The Dean's Perspective

---

The authors of this series have been in higher education for more than 35 years and have been tenured for more years than they care to remember. Over the years, both have engaged in most of the activities described here in order to find ways to continually renew themselves and stay productive. In addition, both have presented sessions on various faculty development topics at regional, national, and international professional meetings and have published in the area. It is from these presentations and publications that the authors have drawn the following observations. [Krishna Dhir, Editor]

Part Two of a Two-Part Series

Life After Tenure, Part II

by James A. Pope, University of Toledo; and William Carper, University of West Florida

In the first segment of this two-part series on "Life After Tenure" we looked at the issue of what a faculty member does after he or she receives a positive tenure outcome. For many newly tenured faculty who have gone straight through undergraduate and graduate programs and then the tenure process, the prospect of a future career of 30 years or more may seem suddenly daunting. Once the euphoria of receiving tenure has worn off, post-tenure depression may set in and questions like "How am I going to survive for the next 30 years?" or "What can I do to break up the boredom of teaching the same courses term after term?" may come up.

In Part I, we looked at the options of moving into an administrative position or becoming a consultant. Each of these alternatives carries with it both opportunities as well as potential problems. In Part II, we examine doing such things as moving into faculty leadership positions, becoming a chaired or eminent professor, seeking out opportunities to teach as an exchange faculty member in an overseas program, serving as a mentor to new/junior faculty, and working with your discipline's professional organizations. After reading both parts, we hope that we have given you information to use in planning your academic career. Again, consider your personality, strengths, weaknesses and interests in choosing which paths make sense and will satisfy you best.

Faculty Leadership
There are numerous opportunities on any campus for taking a role in faculty leadership. Every school is organized differently, and you may have to start low and work your way up. But if your goal is to be a campus leader, plan a "career" path. Initially there is committee work within your department and college, and most programs have more opportunities available than faculty willing to do them. You probably have been careful of accepting too many committee assignments, especially as a new faculty member, because no one gets tenured solely by serving on a lot of committees.

After you achieve tenure, the picture changes and, if this is what you want to do, there will be many options for you. Having become known on campus, you should not only strive to be a member of a committee but to become the chair of the committee. There is a pecking order to committees that goes beyond just departmental, college, and university titles. Some committees are clearly more important than others, and this varies by campus. By the time you become tenured, you should know which committees are important on your campus.

Having said that, personnel committees are always important, especially as you move to the college and university levels. Again, because of the types of decisions that these committees have to make, they can be another double-edged sword in terms of your relationships with your colleagues. Most campuses have a faculty senate or something similar which has a leadership structure that not only includes committees, but also positions as officers and representatives to organizations such as boards of trustees or state level organizations. Some campuses have unions which have their own leadership structures. Union positions can take a lot of time and can put you in frequent contact with the administration and/or even with political leaders. Because this contact can be adversarial at times, it is best to be a full professor before you move too high in the leadership structure of a faculty union.

Eminent or Chaired Professor
If you decide that research is your forte and want to develop this career path to its fullest, you should aim to become an eminent or chaired professor. This will generally mean that your primary duties obviously will be research oriented, but you often will have a budget of your own which comes from endowment and/or grant funds. You may also become a 'big name' in your specialty and be considered for awards such as the Fellow designation from a professional organization such as DSI.

If you are going to lay out a research agenda and develop specific research themes, you will probably also need to be at, or move to, a large university where such talents are recognized and where you will be able to find colleagues with similar agendas and the resources to support them. While your research track may change over time, you still need to become known within your discipline as 'the expert' in some area. Repeated publications in "A" journals are absolutely necessary here, and your participation in national and international academic meetings will put a face to your name.

The writing and review process for "A" journals can be laborious and time consuming. It is not unheard of for these top journals to have multiple year lead times for articles to actually appear in print--and this is after perhaps multiple revise-and-resubmit iterations. Consequently, you need to have a steady stream of research not only completed but in progress. In the vernacular, keep your pipeline full.

Another part of your research agenda should also include actively pursuing significant externally funded grants. Grants not only give you prestige, they allow you to buy additional time to spend on your research, but give you additional resources. Grant writing, however, can consume large amounts of time and energy with small probabilities of payoffs. Fortunately, success tends to breed success, and that success brings more opportunities. One way of leveraging your time is to team up with younger faculty members, especially those whose long-term goal is the same as yours. But be sure you treat them as colleagues and do not try to exploit them! The same would hold for any Ph.D. students who might be working with you.

Mentor to Younger Faculty
Once you have been awarded tenure, you become one of the "old guard," and you can pass along knowledge of how you did it to younger faculty. Even if new faculty have had excellent preparation in their doctoral programs, there are always many aspects of being a faculty member at your school that can be perplexing or even unknown to the new hire. The authors have been involved in relating this information to junior faculty at a number of regional and national/international professional meetings, and have published on this in an earlier Decision Line article (Carper, et al., 2006).

While some schools will have a formal mentoring program in which senior faculty are actually assigned to junior faculty, most still do this on a purely informal basis. If teaching is your strength, you will probably be drawn to mentoring as it is a form of teaching. There are also opportunities for you to mentor in specific areas such as classroom teaching through campus centers that are dedicated to improving instructional effectiveness. Not only could this be a mentoring opportunity for you, it might also represent a way for you to move into an administrative role as a center director.

Be a Leader in the Professional Community
There are many opportunities for leadership in the professional organizations of your discipline, on both the academic and practitioner levels. Organizations such as DSI have a constant need for volunteers, and they tend to also have regional divisions which need volunteers. The regional professional organizations offer an excellent way for junior faculty to become involved without the stress levels associated with national and international meetings. Start as a paper referee and start working your way up; but again, do not spread yourself too thin. Pick one or two organizations and work with them.

In addition to merely going to these meetings to present your research, these gatherings serve many other important functions. First of all, through the networking that occurs, you will make lifetime friends. If you stick to a few meetings, you will form a sort of cohort of colleagues with whom you will progress through your career. Second, if you ever look for another job, you will have a natural network in place that can provide you with inside information. Third, if you are looking to hire someone, you will have that network to help you find and evaluate candidates. Fourth, some of your cohort may become journal editors and be able to help you with publishing. Fifth, you may be asked to be a journal editor or assistant editor by a member of your cohort group. Sixth, you may develop opportunities for joint research, grants, or visiting positions. And the list goes on.

Being active in practitioner organizations can be a bit different from academic organizations, but it also can lead to many new opportunities. You will network and make friends and acquaintances but these will be outside of academia and can lead to consulting contacts and research opportunities. If you earn a professional certification, you will learn the body of knowledge that practitioners feel is important which adds another dimension to your teaching and research. Teaching certification review courses may give you extra income. All of your activities with practitioners give you contacts in the practitioner community which can give you opportunities for summer work, internships and co-ops for your students, plant tours, more examples to use in your teaching. You also will have the opportunity to promote your degree programs and other offerings. Some organizations provide grants for academicians and even scholarships for the children of their members. Many of the organizations have members around the world you can use to improve your international dimension. But, as with the academic organizations, focus: pick one or two organizations and stay with them. And network, network, network . . . .

Some Combination of These
You do not have to specialize to the point where you do only one of the things we have suggested. But, again, do not try to do everything—establish a focus and a career plan. Some combinations have synergy. Consulting and being active in the practitioner community go well together. Being an eminent professor and mentoring younger colleagues not only is a good combination, but it will make you more respected in your department and university and provide you with colleagues who may want to become involved with your research.

Other combinations do not go as well together (or, at least at the same time). Being an administrator means that your research agenda will be put aside. If your goal is to become an administrator as soon as possible and to spend the rest of your career in administrative positions, make sure that you do enough research to obtain tenure and your first positions, and then try not to worry about it as you simply will not have time to do both. Also, you cannot be both an administrator and a faculty leader since they are often at odds with one another.

Retire On Active Duty and Live Off the Efforts of Your Colleagues
Is there anything to stop you from obtaining tenure and then doing the bare minimum in teaching, research, and service to get by your five-year post-tenure reviews (assuming your university even has them)? Absolutely not, if you are determined to do so, and we can probably all give examples of colleagues who have. A colleague stated to one of the authors that she would take whatever across-the-board raise the school was offering and spend her vacations travelling. She did not care about research, full professor, or moving to another school--she was satisfied staying where she was as a permanently tenured, associate professor.

But it obviously depends upon your personal and institutional "ethos." At some schools, doing little or nothing after tenure may be the norm. If it is, and that is what you want to do, that is fine. If it is not what you want to do, you should have become aware of that culture and moved to another school before the tenure decision.

At the other extreme are schools like the University of Chicago where you may be expected to win a Nobel Prize (or similar) at some point. You may remember the story of the wife of the Chicago professor who, during their divorce settlement, included a clause that if he won a Nobel Prize within five years she would get half. He won and she did.

If you are willing for your colleagues to regard you as a "senior slacker" or "senior slug," then retiring on the job is an option. If you have any true professional pride, it is not.

Leave Academia
The thought of leaving academia does not occur to most of us. It is a good profession and we have the advantage of the cycle of renewal--each semester we get to start over with a new group of students (Pope, 1999). If something did not work in a previous semester, we drop it and try something new. We are constantly renewing ourselves and what we do. And, most of us work in the semester system. Two 15-week semesters during the year leaves us 22 weeks to do other things. From time to time, we can take time to do other things with sabbaticals with pay or even leaves without pay but with the security of knowing that you still have a tenured position to return to at some point. Not many other professions offer that kind of lifestyle.

On the other hand, why not leave academia? With tenure, you have proven yourself in academia. As we pointed out, you only have one more promotion opportunity in the next 30 to 40 years, and your raises are likely to be limited to cost of living or worse (unless you move to another school or go into administration). Moving outside of academia can be a major source of renewal but it can also be very scary and remember that there is no such thing as tenure in the "real world."

Whether moving from academia into industry, public service, full-time consulting, or whatever, there are advantages. For one thing, you can probably earn more money, and you can increase your income significantly if you are good at what you do. You also probably have the possibility of multiple promotions over the next few decades (unless you work for yourself). If you are in a research environment, you will probably have more resources at your disposal; although they may be more directed (someone may actually be interested in the outcome). You may see the results of your research implemented in improving a process or organization. Finally, you may have a higher profile. An undergraduate classmate of one of the authors is on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a higher profile position than he would have had as "just" a professor of economics somewhere.

If you do opt to leave academia, and later decide to return, you may find it difficult to return to a similar position or in the same location. Colleagues may have resented your leaving for "greener pastures," or administrators may not want to set a precedent and have others follow you. Both authors have a friend who entered public service and then tried to return to his former position at his old school. His university would not take him back. If you do leave academia, be sure that is absolutely what you want to do.

Whatever You Decide
Whatever path you decide to take (except for retiring on the job), reinvent yourself from time to time. Learn and do something new. The best advice one of the authors received from an undergraduate professor was: "If you always do what you know how to do, you will never learn to do anything new."

In academia we have the wonderful institution of sabbatical leaves. Take advantage of them. When you take them, get out of town. One of the authors believes the saddest sight he sees is the professor on sabbatical who is still in town and who attends all his or her committee meetings. Go somewhere! See and do something new!

In your teaching, take on a new course, redesign an old course, teach in a new way. If you have not tried distance learning, try it. Teach overseas--many schools have exchange agreements with international programs, and many of them teach in English. See if one of those programs has an opening for you to teach. Connect with colleagues who are teaching overseas, either permanently or on a part-time basis. Living in a foreign county is entirely different from visiting as a tourist. Teach continuing education or executive courses. Develop a new course or program, or teach something in a completely new field. As professors of business, we are expected to be at least conversant with all specialties in business; teach in a new one or maybe team teach with someone from a different discipline.

In your research, collaborate with colleagues in different areas or different schools. Do a different type of research. If you do analytical research, try empirical studies, and vice versa. Write case studies. Do more grant writing. Team up with colleagues overseas.

In the service area, the demands will increase. As mentioned above, most schools go easy on non-tenured faculty when it comes to service but as you gain seniority, you will be asked to serve on more college and university level committees. Do not shirk these duties. You are being asked because people value your experience. Serve on a different committee. Renew yourself.

What Legacy Will You Leave Behind?
At the age we typically get tenure, we are not thinking about our legacy, much as our undergraduate students do not think about retirement planning. But it does not hurt to do so. How will people, especially your students and colleagues, remember you once you do actually retire and leave the campus? We have presented a number of ways faculty use to successfully renew themselves during their careers after receiving tenure as well as one that we cannot recommend. How you will be remembered at the end of your career will largely depend on the choices you make after you earn tenure. We hope that this brief presentation will assist you in making them wisely.

Endnotes
Carper, William B., Carl W. Gooding, James A. Pope, and Ernest B. Uhr. Academic Street Smarts. Decision Line, Vol. 37, No. 4, (July 2006), pp. 4-8. Reprinted in Krishna S. Dhir (ed.), The Dean's Perspective, Decision Sciences Institute: Atlanta GA, 2008; pp. 64-73.

Shapiro, Judith. Winning tenure, losing the thrill. The Chronicle of Higher Education, from the issue dated November 16, 2001. Retrieved on March 15, 2010, from http://chronicle.com/article/Winning-Tenure-Losing-the/12027.

Pope, James A. The cycle of renewal in the academic year. Mid-American Journal of Business, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 1999, p. 4.

Reading List
(as well as the works cited in each of these)

Abbott, H. Porter. On the prospects for life after tenure. ADE Bulletin (Fall 1988, pp. 72-74. Retrieved on March 15, 2010 from http://web2.ade.org/ade/bulletin/n090/090072.htm.

Bradley, S. G. Managing the academic tenure process. Leadership and Staffing, July 31, 2006. Retrieved on March 15, 2010 from http://www.labmanager.com/articles_pf.asp?ID=96.

Cohen, J. J. Post-tenure depression, or a goal once attained recedes anew. Retrieved on March 15, 2010 from http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/04/post-tenure-depression-or-goal-once.html.

Hemami, Sheila. Maintaining momentum after tenure, or avoiding the "now what?" syndrome. Retrieved on March 15, 2010 from http://paesmem.stanford.edu/slides/hemami.pdf.

Virago, Dr. Post-tenure blues. Ennui. Depression. Melancholy. Or something like that. Retrieved on March 15, 2010 from http://quodshe.blogspot.com/2009/04/post-tenure-blues-ennui-depression.html.

Wagner, Neil R. Getting tenure at a university. Retrieved on March 15, 2010 from http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/creative_writing/tenure6.pdf.

---