Tenure qualifications

From this OSU document:

Publication expectations*.

25-50 in journals with average impact factors of 3-6 or an H-index of 22 or above. As a general guideline 25 or more peer reviewed publications since appointment as an assistant professor at OSU.

I can see how some people in roughly my fields of interest could hit this. It is not, however, a default expectation that everyone deserving of tenure could clear this bar. Twenty five papers in six years is a lot. JIF 3-6 journals do not just hand out acceptance like tic tacs, no matter what the GlamourHounda might assume.

Funding.

PI or multiple-PD/PI on 1 funded R01 (or equivalent) that has been renewed or the combination of a current or prior R01 plus either a) a second R01 or b) an additional funded national grant; or c) patents generating licensing income.

R01 acquired and renewed in first 6 years? Maybe for the exceptionally fortunate Assistant Professors but even in my day that wasn’t assured. By a long shot. Two concurrent R01s is more reasonable but still is quite a feat. Rockey published data showing that 1-2 R01s is a solid plurality of all R01-holding PIs, right? So this is the entry qualification for tenure? I don’t see that as at all reasonable.

I do agree that hitting the 25+ papers measure would almost require multiple R01 levels of funding. So that part lines up.

I wonder how many of their faculty really measure up to this standard at tenure time.

Speaks to the sad reality that our profession has a general stance of “never enough”. You are rarely allowed to meet expectations because they are set at some absurd aspirational level that only the top few meet (if that). Then most people are reluctantly passed as some sort of exception to the rule. As everyone tells them to redouble their efforts for the next review stage.

I don’t like this part of our profession.

h/t: http://twitter.com/YountLabOSU/status/551520086163718144

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*naturally the narrative above the summary table is filled with the usual weasel wordage about adjusting for subfield expectations, etc. And about how these quantitative measures are not a guarantee nor a non-negotiable hard limit. Nevertheless, they chose to summarize with a *very* high bar.

Nature poll on career advancement and article metrics

A tweet from @NatureNews alerts to a poll they are running.

Is your career advancement tied to article metrics? What else are administrators looking at? Take our poll http://bit.ly/b9Hib9 Please RT!

I feel confident that my readership would like to have its viewpoint included.
The weirdest thing I noticed about it is that they have options for “Assistant Professor” and “Professor” but no “Associate Professor” on the job title question. Just sloppy? or does Britland academia lack that step?
Actually I noticed that they fail to mention any IRB oversight as well. Since they state they intend to publish the results of the survey this seems an error.

Nature poll on career advancement and article metrics

A tweet from @NatureNews alerts to a poll they are running.

Is your career advancement tied to article metrics? What else are administrators looking at? Take our poll http://bit.ly/b9Hib9 Please RT!

I feel confident that my readership would like to have its viewpoint included.
The weirdest thing I noticed about it is that they have options for “Assistant Professor” and “Professor” but no “Associate Professor” on the job title question. Just sloppy? or does Britland academia lack that step?
Actually I noticed that they fail to mention any IRB oversight as well. Since they state they intend to publish the results of the survey this seems an error.

Pulling together as a department when external funding is tight

Some academic departments have internal sources of funding to keep the research programs of their faculty limping along if the PI experiences a gap in extramural funding. This is great. It can be a bit of an issue, however, trying to decide who deserves the (most) money.
One way to look at that is as an investment strategy. Your mini-state Department of -ology might be smartest to invest the internal funds in that laboratory that has a chance of regaining extramural funds in short order.
Odyssey has a few thoughts in Bridges to Nowhere:

Many, including myself, would like to see “actively” and “recent” quantified. The current popular suggestion is that recipients need to have submitted at least two proposals in the last twelve months. I don’t think that’s enough. I would make it at least three in the last six months. I’m not necessarily talking about NIH R01-level proposals here. Pretty much anything that would help keep a lab going should count. I don’t see this as too onerous a burden for someone with a viable research program.

Go read and comment.

Open Thread: Tenure Denial Shooting at UA Huntsville

What a tragedy. Absolutely horrible that someone concluded that the best response to being denied tenure was to shoot the other members of the department.
update: Prior thoughts on the tenure process:
Tenure Criteria During a Downturn in the NIH Budget
PiT on The tenure track and the economic downturn
A Post-Tenure World
Denial of Tenure is not the End of the World

Discussing Talent and Luck

Some Twitt chain or other that I was following had me eventually landing on a NYT book review by Steven Pinker which takes a critical approach to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book of essays “What the Dog Saw: and other adventures“. I was particularly struck by this passage:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

Not only because it is the source of some of my own queasiness when reading (and trying to discuss) Gladwell, but also because I fall into this trap when talking about science careers.