Abstract
Mentoring tenure-track faculty is effective and increasingly utilized but there is demand for concrete mentoring strategies for navigating the ambiguities of the tenure track. The key driver of ambiguity—and therefore of candidate angst—is that some important aspects of the tenure decision cannot be determined until quite late in the tenure track. Two such aspects are the strength and number of external reviews the tenure committee may receive as evaluations of research effectiveness and the determination of teaching effectiveness. This paper proposes some ambiguity management strategies for implementation by candidates and their mentors as soon as the first year.
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Notes
See Conley and Önder (2014) for an insightful and sobering review of this topic.
Faculty mentors are also a key resource for developing strategies for shepherding papers from complete first drafts to submissions; through the revise-and-resubmit process; and to publication. Mentors might share referee reports received for their own manuscripts and describe (1) how they successfully revise manuscripts but particularly (2) how they process rejections and keep moving forward relatively undaunted.
See Sarsons et al. (2020).
I appreciate—and concur with—a referee’s suggestion that homework and exams can also vary in degree of difficulty, such that it may be optimal to have relatively more difficult homework that leads to the exam. Certainly a range of difficulty can also be built into one’s use of old exam questions as homework.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Co-Editor Julie Smith; two anonymous reviewers; and my colleagues Cynthia Bansak, Andrew Herbert, Jonathan Wight, and Anne Winkler for several helpful and encouraging comments that greatly improved the first version of this paper.
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Wagner, J. Concrete Strategies for Economics Tenure-Track Faculty and Their Mentors. Eastern Econ J 47, 449–459 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-021-00189-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-021-00189-5