Advice related to tenure

Leslie Phinney offers some useful advice around tenure at Inside Higher Education.

I agree with almost all of Phinney's post but, of course, have a few remarks.

I would say that it is almost never optimal to fight a negative tenure decision; even if one wins one does not want to stay and the financial and mental health costs can be large.

In terms of work/life balance my own choice was to basically put things like marriage and having a kid off until after tenure. This worked for me and it had the side benefit of making me more mobile early in my career, which can (and in this case did) have a large financial return in academic economics. I also greatly reduced my cultural consumption during my assistant professor years (and the last couple of years in graduate school) - going from 25 books a year when I was in college to two or three and from 35 movies a year down to almost zero. I am really glad that period is over!

The nice thing for economists is that the alternatives to academia often still involve research and sometimes pay more rather than less than what professors make. More broadly, but along the same lines, it is important to always keep in mind that the model we write down is utility maximization, not income maximization or department ranking maximization or vita length maximization. The point is to be happy! I was always amazed as a graduate student at how unhappy some of the faculty at Chicago seemed despite a lot of career success. Had they somehow failed to optimize?

Hat tip: Chris Blattman