Personal hero denied tenure
This totally kick-ass woman professor I know just got denied tenure. I’m feeling pretty strongly about it. I’m not in her field, and I don’t know any of the details– so I suppose she could have head-butted the commitee chair when I wasn’t looking. But from the outside it looks BAAAAAD. Her CV has everything you are supposed to have– giant list of refereed articles, including 7 in Science or Nature, prestigious awards, successfully-graduated students. What’s worse is that she is actually a person who cares about making science a better place. She runs a mentoring program for women grad students, does K-12 outreach, and got an award for communicating science to the public– things everyone SAYS you are supposed to do, but that most people DON’T. I also know of at least two younger women who she has really helped out in one way or another. And she is friendly and laid-back and cool and had a kid in grad school (takes courage!). But no tenure.
So I just finished writing a letter to the provost of her university, saying basically this– if an amazing, successful scientist like her doesn’t get tenure, why would a young woman like me want to choose academia as a career?
Sure, tenure is a fantastic thing. Make it through this one last hurdle, and you have the freedom to do whatever you want for life. But the flip side is this: many institutions simply throw out a good percentage of their professors in the prime of their career. Sure, what people say is that if you don’t get tenure at one place, you can always go somewhere else. But what a blow– not just the feeling of getting "thrown out," but having to relocate wherever, whenever you finally get that "other job"– maybe without much choice. Makes patent law look good… 
Makes patent law look good…
Don’t it, though? I’m sorry to hear of this happening; I’d be very interested to know what the provost has to say in reply to your letter.
Something’s got to give. Science is a community pursuit, and the system as currently constituted is antithetical to community. Filling the top spots with paranoid, selfish type-A assholes is counterproductive in all but the shortest term. Pushing away the very people who, like the professor you describe, would help to build community — that’s just going to send science into a nosedive.
Comment by Bill Hooker — July 10, 2006 @ 7:21 am
News like this is certainly depressing. I am guessing there was some kind of political battle going on behind the scenes?
Comment by jo(e) — July 11, 2006 @ 11:34 am
I’m so sorry to hear this. The outreach she chose to do has been, as I understand it, gendered as “women’s work,” and thus it will be undervalued by many people. Which totally sucks. Part of my dissertation is about women scientists who tried to balance outreach and research in their jobs in natural history museums. I have a sense that more outreach was expected of them than of their male colleagues, and yet at least one of them was penalized for being a more public figure. So frustrating!
Comment by trillwing — July 12, 2006 @ 4:43 am
jo(e), I don’t know what the politics were in this case. But (as trillwing says) I do wonder if she wasn’t penalized for her outreach & education efforts. I know a man here who didn’t get tenure, and rumor has it that one reason was that he was “too collaborative.” Collaborating too much with other groups can be the kiss of death, as you are not seen as a Fully Independent Thinker. Bill, I agree with you completely, but I wonder if you think this is a recent trend to “fill the top spots with paranoid, selfish type-A assholes”? Was it ever different?
Comment by drshellie — July 14, 2006 @ 5:52 pm
Some of the really snotty east-coast US universities don’t actually give tenure to their own people. I have no idea where you are, so I apologize if I acidentally slag of your school. But Harvard, in particular, is infamous for only giving tenure to professors it poaches from tenured posts at other universities. At least in the field of Geology, this has had the effect of allowing their hot-shot post-docs and junior profs to end up in other places. And teh word on the street for early-career researchers is to have your way with the big H and then dump it before it can do the same to you. As a result, their department is now fairly weak. Meanwhile some schools, in particular the University of Maryland, have assembled fantastic departments just by giving jobs to great scientists who get snubbed by such systems.
Comment by Lab Lemming — July 15, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
Just finding your blog as well as sicence+professor+women+me blog. I am also blogging on women in science issues. I am an Associate level biomedical researcher who is taking a non-traditional path - i.e. trying to currently survive in a “part-time” position for a few years while my two children are small. I think I have some interesting times ahead of me, trying to get back in full swing, dealing with the “wife of the recruit” status, and basically getting my colleagues to take me seriously. So I read up on women’s issues and science as well as other things related to my life, and blog when I can. Check out my blog at doubleloop.blogspot.com if you get a chance. Enjoyed your blogs on women in science.
Comment by SciMom — July 15, 2006 @ 6:14 pm
check this out:
MIT star accused by 11 colleagues
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/07/15/mit_star_accused_by_11_colleagues/
Comment by m — July 15, 2006 @ 7:04 pm
We have an associate dean at our university who oversees both the promotion & tenure process AND the women in science program. She keeps careful track of the numbers by gender: how many faculty overall are considered for promotion and how many are granted vs. denied promotion, to make sure that women are not disproportionately denied tenure. As you might guess, this associate dean position did not come out of nowhere. It was created because there were problems. So far, I’d say that it was a success. I hope the woman at your university will assemble some statistics, and possibly also pre-tenure review materials, and fight back. I’ve known some women who won their cases eventually, though of course not without some damage.
Comment by Science + Professor + Women = Me — July 15, 2006 @ 7:47 pm
SciMom– Thanks, I liked your site. But I couldn’t comment without a Blogger account. You don’t want to allow anonymous comments?
Comment by drshellie — July 15, 2006 @ 8:49 pm
Lab Lemming– yup. And certain departments and certain schools will not give their assistant professors tenure unless they are considered to be “the best person in their field in the world.” In which case, defining “your field” so that you are the best becomes oh-so-important a skill…!
Comment by drshellie — July 15, 2006 @ 8:56 pm
m- thanks for the link, i have posted about this here.
Comment by drshellie — July 15, 2006 @ 9:56 pm
Dr. S, you gotta tell me who this is- e-me at 3bulls at gmail. I am so sick of this crapo.
Comment by Pinko Punko — July 18, 2006 @ 6:32 am