Beyond the Tenure Debate: What do faculty career and research trajectories show?
The tenure system is a cornerstone of US higher education and essential for attracting top-tier talent for research, teaching, and service. Tenure-track professors and their research teams are integral to the scientific workforce, shaping knowledge creation and innovation. Meanwhile, the value of tenure has long been debated, with recent legislative moves in several US states seeking to restrict or cancel it.
In this talk, I discuss the relationship between tenure and faculty research trajectories across four key dimensions: productivity, impact, agenda exploration, and novelty. Leveraging large-scale, representative datasets of US faculty and their research outputs, this analysis tracks how research practices shift through the pre- and post-tenure periods and explores the shared patterns and differences across disciplines. It highlights the connection between tenure, incentives, and innovation: Rather than being followed by a collapse in productivity, achieving tenure is associated with research stabilization and a distinct pivot toward novelty. Finally, I discuss how the findings empirically debunk prevalent myths surrounding the tenure system and provide insights for education policymaking and university administration.
Furthermore, the academic career is shaped by the broader higher education system beyond tenure. I share preliminary results of my ongoing work on other critical points in academic career trajectories, such as faculty hiring and institutional mobility, and outline my future research agenda focusing on developing the scientific workforce.
This lecture will also be live streamed via Zoom. You are welcome to join us either in South Hall or online.
For online participants
Online participants must have a Zoom account and be logged in. Sign up for your free account here. If this is your first time using Zoom, please allow a few extra minutes to download and install the browser plugin or mobile app.
Speaker
Xiang Zheng
Xiang Zheng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Information School and a core member of the Metascience Research Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research applies computational methods and qualitative approaches to understand the scientific workforce and knowledge production, with the goal of building a more transparent and equitable scientific ecosystem. His work focuses on areas including academic career dynamics, inequality and disparities in academia, research evaluation, and scientific gatekeeping systems. He holds master’s degrees in computer sciences and higher education from UW–Madison and Tsinghua University, respectively.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact Kimmy Fox.
