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Monday, October 8, 2018

Opportunity costs: promotion to full

This Nobel prize winner made a calculation that going up for promotion was not worth the effort that would be spent on other things. If there is no pay raise involved, why fill out some forms to get promoted? She describes herself as "lazy" but I doubt she is.  The process of going up should not be so onerous that people don't bother to do it.  And there should be an incentive.

And the department chair should basically be on top of things and make people get promoted on time.   If you can win the Nobel Prize in physics then you should be a full professor already without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops. Einstein would be probably be told today he wasn't productive enough. Like, "what have you done since that relativity thing, and that other relativity thing..."  

2 comments:

Leslie B. said...

Right, but that isn't how most departments and department chairs operate. An R1 I worked at was more like this but it isn't most places. When I was younger and a child, in science it was a major thing for women to get promoted to full, no matter how good they were. It wasn't nearly as automatic as for men of the same caliber and the outside ad hoc "control" committees (made up of people out of field) were often the ones who said yes ... and pointed out that they couldn't see why this had not been done sooner.

Clarissa said...

We have the opposite problem. Everybody gets promoted pretty much automatically given that they've been here a certain number of years. I don't even want to go up for Full because it's meaningless.