How I was able to retain a superstar under less-than-ideal circumstances
Some details here — names and offering institutions — have been changed. The dilemma is real; the disguises are mine.
She had two NIH RO1 grants and a written job offer from an extremely prestigious Bay Area academic medical center. And she was in my office explaining the side deals that included subsidized housing and virtually zero teaching load. And my job? I needed to retain the human talent. As her dean at George Mason, at the time, not even an R1, I needed to persuade my nascent superstar that she should stay in Northern Virginia, with its awful summers and hellish traffic in her undersourced lab with its retrofitted offices and hallway alcoves. As a native Californian, I was well-versed in both the positives and negatives of the Golden State. But this really wasn’t about lifestyle. It was about the future–both hers and our suburban state school on the make.
But I had a plan. And it got to the essence of the matter: job security versus prestige. It also depended on the accuracy of my assessment of her ambition.
“Jim, they’re offering a one-million-dollar start-up.”
“And tenure,” I responded, having read the letter myself.
“And tenure, yes.”
“And a condo overlooking the Presidio,” I added.
“Yes, with the same square footage as our house in Fairfax,” she answered enthusiastically.
“That sounds great, Kari. I don’t think we can beat it on paper. But I do have one question for you.”
Silence for maybe ten seconds.
“OK, so what’s your question?”
“What do you think tenure means in that letter?”
This was the hook. I knew that tenure at the California offer was conditional. She’d get her goodies as long as she had ample grant support. With her two NIH grants, Kari was in great shape–for now. Best case, she’d go on to win the Nobel Prize with a lab with all the bells and whistles. In the worst case, if for some reason her grants were ended, the Bay Area institution would terminate her employment and evict her from the nice housing.
She responded, “It means tenure, like here. Job security. Not having to worry about my family, our kids.”
“No dice, Kari. If you lose your grants here, you can always teach more college kids.” You’re a great teacher, and your course load can pay your salary.”
“But that has nothing to do with my tenure,” she answered indignantly.
“Well, it kind of does. It allows us to offer you a tenure that you can take to the bank–just like you’re thinking about. We’re not going to go bankrupt on whether you have grants or not.”
A half hour later, I was pretty sure that I’d won. Kari wasn’t willing to take the gamble on the prestige. She understood that “tenure” is a squishy term and that one of the key advantages of staying was that it meant what she thought it meant.
So let’s zoom out. Academic tenure in the United States is an endangered species these days. But, even so, there are three different variants out in the wild. The first, the lifetime job-security one, is increasingly rare. Ultimately, it depends on an Institution, having some sort of collateral on your salary. At my place, the university can require me to teach more classes (with more tuition-paying students) until my salary is covered. If I were at the academic medical center as a physician professor with tenure, my place could require me to see more patients. But ultimately, the job-security version of tenure requires some financial backup in a situation where there is no grant success.
The second variant of tenure (a bit more common), especially for PhD’s at teaching hospitals, is tenure as a hunting permit. In this version, tenure means you get to ‘eat what you kill.’ This was the package that Kari was looking at. So, if you can pay your salary with grants, great. If not, then no money. And if you have half your salary from your grants–then that’s what you get. This formula is actually pretty similar to the professional business world of lawyers and lobbyists.
And there’s a final variant, where tenure is an honorific. You get to say that you’re tenured to your friends and maybe put it on your CV. But it means nothing in terms of financial obligations from your employers.
How can the same word, ‘tenure’, have such different meanings across our science ecosystem? Ultimately, it’s an accident of the history of science here in the US. When tenure was first rolled out in the 1940’s, at many public and private universities engaged in STEM, the budget model was fundamentally based on tuition revenue (and state appropriations for public universities). These institutions were among the earliest to put tenure in place as a protection for faculty academic freedom, and they were able to do so because of their budget models. Later, as academic medical centers entered the equation, faculty salaries were much more dependent on ‘soft money’ (grants). In addition, such medical institutions often have a high velocity of cash flow (from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement for procedures) that makes faculty salaries a significant risk factor, one that can only be mitigated for those with M.D.s who can see more patients if required. When mandatory retirement at 65 was eliminated in 1994, the tenure equation became much more fraught for universities as there was no guaranteed end-point for the employment guarantee. Some places responded by changing the meaning of the term to purely a title rather than job security.
Kari was unaware of the extant tenure variants when she came into my office to play hardball. This was a crucial problem for her job negotiation strategy. Since I was very aware of her compensation package priorities, simply informing her of what the California package really entailed served my purposes: we retained her.
The social ecology of tenure is as important for Institutions as it is for people. There was no way our place could compete with the California institution on most concrete aspects of the compensation package: salary, benefits, start-up. But we could compete on the question of job security, and that turned out to be the critical factor.
It’s worth pointing out that what happened with Kari wouldn’t necessarily work in other cases. It was the intersection of her priorities with our ability to meet those needs. In a sense, I got her to articulate what she really needed: for tenure to mean what she thought it meant.
I stated earlier that tenure is endangered here in the States. The deal that I was able to make with Kari probably won’t be available to deans in the future. In that future, institutions like George Mason are going to have a tougher time of it. As with the private sector, the market for talent will become a lot more transparent. And maybe that’s a good thing.
Discoverers and Discoveries 