I understand there’s been a restriction imposed on posts about my Ph.D program. While this information is indirectly related to the Ph.D program, my primary question can be isolated from my Ph.D program.
Long story short, the hammer officially got dropped today at a meeting with the Dean, current graduate students, and faculty about the future of the Psychology graduate programs. They’re slated to cut not just the Ph.D programs, but also phase out the rest of the graduate courses within the next 2-3 years! The Dean said they’re going to commit to try and make sure students in the programs can finish their degrees before they graduate, but they need to act quick (given the 2-3 year timespan). Fortunately, I’m done with dissertation data collection.
Main thing I’m wondering though. One of the faculty said that once tenure track faculty earn tenure, they can’t go anywhere. Is this true? I have a feeling it’s nonsense since my first advisor, within her first year of becoming a full professor, left the program for a different college before she dropped me as an advisee.
It’s really hard to move because the new school would need to give the leaving faculty member tenure, and faculty members with tenure are more experienced so much more expensive. So most schools will hire someone new off the market rather than a lateral. It can be done, but generally a tenured faculty member is less attractive on the market unless they are a leading scholar in their area.
To move schools you also have to literally move almost all of the time, upending your entire life and your family’s life. If you spouse has a job? Kids in school? you have to move to where the rare job is.
It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult. Of the very few jobs available each year in any given discipline, there are even fewer in a faculty member’s specific field, and the vast majority of the available tenure-track jobs (which is a small number compared to non-tenure track jobs) are for the assistant professor level. When universities are hiring, they prefer hiring at the probationary assistant professor level rather than committing to a tenured faculty member who may or may not work out. And for assistant professors, that pre-tenure period offers chances to make lateral moves to more desirable universities if they want to and are able to.
Are there exceptions? Sure. Sometimes, universities decide to hire a superstar full professor. Some searches are open rank, and some are for advanced assistant or associate level. Sounds your first advisor got a rare tenured position in one of these searches. It’s also possible for a tenured faculty to give up tenure and apply for pre-tenured jobs, but obviously that’s a step down (but sometimes there are reasons - my husband gave up tenure so we could move to an area where we could both get tenure-track jobs, which eventually worked out for us). Applying for non-tenure-track jobs would be a huge step down. On the other hand, clinical faculty in some disciplines (like psychology) can look for non-tenure-track teaching positions that could allow them to practice in the field, but those are fundamentally different than tenured positions.
But usually, shutting down a department or program means ending people’s careers, full stop. There just aren’t enough jobs for everyone to find new positions, and not everyone can move across the country for the few jobs that are available. And it’s very difficult to switch gears entirely when you’ve had one career for a long time.
Tenured professors leave programs not uncommonly. Usually the ones good enough to get tenured have enough clout ($$$) to take their money and go somewhere else, who will happily give them tenure and accept their grants/funds.
On the other hand, if what you are asking is if tenured faculty can be made to leave, then that’s still yes. Difficult but not impossible. Like someone said, closing program / department usually means the end of your usefulness. Or School can reassign you somewhere you don’t want to be doing things you don’t want to do. I’m more familiar with physical and biological sciences where people in academics usually have their own money and school is just a building that houses their research.
That is absolutely NOT true. Folks who have reached tenure do switch positions. Usually there is a good reason as outlined in above posts. Plus…many folks seek tenure at a certain place because they actually want to stay there!
The conclusion I’m getting here is that it seems to be the case that once faculty have tenure that it is possible to leave, albeit it is not necessarily advisable for the following reasons: 1.) They can be more expensive for a new university to hire since there’s higher salary expectations. 2.) Connections in the university and/or area are enough to the point moving would be risky. 3.) Folks who are newer are preferable since it can be easier to lowball a salary.
I also checked my first advisor and she did, in fact, get one of the rare positions that gave her tenure right off the bat. Even at this SLAC where I’m visiting right now, another faculty who was on the tenure track for neuroscience was at the SLAC for 3 years before she got her dream job at another R2 where she wanted to be faculty. Apparently, her salary nearly quadrupled.
Where I’m at now for my program, apparently faculty (unless they’re in a position like department director or department chair) haven’t had raises in 10 years. When I put all of this info together, faculty leaving even if they have tenure seems more likely than not given that a new job will give them the raise they’ve always wanted (assuming the new place has the money to do so and they want them that bad, which was the case with the neuroscience faculty at the SLAC).
Once tenured, it is difficult but not impossible to leave, as posters have said above. Typically, the ones able to leave fell into two categories.
First, the professors have established themselves as superstars in their areas of research and went to higher ranked schools with tenure, likely the same titles, and likely higher salaries. The jump could be from a directional school to a normal state flagship, or from the latter to a top ranked one.
Second, they have established themselves as stars and went to lower ranked schools with tenure and potentially bigger titles, such as going from Assistant to Associate, from Associate to Full, or from “normal” to endowed chair professors. Some were also tasked with administrative duties, such as becoming department chairs or leading newly formed research initiatives or centers. Some simply went to lower ranked schools for their locations due to being tired of living in the middle of nowhere or living stressful fast-paced city lives.
In general, the new schools these professors are moving to are wary of awarding them tenure only to find out a few years later that they have decided to slow down in research, at which point it would be difficult to get rid of them. Hence the advice to young tenure-track faculty members is usually “if you want to move, do it before you get tenure.”
You can’t go from Assistant to Associate or Associate to Full just by changing jobs. It requires a review protocol and application at the institution granting tenure and promotion. If you’re already tenured, you can be hired with tenure. And you can be hired into an endowed chair at the same rank. But you don’t get tenured or promoted in the hiring process - that comes later (possibly the very next year if the timing is right).
I would also add that it’s easier for professors with doctorates in professional or scientific disciplines to either pivot to a new career or make a lateral move, especially if they can somehow pair applied work in the field with teaching and research, or if they’re moving to a new lab with portable grant money. It’s much harder (and extremely rare) for those in liberal arts disciplines to make similar moves – they almost never have the kind of grant money that universities are after, and it’s typically harder to pivot professionally.
This was in 1980, but I worked on a case where an assistant prof (NYU) was hired to be the new chairman of the poli sci department at UMD and was skipped from asst to full tenured professor. Until the Pres of the university system quashed the hiring. The asst prof sued the university, the new president, the old (retired) president, and the board of regents. He claimed discrimination since he was a Marxist.
This guy wasn’t qualified to be an assoc prof, never mind skipping to full and being chairman of the dept.
Those on the hiring committee didn’t do a very good job of vetting him. He didn’t have enough publications (used a game similar to monopoly but about Marxism as one publication), didn’t have the experience, didn’t have the correct recommendations. but the fault wasn’t theirs alone as the college of Arts and Sciences and the Chancellor also approved the hiring/promotion.
The committee thought he was ‘cool’ and didn’t care if he had the right background.
Many departments had hired from the outside or promoted from within with documentation missing from the process, but most not as bad as this one.
If the department wouldn’t have made such a big deal about how cool it was that he was a Marxist, I think he would have slipped through the process and the old President would have signed off on the hiring and promotions. He would have skipped from asst to full, and gotten full tenure in the process. Alas, he stayed at NYU as an assistant and is still there (although I think promoted).
This wasn’t a little matter. He was represented in his lawsuit by Arnold and Porter (major DC law firm) and it was a 4 week trial in federal court. Hundreds of hours of legal brainpower was spent and lots of money. Maybe all universities learned from this and tightened up their promotion and hiring procedures.
It was possible, but for the pen of the new university system president.
The OP’s premise is a professor who already has tenure, which presumably means they are already at the Associate or Full level. Moving as an Associate with tenure at a top school to a Full with tenure at a lower ranked school during job change is not uncommon, at least in engineering. My department has someone like that. It’s part of the package of enticing that person to come, which obviously has the support of administrators up the food chain. Tenured faculty has no say on that hiring unless they are on the search committee.
As for going from Assistant to Associate, that was actually outside the scope of the OP’s question. You are correct that it is not possible to go from Assistant without tenure to Associate with tenure immediately. What I had in mind was an Assistant Professor in Year 4 who is a “shoe in” to get tenure at a T20 who decides to move to a T150 school for say a two-body-problem reason. That person likely will join as an Associate Professor without tenure in August/September with the understanding that the tenure process is more or less a formality, getting their tenure in March/April the following year.
Having spent that year of my life looking at the documentation of every hire and promotion at the school, I will say that things are different in the more professional departments like engineering as often those people are being hired from years of work in the industry while poli sci, history, etc are usually academics from day one.
Also, the departments like agriculture were a LOT better at following the rules. Three LORs required? Three in the file. Check check check.