The other day I was having a conversation with a friend, who is not an academic, about the tenure and promotion process. We have a mutual friend who is going up for full professor and she's at the stage where her department is sending out the requests for letters. My non-academic friend was asking about the process and he made a comment about how stressful it must be given that, at this point, there really isn't anything one can do to influence those letters. I said that was kind of the point, that in order to become a full professor, one needs to have been consistently productive and building a reputation as a contributor in one's field. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the costs of this process. In order to build that reputation, we all specialize, sometimes in pretty small niches. Of course, as an economist, I generally believe specialization is a good thing but when one has wide-ranging interests, becoming 'stuck' in a specialization can become ...
Observations and ramblings of an economist with a passion for teaching...