Ten Years Ago
Posted 08:00 PST Thu May 8, 2008 in
Bloggish
In keeping with the me-me-meme I’m going to write a bit about ten years ago. It’s the first question of the list.
Ten years ago would have been early in 1998. I was five years into my academic career and it was time to prepare my tenure and promotion package. No one outside the academic community understands what that means.
It began with a survey of everything I accomplished over the preceding five years, including proposal written, research projects completed, graduate students overseen, service activities, and publications. It also required letters from students, colleagues both inside and outside the university, and a review of student evaluations from preceding years.
In the end, the dossier required something between 40 and 80 hours to prepare. The due date loomed and I worked a lot of extra hours1.
I remember completing the package to the best of my ability and turning it in. That evening I went the long way home on my first BMW motorcycle, Gracie. I remember seeing the sun set as I rode west, then north through Shallowater, Texas. I remember the feelings I had, wondering whether I would be good enough for the next phase of my academic career.
Gracie was a 1988 K100RS and was a joy to ride. We spent the early evening riding the back roads of west Texas, taking in the air and enjoying the cotton fields before I turned toward home and family. It was good to have the task completed and being ready to move onto the next thing. But the uncertainty hung in my heart and I wondered “was it good enough?”
I remember the trepidation I felt at the time. I had no idea if I had enough publications to earn tenure and promotion. No one ever said how many were enough. I thought the other parts of my work were plenty good enough, but I was concerned about the publications. The setting remains “publish or perish.”
1 Extra hours is a funny term applied to academics. We don’t work a fixed schedule, but generally work as much as required to get the job done. Sometimes that means going home early on Fridays (I loved those days). Other times it meant working nights and weekends to get the job done. I didn’t like those so much. There were too many of them.