The Best Way to Not Get Tenure

I don't think this piece is that bad, and it doesn't sound like he is fighting his department.

I think you're right that viewing public pieces like this as "bad" is generally not helpful to anyone, but there seem to be lot of people in academia who are afraid of pieces like this and initially jump to the interpretation they're a fight or some way of circumventing the existing processes.

If this guy is as good as he says he is - then yeah he should be able to find a job, but posting this could make some of that searching harder, or at least cause resistance.

I know this is a rough situation, but perhaps there are real merits to the decision that I wish we could've seen discussed in the post. For example, I went ahead and watched a few of the videos from his internet course and very quickly grokked what kind of professor he might be.

On an industry level, yeah he's right. These things are happening throughout academia in departments everywhere. Tenure is a poorly designed system. Most likely, UBuffalo is missing out on a great teacher. On a personal level, it'd be a shame to walk away from an experience like this as being cynical and defensive.

> Full disclosure: I'm coming up for tenure myself, and one lesson it has taken me 5 years to understand is that people who disagree with me on campus aren't doing so out of spite, stupidity, or carelessness, they often just have different priorities than I do

In my experience, one problem is that the priorities are frequently rooted in the self-interest of powerful PIs or staff and are to the detriment of the department / university as a whole. As a staff scientist working on many different types of projects, I frequently bump up against stupid problems which should be fixed at a university level. At one point, I tried spear heading a number of these projects (creation of a central index of core facilities and support services for our university so people can actually find resources efficiently, centralized billing and training services for shared facilities across departments, secure storage and an EMR for investigators working with patient information).

All of these projects failed to launch for selfish reasons:

central index: powerful PIs feared discovery of their private core labs which they were abusing; core labs feared institute-level data would lead to institute wide optimization and loss of local control.

centralized billing: financial admins feared loss of control and had job security issues

centralized training: core labs feared loss of control

secure storage and EMR: PIs thought this was too inconvenient, preferred leaving shit on external hard drives with no access control. Feared if this were created they would be forced to use it.

I don't ever try to fix anything now beyond the lab level, and even that is frequently challenging.

I've also seen two talented investigators passed by for tenure in our department because my PI is powerful and other PIs fear that having another person from our lab in the department will further consolidate power in my PI's hands. Our department recently spent an enormous amount of money renovating a single floor in our aging building. That floor had the departmental chair's lab on it. In my experience, academia is full of people who for the most part are in it for themselves and have no interest in improving the situation of the group / lab / department / university as a whole.

Some people simply aren't politicians and will NEVER have any "tact", nor could they look themselves in the mirror if they faked it.

My suggestion to them is to start their own business or find one to work for (with a willing owner) that needs its core rocked or is full of straight-talkers.

We shouldn't typecast ourselves for a paycheck of it leads to misery.

I wonder if there is any professional psychology on this kind of thing (link me!) but my layman observation is that most organizations tend toward median smoothing at best or lowest common denominator at worst for performance. That is of course not how you achieve high performance. But high performance scares lower performance, the conflict is bidirectional. From the article it's pretty obvious he was a high performer. High performance means having opinions. Opinions are contestable, and create conflict. Conflict is part of a high performance organization. Lower performers are terrified of conflict with higher performers. Therefore median and lowest common denominator organizations force high performers out. It's kind of ridiculous to think about that happening in academia, but today I learned!

When you switch to the arts and sports we LOVE to see extreme outliers and go to great lengths to assemble and prop them up. It's visceral excitement to see 320lb freaks of nature face off on a line of scrimmage in an NFL game. It would be cruel to have them face off against a highschool team or even just mix them in on the same line. Yet that kind of disparity happens all the time in other types of human assembly.

So I look at this from the other side. He did his deed at the University, made a mark, and got rejected for having high impact good, neutral, or bad. Some people were uncomfortable with high performance for reasons which could range from pettiness to valid criticism.

What you would call lack of tact I might call integrity. I am sure he will land somewhere else and do great things. Industry is more fluid and amenable to assembling high performance, especially in startups.