One more tenure catch. Giving external seminars.

In my previous post I described that I was caught off guard by the fact that my department chair and tenure committee were advising me to wait another year before submitting my dossier.  When I spoke with my department chair, she recognized that I was frustrated, and after I left, she contacted the dean, and asked him to review my CV to provide another opinion as a personal favor to her.

The dean concurred with my chair that I should wait a year so that it is a no-brainer decision.  However, the dean also made another comment.  It was something along the lines of, "I don't know that this person would receive tenure without being invited for several external seminars at other universities."  Again, this is something new that has literally never once been mentioned as a deficit in my reviews for the last four years.  I have papers and have been on study sections, so I never really thought about this as a problem.  But hearing this from the dean sent my chair into action, which I'll talk about below. 

First of all, I know that everyone always says, "just contact your network and ask them to set up a seminar for you."  I have in fact done this, and everyone always says, "I'd be thrilled to organize a seminar for you if you're ever in our area, but I don't have available funds to pay for the travel."  Basically this means that if it's free for them, of course they would host something, but without a Nature paper, an Assistant Professor doesn't qualify for their fancy seminar series.  I understand completely.  I'm in exactly the same boat.  I have many friends and people in my field that I would love to host for a seminar here, but they don't meet the level of fame required for our limited number of seminar spots.   

I asked some of my colleagues for advice, and word got around that I needed help with this.  My department chair and several other people in my department have gone out of their way to make phone calls and send emails to their friends around the country.  One of my colleagues said that they emailed everyone that they've written a tenure letter for over the past five years because they should owe them a favor.  I've been overwhelmed by how generous my colleagues have been.  As expected, 99% of the responses from people have been something along the lines of what I wrote above regarding hosting me if I'm ever in town.  At least this gives me some options, and I may choose conferences more strategically with potential seminar locations in mind.  But somehow this networking strategy did in fact work, and within 48 h of emails being sent, I have at least two "invited" external seminars lined up for later this year.  I'm really loving my coworkers right now! 

Am I ready to go up for tenure?

My university has a 6-year tenure clock.  I’m now at year 5, which is when I should be submitting my tenure dossier.  Since I am almost surely going to receive my R01 based on its recent score, I was feeling gung ho about submitting this year, even though I had previously received a 1-year extension just in case I didn’t get the grant. 

Just before Christmas I received an email from our tenure and promotions committee chair who asked what my plans were.  He offered to review my CV and have three other members of the committee give me a pre-review as well.  All four of them said that I need more papers and that I should wait a year.  I was livid!  Every annual review I’ve had up to this point said I was doing great, and that all I needed was the R01.  So how could this have changed?

I went to my department chair to get another opinion.  She agreed that I should wait a year.  Again, I thought, “how can everyone be so cavalier with a year of my life?”  She recognized that I was upset and explained their perspective. 

No one in my department wants to see me be denied tenure.  They want my case to be a slam-dunk.  It’s as simple as that.  I’m just short of one of the published metrics for the recommended minimum number of papers for our college.  I thought this was not a problem since my papers have been high impact.  However, everyone would really like to have me meet the metric so that there is no guesswork involved.  I eventually decided that it wasn’t so unreasonable for me to wait a year now that I understood where they were coming from. 

The other thing that happened is that my chair said that she would look into increasing my salary since I am in fact doing well, and I would potentially be foregoing the salary increase of an associate professor for a year.  I don’t know whether this will actually happen, but that also made waiting a year a little easier to swallow.