On Being a Junior Prof and Presenting at Your Home Institution

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Today I presented a work in progress at a faculty workshop here at UF.  This was a wonderful experience because the paper was in an early enough form (full draft but still at a point where I could use lots of input) that I could most benefit from the presentation and Q&A.  One advantage of having such a large faculty at UF is that people with a diverse set of viewpoints and theoretical approaches provided great insights into how to better frame my paper and how best to qualify the limits of my analysis.  Had I presented a near finished product, I would not have been able to have benefited as much as I did from my colleagues.

This experience leads me to question conventional wisdom.  At the AALS new teachers conference held every summer, the year I attended a number of panelists suggested that it was a mistake to present a paper to your own faculty as a junior professor.  Their justifications were two-fold:

1. Colleagues will only remember your work in not final form and will hold it against you when it comes to tenure decisions.
2. You are better presenting work at "safe" conferences where people will go easy on you.

Conventional wisdom is misguided.  Let me address each of these points.

1. Your colleagues want you to succeed.  When they raise questions for you, it is because they want your work to be better and address issues that they would raise with it later in an internal review.  It is better to see potential shortcomings in your work before someone does an internal read of your final product for tenure purposes. With an internal workshop, you have an opportunity to anticipate their concerns and address them in your article.  Moreover, many of the points that people will raise internally are exactly the points that external reviewers will raise. It is the opinion of external reviewers that in most cases will carry the day in a tenure vote.

2. People are not doing you any favors if they are unwilling to give you truly constructive criticism.  Indeed, a "safe" conference is anything but safe because it gives you a false sense of comfort.  Unless someone challenges you to do better, you won't.  Only asking for platitudes at a safe conference means that you are unwilling to be challenged as a scholar because you are concerned that your ego may get bruised. Criticism is helpful even if it is painful.  You will benefit from the experience, especially because it is humbling.  I have.

Comments

[Michael Risch]

I would add that in many fields, the "safe" conferences are attended by those folks who will be external tenure reviewers.

I've always put the best draft together that I could, and then shared it with those I thought might be willing to provide me with the most helpful feedback. It's possible that there's a group of senior professors at my school and elsewhere that think I'm a hack, but I doubt it's because they saw a draft and not my final product.

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