Tenure!

As soon as I set foot on campus this morning I will be officially tenured. Yippee!

Tenure at a community college is, admittedly, not as difficult to obtain as tenure at a research university. There is no requirement to obtain grants or publish papers to get tenure at a community college (heck, I don't even have any space to do research in); the primary criteria used to evaluate an instructor for tenure is their ability to teach (imagine that). The process has taken four years, and primarily involved interacting with a small committee (made up of tenured professors and my dean) that evaluated me annually. The tenure process went very smoothly, and I never felt that I was in danger of not getting tenure, but it sure is nice to know that as of today I won't have a committee filling out a form every December that has a large checkbox labeled "Do not renew contract" (translation: you're fired).

Of course, other than not being evaluated by said committee annually, there are also relatively few benefits of being tenured (other than the fact that it sounds really, really cool). I still have to teach my classes. I can still be fired. And I still have to go to committee meetings. But even so, I'm still psyched.

[Update 11:00am: I'm now on campus!]

Categories:

• personal
• teaching