一篇最近的IEEE Spectrum的文章，关于科学工作者的职业生涯的（How to climb the academic ladder）。正在读博士或者博士已经“后”了几年的读者值得一读。

里面提到的"Tenure clock"是六年。

What's Up, Postdoc?

By Prachi Patel-Predd

How to climb the academic ladder

Late one night, Richard J. Radke was at his desk, putting together
applications for faculty jobs. Nearing the completion of his Ph.D., he
was hoping to embark on an academic career. A senior professor he knew
well took Radke aside and said, “I hate to tell you this, but it’s
going to be brutal,” he recalls. Radke, now an assistant professor in
electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, in Troy, N.Y., admits that his professor was right. Even
once he’d landed a job, for the first few years he was constantly busy
and stressed out as he learned the ropes and started worrying about
tenure.

Roughly 28 percent of all electrical and computer engineering Ph.D.s
follow the academic career path, according to a 2003 survey of doctoral
recipients by the U.S. National Science Foundation. After five or six
years as graduate students—a grueling stretch of time spent in proving
that they can develop their own ideas and become well versed in
research methods and goals—freshly minted Ph.D.s find themselves at the
bottom rung of the academic ladder. Now their objectives must be to
prove themselves in their fields, contribute to the learning in those
fields, and in countries where it is offered, get tenure.

It is the start of serious multitasking—simultaneously writing research
grant proposals, publishing journal and conference papers, advising
graduate students, teaching multiple courses, and serving on school
committees and engineering organizations. As Radke points out, the
process can be very intimidating and stressful.

Typically, young academics in the United States start out as
assistant professors, become associate professors if they get tenure,
and may then be promoted to full professors.

Tenure at most schools requires some combination of research,
teaching, and service on administrative committees. Schools usually do
not weigh the service aspect as heavily as the others, and the emphasis
on teaching and research varies, based on the school.

At research institutions, the focus is, naturally enough, on
research. “If you’re an excellent researcher and a so-so teacher,
you’re okay,” says Russ Joseph, an assistant professor in electrical
engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, in
Evanston, Ill. “If you’re a so-so researcher and an excellent teacher,
that’s not going to fly.”

Conversely, liberal arts institutions generally emphasize teaching
ability, although they do encourage research. At Swarthmore College, in
Pennsylvania, there are no graduate students, but faculty members run
research labs with the help of talented undergraduate researchers and
funding from the college, says Associate Professor Bruce Maxwell.
Swarthmore also gives faculty members a research sabbatical every four
years, a leave Maxwell is taking advantage of this year by working at a
small start-up company.

Institutions that focus predominantly on undergraduate studies, such
as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in Terre Haute, Ind., usually
make good teaching the top qualification for tenure. At Rose-Hulman,
there is no pressure to write research proposals or to get funding,
says Mario Simoni, an assistant professor of electrical and computer
engineering, who chose the school because he wanted to teach. “I enjoy
interaction with students, and I didn’t want to spend my time worrying
about where my next million dollars were going to come from,” he says.

Just as a school’s emphasis can shape its tenure requirements, its
size can also affect who gets tenure. The opinions of individuals on a
tenure committee in a smaller school can carry more weight than those
in larger schools and could lead to more subjective decisions, Simoni
says. On the other hand, there is a greater chance that people on the
tenure committee in smaller schools are familiar with your research and
could judge you better, Maxwell says.

The exact issues that young academics face depend on the school, but
the pressure of the “tenure clock” is always on their minds. The term
refers to the time period, six years or so, that young academics have
to secure tenure. After that, chances are they’ll find it impossible to
get tenure at all.

That time frame can have a negative effect. The emphasis on
research, for instance, can create undue pressure to publish. “In some
sense, I feel a little guilty about being so driven about getting
papers out,” Radke says. “In the ideal sense of a scholar, you
shouldn’t be thinking about getting a paper out all the time.”

Sometimes less is more. At the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor,
Domitilla Del Vecchio, assistant professor in electrical engineering
and computer science, finds there is less pressure to churn out papers,
because “they put a lot of stress on quality of publications rather
than on quantity.”

“A lot of publication occurs not because you have a great new idea
but [because] you have an idea in your head that I need so many
publications,” says Gill Pratt, associate professor of electrical and
computer engineering at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, in
Needham, Mass. Olin is taking an entirely different approach to faculty
development by eliminating the tenure process completely. Instead, the
college gives faculty members five-year contracts that are renewed
based on teaching and research performance. [For more on Olin’s new
approach to engineering education, see “ The Olin Experiment,” IEEE
Spectrum, May.]

Pratt, who was previously an associate professor at MIT, says that
the key difference at Olin is that faculty, besides conducting
traditional research, are encouraged to contribute to the field by
participating in government service, consulting, and founding start-up
companies. “Olin is recognizing that different people don’t have to fit
exactly the same mold,” Pratt says. “We’re trying to show that
entrepreneurship along with research can exist together.”

Apart from the entrepreneurship principle, Olin’s system is similar
to that in the United Kingdom, where reforms in the 1980s abolished
tenure. British academics hold fixed-term appointments and are
reevaluated at the end of the term, which can lead to their losing
their positions. Tenure also does not exist in Japan, India, China, and
other Asian countries, but although there are no guarantees, a
full-time academic job in these countries is usually a permanent
position.

The system varies widely in Europe. In most countries, including
France, Germany, and Italy, only senior academics are appointed
professors, a venerable, tenured position. Junior faculty members,
typically called lecturers, can have fixed-term or permanent contracts,
but they usually do not move up the ranks at the same university.

A key difference is that European countries give preference to
older, more experienced people, says the Italian-born Del Vecchio, who
is familiar with the European academic system. After earning their
Ph.D.s, people commonly get postdocs, temporary positions to gain
additional teaching and research experience, instead of being hired as
assistant professors, she adds. In the United States, postdocs are a
norm in science disciplines such as biology and physics but are
uncommon for engineers; the NSF survey shows that electrical engineers
make up only 0.5 percent of all postdocs.

The U.S. tenure process is considered a way to judge a new
academic’s potential and weed out weaker candidates. But Olin’s Pratt
argues that it is not the only way. Contrary to what some believe, the
absence of a tenure system only makes him work harder, he says, because
of the freedom to be creative, develop new courses, think about fresh
ways to teach the same concepts, and consult with the industry and
develop new products. “One of the fallacies of the tenure system is
that if there weren’t hoops to jump through, faculty would sit around
and have coffee all day long,” he says. “[Here] folks create their own
hoops to jump through.”

But others believe that tenure drives the bar up for quality. Radke
says that the tenure clock pushes him to do more and makes him a better
researcher. According to Michael Flynn, associate professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at the University of
Michigan, “The tenure process is one of the reasons that the U.S. has
the best schools in the world.” Northwestern’s Joseph believes that the
job security that comes with tenure gives academics freedom to voice
their opinions and to perform high-risk, high-reward research as well
as teaching.

Whether or not people spend their time as assistant professors
stressing about getting tenure, Radke believes they clearly love what
they are doing if they have chosen academic careers, especially in
engineering. Unlike such other fields as liberal arts and social
sciences, it is much easier to get a high-paying private-sector job in
the technology field, he says. Like other academics, he chose the
career for the freedom of pursuing research that interests him and for
the rewards of teaching. “There is nothing like the academic lifestyle
for flexibility,” he says. “No one is watching over my shoulder to see
when I’m in the office.”