GoKawiilEarlier this year, J. Mijin Cha received tenure for the second time. Cha had been tenured — given confirmed, permanent employment — at Occidental College, a mainly undergraduate university in Los Angeles, California, before joining the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), a large research institution. Although the two tenure processes were different, she says that both felt opaque and, at times, frustrating.
At UCSC, she says, “some of the early research I’d done was about integrating equity and justice considerations into climate policy, which is still an emerging field”. This made it difficult to put this part of her work into the proper context and highlight its significance for her tenure application. “I do remember wishing I’d had more guidance,” she says.
She’s not alone. To convince their peers that they deserve a tenured position — often viewed as the pinnacle of the academic career path — academics must gather enough evidence of their productivity in research, teaching and service to their institution and colleagues. The process can be fraught and stressful and is often unclear.
Is it time for tenure to evolve?
As an academic status, tenure is most common in North America, although some European countries have something similar. Typically, tenure review takes place after five to seven years in a full-time professorship and usually happens only once in a person’s career unless they move to an institution that requires them to reapply. Tenure was originally meant to protect academic freedom, and once granted, it cannot easily be terminated. But in recent years, such protections have eroded. Tenured academics have been fired, allegedly for voicing support for the Palestinian cause or because of their views on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Even so, achieving tenure remains an aspiration for many academics. Understanding the process can help to minimize the anxiety and upheaval, but because the requirements differ across disciplines and universities and even between departments, it can be difficult to find guidance. To help, Nature’s careers team spoke to eight tenured faculty members about how they pulled together their application, also known as a tenure package.
Start your preparations early
The tenure process generally entails an iterative assessment of your research, teaching and service contributions by colleagues, university leaders and external scholars who can attest to your abilities. You might have some influence over the make-up of these groups, or none at all, and some universities provide more guidelines than others.
Therefore, an early priority should be to establish the criteria against which you will be evaluated. Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says these include not just the written rules, but also socially held ideas about what constitutes success in your field. Research-focused institutions will prioritize grants and publications, for example, whereas a smaller, mainly undergraduate university will emphasize teaching and mentoring. There are geographical norms to consider, too: in Canada, scientists often begin with less funding than do their US counterparts, so their early research productivity is judged more leniently than it would be at a US institution.
Tenure-track researchers must understand their institution’s unwritten expectations for earning tenure, says anthropologist Deepa Das Acevedo.Dawit Kidane
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