Those who embark on the odyssey of the Ph.D. rue the day whenthey must face that they are both highly educated and depressinglywithout job security. Receiving tenure marks the end of a longjourney for those who aspire to intellectual greatness.
Enter the tenure track. Before one can receive tenure and beguaranteed a job for years to follow, a few hurdles must beovercome. Some tenured-wannabes consider the “hurdles”to resemble a lower circle in Dante’s Inferno that includespunishment for those who possess the audacity to considerthemselves worthy of the intellectual bourgeois.
At SMU the sentence for guilty offenders consists of six yearsof lofty (some would argue unreachable) expectations and ambiguousstandards of excellence in research, writing and teaching.Themulti-arsenal launched on unsuspecting professors is meant toprepare them for the challenges of teaching, while strengtheningSMU through the research they publish and contribute to academicwriting.
Most un-tenured types teach a heavy class load, research(imagine the labor behind not a 15-20- page paper, but a 200- pagebook), and publish articles.
“SMU is a research university. Professors are paid forteaching and researching. Sometimes, a professor will be good atteaching and not research, but one does not compensate for theother,” Dean of Dedman College Jasper Neal said.
Which is why a teacher can have an abundance of glowing studentevaluations claiming that a professor had a hand in jump-startingcollective intellectual lives, but at the three-year review period,the World’s Best Teacher recipient can still be chastised fornot meeting the published-works quota for the SMU track.
In the American system, quality of research is determined by howinfluential and prolific the research is on a given field of study.The collective faculty that publishes a larger, heavier (and I domean strictly pounds and ounces here) stack of research is givenhigher regard and ranking.
This fact alone begs the question: Are our professors here toteach or publish? And more acutely, are we the students here tolearn something, or simply pass through SMU in hopes of gaining adiploma from an institution that carries the “weight”of a good reputation as a research university?
Of course we all know there are great thinkers who can publishand also teach, but that is not always the case. This explains whysome students are dumbstruck when a favorite professor gets the axeat the halfway point of their tenure race.”I’ve seenstudents carrying signs or sending letters … but I’venever seen it work. I’ve never seen a tenure decisionoverturned,” Neal said.
So in short, if you expect to actually learn something with thehelp of your professor, and not just ride your diploma on theafterbirth of their academic/creative/scientific parturition, youshould have gone to a small “teaching” college and nota research institution.
