Dr. Maria Holland

And...it's here. UW announced tenure clock extension options for junior faculty last week.

Leadership frames this as part of their deep support to junior faculty. But how, exactly, is more time (& delayed promotion) are meaningful support in response to reduced & uncertain research resources?

Wow, I really wasn't expecting this paper to become so relevant again, so soon - but I've been hearing conversations about extending tenure clocks AGAIN. What about a four-year clock extension? 🤔 I'm sure there could be no downsides . . . .

MOOD

That's great to hear! I did talk to a few colleagues who felt they were held to clear standards like that but unfortunately it was not the majority...but it does show it's possible!

Thank you to all the colleagues who chatted with me privately about this over the past ~year. I'm happy to play a role in bringing this conversation into the public view! (6/6)

There are ways to improve these policies so that they better benefit both individuals and institutions. Here, we offer extension-related policies that support the success of early-career faculty, based on the literature and our own experiences. These include giving candidates agency through the flexibility to opt out of extensions and clear standards for tenure that are independent of a timeline. In cases where candidates do choose extensions, we urge universities to make them more equitable by extending funding along with the timeline and by mitigating the long-term consequences on salary.

We wanted to bring some light to these experiences and share some policy suggestions: (5/6)

My coauthors and I wrote based on the literature and our personal and shared experiences. This phenomenon is not discussed much publicly but in trusted spaces you hear the same stories over and over and over (4/6)

In many cases where faculty request or are granted tenure clock extensions and then wish to go back to their original clock, university policies often require adherence to the adjusted clock and label the original clock as “early.” This revised expectation can (and often does) occur, even at universities with nominally opt-out policies due to cultural norms around tenure and promotion. Thus, formal policies supporting opt-out options, while important, offer only a partial solution. Faculty should be able to opt out without being viewed as going up for early tenure, which is generally known to be held to a higher standard. Otherwise, having achieved similar productivity as someone lacking the circumstance that necessitated the extension, their case could nevertheless appear weaker in light of the “early” designation.

The tenure track illustrated as a race up a hill. The typical tenure track involves reaching the bar for tenure in 5 years, although it can be as much as 8–11 years. In the case of an extension, the intention is to allow an additional year to reach the same bar; this results in a slightly lower “slope” to account for the presence of challenges along the way. However, in reality, the bar for tenure often gets higher. Faculty have to climb a steeper slope for more time, while simultaneously having to navigate multiple obstacles.

And when faculty try to opt out of the extensions they're eligible for, they're viewed as going up "early" (3/6)

AAUP’s original 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” (9) stated that the tenure clock should not exceed seven years, under the rationale that it was intended to be a fixed probationary period, not an indefinite sentence. This policy is interesting in light of the increasing number of faculty with multiple extensions. And this is not a hypothetical scenario; we know of one junior faculty member who accrued, during five years on the tenure track, an astonishing four years of clock extensions. These much longer clocks call for extra attention, to make sure that they help, rather than hinder, faculty.

Extensions are becoming more and more common (e.g. COVID) and they're accumulating for some faculty (2/6)

New paper I'm extremely proud of: "Extended time, elevated expectations: The unappreciated downsides of pausing the tenure clock". We argue that extensions should be treated as a safety net, not insurance policy (1/6) www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

A two-proof day. First Springer removed all the italics from in vivo/ex vivo/in silico, then OUP replaced all my spelled-out numbers with digits (e.g. "2 local peaks" and "8 species"). You see, academic publishing costs so much because of the aDdEd VaLuE 🙄

histogram showing that all 10 students scored between 0 and 95 points.

I love Gradescope in general, but their data visualization is COMICALLY bad.

Behind every seemingly sane early stage professor, there is a slack of other ESIs shitposting through it with her...you know who you are.

why would researchgate name itself after an academic scandal that hasn't happened quite yet

When Hiroshi and I first talked, he described us as "climbing the same mountain from different sides". I'm very much looking forward to seeing what we find at the top!

We submitted our proposal to NSF (and a similar version, in Japanese (!!) to an agency in Japan), but it was picked up for funding by NINDS. I'm very grateful for their support as well as the Japanese NICT. I'm also happy to talk about my experience with CRCNS!

CRCNS (Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience) is a weird program that definitely had some administrative/logistic challenges - but it is so cool that a mechanism exists to fund international collaborations like this.

Ever since I met one of Prof. Kawasaki's students at SfN in 2019, which I attended to find experimental collaborators, I knew that we could do cool things together. First, we published an awesome paper in PLOS Comp. Bio, and then I found the funding mechanism to let us keep working together!

Just awarded my first R01! With our collaborator Hiroshi Kawasaki, we're going to investigate the role of astrocytes in cortical folding via a combined computational and experimental approach!

A wise man once said “every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time”. (B. Gibbard, 2005)

But these days w/little kids it’s more like “every plan is a tiny prayer to our immune systems” and let me tell you they are an uncaring lot.