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Post by examples on Feb 24, 2014 12:15:15 GMT -5
I learned the hard way that advanced assistant professors and associate professors can play a lot of political games with newer hires. Some are great; some are not. Sometimes it is difficult to know the difference until it is too late. Really, why? Boredom? Jealously? What purpose would that serve? Having high performing colleagues would reflect well on the dept and thus, one's own career, no? And newer hires wouldn't threaten advanced assistant's tenure review. I just wanted to go back to this issue to highlight that it is frequently not a case of people being jerks for the fun of it. Very frequently, junior faculty land in the middle of ongoing disputes between faculty and administration that can be difficult to navigate. Let me give you a couple of examples: My institution pays a flat rate for summer teaching. Full professors and assistant professors make the same for teaching in the summer. Partly out of their own self interest, and partly because they want to legitimately provide a better incentive for faculty to teach summer classes, senior faculty have been pushing for a system where summer pay is based on the 10 month salary. This would lead to a small decrease in how much an assistant professor teaching summer makes, but a large cost increase overall for the institution. As a result, admin are using junior faculty as the reason for not changing the system. Additionally, some senior faculty who avoid teaching summer classes to force the admin's hand regarding pay will see junior faculty teaching them almost as undercutting their bargaining position. It is a shitty deal, but the admin were very smart in setting up the alternative policies in a way that split the faculty. Another example is that the admin has used this terrible, terrible market to dramatically increase expectations for tenure. We are talking from the old system having the requirement of excelling in teaching and then either service or research (in practice, always service) to one where they've switched to having to have "excellent" in 2 and a "very good" in one of the 3 areas. Which in practice now means that faculty are still expected to teach 4-4, do all the advising, etc. and still end up with 4 publication equivalents by the time they come up for tenure. And this change affects not only assistant professors, but associates as well, as this school also does a "post tenure review" a few years after promotion. And no one has been grandfathered in (exception being if you were up for promotion the year the changes came in, but you were still expected to shape up by the time of your post tenure review). This has obviously created a lot of bad blood between admins and faculty. And it is not that the senior faculty feel threatened by the productivity of the junior ones. But that cancelling classes/missing meetings/etc. to keep up with research obviously helps the admin's agenda. |
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Post by also on Feb 24, 2014 19:53:16 GMT -5
Really, why? Boredom? Jealously? What purpose would that serve? Having high performing colleagues would reflect well on the dept and thus, one's own career, no? And newer hires wouldn't threaten advanced assistant's tenure review. I just wanted to go back to this issue to highlight that it is frequently not a case of people being jerks for the fun of it. Very frequently, junior faculty land in the middle of ongoing disputes between faculty and administration that can be difficult to navigate. Let me give you a couple of examples: My institution pays a flat rate for summer teaching. Full professors and assistant professors make the same for teaching in the summer. Partly out of their own self interest, and partly because they want to legitimately provide a better incentive for faculty to teach summer classes, senior faculty have been pushing for a system where summer pay is based on the 10 month salary. This would lead to a small decrease in how much an assistant professor teaching summer makes, but a large cost increase overall for the institution. As a result, admin are using junior faculty as the reason for not changing the system. Additionally, some senior faculty who avoid teaching summer classes to force the admin's hand regarding pay will see junior faculty teaching them almost as undercutting their bargaining position. It is a shitty deal, but the admin were very smart in setting up the alternative policies in a way that split the faculty. Another example is that the admin has used this terrible, terrible market to dramatically increase expectations for tenure. We are talking from the old system having the requirement of excelling in teaching and then either service or research (in practice, always service) to one where they've switched to having to have "excellent" in 2 and a "very good" in one of the 3 areas. Which in practice now means that faculty are still expected to teach 4-4, do all the advising, etc. and still end up with 4 publication equivalents by the time they come up for tenure. And this change affects not only assistant professors, but associates as well, as this school also does a "post tenure review" a few years after promotion. And no one has been grandfathered in (exception being if you were up for promotion the year the changes came in, but you were still expected to shape up by the time of your post tenure review). This has obviously created a lot of bad blood between admins and faculty. And it is not that the senior faculty feel threatened by the productivity of the junior ones. But that cancelling classes/missing meetings/etc. to keep up with research obviously helps the admin's agenda. In my case, once you throw in merit pay, the tensions among ranks can get really out of hand. |
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Post by examples on Feb 25, 2014 0:12:19 GMT -5
I just wanted to go back to this issue to highlight that it is frequently not a case of people being jerks for the fun of it. Very frequently, junior faculty land in the middle of ongoing disputes between faculty and administration that can be difficult to navigate. Let me give you a couple of examples: My institution pays a flat rate for summer teaching. Full professors and assistant professors make the same for teaching in the summer. Partly out of their own self interest, and partly because they want to legitimately provide a better incentive for faculty to teach summer classes, senior faculty have been pushing for a system where summer pay is based on the 10 month salary. This would lead to a small decrease in how much an assistant professor teaching summer makes, but a large cost increase overall for the institution. As a result, admin are using junior faculty as the reason for not changing the system. Additionally, some senior faculty who avoid teaching summer classes to force the admin's hand regarding pay will see junior faculty teaching them almost as undercutting their bargaining position. It is a shitty deal, but the admin were very smart in setting up the alternative policies in a way that split the faculty. Another example is that the admin has used this terrible, terrible market to dramatically increase expectations for tenure. We are talking from the old system having the requirement of excelling in teaching and then either service or research (in practice, always service) to one where they've switched to having to have "excellent" in 2 and a "very good" in one of the 3 areas. Which in practice now means that faculty are still expected to teach 4-4, do all the advising, etc. and still end up with 4 publication equivalents by the time they come up for tenure. And this change affects not only assistant professors, but associates as well, as this school also does a "post tenure review" a few years after promotion. And no one has been grandfathered in (exception being if you were up for promotion the year the changes came in, but you were still expected to shape up by the time of your post tenure review). This has obviously created a lot of bad blood between admins and faculty. And it is not that the senior faculty feel threatened by the productivity of the junior ones. But that cancelling classes/missing meetings/etc. to keep up with research obviously helps the admin's agenda. In my case, once you throw in merit pay, the tensions among ranks can get really out of hand. Absolutely. Especially when you add that in many places, raises over the past 5 or 6 years have been small or non-existent. In these situations, it is not uncommon for people who have been hired more recently to have higher salaries, given that they've been able to negotiate against the salaries at institutions that have given better raises. It is not uncommon for more recent hires to make more money in these situations. I know that I personally make about 2k more than a colleague who has been here 3 years longer because of this. But now for the first time in a long while we may see a more substantial raise. And the whole thing may get out of hand at the next faculty senate meeting. How much of that money is going to go to merit pay versus cost of living raises? And the cost of living raises, should they be linear, or should they privilege those who have had their salaries frozen the longest? |
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