Some Personal Good News

I’m pleased to share the good news of my tenure and promotion to associate professor. Some frequently asked questions:

1) You weren’t nervous about the tenure vote, were you? [This question has been posed in a variety of forms, all with an implicit skepticism about a negative outcome.] Being recently hired as a lateral assistant professor, I had some reason to believe the faculty would generally support my tenure application, and I felt good about my application on paper. However, tenure is a major decision by a faculty, and faculty politics can be complicated–especially in an environment where I was a relative newcomer. So personally, I never assumed tenure was a foregone conclusion.

2) What role did blogging play? I don’t have a precise answer to this question. In preparing my materials, I treated blogging as a “plus factor.” In other words, I felt like my application should stand on its own merits even if blogging was completely stripped out of the application. As a result, my hope was that blogging would enhance the application but not act as a substitute for some other obvious deficiency.

3) How are you going to celebrate? To celebrate both tenure and my recent milestone birthday, next month I’m going on a 2 week guided river rafting trip down the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I’ll blog more about that trip over the summer!