Academic Roadkill

I have posted much of this, if not exactly this,

earlier, but here it is from the Inside Higher 

Education website.

Academic Roadkill

November 13, 2013

By

Martin H. Krieger

Stephen Spielberg's "Duel" (1971), one of his first films, is about a truck that keeps coming. You really don't want to be the character, played by Dennis Weaver driving a red Plymouth Valiant, who is being pursued by an actual (but otherwise anonymous) truck.

1. I often say, in my new book The Scholar's Survival Manual and in everyday discourse: A truck is coming, and you better not say: What truck? Trucks are real and if they are coming, you had better get out of the way. Otherwise you will become academic roadkill.

Publish that book or get that grant or have n papers out and seen. You had better do it. You don't want to say to yourself, "Smith did a half a book and it was in draft, and he got tenure." Your advocates might say this, too. But most others will think to themselves, Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Then they will get the broom and dustpan to clean up the road.

Maybe Smith had other virtues, maybe he had slept with the president, maybe they made a mistake. But you are likely to be academic roadkill, be splat on the ground, unless you do what you must. You are lucky to have seen the oncoming truck.

2. As in Harry Potter: "Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them... Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself... soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life."

                                                   —Remus Lupin to Harry Potter

Now you may have received incorrect counsel from your mentor, who turns out to be a dementor or tormentor, so to speak. Tormentors (pronounced tor'mentors) are mentors who are destructive under the guise of helping you. In effect, tormentors are "internalizing the aggressor," saying "It (torturing) was good enough for me, so it is good enough for you."

They may have referred to Smith. They may not realize what is really going on at the university level. But if you look around you at others at peer or better institutions, and see what they have done, you are likely to get a good idea. By your second year you should know what you ought to do.

3. Say, for whatever reason, you are not tenured, or appointed. Shenanigans and bias are not so rare, and some colleagues or deans or provosts really are forces of evil. You might appeal internally or launch a national campaign of publicity and letter writing, or begin a legal process. They sometimes work. I know of scholars who have been turned down, then have the decision changed, and who are now at least as published and prominent as their colleagues. They tell me they are still trying to prove to their colleagues that they made a mistake initially, and from what I can see the proof is overwhelming.

Still, in your back pocket you need to have a Plan. During the year in which you are being evaluated for tenure, apply for jobs at other institutions. You can explain to your dean something to the effect that the process has enough uncertainty you want to have alternatives, although you would dearly love to stay at Your U. You should also have a go-bag, in effect a briefcase of the stuff you really need for your work, so that if your office is incinerated, you would be O.K. Obviously, for those in laboratory sciences, you cannot do this. But you want to have all your data and writing on a thumb drive, or in the cloud, probably in several distinct sets of copies -- whatever else that cannot be replaced for a few thousand dollars. Universities only rarely just fire someone and escort them outside the building immediately, unlike many firms. But you don’t want them to control your assets — ever.

You might ask yourself: Do I really want to be a professor -- or a professor at Your U? Often, it is not sour grapes to admit that this job is not for you, but a realization of what you really want. It is hard to say this, since it will seem like an excuse to others. But the most important person is you and your career, and of course your family. So, if you have sold a screenplay already, maybe that is where you belong. Or perhaps your entrepreneurial spirit lies in the direction of business and finance. Or what you need to do is to get a job at another university, and you can do so in the next year after the turndown.

Living well is the best revenge, said the poet George Herbert (1593-1633), but it may well have been in common usage. Actually, revenge is not a good idea, and you are better off looking forward or forgiving. In any case, living well will surely be good for you. In my experience, the places that do not appoint or tenure you, if you go forward with your work, look less and less attractive as time goes on. And if you go forward in a different direction, the appeal of a life of learning as a professor, will lessen as you watch many of your former colleagues atrophy. At some point you may pity those who spend their lives with late adolescents.

BIO

Martin H. Krieger is professor of planning at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. His most recent work is The Scholar’s Survival Manual: A Road Map for Students, Faculty, and Administrators (Indiana University Press, 2013).

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2013/11/13/essay-how-avoid-becoming-academic-roadkill#ixzz2kWuoeMZP
Inside Higher Ed 

"It pays the weaker or smaller contender to fight harder"

In Jack Hirschleifer's The Dark Side of the Force, he has an essay on The Paradox of Power. His point is that "While wealth certainly provides the wherewithal for successfully exploiting a poorer opponent, the initially disadvantaged group is typically rationally motivated to fight harder. Or, put the other way, non-conflictual or cooperative strategies tend to be relatively more rewarding for the better-endowed side."
p. 45.

Put differently, those who have received reward fairly easily might well be majorized by those who are poorer who have learned to work very hard to get anything. It would be rational to hire those who have been discriminated-against but have made their way, over those who have had it comparatively easily, even if the discriminated-against were weaker than those who have been rewarded easily.  How much weaker I cannot say.  (This is not about affirmative action or anything compensatory. Rather you are making a long-term bet and those who work harder are likely to last longer.)

Destroying Junior Faculty vs. Making Assistant Professor Bloom

In an essay, Andrew Marshall describes RAND Corporation in the 50s and 60s. The staff was quite young, at one point the average age was 28. There was an effort to mentor those younger staff members and encourage them to think more widely and examine problems from different angles. People worked in groups or at least in teams. Some of the problems did not have much of a tradition that one could rely on. Maybe the slightly more senior people were extraordinary, for at that time university jobs were just beginning to open up in number and quality.

Moreover, RAND had may summer visitors, usually the most interesting and powerful minds in their fields. They would help the RAND staff move wide and far, and it seems they benefited as well from the Santa Monica breezes and the RAND  breezes as well.

Econmists were valued just because they knew experts could be wrong (unlike natural scientists, it would seem). Moreover, Wohlstetter was known for extending the range of alternatives if new ones were discovered in the process of evaluating the given set, presumably abandoning others. Marshall believes that those trained in business policy and strategy might well be good strategists in the defense and policy areas. What you need is lots of recurrent questioning, serious questioning, to kick you out of your ruts.

Given what we expect of probationary faculty, we are doing the reverse. They are supposed to work alone, their work has to meet the expectations of their field, and rarely does anyone take charge of them.  It's not a question of whether someone could work alone and exhibit serious work. Rather is this the way to train our faculty for the rest of their careers. Surely it works for some. But say that we wanted to have a much more interesting and leading university. Perhaps we should never hire assistant professors, and only hire associate professors with a total a ten years experience. Or we'd need to figure out how to create communities of scholars where mentoring and senior leadership would enable more junior faculty to bloom.

I don't know the answer. Maybe RAND is no model for anything. It surely helped that there was a demanding client, a client that did not know what it was looking for, and problems that were of enormous import.  Someone must have tried this at some department, or some dean made this happen in their school. I just don't know of any

Privacy, Cyber-warfare, and the Brouhaha Over NSA's Listening In

Privacy may be a matter of no one knowing, or a matter of there being no consequence (as you understand it) that others know (or at least some others know). I assume that someones know among themselves everything, but they do not coordinate too well. What we need is protection from consequences--if what is being private is likely legal and perhaps ethical. In other words, people who game the system should not expect to be so protected. 

I'm not sure I mind Google making the ads suit me, but no telemarketers or broadcast emails. Embarrassment is surely unpleasant, but more consequential harms are to be protected against. Stealing my property, intellectual or material, is not fair game. 

The vanity is to think that you are special, that your actions are rare and outrageous, that you are particularly interesting. 

As for NSA's listening to Angela Merkel, what's embarrassing is that surely her own government (even without the Stasi of DDR) is listening to all, since they are likely to have the technology and access. There are many privacy protections, given the past of the Stasi, but I do not believe that stops the German listeners, the French listeners, or most others who can do it. So the scandal unleashed by Snowden, or by Wiki-Leaks earlier, is rather a matter of saying what is not to be said, not about others' innocence or whatever. 

(I am not judging US or other countries' actions, and they might well be against the law and ethics. I'm just saying that the outrage is a show, albeit hypocritical--although hypocrisy is the coin of the realm in this arena.)

As for cyber-warfare, and vicious hacking and stealing data and vital/financial data of individuals, that is hard to control. One focuses on the most significant players, but I suspect there is much more than we are willing to devote resources to protect ourselves. So, what one needs to do is to go on the offensive. If the "Chinese" are the biggest cyberwarriors and thieves, what you need to do is to:

    Figure out how to sprinkle false stuff that appears to be authentic among the various data archives etc.

      Properly chosen sleeper code and material is likely to be very destructive.

    Vigorously respond to intrusions, by hunting them down, drowning them in their own materials. This is not easy, but that is why you need hackers and experts to do the work. I think in terms of our being snipers: the opponent, in attacking us, reveals their positions; our job is to then fire back. I realize that the ballistics here is not gravitational and aerodynamic, but is more like a maze. But that is a challenge.

    The proverbial Russian con schemes need to be blocked, and if possible they need to be counter-conned by their supposed customer-victims. 

    Create an environment of paranoia and real danger for our opposites. 

I am convinced that our agencies have a much better handle on some of this than they allow publicly, appropriately. I am not at all sure they are being deceptive, offensive, snipers, and counter-conning the others. Notions of fair play and faithful bargaining are instruments for deception, allowing those who believe they are still safely secret to continue to believe that while undermining them, and undermining individuals with gossip (true!) about their malfeasances are all part of the game. Do we play dirty enough? Do we have enough sleeper code in our software and in our hardware, that even the smartest players are swallowing poison while they get drunk on their power?

 

Unity of Command--in a University: How Allies Defeat the Axis

Colleges and universities are organized into schools and departments, with organized research units distributed among them. The schools are under a provost, the departments are under a dean, and departments are under chairs. Faculty may be treated as workers in a bureaucracy, much as movie stars were treated in the old studio system.  Some superstars have greater autonomy. Some researchers are so productive and rich (in terms of external support), they run their own empires. And in some universities, the deans are afraid of the faculty since the faculty under them is so strong and potentially mobile.

Under this system, each major unit may well have budgetary responsibility. Using standard accounting principles, their revenue in terms of tuition, grants, gifts, endowment returns is balanced by their costs for staff and faculty, facilities, and revenue generation (development, marketing, grant administration). Some fraction of their revenue stays with the central administration. In effect the provost and president are running a conglomerate that is reminiscent of Hal Geneen’s ITT of the 1960s and1970s, where investments are made in units that are most likely to be productive. There is competition among the units for programs (should computer science be in engineering and with mathematics?), for undergraduate students and their tuition, for donors, and for grant overhead. And the provost and president manage that competition. They may propose and support cross-unit projects (“interdisciplinary”) and they may well be open to initiatives that are university-wide. Presumably, students see the university as a single university, taking advantage of the strengths throughout the institution. But at the same time, they will feel the pull of departmental requirements and even school fellowships, that demand that they provide revenue for the department of their major.

From 1941 to 1960 Dwight Eisenhower pushed for unity of command in the armed services, first of the Allies in the Second World War, and then of NATO, and then of the armed services of the United States. My description of the university was the situation of the armed services, barely able to work together during wartime, and during comparative peacetime they believe their units were the vital force for security, others there to support them. External interested constituencies (Congress, for example) much preferred the competitive and conglomerate to the unified.  Over those twenty years Eisenhower pushed against the national and service chiefs, and those interests, to create a more coherent fighting force. He only partially succeeded, and the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 went further. It is likely that there will be further Congressional action in the direction of unified command in the next few years.

Imagine if there were such unified command in a university, and competition was focused on external competitors at other institutions. The interests of students could be addressed with less concern about unit budgets, and faculty might well more readily experiment with new fields of research and teaching. Some students and faculty would be comfortable and productive in more conventional paths, perhaps most. But what one is hoping for is more cooperation among deans, where their budgetary concerns and their turf concerns are muted, and where their main concern is increasing the strength and quality and adaptive capacity of the institution. Now, you will still have to have strong financial controls. The provost’s job becomes one of insuring both responsiveness and solvency, not so much by generating revenue or controlling deans and faculties, but by addressing problematic mis-matches and deciding which ones are better for the academic mission of the institution. What you want to do is to make the institution into a competitive one, competing in the larger society rather than among its units. Otherwise, you will be defeated by the Axis of Educational Tyranny and the Lowest Cost Producers.

Publishing Your First Book

You’ve finished your dissertation, the cover sheet has been signed, and fortunately you have landed a teaching position. Or, perhaps you have decided that after all this work you would rather not spend your life with late adolescents (college students), and you are writing screenplays. Or, awfully, you have not been able to get a job, and are settling for second-best, whatever that is.

Whatever, you want to make your scholarly work more widely available, or better put, you have a moral obligation to publish. And if you wish to move up in the scholarly world, you have to make your contribution part of the literature. If writing and publishing is not for you, for whatever reason, you need to think again about where you want to teach. There is nothing so awful as being an non-publishing scholar at a research-oriented institution.

As for articles, briefly: In some fields, articles in journals are standard, books are rare, and perhaps you have even done three articles as chapters for your dissertation. You need guidance on the appropriate place to publish those articles, and also guidance as to what you need to do to make that work journal-friendly rather than dissertation-fodder. Your new colleagues, your advisor, or perhaps you yourself scanning the journals, will guide you.

If your dissertation must be made into articles, and you have not written it as such, you’ll have to figure out how to divide the work, how to rewrite chapters so that they are articles, and which parts of your work are worthy of publication. If possible, you need guidance from experienced scholars. Your initial intuitions are likely to mislead you. And you need to realize that rejection is not rare, even for the strongest scholars, and you will need to revise-and-resubmit--if you are fortunate. 

However, for the moment, I want to focus on those whose dissertation research is best published as a book.

There is much talk about how university presses and other presses are publishing fewer monographs (the usual product of a dissertation). But your job is not to make excuses or pity your condition, but to get your book published. (Your institutions may say, we want the scholars who do get their books published by the strong presses.) You will want to find a reputable press, one that publishes important books in your field. If your advisor or colleagues have connections to editors, they may be able to help you. There are commercial publishers who will publish books that retail for $100+, aiming for libraries it would seem. Unfortunately, their weak reputations won’t help you. Reputational assets (a prestigious press) is just what you need at this stage in your career.

Now, you will be going to scholarly meetings. There will be representatives of many of the important publishers in your field. You need to prepare a 2-3 page description of your book project, maybe summaries of the chapters, and maybe some sense of the audience for the book. Publishers often provide guidance for what they want in book proposals.

This process has never worked for me, for all of my books. I always finish the book manuscript, and then search for a publisher. (Many of my friends seem to get a contract much earlier on than I do, with just preliminary material.) I then have to get someone (an editor at a press) committed to the book. Along the way there are rejections by other presses.

My first book got a publisher fairly quickly, but eventually they backed out since my revisions were not satisfactory. It took seven or eight years, and a major reorganization of the book, to find another publisher.

When an editor is interested, the book manuscript will be vetted by readers. If that goes well enough, and your revision memorandum is sufficiently responsive, the editor then submits it to the press’s board (usually professors at the university)—if all goes smoothly. And then you have to revise the manuscript as per the agreement between you and your editor.

See the previous post: You don’t want to do what I did. 

But let us return to your dissertation. There are books on how to convert you dissertation into a book. I do not know how helpful they are. Here I will be schematic, mostly making sure you get done in time to get tenure.

Before you go further, you must make your dissertation into a book manuscript. Look at the best monographs in your field. You will find that they do not have your chapter 2, a survey of the literature, and they are likely to have a preface, introduction, or first chapter that gives away the main ideas of the book and makes it clear why the book is significant for the important people in your field. Your book makes not only a contribution, but moves over the dominant players showing how what was conventionally thought to be the case is not in fact the case. Your interpretation is inventive. And as people go through your book manuscript they will be impressed with the care and rigor of your argument and its use of sources or others’ arguments.

None of this is apparent in your dissertation. So you need to take it apart and figure out what actually is worthwhile and significant, where you need to do more work, and how to make the argument and analysis more fluid and effective. If you are lucky, your advisor or another reader will help you get started, show you what’s significant and important, what might be let go.

Now, given what you have in front of you, can you write a first chapter that does the work I indicated above. You have some distance on the dissertation, you might be able to read it and take notes. (This may be very difficult at first.) In effect, you want to figure out what you have said and tell that to the world. Clearly and straightforwardly.  And you want to give an account of the book, chapter by chapter, that says what you are going to do. You may not have done all this at this point, but your account is a punch list of stuff you must do to make the book be the book you want it to be.

Now it may be that you need to do some further research, fieldwork, analysis. The problem here is that you cannot let this further work take you four or more years. Yes, it may well make for a much better book, but you may not be through in time for a tenure decision. Again, you need mature advice about what you need to do. And what you can leave for your second book.

If you are fortunate (again!), you will find a mentor, and perhaps an acquisitions editor, who will be supportive and encouraging, and will give you hope when all else is lost.

You cannot afford to let your first year of teaching or other work, post your dissertation work, be consumed by teaching or whatever else you are doing. You want to spend enough time during that first year focused on how to reconstruct your dissertation so that it can become a book. Again, find some well-regarded monographs in your field, and they will guide you about what your book might look like.

Now you want to spend the next few months doing the reconstruction, filling in the missing parts, and if necessary leaving room for further research. Probably at the end of your second year, you will have a manuscript of a book (not a dissertation). You may be dissatisfied with it, it may have big problems, but at least now you have something you can fix. Do so. You want to submit your book manuscript to a press surely by the end of your third year. Yes, Joe Schmoe submitted it at the end of his fifth year, it went through more than one publisher, and when Joe came up for tenure in year six, Joe was turned down. But the next summer a publisher was found, and by the good graces of Joe’s dean and provost, there was a reconsideration and a positive tenure recommendation. You do not want to be in this position.

With some luck, by the middle of year five (at the latest!) you have a publisher and a contract, you revise immediately, and then your book is in press. This schedule is quite demanding, but if you want to have a career as a publishing research scholar this is what you will have to do. Again and again. For the demands on you will increase if you are tenured, and increase further when you are promoted to full professor.

I should note that it took me a while to realize that I liked writing books, that I liked the rhythm and the focus. I liked preparing a ramified argument with extended examples. Earlier in my career I was in the article mode, and that was quite acceptable in my field. But when I had a home-run article published, I realized that this was not enough for me.

Keep in mind, a first book is just that, your warm-up to a career of scholarship and publishing. Writing books keeps the ghosts away, keeps me off the streets, and gives focus to my life. I hope the same for you.

Now, the book is about to come out. You are proud and exhausted, excited and worried. What you need to do now is to help promote your book. Send out notices to your listservs, your university bookstore, every one of your professional colleagues everywhere. Make sure your publisher features your book at the next scholarly meeting. And see if you can get invited to give talks based on the book. Send out gratis copies to the five or ten people you want to be sure to read the book. And send copies to your chair and dean, and your advisor. What you want to do is to make others in your field aware that reading your book, or at least owning it, is essential to their being au courant. Frankly, I have no idea how to do this, but I hope some of you do.

Don't Do What I Did

Note the long time until my first book appeared. I received tenure much later. And the flow of books started a bit later.

I am not sure I have posted this earlier, but if not, it’s about time. I wrote it for the preface of The Scholar’s Survival Guide, and I have retained its particular references to that context. It was cut down in editing. Here I want to provide the whole text. More recently, I put together a chart of what is sometimes called “my career,” the implication being that you are following some sort of nice path (“career” comes from the French for a square). LOL as they say in text messages. It’s worked out fine for me, but it’s not likely you want to follow my path. My blogs and book are my attempts to tell you how not to do what I did. If it was good enough for me, it’s surely not good enough for you. 

        I was born in 1944, in the Israel-Zion hospital in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. I guess we were working class, but I always thought we were middle class, neither poor nor rich. We attended an Orthodox Jewish shul, but clearly my grandmother was more important than the rabbi or God. Mostly for my grandmother, we bought the Yiddish newspaper Forverts (The Forward), which I recall had a rotogravure picture section in brownish ink. (And we did not get the Yiddish Der Tag, since it was "right wing" according to my father.). We lived in Bensonhurst (Kings Highway station on the BMT/Sea Beach Line), and then almost at the end of the IRT/New Lots Avenue line. I went to PS 177, Seth Low JHS, and Thomas Jefferson HS. I think it was in high school when the class went on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Much earlier, my parents had taken my sister and me to the Museum of Natural History. My high school World History teacher, who was in her fifties or sixties, spent a great deal of time on the origins of the First World War, her source being Fay's books. (Fay’s books, The Origin of the World War, were also the inspiration for the game Diplomacy.) Once, I got in trouble in American History class because I read The New York Times, secreted on my lap but under the desk, during class. (My father had taught me how to fold The Times so you could read it on the subway, but this method does not work in class.)

             My father read The New York Times, cover to cover, every day, as well as the afternoon New York Post (then owned and published by Dorothy Schiff) when he came home from work. His usual comment when reading was, "Shirley [my mother], remember Joe X. He died." since the obituaries were always carefully studied. Jews who changed their names were also announced to Shirley. We also got the Brooklyn Eagle on the weekend. And on Fridays, my father brought home the New York City civil service newspaper, The Chief.
             My parents were introduced to each other by their friends Al (an electrician) and Jean, and they had a Hudson automobile. In my neighborhoods, families were ethnic, Jews and Catholics. But most of our socializing was with our relatives on both sides of the family. I did not encounter Protestants explicitly--or other Christians (except for Jehovah's Witnesses at our door)--until I got to college, and I am not sure I was aware of the distinction between Catholics and Protestants until then. (Of course, I knew about the Reformation and Luther from World History with Miss Meehan, but somehow that did not become practical knowledge.) Republicans and Southern Democrats were referred to as "reactionaries." I learned of Nixon and his red-baiting of Jerry Voorhis and of Helen Gahagan Douglas (Nixon's opponents in 1946 and 1950) when I was about six or maybe earlier. At home, we never talked about sex so I only got all that straight when I got to college and much later.
             It was vital that we have fresh rye bread with caraway seeds each day. We got a telephone, which was French-style with the mechanism in a box affixed to the wall, and then a television, later than many families, but not so late that I felt different. While we did not have a Servel gas refrigerator, I recall that some neighbors did. We did not have a car, only my father drove, and I learned at 24 since I was going to work in the Bay Area.
             I used to borrow lots of books from the Brooklyn Public Library on West 6th Street, and at times had so many at home I had to return them using a folding shopping cart. The big event in my life was when I could go to Manhattan on my own using the subway. From then on, there was a whole new world.

             Columbia College was all-male and quite small (650 freshman each year) in 1960. I had received a good scholarship (a Pulitzer) and moving to Manhattan to live in a dormitory was a big step. The undergraduate requirement of General Education--Great Books ("Humanities") and significant political and social thinkers ("Contemporary Civilization"), was very different than breadth requirements at most universities, and I thrived on it--even though I was too young, at 16, to understand much of what I read. In general my teachers were not great didacts, but watching them think in front of the class was the education I needed. (I recall Daniel Bell and Herbert Deane, and many of my physics teachers, eight of whom received Nobel Prizes.) I studied mathematics and physics, and majored in physics. I did my doctoral work at Columbia, working in particle physics, already then Big Science. But by temperament I was not meant to be an experimentalist, at least in Big Science, and soon after receiving my PhD and starting a postdoc at Berkeley, I moved over to city planning at Berkeley as a postdoc. My initial foray into planning was using a model of a phase transition in solids to understand neighborhood transformations. In the background was the revolution in particle physics of the early 1970s to the early 1980s: the Standard Model, quantum chromodynamics, non-Abelian (noncommuting) gauge field theory; and in parallel, in astrophysics, the three-degree background blackbody radiation, the Big Bang, quasars, and the inflationary scenario of Guth and others, paralleling earlier developments in nuclear physics and Bethe's late 1930s account of the sources of the energy of the Sun; all paralleling developments in condensed matter physics

             I am a late bloomer. More precisely, my early flowering was almost frozen on the vine by a seeming cold spell. I received my PhD when I was 24, but received tenure when I was about 44 or 45. While a "home-run" article appeared when I was 29, all but one of my books appeared after I was 45. At age 34, I was denied "early" tenure, probably appropriately, although at that point I had not only that article, but many others and a book manuscript, and several nice high prestige fellowships. But that denial opened up new opportunities for which I am grateful.

             I have committed just about every mistake I describe The Scholar’s Survival Manual, more than once. My life is a story of snatching survival from the jaws of idiocy.

             When I was 40, I thought that my academic career was over, I had left that tenure-track job before I came up again at the regular time, nothing new came up except for grants and fellowships. (By the way, one should never leave a tenure-track job without another real tenure-track job in hand, unless you have changed career trajectory.) Maybe I would go into philanthropy and foundation work, maybe journalism. When I went to one foundation about working in their world, they did not give me a job--but they did give me a grant although I had not asked for one. [In a different context, a propos of her Harvard colleagues waiting a very long time before making her a regular faculty member, Judith Shklar said, "There are very many scholars whom I regard as my superiors in every way and whom I admire without reserve, but I have never thought of myself, then or now, as less competent than the other members of my department." (A Life of Learning, American Council of Learned Societies, 1989.) I am grateful to those universities I worked for, even for a short period, for I learned a great deal from colleagues, in my department or, especially, in humanities departments.]
             I was hired at my current institution to teach for a semester as a temporary replacement for a faculty member who had left, with no further expectation. Afterwards, out of the blue, I was offered a job there, and took it since I had no other choice (the usual fact of my life). What saved me, what made the big difference, was my adopting a newborn on my own when I was 42, nine months into the new job. Bringing up a child on your own focuses the mind wonderfully, and so the subsequent books and grants and fellowships were possible because I worked and parented. What helped was that my son slept. He is now 6'5", I am 5'7", and so we are a Mutt and Jeff. Moreover my university left me alone to work and parent, although I have done my share of teaching and service. People still remember my son playing with Lego at research seminars.

             I read the African Berber and Christian Father Augustine of Hippo's Confessions (~400 CE) when I was a freshman at Columbia, but it was only when I happened to hear lectures at the University of Minnesota by John Freccero on Dante and Augustine, when I was about 33, that the work entered my working vocabulary. Augustine wrote his confessions in his early 40s, about ten years after his conversion to Christianity. The Confessions are archetypal: the time before conversion is a life lived away from the truth, with moments of temptation toward the truth; the life after is living in the truth; and what we thought was best about the before-time was just what was worst for us. This book is not really a confession, ala Augustine, since I have come to see my pre-parent days as preparing me for all my work and life since then. And I never did have a moment, as did Paul or Augustine, where I was struck by the light and changed my life--although bringing my newborn son home from the hospital might be such a moment, but without our falling off an ass on the way to Damascus. I always say that babies are made to make their parents into good caregivers, their coos and smiles being the guide to parents to do the right thing.
             More relevant to this book's tone: Only if advice comes at the right time, with the right flavor, will it penetrate a bubble of excuses and justifications, and then such a revelation can well be transformative. It would be nice if those were moments when one has not hit rock bottom, but sometimes they are the moments we need. The Confessions provides the archetype of the resistant's story and of the transformative moment. Hence, all I can hope is that you hear a child's voice sounding or saying something like "take it and read" (Augustine heard in the rustling of the leaves in a garden the Latin "Tolle. Lege."), open up this book at some random page and find that what you encounter tells you something powerful and helpful. (There are similar traditions in Judaism, the Bat Kol, as well as in the I Ching and Tarot.) In any case, the basic advice about doing better and getting done is pervasive and given in a variety of contexts, and so will be found everywhere. One does not need to find, as did Augustine, a particular passage (his was Romans 13:13-14).

             In the middle 1990s I discovered what we would now call a blog by John Baez, This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/README.html , recently having changed its name and focus). If someone were about to walk in front of the proverbial oncoming truck, I often tried to intervene and tell them how to avoid the splat that was likely. I began a regular column addressed to our doctoral students, mostly about topics in urban planning,  but along the way I conveyed some of the lessons I had learned in my discontinuous and unsmooth path in academia: This Week's Finds in Planning: "Do not do what I did; do not make my mistakes; what was good enough for me does not mean it is good enough for you." Sometimes the column was about books or articles, sometimes about particular policy issues, and as time went on it became more and more about academic life. I was fortunate to serve on our University Committee on Appointment, Promotion and Tenure, and I have probably read something like 600-700+ such dossiers for appointment, promotion, and tenure decisions, in all fields and at all ranks, and attended my share of meetings. I have also read a wide range of third-year reviews of probationary faculty. Much of this book reflects my experience, and my desire to prevent more oncoming-truck events for others. I have also read some of the research literature on higher education, and on promotion and tenure in universities, and on academic work. My experience is that the concrete facts of most situations would seem to trump generalities, yet people also seem to be quite willing to risk being hit by a truck even when they know that what they are doing is not what they need to do.
             So this book draws from not only my own experience, but also my observations from within the bowels of the university. By the way, such university promotion committees are almost always advisory to the provost or the president, so your main job is not to say yes or no or maybe, and vote and give your reasons, but to help the provost figure out what is going on in difficult cases. This book is not a tell-all, and my experience is that the central university promotion and tenure process is fair and unbiased--although I cannot judge what happens at the departmental level. Moreover, I am sure there are mistakes of commission and omission, probably rather more tenurings than are warranted, and remarkably few denials that are mistaken. But there are mistakes and sometimes there is unfairness or shenanigans. This book is not about those situations. I know nothing useful about them.

Everything I describe is common. If what I say feels like I am describing you, and perhaps you know me and figure that I am using you, my response will be "It's not you." There are too many examples for any of us to think we are unique or marked by our problems.

Recently I came across this observation in Mehrling’s biography of Fischer Black: “Human capital was not only the largest fraction of his [FB’s] wealth . . . “I find this congenial.

Basic Ideas of Finance

We often have students take a micro course in economics. But what they also need to learn are the basic ideas of finance and decision.

In thinking about real options (not about securities, but about future choices, such as the possibility of expanding the factory three years from now and the need to spend money now to make the foundation stronger if we want to have the chance/option of doing so), . . .

and how they might be taught outside of a mathematically mature audience, I see that the basic ideas of finance that our students might learn, without any mathematics beyond 
--expectation (prob x $) 
--time value of money (interest rate), and
--a notion of variance (volatility). 

All these surely have complications galore, but the basic ideas are straightforward. 

There is nothing so essential in the mathematically more demanding formulations that cannot be explained using decision trees (binomial). The hardest part is convincing people that a random walk moves away as the square root of time, and that might well be done with simulations. 

The Big Ideas of Finance

1. no arbitrage

2. random walk and volatility, variance  

    risk and volatility

    price as discounted future cash flow

3. time value of money and risk free asset, rate of return

    decision analysis as expectation value

4. paying for an option to make a future action (or not doing it)

5. portfolio optimization for greatest return given different risk and return, and volatilities--this may be hardest to explain.

Have I left out anything important?

N. Kaza suggests: "the link between uncertainty and irreversibility: The larger the cost of reversibility an action and higher the uncertainty about the effects of the action, the longer we wait before committing to it. Also it becomes cheaper to seek information and make plans while waiting, which can potentially reduce uncertainty."

Citation Counts and Influence and Tenure

Citation counts are quite unreliable, since they can be jiggered (you get credit for papers with your famous professor, having worked in his lab or project, but you really don't want to count those citations unless you did most of the work). But at the extremes, they may well be useful.  As for influence in the field, for assistant professors, letters are likely to be more informative. You’d need to award tenure at 9 years, rather than 6, to have good data for citations that would be worth attending to. Many fields have long gestation times.

But letters have their own problems, and only 1/3 at best really tell you what you would want to know about quality and influence, and again letters too may not be reliable even from strong scholars. But if you have several, they are likely to reveal the problems among them and so as a whole they are quite informative.

For Assoc to Full, the citation data is likely to be helpful. Again, it can be jiggered. Letters are still the best information, with the proviso that very high or low citation counts are flags.  h-indexes are popular with scientists, and they check them weekly in some cases. Warshel of recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry is one who said he did so.

As for whether papers are influential in policy, wow! It helps to have a stream of papers by many authors. Single papers, like "broken windows," may appeal to prejudices and so be influential, but even there others took up the challenge. In general single papers are quite unreliable unless explored by many folks in follow-up studies. And there is a lag between paper and influence, many years often, in part because interests that do not want the paper's ideas to dominate will work against that, and may well generate counter evidence. Think of tobacco use and decades between good evidence and changes in policy.

It also helps to do lecturing, testifying, and lots of people-work.

Real Options and Finance Ideas in our Teaching (not only in Business School).

I know that we teach decision analysis in some of our courses in our policy school at USC, and perhaps ideas like Black-Scholes. But in thinking about a lecture in my defense policy course, where uncertainty and consequences are high and costs are constrained, I realized that the general idea of finance and more concretely, real options, would be useful to convey to our students, undergrads and masters, more generally. In an econ course, two weeks could be devoted to finance ideas (namely, volatility and random walks, options, no-arbitrage). And in public policy courses or real estate development, the notions of an option must already be conveyed, at least implicitly.  I see that Richard deNeufville and David Geltner of MIT and Yongheng Deng of Singapore recently gave a paper at a real options conference on real estate design and development planning

 I have noticed that my colleagues in law may well be economics literate and law-and-econ practitioners, but finance and options are not part of their everyday discourse. When someone gave a paper on options, the finance notion was in the author's  mind but not much in the paper or in the audience’s minds.  And option for them was some sort of future choice, but not what finance calls options.

I may well be years behind in what we teach. So please excuse this back-seat-driving.

-------People have written me that the math and formulas may be too difficult for many students. I am not concerned about that. The basic ideas are straightforward, and you could always make a decision tree with a few branchings. The difference from most decision analysis is that you pay now for the chance to make a choice later, and you don't have to know which choice you will make until then.