Here at the The Way of Improvement Leads Home we have been passing along Gina Barreca’s tips on how to survive academic life. (See here and here). Now she offers some tips about how to survive life after tenure. They are:
1. Throw a party
2. Tell your former advisers and members of your dissertation committee
3. Join the AAUP
4. Speak Up
5. “Make sure you’re not speaking up only for yourself.”
6. “You’re not done.” (You’re only getting started).
7. “You can afford to select with more care the committees you join.”
8. “Don’t start dressing either like a character out of Kafka or like a hooker.”
9. “Accept more graduate students, honors students, independent study students, students in need of mentoring…”
10. “Get ready to start reading big, fat tenure files for people who are coming up next year.”
LOVE the picture 🙂
As the son of a professor, I know what tenure meant for me – it meant not having to move anymore. My Dad taught at three different institutions before receiving tenure, which meant we moved from Wheaton IL to Boston MA to New Haven CT and back to Chicago before my Dad (and by extension his family) had the security of tenure.