Almost a decade ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a column by “Ivan Tribble” (a pseudonym), slamming the growth of blogs written by fellow scholars (and bluntly saying that as far as he was concerned, “bloggers need not apply” to his institution). Last week, the Chronicle published another anonymous column by a senior scholar, “Neal Dow,” talking about long-term associate professors, what he called “terminal associates.” He caricatured all associate professors as either (mostly-retired) faculty who never were interested in research or faculty whose current projects are always in-process, never in completion. And, he implied, all long-term associate professors were men.
As I wrote in a comment, Dow’s analysis is slipshod. I have known some unproductive tenured associate professors, of either type Dow describes here. I have also known some tenured full professors with similar characteristics, and also some assistant professors who have ignored all sorts of advice on the dangers of lassitude at a research university.
But I have also known many longterm associate professors who fit different profiles, and the differences are telling:
- I have known many women (and less frequently men) in the “sandwich generation” who earn tenure and then become expected by their families to turn around and take care of aging parents as well as children. For these colleagues, the tenure-earning years were the time when it was acceptable in their families to be professionally selfish, but with a catch. In many families, the explanations that “once I get tenure I can do more for the family” becomes an expectation that a newly-tenured faculty must then make up for all the time by being the extended family’s amateur gerontologist, therapist, events planner, financial advisor, and chaffeur. I wonder how many long-term associate professors in Professor Dow’s institution are women; if his place is anything like mine, women are disproportionately represented in the associate ranks.
- Other associates are in the academic equivalent of the sandwich generation, asked to take on heavy administrative burdens to keep their programs running. Often, these roles appear at non-AAU institutions (i.e., most places) because there isn’t the infrastructure to respond to multiple pressures without loading up on the associates. If they are administratively competent and level-headed, and especially if they belong to racial or ethnic minorities, newly-tenured faculty are likely to bear a disproportionate expectation of service.
- A third category overlaps with Dow’s claim about historical long-term associates: at institutions whose character has changed, some faculty earned tenure when the institution was less research-focused. I have seen plenty of colleagues in such a situation who have found a way to contribute to their departments and colleges in other ways: teaching more, advising students, completing the curricular administrative details, and otherwise making the business run in multiple ways.
- A fourth category is one I wish I saw more frequently. I wish there were more faculty who took tenure not only as the opportunity but as the obligation to tackle challenging and difficult problems BECAUSE they have tenure… and for whom the risk has not (yet) paid off. These are rare in part because our modern academic culture values the “publish it all NOW” approach, helped along by language such as Professor Dow’s. In Professor Dow’s ideal world, I suspect new physics Nobel awardee Peter Higgs would have been seen as an unproductive colleague.
What was deeply sad about Dow’s column was the terminal tone of it. He implied that if an associate professor has not been promoted in X years, it is because they do not have the essence of being a full professor and will never be promoted. For someone in a college of education, Neal Dow is expressing an idea fundamentally at odds with the purpose of his (and my) college. No matter what the cause, it is the obligation of senior colleagues to assist and mentor colleagues with less institutional power and success. Here is how not to start a productive conversation: “Well, you’ve gone stale on the shelf.”
Maybe I am wrong in assuming that Dow’s colleagues would want to stay far away from him as far as mentoring and advice is concerned. Maybe he has been better than what he wrote; maybe he has successfully mentored middle-aged associate professors to become more productive. Alas, because the Chronicle publishes anonymous pieces, even by senior scholars wishing to gain enough credibility to give advice to others, we will never know if Neal Dow is as shallow as his column. I hope not.