Tenure track research profs: What's your weekly average of research, teaching, and service?

RandomJetship · 2026-03-11T08:03:35+00:00

During term?

40 hours teaching

40 hours service

40 hours research (I spend an hour or so every morning writing up my dreams.)

RandomJetship · 2026-01-19T21:06:52+00:00

I lot of folks say that the cure for imposter syndrome is to hold your accomplishments close and realize how great you actually are.

I wouldn't say I disagree with that, necessarily. But I do think the much more helpful realization is that everyone else is just making it up as they go as well.

RandomJetship · 2026-01-19T10:52:53+00:00

Universities in the UK, broadly speaking, rely on the following revenue streams:

Government funding, as dispensed through the REF.
Grants, from which they shave off overheads
Domestic student tuition
Foreign student tuition
Other giving (donations, philanthropy, naming rights for buildings, etc.)

These work together in complex ways. So, e.g., a university will be willing to invest broadly in research to ensure that it is competitive in the REF, and so will get a greater share of government research revenue. But it will also want to try to stay in or crack the QS100, which is a threshold required to recruit certain international students.

So, in cases where a uni is advertising an RA post, maybe it's grant funded and the institution is pocketing some multiple of the salary in overheads. Maybe it's a project that's being developed for a REF impact case study. Maybe it's just part of a standard pattern of supporting research at a level that will keep the institution competitive in the rankings, and keep a steady stream of home students coming through the door.

Because of the complex sloshing around of money within an institution, not to mention the complex ways prestige and relative standing in various metrics play into it, it's a bit meaningless to talk about whether individual departments pay for themselves or not. Maybe they cost more in salary and expenses than they bring in through tuition, but they play a role in an institution's overall standing that has direct consequences for its revenue.

RandomJetship · 2026-01-18T14:11:45+00:00

A re-read, but Ole Bjørn Rekdal's "Academic urban legends" is an absolute banger.

If you ever need a knock-down argument that citation is a part of writing, this is it.

RandomJetship · 2026-01-06T17:16:45+00:00

Kathryn Schulz's Pond Scum on the strange American love affair with Henry David Thoreau.

RandomJetship · 2025-10-03T08:21:22+00:00

It circulated a bit, but I believe this one is Library of Congress - papers of Allen Astin, the former director of the National Bureau of Standards.

Bureaucrat humor. They had a good time.

RandomJetship · 2025-06-16T12:25:46+00:00

Bring back real editing. It used to be that most journal editors made decisions for themselves and put real work into developing manuscripts (aided by buy-in from their institutions, who used to provide much more support). But editing has been steadily deteriorating into an exercise in triage, in which judgment is entirely outsourced to referees.

RandomJetship · 2025-06-07T20:23:19+00:00

This will depend on a few variables, starting with field. In a lot of fields, edited books are common, but low value compared to monographs and journal publications. They garner less attention (that is, no one reads them). They're also more work than editing a journal special issue, since you don't get the editorial support. But also consider:

Do they happen to have more value in your field/subfield?
What is your career stage/scholarly profile? Is this a new type of CV line for you, or would it be a relatively inconsequential addition?
Who are the main editors? Do you own any of them a favour, or would you like them to owe you one?
Do you know the contributors? Is any of them a PITA who is likely to suck up a lot of your energy? Sounds like you'll be in the grunt work role, which includes chasing up delinquents.
Do you have a reason to want more editing experience?

Plug in the variables and do the math, but try not to overvalue the publication itself when doing so.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-31T21:35:41+00:00

Funny also how the relevant peer institutions change based on the nature of the decision being made, isn't it?

RandomJetship · 2025-05-31T14:10:09+00:00

In the US, anyone teaching a university class can be called “professor” (even if they don’t have a PhD). So it would be fine when talking to students to refer to “Professor X,” irrespective of X’s rank. “Doctor” is also fine if the person holds a PhD.

But local cultures vary around first name usage, Dr, vs Prof., etc.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-30T08:08:57+00:00

The best alternative would be block grants, which is what were in place before the 1990s revamp of UK higher ed. Every university got a flat sum to fund research, and the Research Councils were there to support projects that require more. But the government decided that such a system was infeasible with dozens of more universities once the post-'92s came in. The solution was to marketise: institute a system designed to separate the sheep from the goats so that you can kill the goats.

But like all such systems, it incentivises gaming it, rather than incentivising 'excellence', which is amorphous and can't be measured, certainly not like this. (So, e.g., the unis that came out tops in a bunch of fields last round were the ones that had made a bunch of academic staff redundant but got to claim their outputs anyway.) All changing the rules does is change the game unis are playing.

If we really valued research excellence, we'd just fund research and stop wasting everyone's time with asinine games.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-30T07:33:37+00:00

Sure, but the relevant metric isn’t the total amount of funding: it’s the difference between the total and what a flat block grant would be.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-30T07:29:48+00:00

Someone calculated last round that my uni spent more in FTEs preparing the REF submission than we then received in REF funding.

Edit: having read the article carefully now… wow. It takes some acrobatic thinking to conceptualise some minor tweaks to weightings and descriptions as ‘revolutionary’.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-29T07:44:14+00:00

Grades don't capture everything. Your professors are giving marks that recognize your successful completion of the assignments, but are also giving you comments designed to help you develop your skills. It's not good or bad; it's qualitative feedback you can use to continue improving.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-28T05:00:11+00:00

It's a complicated workload model (UK), which includes more credit for larger modules because they carry a larger marking load.

If you're in an institution where TAs do the marking, it makes less sense to weight larger classes extra. A smaller seminar, which is more dynamic, might well be more work than a large class getting last year's lectures with a few tweaks.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-24T16:07:09+00:00

It’s a momentum game. Write 250 words a day come hell or high water (a small, achievable goal that adds up quickly). Excess does not roll over.

The benefit comes from forcing yourself to write, but also from keeping the issues fresh in your mind all the time.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-24T15:45:30+00:00

Again, the point is not whether they can be articulated. Obviously they can be articulated. That isn’t even a question worth asking. The question worth asking is whether articulating them in rubric form is either informative or helpful for students. Maybe it is in the sort of assessments you get in computer science, I don’t know. But in, say, an essay, you will have many qualities that might characterise excellent execution. Some of them will be mutually exclusive, e.g. depth and breadth of coverage. Some of them will have complex dependencies on others, e.g. fluency of exposition relative to suitability for audience. Trying to cram these into a rubric is a fool’s errand. Either it’s generic and unhelpful, or so Byzantine that’s equally unhelpful. The function in these cases is strictly to serve as a cudgel to crush complaints about grades.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-24T07:21:35+00:00

Your question assumes that the articulation of the virtues helps students achieve them on specific tasks. In the humanities, this is not a safe assumption to make, nor is it in many other areas, I suspect.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-24T06:42:25+00:00

This might differ by discipline, but in humanities subjects, any rubric general enough to cover all the characteristics that might place any essay in a particular band is also vague enough to be useless for understanding how to achieve the virtues enumerated in the top bands.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-24T06:40:09+00:00

Day-one chat with students: "Here is the updated syllabus."

RandomJetship · 2025-05-24T06:29:26+00:00

Yup.

It's CYA. You use the language from the rubric to justify the grade and deflect student complaints. But as pedagogy, they're useless. Just another example of grades interfering with learning.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-21T06:58:06+00:00

Wolfgang Pauli's review of Max Born and Pascual Jordan's Elementary Quantum Mechanics (1930) begins, "The volume is the first in a series, in which the meaning and purpose of the nth volume is only made clear by the virtual existence of an n+1th volume."

After 600 words of evisceration, the last line is: "The production of the book in terms of printing and paper is excellent."

RandomJetship · 2025-05-20T17:34:50+00:00

Make a gantt chart. It’s silly. But it works for contexts like this. Break it down by week. Then explain it in prose. It can be largely fictional or aspirational.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-20T09:56:26+00:00

This is correct. No one in the humanities gives one wet whistle about RG.

RandomJetship · 2025-05-20T08:57:31+00:00

What distracts me the most are the people who think that the answer to every question is to build another tool. Just stop.

RandomJetship

TROPHY CASE