Below are posts associated with the “tenure and promotion” tag.
all I want for tenure is to be added to the Star Wars bulletin board
This “Don’t Fly Solo” board has been up in the hallway of our building since before I was hired. I took a picture of it back in December 2017, when I was here on a job interview. It was one of the most prominent signs (no pun intended) that this would be a friendly and fun unit to work in, which was one of the biggest considerations on my mind when I decided to accept the job (though the adventure of changing disciplines and the convenience of living closer to family shouldn’t be discounted). I think of all of this just about every time I pass the sign.
disappeared papers and the importance of personally hosting my research
Two of my major projects for the summer have been updating my website and submitting my tenure dossier for consideration. One specific thing I’ve been meaning to do at the intersection of these two projects has been to include a modified research statement on my website as well as a list of my publications along with links to PDFs for all of my research, ensuring that it remains accessible to everyone. I haven’t yet decided how much civil disobedience I want to engage in here—part of the reason that I keep putting all of this is off is that I want to revisit all the contracts I’ve signed over the years to figure out what rights I have in terms of posting preprints, sharing papers in personal/institutional repositories after a certain amount of time, etc. I do want to push the envelope in terms of open access to research, but I think there’s an important balancing act involved in all of this, and I haven’t figured out what side to err on.
knowing when enough is enough
The past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about a memory from my junior year of college. It was the end of a semester, and on top of all of my own finals, I was teaching FREN 102 for the first time, so my end-of-semester was busier than it had been in previous years. I don’t remember all of this busy time, but I do remember specific parts of taking my online FREN 362 (French Civilization II) final while sitting in the office shared by instructors from the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Scandinavian Studies. I had either left this final for last or was trying to get it out of the way first—either way, I specifically remember feeling as I was navigating through different pages in the LMS that I had done enough work—in this class generally and for the final in particular—and that there were other things that needed my time and effort more. It was time to submit and to move on.