hmmm...

So after reading this post about this article, I got to thinking. Mostly about my currently unfulfilled dream to find a faculty position. Could the current "flight of faculty" be the cause of my multiple applications being returned with a nicely worded you are fabulous and we'd love to hire you but the other applicants had more experience note in them. (A note for full disclosure, my particular rejection letter from UW-Madison was just that...a straight out you suck kind of rejection...not the we love you but kind)

Given my recent encounter with the age old can't get experience without a job and can't get a job without experience brick wall I started to wonder what was really happening. Are these supposed fleeing faculty fleeing to jobs that would otherwise have gone to young, energetic faculty candidates? And if so, what does the mean for the fate of all the Universities? To me it has implications beyond the shrinking reputation of UW-Madison. I'm assuming that most of these fleeing faculty are tenured and therefore fleeing to other tenured positions. Does this mean that the dwindling number of pre-tenure positions are a direct result of faculty just jumping from University to University and leaving no room for new comers? I sure hope not, because that means we will come to a point were all of these hopping faculty will retire, and if no one new has been let in, then every school that wasn't proactive and just happy to accept faculty from a school with a supposed better reputation will be screwed in the long run, with no faculty to fill up the ranks.

To me the tenure system works because of it's revolving nature. And the advances in science, arts, literature, etc that we make are directly fed by the combination of young professors producing the solid kind of we'll definitely get results and therefore many papers stuff so they can get tenure, and "older" (don't like that what that word implies but can't think of a better one...I personally never met an "old" professor...and let's remember that my major advisor is retired now) professors with secure jobs allowed to pursue the more experimental, risky types of experiments because their whole career isn't riding on the formula of X grants to produce Y papers, where X and Y are arbitrarily assigned by a tenure committee at some upper level of the university who really only cares about Z dollars. I hate to believe it, because everyone wants to think that everything they do is the hottest thing out there, but the truth is the most amazing science, often comes either from a) tenured faculty whose tenure gives them the ultimate freedom to pursue the science they dream of b) people who have given up on the tenure system, do whatever the hell they want, win some big prize/award for their work and are granted automatic tenure or c) those with extraordinary luck. This is not to say those of us still hoping to get a tenure track position and eventually tenure don't produce good, valid, important and ground-breaking science, but in the grand academic scheme we are still children learning to walk on our own.

But if the system stops revolving, doesn't let the young pups in, what will happen? Will it be the death of science? I see more and more young PhD's opting out of the academic lifestyle, mostly because it's becoming next to impossible to find a job, and hopping from post-doc to post-doc being asked to pursue a new topic each time doesn't allow anyone to build up enough work to truly be productive...and then it doesn't really help the paper and grant count that is needed to get into the tenure system. They just get tired and say screw it. I myself have come to the conclusion that the lack of women professors is directly do the the Post-Doc stage of the career coinciding with prime child bearing years, and I could go on about that for a whole other post.

Personally, I think Universities, should stop worrying about who they are losing and start worrying about who they aren't getting the first place.

just some thoughts.