How I Got Tenure

There’s no point burying the lede: I now have tenure at Utah State University, an R1 research institution.

A friend helped me put this in perspective when he reminded me this has basically been my goal for 15 years. I hadn’t thought about how much of my life had been dominated by this one objective.

But this isn’t a post about how my tenure was the result of a bulletproof set of strategies. Tenure is mostly about publishing good papers, and I already posted about how I got my research ideas.

No, this is a post about how I got tenure despite being told I would fail.

The Email

It’s the week before my second year in graduate school. The first year was rough. Not only were classes hard and exams impossible, my wife and I came to school with a kid, and we had our second just weeks after the first year ended.

Despite the difficult first year, I’m excited for the second year. The second year is when you get to really explore your interests and when you start thinking about research. This is my strength.

But during this period of anticipation, I get an email from a professor in the department. It’s an email telling me that I should drop out.

This professor felt my performance in the first year indicated that I was likely to struggle over the rest of graduate school, “and then end up taking, say, a 1-2 year lectureship with a huge teaching load, low pay, and poor prospects of career development, often a dead end” (yes, I’m directly quoting the email).

The professor hedged his language, saying maybe there was information he didn’t know that might prove that I had it in me to be a professor one day. But the message was clear: you should drop out and seek another path.

Do I even need to say that this was a huge blow? Is it hard for you to imagine that a student beaten down by his first year in school would find this a devastating message? A funny thing about this email is that I now know it was a period when I rode my bike to my office because I have a distinct memory of riding my bike and fuming.

For the last 11 years, this email has been in the back of my mind.

Piled higher and Deeper

This wasn’t the only discouragement I received. Despite coming to graduate school thinking I’d do something at the intersection of labor and development economics, I felt like I could make the most contributions if I went to economic history and looked at Haiti. Very little work had been done there, and it turns out there was a reason for that!

And so a few times throughout the rest of graduate school, people nudged and pushed me towards “better” fields. One professor told me I was limiting my job options by choosing this path. When I interviewed for a job, a professor told me that they would rather me be a labor economist than an economic historian. Journal editors told me that Haiti was too niche to be interesting to their audience.

How I really got tenure

So the question is, despite all of the pushback, how did I get tenure?

Well, one, I didn’t drop out of grad school. This isn’t a “follow your passions and you’ll succeed” survivorship bias story, by the way. I just would never be a professor if I decided to drop out, and the first step was to stay despite counsel from a professor to leave.

How did I stay? I went to the director of graduate studies, Truman Bewley, to talk about the email. He already knew about it, since the professor had recommended to him that I drop out. And so, sitting emotionally in front of him, I asked if I should be done. This man, who had been one of my professors the first year, who gifted me a book for my newborn daughter, gently replied, “I don’t want you to drop out.”

It was a short meeting. He didn’t give me any other advice. He didn’t need to. I just needed to hear him say that, and I was good to keep going.

How did I get tenure? I had another first year professor, Tim Guinnane, see me on the street and invite me to his office. I had taken his economic history class my first semester, and I mentioned that I was thinking about doing the economic history of Haiti. When I came to his office, he said, “I’ve been talking to people, and no one does Haiti. You could be the guy.”

Despite the pushback, I could always remember him saying, “You could be the guy.”

How did I get tenure? When I got on the job market, with my Haiti papers barely in shape to be presentable, I had a really hard time. But special group of professors at the Naval Postgraduate School could see past the rough drafts and were willing to give me a chance. Only one school gave me a tenure track offer, but it only takes one offer to get a tenure track job.

How did I get tenure? Another group of professors and a dean at Utah State recognized the value in economic history. They reached out and invited me to apply for this job, something I can’t imagine I would have done without that invitation.

How did I get tenure? Despite multiple journal editors who rejected my work within five minutes of seeing it, there were a handful who realized that I could publish the papers with a little more help. And this wasn’t the normal, “We’ll send these to some referees and they’ll give you comments.” No, these editors sent me my paper with their personal annotations, showing me what was strong and what needed improvement.

How did I really get tenure?

I got tenure because there were people along the way who believed in me.

Conclusion

My difficult time in graduate school is not unique. Most students and junior professors can tell you lots of stories about these discouraging parts of the career. Unfortunately, fewer of them can tell you about the people who offered encouragement along the way.

Thinking back on that email, I don’t blame the professor for encouraging me to drop out. He was delivering some tough information to someone who needed to hear it. But I do wish that instead of telling me to stop, he had been one of the professors who said that I could overcome my struggles and succeed.

This write-up in no way captures all of the people who helped me on the path to tenure. There were a lot of you, and I appreciate each one.