Tenure-Track
September 30, 2004 6:38 AM 
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US academia: When a position is described as 'tenure-track', what would the holder have to do to actually make it to tenure?
While we're about it, are there any standards for pay and for days of paid vacation in US academia, or are these all subject to negotiation between employee and institution?
posted by biffa to education (13 comments total)
For the distinction between the two kinds of jobs, maybe it would help to look at examples of job advertisements. Here are two from Cornell (more-or-less randomly chosen): Tenure-track assistant professor, and non-renewable, three-year term appointments.
There are a few different kinds of non-tenure-track jobs: leave replacements (when a department hires someone off the street for a year to replace a faculty member who's on sabbatical or leave), postdocs (1- to 3-year appointments, usually for recent PhDs, to get their research jump-started by working with a senior person), and a kind of nebulous third category that arises when a department or university only has enough money to hire for a year at a time.
Here's a distinction I just learned recently in conversation with the head of last year's Promotion & Tenure Committee at my institution. Promotion (from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor) is typically awarded based on accomplishment -- papers written, good teaching, grants gotten, etc., etc. Tenure, on the other hand, is awarded based on future expectations. The department (and college, and university) is making a huge commitment -- that they're willing to have you as a colleague for the next thirty-odd years, barring malfeasance -- they want to make sure that you're going to be a good colleague, not so much that you have already been one. Of course, the future and the past are inextricable, but that's the rule of thumb as it was explained to me.
P&T generally rests on the "three columns of academic achievement": research, teaching, and service. (Some places also include "contribution to the mission of the college/university", particularly schools with a religious affiliation.) Expectations in each of these vary wildly by department and even more wildly by institution. (For example, a research paper a year is considered pretty darn decent in pure mathematics, while it won't get you a cup of coffee in chemistry.) Research and teaching are relatively self-explanatory (though incredibly hard to measure on any kind of objective scale). Service means committee work (departmentally and in the larger institution, as well as in the community), being chair, etc.
For your followup question, as far as I know salary etc. are all open to negotiation. There are, however, various ways to find out what the "going rate" is. For example, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society publishes yearly data on starting salary for new hires (broken down along dozens of lines, like geography, sex, age, etc. -- number geeks loves them some data).
Finally, it's a little tricky to talk about "paid vacation" in academics, where one of the biggest draws is that we get whole months of the year off from teaching. There is often an option to sign a 9-month contract (and fend for yourself over the summer, with grant support, etc) or a 12-month contract (in which case I suppose you could see the summers as paid vacations). Apart from that (and various academic breaks), I don't think there are usually any allowances for vacation. Also, even over summer and winter breaks, when we may not be teaching, we're often trying to catch up on research and other things that are harder to do with students in your office, but are still definitely part of our jobs.
caveat: all this is for mathematics at universities, which is what I know. In particular, I've been told that postdocs in other sciences and in the humanities work differently, and I'm sure that things are different at liberal-arts colleges..
posted by gleuschk at 7:22 AM on September 30, 2004