Just last year, Lynne M. Dearborn was a junior faculty member in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working to persuade her department and the university that she deserved tenure.
Now she’s an associate director at the School of Architecture at Illinois, responsible for recruiting and advising 200 graduate students.
Ms. Dearborn took on the new leadership role just two months after she earned tenure, in May 2010, and became an associate professor. While she expected that her new rank would bring new duties, she wasn’t prepared for the kind of leadership roles associate professors are asked to take on. “That wasn’t on my radar screen,” she says.
It was precisely to help associate professors like Ms. Dearborn navigate their new roles that Illinois began offering a set of workshops last academic year for midcareer faculty members. The workshops were aimed at teaching associate professors about their new responsibilities and helping them figure out how to make it to full professor.
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“The minute you get tenure, people start asking you to do to more things,” says Barbara J. Wilson, vice provost for academic affairs at Illinois. “How do you navigate those choices?” The answer is not very clear to associate professors, who typically get few guidelines from their universities. “Here you have this vague and ambiguous time period that doesn’t have markers like the pre-tenure period,” says Ms. Wilson. “You are never quite sure when you’ve done enough to go on to the next promotion.”
Illinois realized it had a problem when two-thirds of associate professors who answered a university survey last year said they felt overwhelmed trying to balance their teaching, research, and service commitments. The same proportion reported they had no mentor at Illinois to help them figure it all out.
The sense of confusion and being overburdened is not unique to Illinois. Other campuses, like Michigan State University, have studied the issue and now offer orientation sessions for new associate professors and workshops to train them for leadership. “Within the first two years after tenure, professors are asked to run very high-stakes activities like search committees, academic-governance committees, and large grants,” says Deborah DeZure, assistant provost for faculty and organizational development at Michigan State. “Until we surveyed our associate professors, we hadn’t heard the degree to which they were swimming alone.”
A pilot study of seven public research universities completed last year by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, based at Harvard University, showed the same thing. Midcareer professors find themselves caught between older faculty members, some of whom may use large research grants to buy their way out of teaching and service commitments, and young professors, who are typically shielded from administrative assignments while they focus on earning tenure. That means the bulk of faculty administrative work often falls to associate professors.
“Associate professors see themselves as a sandwich generation,” says Cathy A. Trower, research director of the collaborative at Harvard. “At a time that should be a great celebration, after earning tenure, when they can do more innovative things in the classroom or do research in a different way, they are completely beleaguered and find themselves dumped on.”
At most universities, junior professors on the tenure track come up for tenure within six or seven years after they’re hired. Once they earn tenure, most are granted the title of associate professor. But the advancement process from associate to full professor is much less predictable. There is no set time period after which associate professors are considered for promotion, and the expectations for it are often unclear.
There are no national statistics on how long it takes associate professors to be promoted, on average, but some smaller studies show that most spend about seven and a half years on the job before becoming full professors. Some associate professors, however, never accomplish enough to advance to the next level, and remain at the same rank until they retire.
Illinois sponsored three sessions on the campus over the last academic year for midcareer faculty members. Senior professors talked to them about how to build a case for promotion to full professor. And deans and other administrators talked about leadership responsibilities and strategies for juggling the demands of the job. It is during the midcareer years that many faculty members turn back to family responsibilities they may have neglected while they were working to earn tenure. Some take the time to start families; others are raising small children or caring for aging parents.
“We had a senior faculty member who was an associate dean at one time and has been in a lot of leadership positions,” says Ms. Wilson, the vice provost. “During the workshop, she laid out how to do all of this while looking at your personal and professional life. It is a complex mix.”
Carol Symes earned tenure in history at Illinois three years ago, and she has already changed the course of her future research a couple of times. At first, she decided to pursue something quite different from the book that helped her earn tenure, which was about the role of plays in 13th-century Europe. But after attending some of the midcareer workshops at Illinois, she decided to jettison her ideas about a brand new project and focus on work that builds on her first book.
Being an associate professor, says Ms. Symes, can be daunting. “Pre-tenure, I was happy with the idea of being the young Turk: I shook people up,” she says. “Now, I am one of those people defending my turf. I had this book out and it won all these awards, but now are people going to say, ‘You know, Symes—she’s kind of passé.’”
Ms. Symes says the workshops helped her realize: “I am not alone, and I’m not crazy.”
Gabriel Solis earned tenure in music at Illinois three years ago. He says he has a whole new set of worries now that he is an associate professor. Not only does he have two new book contracts, he is in charge of the School of Music’s musicology unit, which means he manages eight people. During the new academic year, he will also begin serving on the music school’s executive committee. Since earning tenure, says Mr. Solis, he has become more interested in whether his work has an impact on his discipline. “I’m more concerned about whether my voice is being heard and whether what I do matters,” he says.
Last month Mr. Solis took some advice he’d heard at one of the Illinois workshops and met with a senior faculty member who had been his mentor during the tenure process. “I told him, I’m having all of this stress, can we have coffee?” Mr. Solis recalled. “He helped me come up with a strategy about what to do with my work, where I might place a couple of articles, and he said, If you think about that piece in these terms instead of those, it might have a bigger impact.”
Typically, says Mr. Solis, academics are reluctant to ask for help, particularly associate professors who are assumed to have finally arrived and to know how to do their jobs. “I am like many academics. I don’t want to be told what to do,” he says. “I think that I can do things by myself.”
Christopher M. Span, who became an associate professor of education with tenure at Illinois in 2009, thought he knew exactly how to plan his research during a sabbatical he took this past academic year. “I was going to try to hit all of these different archives and spend a couple of weeks at each one,” he says. But then he attended some of the midcareer workshops at Illinois and decided to trim his research and the scope of his next book. Instead of looking at the education of free blacks during the entire 19th century and across the entire nation, he will focus on just the first half of the century and look only at the North and the South.
“What I learned at the workshop is that I didn’t have to cover all that ground,” he says. “They said, What you want to do is look at what you have the greatest interest in. That’s what will keep you motivated.”
