<p>“webhappy, there have definitely been tenure denials here at Caltech during the last four years, for example in chemistry and mathematics. There aren’t very many asst. professors around and I think their final tenure review is after nine years, so it doesn’t happen very often. Unlike Harvard the majority of our faculty is crusty and old, without many new positions open for people to cycle in and out of…”</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure no one in the math department has been denied tenure in quite a while-the five(!) people in the department who left in the past four years were all tenured (in fact, were all HIRED as tenured really young without previously holding tenure-track jobs) and left for personal reasons. The current math faculty has only one assistant-professor and she might have been a spousal hire type deal…every other math prof who is under 60 years old (most of the department) was hired as tenured. (This is common among math departments- the ones at Harvard and Yale don’t even have a tenure track- only postdocs and full professors). I think the last two CS profs up for tenure were denied, and a chem prof was denied tenure last year, so the trend is not institute universal.</p>
<p>Re:Sakky’s “why worry”
There are very practical reasons why an assistant professor would not want to change jobs, uproot their life and move across the country at age ~40, especially in a field where (unlike the private sector examples you mentioned) there are very few academic jobs, certainly enough to take tenure rates into consideration when choosing where to accept a position.</p>