An assistant professor in the social sciences once described a group of tenure-track colleagues in his department as “the lamenting society.” Once a week they met for lunch to complain about, well, everything and everyone. At first, attendance at this conclave of the irate exhilarated him: He felt better knowing other people were as unhappy there as he was. But over time he noticed that: (a) nobody in the group offered any solutions to the evils they cited, (b) some of the “cataclysms” seemed petty or imaginary, and (c) he felt increasingly drained by all the negativity.
In contrast, I know of a group of young faculty members who periodically gather for the weekend to work intensively on their individual research, and encourage one another. These “boot camps” have markedly increased their productivity.
Which group of peers do you think would have a more positive impact on your quest for tenure?
In this series of columns I have sketched the key people who play critical roles in the P&T process: the departmental chair, the head of the P&T committee, the faculty factions, the senior campus administrators, the external evaluators, and the campuswide tenure committee.
This month I turn to an unofficial yet profoundly vital group: the tenure-track peers that you choose to make close compatriots. They can’t help but influence your mind, spirit, and activities.
Pick your friends carefully. Among the questions any job seeker should ask is whether the workplace culture of a potential employer leans toward the collegial or toxic. If, for example, you have lunch with the junior faculty members during your campus interview and the entire conversation revolves around their exit strategies to escape from “this lunatic asylum,” perhaps providence is giving you a thumbs-down sign. Unfortunately, in these lean times the lucky doctoral student who gets a tenure-track offer can’t be very choosy. If the alternative to unemployment is an assistant professorship at the island of misfit toys, that’s a tough choice.
Still, while it’s difficult to pick your peers in academe, it’s easier to pick your pals. Levels of departmental dysfunctionality vary in kind and degree. A friend at a regional state university described faculty meetings in his department as “a fun diversion.” Some of the senior faculty members regularly battled it out over trivia but “pretty much left us tenure-track folks alone.” Furthermore, he and the other high-achieving newbies were supportive of each other.
Today, thanks to the web, the pals you pick need not be in the next office. I know doctoral students and assistant professors who have a tightknit group of fellow partisans across the country—perhaps accreted through professional connections or like research interests.
Avoid disablers and enablers. In a previous essay about picking a good mentor, I noted that the ideal type was neither someone who tore you down all the time nor a blindly supportive cheerleader. The same balance is inherent in a helpful tenure-track peer.
Certainly, some peers are disablers: They seem to be friends and offer token gestures and ritual statements of support, when in fact they are egoists and enjoy aggrandizing themselves at your expense. Did you achieve some goal, like a good publication? The disabler will smile and point out how it’s too bad that you couldn’t have published in a more prestigious journal.
By contrast, enabler friends are attractive: Who wouldn’t like to have a buddy who always said we were brilliant and in the right—especially in the ego-vulnerable years of graduate school and the tenure track? I have witnessed and experienced many such dyads. An acquaintance described a graduate-school drinking partner who “told me I was always making the best choice in everything.”
A truly valuable peer, however, is a fair but sensitive critic. It’s someone who gives you an honest opinion, not to get in a shot but to serve as an objective sounding board for your work and life decisions.
A good peer values your time. If the stereotype about faculty work—a few hours or so of actual teaching interspersed by long lunches and deep thought sessions in the faculty lounge—ever existed, it does not now. Nearly everyone I know in graduate school, on the tenure track, and in any role in our business is rushing through a crowded day, and night. If you don’t learn how to manage your hours, you will fail.
One threat to our productivity in academe is people who don’t value our time. It is quite fine for a colleague to drop by your office at 5 p.m., point out how hard you have been working, and suggest a beer and pizza. But what if the lure to leisure becomes a habit, and the colleague seems clueless about when you are desperate to finish something under deadline? Or worse, doesn’t view your work obligations with the seriousness they deserve?
I recall one such fellow I met in graduate school. He was charming and personable but also downright unfocused—which explained his several-decade status as a doctoral student. He was enjoying his life, stretching out his degree at a time before graduate schools tightened total time-to-degree pathways. For him, his meandering was not too harmful: He had wealthy parents. But he negatively affected his peers. He was always the throw-a-party guy, the “forget your deadline, let’s go camping” guy. Later I learned that one of his friends nicknamed him “time suck.” He was.
Complaining is fun, until it isn’t. One of my first jobs was working as a clerk in a video rental store (younger readers may want to look up what that is on Wikipedia). We proles had a saying that “this would be a pretty good job if there were no customers.” Since then I have noticed that in all work settings employees complain—about pay, bosses, conditions, and, above all, “the customers.” Complaining is a necessary release of tension, a way to have a bit of subversive control over situations in our lives in which we have little or no actual power.
Likewise in academe, grievance-citing is not unknown. Many have merit, although I think we should always maintain perspective. If you are a tenured professor with a 2-2 teaching load at a research university, you are a lord of the manor compared to the legions of scrabbling adjuncts.
But complaining or feeling aggrieved can be dysfunctional if it inspires in you a perennial feeling of entitlement and hopelessness, or if it diverts you from getting your work done. Your peers can be crucial influences on your mood and manners about your job. Are they folks who share a chuckle or a lament about the foibles of our craft now and then? Or do you waste countless hours a month with them in paroxysms of despair?
Are they intellectually stimulating? I was recently invited to guest host a radio show produced at my university. My mission was to interview an author of a new economics book. I led off by telling him I loved his work because it contradicted everything I believed on a topic I thought settled and uncontroversial. In short, he was forcing me to think. The human mind loves to dwell on one position, idea, and stereotype and cling to it despite contrary evidence. Professors should actively fight such a tendency, but how often have you seen an accomplished scholar admit (publicly), “Wow, that big theory I have been propagating and publishing on for decades and upon which I got tenure was darn wrong”?
Ideally, then, your peer buddies should help hone your research, teaching, and service by challenging and vetting it at least occasionally. They should be smart folks who ask questions of you that you should be asking yourself about your ideas and decisions. It would also help if they had skill sets in complementary research or teaching methods that perhaps you were weaker in, and vice versa.
Be helpful but not a giving tree. Even before Facebook made “friend” almost a meaningless description, most people understood that the term was subject to variable definition. A graduate-school colleague from South Asia explained to me: “That Americans will call you a friend after a few meetings is admirable but scary because in my culture a friend is truly someone who would loan you money to start a business or run into a burning building to save you.” It’s good to have friends, but being a peer buddy should not equate with signing up for King Leonidas’s bodyguard. There are limits to friendship, and good friends observe them.
To take one example: A doctoral student in the arts described a “friend” who almost dragged her to doom. The friend tottered from one crisis to another: fights with faculty, insecurity, stage fright, personal upsets. Each new disaster would invite endless discussions. At some point my informant realized two things: (a) her friend’s problems were deep-seated and would not be solved by a kind word and a beer, and (b) the time and effort she was putting into the friendship were hurting her own studies and research. As she put it: “I had to get a little selfish.”
It was painful for her. After all, most people who go into teaching do so in part because they like to help others. But succeeding in graduate school, job hunting, and the tenure track is so difficult that small distractions can delay you and larger ones can sink you. You can be a good person without becoming a giving tree.
One of the great advantages of a higher-education career is that we are surrounded by inspirational peers, people whose dedication sets good examples and whose friendship helps us overcome obstacles. But that does not mean every colleague will be a positive and productive buddy. You must be choosy about your peer pals and also be worthy of their choosing you.
