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<p>Well, first off, it’s not merely difficult to obtain tenure at top schools ‘these days’, rather, it’s always difficult to obtain tenure at top schools, regardless of the economy. For example, the Harvard sociology department hasn’t promoted a single junior faculty member to tenure since the 1990’s; all of their new tenured faculty have been outside lateral hires. Similarly, tenure at MIT or Berkeley doesn’t become easy to obtain when the economy is strong. </p>
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<p>Well, I’ll put it to you this way. The University of Alabama may not be an elite school. But hey, at least it’s still a flagship state university that run research and PhD programs. That’s still far more promising, from an academic career standpoint, than to be teaching at some NE or West Coast community college or mediocre satellite public university campus where the highest degree offered may be master’s (and sometimes not even that). </p>
<p>But the point is that if Alabama is merely picking up junior faculty from Berkeley or MIT who had simply failed to win tenure, that’s a fairly quotidian turn of events. Berkeley and MIT routinely cast off hordes of junior faculty through tenure reviews or through ‘taps on the shoulder’ to indicate that somebody is likely to fail their upcoming tenure review and hence should be seeking gainful employment elsewhere.</p>