physics does too. However, it is the ups and downs of life that often gets in the way of understanding the ups and downs of physics. In my article I tell the story of how I reacted to the magnetic moment of the neutron and missed out on a possible Nobel Prize because I focused on what I thought physicists were full of when I should have thought more about what neutrons might be full of that allowed an uncharged, supposedly point particle, to have a magnetic moment. Of course the quarks explain that puzzle. Ironically, as I pointed out in my article, Murray Gell-Mann was at MIT at the time as a visiting professor, and our assistant faculty adviser in the Junior Physics Lab, in which I was a teaching assistant at the time, was Jerry Friedman, who both won Nobel Prizes for their work on physics that eventually led to the development and acceptance of quarks, a name coined by Gell-Mann. I was so mad at physicists at the time that I didn't want to talk to any of them - not a good attitude for someone seeking a PhD in physics.

As it turned out, I left my PhD program to take a job for a company as a consultant to NASA on the Apollo Unified S-Band Communication System. It was my work there that eventually let me take a systems engineering approach to physics, and figure out how I would have designed things had I been in charge. By looking at the so-called 'claims of the paranormal' and what we didn't know about physics, I was able to put 2 and 2 together and figure out a lot of what was going on, with a little help from the Face on Mars. But that's a story I plan to tell in a book that I am working on. I apologize if this note is a little long, but it hardly even scratched the surface. After all, I had done a whole lot of head scratching over the past four decades, and have the male pattern baldness to prove it.

I am now a PhD. candidate and major in Bioinformatics. I think tenure is good for the real scientists, because the real research needs time and unavoidable failures.

Personally, I think that there is no common system to evaluate the talent and effort of a researcher. The better way to give a tenure may be to consider both his/her thoughts (research potentials) and his/her current achievements.

And also a supervisory system should be established to evaluate the work of a tenure faculty, not only by grants and citations by also his/her lab members' devotion to their research.

Anyway, evaluation of a researcher is very hard. Current tenure system is good for the old real scientists but poor for the freshmen.

One important aspect of the tenure review process should be to objectively quantify the significance of mentoring graduate and undergraduate students who come through one's lab. The reviewers should take into account the effect of the faculty member being considered for tenure on the interest of graduates to pursue research careers. I am not sure how this can be quantified for comparison purposes.

I do agree with the notion that there is too much emphasis on applying for and getting grants. This should not play a major role in the tenure review process particularly when the institution does not provide enough start-up support for junior faculty. How can a new faculty member do experiments, write papers and at the same time apply for grants? This is a catch22 since most granting agencies require preliminary results!

One metric is the long term value of the scientists work related to the objectives of the laboratory that employs them.

Unless the scientist has a rich benefactor, like Italy of the middle ages, there needs to be more than just tenure to maintain a professional position.

As the employer, I have to pay the bills. I am the one who makes sure the facilities are available, the equipment is calibrated, the certifications maintained for the scientist to have the appropriate environment in which to work.

Yes, we need other measures of recognition beyond tenure. The scientist has a responsibility to show enough tangible results of their research to provide value to the benefactor, whoever that is.

My responsibility is to set the expectation of performance recognition with the scientist when they join my organization. It is encumbant upon me to remind the scientist of this broader responsibility on a frequent basis. Tenure is a useful approach to balance out the highs and lows of the creative and discovery process. Long term benefit to the organization, however, is what brings in enough cash flow to keep the doors open and the paychecks coming.

It appears to me that the main concern of most universities is for their scientists to bring in as much money as possible. Grant money is a good thing but educating students is still the most important duty of a university, a fact most of them have forgotten. The best teachers of both undergraduate and graduate students are often denied tenure and thrown out in favor of those who can bring in more dollars. In addition, some very talented researchers don't bring in enough money and they are also denied tenure. Universities need to weigh in more factors than the almighty dollar in evaluating faculty.

Tenure definitely needs to go. As a post doc, I came across dozens of incompetent professors whos lacked the passion for teaching and were basking in their research done a decade ago. I love to teach and do research but could never get a position in university because of all these "tenured" professors occupying the position just having an early retirement and create research group "mafias".

I used to teach as a post doc and students complained on how bad the tenured faculty had been in dealing with the class. If science and research are to be saved, kick tenure out.