Don’t Worry, Be Happy, and Get Tenure
Here is an interesting new take on the nature of the tenure track that just came out from a (former) Assistant Professor at Harvard. In essence: Don’t worry, be happy, work smart, and its not always necessary to answer your email right away.
I would appreciate this article more if the author had not gotten tenure in the end, and could still take this attitude. Or more to the point, perhaps if she had the same attitude after spending three years on the tenure-track job market not finding a job. But the article is what it is.
I too tend towards the skeptical, however this list seems both commonsensical and brave. Note, she is not saying it LEAD to success. She is saying she stopped worrying so much IF it would lead to success.
Ah. The usual self-absorbed academic. We’re all reaching our holes, graves, hospice rooms or urns in the end – seventy to eighty years of meaninglessness and then it’s over. Some of the cattle require privileged lifestyles along their way to oblivion – such as that can be gained from the comfy White Towers of the Academy. Others don’t. I hope alzheimer’s doesn’t make all that knowledge she gained go poof someday. That would be a shame… Or not.
I would agree that this list seems commonsensical.
Not so sure about brave, though. It would have been braver to have published it before getting tenure at Harvard. Or even braver to have published it while on the job market after being denied tenure.