Tenure Trouble for Interdisciplinary Faculty
The Gap Between University Faculty Hiring and Tenure Processes
Sep 19, 2008
It’s a brave new world for tenure-track faculty these days. Traditional disciplinary boundaries are blurring as modern scholarship becomes increasingly collaborative and cooperative. Institutions of higher education are responding to this sea change to varying degrees, but generally, interdisciplinary (ID) faculty get left out in the cold at tenure time.
Universities Seek to Hire Interdisciplinary Faculty
Faculty searches at many institutions of higher education embrace ID work, actively seeking incoming faculty who are multi-disciplinary their training, teaching, and service interests. For many new faculty, the silos that defined training and teaching 15 or 20 twenty years ago have given way to team-based approaches to graduate training, teaching, and field and laboratory-based research. This indicates viability and support for ID work, but structural problems in the university plague ID faculty at tenure time.
Interdisciplinary Work Doesn’t Fit the Tenure Model
When the time comes for retention, tenure and promotion (RTP) reviews, faculty engaged in collaborative and ID work find themselves in the position of essentially defending their activities. This is because many existing RTP criteria are based on traditional fields as they were defined at the first half of the last century. ID and collaborative work, especially research, are seen as an aberration that requires justification, additional documentation, and assurance that the collaborative or ID approach was entirely necessary in for the activity in question. Although the purpose of these guidelines is to assure that candidates are making substantial and relevant contributions in research and scholarship, the implication that ID work is not demanding, rigorous, or valued is concerning, and must be changed.
A New Definition of Faculty “Independence”
The prevalence of ID and collaborative work has led to a new definition of "faculty independence" which can fuel the needed change in RTP criteria. The modern view of an “independent investigator” focuses on the independence of thought enjoyed by a faculty member, rather than on whether research work was done as part of a team or as a single investigator. Specifically, "independence” does not mean “isolated”, “solitary,” not does it imply "separately funded [Bridges to Independence: Fostering the Independence of New Investigators in Biomedical Research, National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2005]. This definition is fundamentally different from the traditional definition of a solitary scholar in which ID and collaborative work are discouraged with the admonition that for tenure, one “has to prove one’s independence”.
Modern Collaboration is a Strength for Faculty
In the days when collaboration meant travel, working “for” another faculty member, or addressing a research question from a risky standpoint, the old definition of “independence” made more sense. It could be argued that in a world without the digital, data, and real-time communication and knowledge access capabilities of today, engaging in collaboration or an ID project was much riskier, and had the real possibility of diverting a pre-tenure faculty member’s attention, resources, and focus. Today, however, the world is a very different place, and it is entirely possible for faculty to collaborate, cross disciplines and time-zones, and have the communication they need to develop highly functional, innovative, and well-grounded collaborative and ID projects.
Institutions of higher education strive to recruit the brightest, most promising faculty, many of whom are doing wonderful ID work, but and now the challenge is to create structures and processes that measure, appreciate, and celebrate the work they do through the tenure and promotion process. This is a tough task, but one that must be accomplished on a national scale for the sake of the academy, its faculty, and, most importantly, its current and future students.
