Tenure Track Research Articles

Rewarding academics: Experiences of the Tenure Track System in Pakistan

AbstractPakistan introduced the Tenure Track System (TTS) as a new performance‐based reform in public universities in 2005. The purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of higher education authorities, university leaders and tenure‐track faculty about the implementation of this reform. This is a qualitative interpretive study and utilised a nested case study design, focusing on two cases—Science Faculty and Social Sciences and Humanities Faculty in a large provincial university. It utilises three perspectives taken from organisation theory—instrumental, cultural and myth perspectives. The main results show instrumental problems of hierarchical authority and horizontal coordination, lack of expertise to implement, cultural compatibility problems through active resistance from some groups and active use of symbols to modify the impression of a challenging reform implementations. Summing up, this is a Western‐inspired reform that meet challenging conditions in Pakistan, making is rather less successful.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic American otolaryngology faculty: an elusive dream

ABSTRACT We analyze gender and racial disparities in academic otolaryngology from 2007 to 2018 in the United States (US). A cross-sectional retrospective analysis was done using data from the American Association of Medical Colleges. The distribution of gender and race, academic ranks, tenure tracks, and degrees was reported. The total number of otolaryngologists increased from 1,490 to 2,239, where 53 percent were females. All races experienced an increase; however, Whites and Asians had a greater increase compared to Black and Hispanics. Regarding percentages at different ranks, White were the majority (>50 percent) in every category. As for tenure, the general trend was a decrease in the total number of tenured physicians from 327 in 2007 to 318 in 2018, where Black, Hispanic, and Asian tenured physicians increased, while White tenured physicians decreased. White male otolaryngologists were the majority for every subgroup (>60 percent), whereas Black faculty made up less than 1 percent of tenured category. Female representation gradually increased for all levels of tenure. As for all degrees, Whites were the majority for all levels of education (>60 percent). There were some improvements in the representations for the females in all and Asians on the tenure track. However, progress for the URM remains an elusive dream.

Paved by Good Intentions

I was thrilled to be accepted into the University of Michigan for my Masters of Science in Information, but it was an unexpected deviation as my health derailed my original plan to pursue a career in criminal law. As I enrolled in classes with my peers who intended to pursue careers as librarians and archivists, I was the odd person out asking myself how I could market my research in these courses to law schools in the future. I had always assumed I had incompatible passions, a love for history, literature, and research coupled with disinterest in pursuing a single field towards a Ph.D., and that my legal career would support my hobbies in the cultural heritage sector. With a heavy dose of irony I walked into “SI519 Intellectual Property and Information Law,” my first graduate school class, determined to use it to confirm to law schools my decision to pursue criminal law, but walked across the stage at graduation ecstatic to build a career at the intersection of copyright law and cultural heritage. Fantastic mentors, supportive networks, and timely court rulings and legislative changes, paved a path and provided me a stepping stone into a career at the intersection of my passions in a field I had not known existed. I entered the field at an increasingly critical time and had unique access to practitioners that helped create opportunities for engagement without which, I would not have had the opportunity to accept a tenure track librarian position at the age 24 as my first full time job out of library school.

The Mask of Confusion.

The Mask of Confusion Donald F. Moores, Editor (In response to Dr. Lane) Lane’s response consists of two main arguments: First, the book was reviewed favorably in two other places, and second, I was either baffled by the book or I evaded his criticisms and fresh vision by pretending that everything is now fine with deaf education. The first argument is irrelevant. Lane must know that others have written critical reviews of his book. For example, I can refer to one by the sociologist Robert Scott, who, I believe, is not directly involved in education of the deaf. Scott (1993) states that Lane weakens his case by overrelying on ideology in place of serious analysis, and that Lane’s rhetoric is in the end self-defeating. Scott lists four concerns that seriously undermine Lane’s position, as follows: First, the author is not consistently sensitive to the heterogeneity of beliefs, attitudes, and values of people in the groups he attempts to portray. Second, his rhetoric is sometimes misleading and unnecessarily inflammatory, thereby contributing more heat than light to the issues. Third, his use of evidence is selective and uncritical. And fourth, vital parts of his argument lack historical and social context. (p. 84) Lane cannot believe that I think everything is fine in deaf education today. In the beginning of my review, I alluded to the serious problems we face. As I have stated frequently: we face enormous difficulties in the field. Also, I do not think I was baffled by a “fresh” vision. The basic premise of the book is that deaf communities have suffered repression, in all of its forms and consequences, in common with other cultures that were literally subjugated by imperial powers. In truth, I find his message simplistic. Rather than face complex issues he unfairly demonizes an entire profession. Lane claims that he identified five major issues that I avoided. I believe I did address them, and will go over them again. Is Deaf Education Oppressive? Lane retracts his overgeneralization and acknowledges that, “Indeed, it would be mindless to equate [sic] oppressive practices in deaf education and imperialism, and Mask doesn’t do it.” It is mindless, but I believe Lane did do it. Some quotes from the book: In fact I [Lane] was beginning a journey that would lead me to appreciate the profound commonalities between the cultural oppression suffered by the colonized people of Africa and that suffered by deaf communities. (p. 32) The universal properties of paternalism do show up in the stereotypes the colonial authorities and the hearing authorities create for themselves to rationalize and justify their predicament. (p. 40) It seems, then, that there are fundamental commonalities between the relations of colonizers and colonized on the one hand and those of audists and deaf people on the other. (p. 50) Yet if the experience of colonization is to be more than an analogy and actually a template for the experience of audism (p. 50) Lane claims that the book is a work of social irony. These statements seem straightforward, with no suggestion of irony. Lane now states that he did not mean them. Fine. [End Page 554] Now to the point: Is deaf education oppressive? Partly. For example, Gallaudet does have a legacy of oppression—35 years ago deaf students were not allowed into graduate school—but people of good will are working through remaining problems of bias and discrimination. The presence of a deaf president, vice presidents, deans, directors, and doctoral-level tenured professors provides evidence of progress that Lane casually dismisses. He dismisses these improvements in the same way that he dismisses leadership by deaf professionals in CAID and CEASD. Exploitation takes many forms. Many universities hire deaf instructors to teach courses on ASL at low pay but never provide opportunities for doctoral-level tenure track employment. This is exploitative if not oppressive. Northeastern University has had an ASL research lab for about 20 years, and has a Disability Resource Center with 40 deaf students and an interpreter training program. I would like to know how many doctoral-level tenured, culturally deaf professors Northeastern has had in the past 20 years. I...

No other choices but involution: understanding Chinese young academics in the tenure track system

ABSTRACT Based on an analysis of policy documents, questionnaires and interviews, the paper discusses the experiences of Chinese young academics on tenure-track contracts. Findings suggest that young academics perceive tenure as a managerial solution to governance reform. Meanwhile, a population-resource imbalance and the uncertainty in career progression interactively and collectively create an involuted culture where overwork is normalised for self-adaptation. While young academics are experiencing insecurity and anxiety, the study found that they adopt a wide range of strategies to actively adapt into the context. Drawing on the competitive nature, the tenure system is interpreted as both a managerial approach and a training mechanism. This competitiveness and its related precariousness seem to remain, however, uncharted in social perception. An analysis of these issues illuminates tensions and conflicts in the implementation of the tenure-track system in the Chinese context, which have important implications for future managerial policies and practices.

Chasing the academic dream: Biased beliefs and scientific labor markets

We investigate whether biased beliefs play a role in the persistent demand for postdoctoral training in science. We elicit the beliefs and career preferences of doctoral students at 56 U.S. chemistry departments through a survey combined with a field experiment, in which we randomize the provision of information to a subset of respondents on historical academic placements by department. We first show that respondents have excessively optimistic beliefs about their own and their peers’ chances of obtaining a tenure track faculty position. Respondents who received the historical placement information treatment updated their beliefs about their own likelihood of obtaining a faculty position in a follow-up survey one year later, particularly those who had the most biased initial beliefs. However, we do not find an effect on the likelihood of doing a post-doc at four years post-intervention.

Stepping off the tenure track

Stepping off the tenure track

Shifting Culture by Creating Synergy and Equity Through the Unification of Tenure Criteria.

Tenure requirements within universities vary; however, most focus on excellence in teaching, service, and scholarship. Within our university, faculty with either research or clinical doctorates were on both tenure and clinical tracks, with reported marginalization from clinical track faculty. A task force was convened in 2018 to develop a unified single track that included a single set of criteria for all College of Health Professions faculty to obtain tenure. The Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) Roadmap was used to guide the work of the task force. The implementation of a single track has influenced discourse around previous notions regarding what is considered "tenure worthy" and has opened the door to contractual equity among faculty. Internal structures, such as implementation of a single track, can support cohesion and productivity that facilitates collaborations among faculty of all ranks and degree backgrounds, promoting a culture that continues to embrace intellectual discourse and unity. [J Nurs Educ. 2022;61(8):455-459.].

Guardians of the Discipline: Institutional Maintenance through Tenure Review

While interdisciplinary research continues to be promoted in universities, early-career researchers struggle to receive recognition for their interdisciplinary work and advance in their academic careers. Drawing on institutional work and the study of professions, we examine how professional norms around career promotion are discursively constructed and used in institutional maintenance. We conducted 59 interviews with department chairs, directors of interdisciplinary research centers, and disciplinary and interdisciplinary untenured scholars in an American university. We identify two modes of discursive institutional work—expansion and expulsion discourse—which suggest that while interdisciplinarity activated efforts to transform tenure review, it also triggered institutional work to maintain disciplinary order. The untenured interdisciplinary scholars used expansion discourse to argue that the tenure review norms should be revised. However, the untenured scholars simultaneously drew on expulsion discourse to reflect on the illegitimacy of interdisciplinary research. The senior scholars relied mainly on expulsion discourse arguing that interdisciplinary research among tenure track faculty should be renounced. We contribute to extant literature by demonstrating the discursive and performative aspects of institutional work by professionals as well as by shedding light on the discursive production of justifications for institutional practices that actors seek to legitimize and maintain. More broadly, our findings problematize the career risks that untenured interdisciplinary scholars take to accomplish the interdisciplinary aims of their universities.

The Decline of the Professions

The paradigm of an academic career- doctoral study, then a well charted ascent through the ranks, culminating in 25 or 30 or so years as a full professor, and tapering off with many years on an ample pension-was never guaranteed or anything like universal, but was a reasonable aspiration for a college graduate who loved physics or sociology or art history. Of those teaching in colleges and universities, around 75% are contingent workers: short contracts, no assurance of renewal, low pay, maybe health insurance but probably not, no pension fund, little if any say in faculty governance or in the making of curriculum, maybe no office and no phone, maybe several other jobs off the tenure track.

Gender Issues in Physiotherapy in Quebec, Canada.

This study examines gender differences in the physiotherapy (PT) profession in the province of Quebec regarding: (1) areas of practice; (2) roles associated with the advancement of the profession; (3) formal disciplinary complaints; and (4) interests and competency perceptions of PT students. We collected data from the Canadian Institute of Health Information, the Quebec Professional Order of Physiotherapy, Quebec university public Internet sites, and PT associations. We also surveyed PT students at the Université de Montréal. The PT workforce in Quebec was 76.6% women. The presidents of the four main PT associations were men. In the five university programmes, the percentage of male and female physiotherapists in tenure track positions was 46% and 54%, respectively. There were more sanctioned complaints of sexual misconduct and not maintaining continuing education for male physiotherapists, while more women were sanctioned for problems with documentation and billing. Among students, men were more interested in becoming administrators, but neither men nor women had a strong interest in research. Male physiotherapists make up 23.4% of the PT workforce in Quebec but are more involved in leadership positions in the profession than women.

Factors Influencing Retirement Decisions of Senior Faculty at U.S. Medical Schools: Are There Gender-Based Differences?

Purpose: Women comprise almost one-third of academic medicine faculty 60 years of age and older. Gender disparities have been documented across many measures in medicine, including salary, promotion rates, and leadership positions and may impact long-term career and retirement decisions. The authors sought to describe gender differences in retirement decisions among late-career, full-time medical school faculty. Materials and Methods: The authors conducted a secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data from a 2017 survey of faculty 55 years of age and older at 14 U.S. Medical Schools. Responses were compared for differences by gender using bivariate and multivariable analyses. Results: Among the 2,126 respondents (41% response rate), the majority were male (67%) and the average age was 62. Less than half (45%) had current plans to retire and 50% reported that they would consider working part time. Women faculty were less likely to be professors or on a tenure track and more likely to be single and report past and current caregiving responsibilities. Women differed from men in the personal and professional factors influencing retirement decisions with women more likely to identify health insurance, sense of burnout, lack of access to career advancing resources and opportunities, feeling devalued at work, and caregiving responsibilities as important issues. Conclusions: Women late-career faculty report unique and salient factors influencing retirement plans that may reflect cumulative gender-based career differences and disparities. Institutions should be aware of these differences and work to support women during late career and retirement transitions, including creating opportunities for faculty to remain engaged in meaningful work during retirement transitions if they desire to do so.

A Discipline wise Comparison of Challenges and Problems of Tenure Track Teachers

A Discipline wise Comparison of Challenges and Problems of Tenure Track Teachers

Rank and Tenure Amongst Faculty at Academic Medical Centers: A Study of More Than 50 Years of Gender Disparities.

To investigate progress toward gender equality in academic medicine through a longitudinal analysis of gender parity among faculty at medical schools. The authors conducted a retrospective analysis of Association of American Medical Colleges Faculty Roster data on gender, tenure status, and academic rank of faculty in basic science (BSc) and clinical science (CSc) departments from 1966 to 2019. They expressed data as whole numbers and percent female. A trend analysis projected time to gender parity across rank and tenure categories, and cross-tabulation analysis revealed the relative odds of females being in a rank and tenure position relative to males. A 12-fold increase in the number of faculty occurred from 1966 to 2019, driven largely by increases in non-tenure track faculty. Female tenured and tenure track numbers increased at consistent rates (121 and 174 per year; P < .001). Female non-tenure track rates mirrored those for males, both changing in 2000. Odds ratios in 2019 for BSc and CSc females to be in tenure track versus non-tenure track positions compared with males were 0.83/0.98 and to be tenured were 0.63/0.44. Odds ratios in 2019 for BSc and CSc females to be full professors versus assistant or associate professors compared with males were 0.55/0.42. BSc assistant and associate professor percent female rates increased linearly from 1966 to 2019, while full professor rates increased in 1986. Transition points between periods of linear change were seen later in CSc departments (1977, 1980, 1985, 1994). Best fit line models indicated gender parity will be reached for BSc/CSc faculty in 2034/2023, 2047/2033, and 2065/2053 for assistant, associate, and full professors, respectively. These findings suggest large historical changes in medical school expansion, medical education, and economics have shifted gender curves at all academic ranks. To achieve gender parity, additional national changes are needed.

11 Ambivalent Contingency and Queer Exuberance; Or, My Five Years on the Market

11 Ambivalent Contingency and Queer Exuberance; Or, My Five Years on the Market Douglas S. Ishii (bio) I am an unpartnered gay man of color who has taken four full-time contingent faculty contracts. After receiving no job offers my first year on the market, I signed on in 2014 as a last-minute hire as a visiting assistant professor of Asian American media and history at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2015, I became an inaugural chancellor's postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2016, I began as a one-year visiting assistant professor of Asian American humanities at Northwestern University, and then secured a three-year, nonrenewable lectureship there after a national search. The voguish uptake of Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure (2011) in this period celebrated failure as politically pure and morally righteous, which poked my ever-present fear: actually being a failure. I accepted only full-time employment, and was willing to relocate for work. Over the years, I became more certain of the life of the mind and more discouraged of my chance to live it. With each new gig, I found solace in making a life for myself: friends, lovers, community, routine—a home. At the end of each contract, I abandoned that life to follow the fleeting promise of permanent employment. When Northwestern would not provide a secure future, I accepted an assistant professorship at Emerson College in Boston in 2018. However, in 2017, I had declined a tenure-track job [End Page 297] offer—then my first and only one—to gamble on a longer contract at Northwestern and the chance to keep living the life I had built around it. Hearing my decision, a treasured mentor and friend told me to consider that, regardless of how unstable and sometimes unhappy my nonwork circumstances had been, I turned down what so many others sought. So, why did another contingent faculty contract feel more like a life than a tenure line? To reckon with the interdiscipline, as part of professional academia, this essay reflects back to theorize ambivalent contingency—a mitigated agency based in not only structured precarity, such as higher education's administrative regime, but also constrained privilege and the wish for a future. In the casualization of higher education, contingency names temporary, contract-based teaching personnel. However, Sara Ahmed meditates that to be contingent, which shares an etymological root with "contact," is linked to "the sociality of being 'with' others, to getting close enough to touch."1 What makes the discourse of failure so touchy is this unreachability, what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism, "a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic."2 I do not know how it feels to ascend early to the tenure clock. But I do know how it feels to be told, "We are so sorry to lose you," by someone who did not support my retention. I also know the cut of those words: "You're not tenurable." Yet, as Vivian L. Huang and Summer Kim Lee reiterate, though contingency may make us lose touch with a future, it also enables "the insistent act of reaching out toward another for survival and more."3 For me, as for many, this act was sustained by love—for ideas, collegiality, students, and the profession. Although love has been mobilized toward ideological mystification, Keguro Macharia argues, "Love is more than tolerance, more than equality, more than freedom. It is an embedding, a valuing, a possibility, a 'risking,' a demand."4 Love's embeddedness, this ambivalence within contingency, exceeds the liberal individual—the hero of job market stories, for example—to illuminates social ecologies beyond academic capitalism. Against at-times totalizing accounts of cruel optimism, ambivalent contingency is not a grand theory of academic labor. Adjunct faculty organizing has forced us to confront the numbers: more than 75 percent of faculty are off the tenure track.5 Nevertheless, Rani Neutill's 2015 quit lit essay, "Sixteen Years in Academia Made Me an A-Hole," outlines a familiar conversation between contingent and tenure-line faculty: contingent...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note James C. Wadley It has been a significant amount of time since i wrote my last editorial. Within my department at Lincoln University over the past nine months or so, three of my colleagues died. Drs. Szabi Ishtai-Zee, Solomon Caudle and Ms. Rafaela Bermudez were exceptional professionals and dear friends of mine who created spaces and opportunities for our Counseling and Human Services programs. Dr. Ishtai-Zee was one of the faculty founders and contributors to the Master of Human Services program in 1977–2978. Dr. Solomon Caudle was a graduate of the Master of Human Services program years ago and returned to us as an adjunct, visiting professor, and then a tenure track assistant professor. Rafaela (Faye) Bermudez was an adjunct professor in our program and devoted several years of her professional career towards helping our students complete the process to become licensed professional counselors. All three of my colleagues are missed dearly as it has been difficult to fill the huge "shoes" that all of them maintained. Prayers and condolences to the families of these three remarkable professionals. In addition to the loss of my three professional family members, it has been challenging to manage family, life, and professional responsibilities due to COVID-19 restrictions and protocol. The COVID pandemic has influenced several different initiatives that I have been a part of within and outside of my university. Efforts have been time consuming and in some cases, overwhelming. While masks, vaccinations, and isolation helps reduce the likelihood of acquiring the virus, many people still find their lives to be significantly impacted while navigating this potentially debilitative infection. COVID restrictions also impacted ABSC organizational functioning. As a founding member of the Association of Black Sexologists and Clinicians, we managed to have our Spring Roundtable series in the U.S. Virgin Islands (St. Thomas) as well as our International Lecture Series in San Pedro (Belize) using a hybrid format. For those of us who were fortunate [End Page vii] enough to reach each destination, we were able to learn and celebrate each other's contribution to the field of Black sexuality. As you can imagine, it was difficult for all of us to get tested within a certain time period, receive a negative result before airplane boarding, and then travel safely to our destination. Fortunately, the hybrid format allowed many of our members to remain at home or other safe spaces to be a part of the conference. I am grateful for the support, care, and generosity of our sponsors who participated in the events as they were instrumental in helping us increase our attendance through scholarship. Our next ABSC International Lecture Series will be in Montreal, Quebec on October 27–28, 2022. I hope that you can attend so that we have an opportunity to learn more about your work. Over the past year or so, I decided to invite more scholars to serve as guest editors for the JBSR. After several conversations with colleagues and staff of the University of Nebraska Press, I decided to reach out to several notable scholars in the field to help facilitate and lead conversations about Black sexuality and relationships in a more expansive manner. While we (editorial board) have been successful at creating space and opportunities for scholars over the past eight years, it has become increasingly important to create space members of our community to use their own voices and construct JBSR issues that are specifically devoted to their research or clinical best practices. This initiative has been needed for some time and has allowed newer scholars to have their work published. I am grateful for the contributions of Drs. Juan Battle (CUNY), O'Shan Gadsden (Norfolk State University), Karen Sears (Denison University), Kamilah Woodson (Howard University), Jannis Moody (Texas Southern University), and Stacey Brown (University of Connecticut) for their hard work and professional expertise in shedding additional light upon the intersection of race and gender for persons across the African diaspora. The current issue of the JBSR offers us an array of learning opportunities that showcases a robust and diverse perspectives for understanding the sexual and relational experiences of Black folx. As we move towards...

Great expectations: Adapting a research agenda to changing scholarship requirements

When leaving initial professional librarian positions to join new organizations, the authors considered several common factors: salaries and benefits, livability of potential cities, and new colleagues. However, thriving early- and mid-career librarians taking the step into different roles must be able to navigate one less commonly discussed aspect of a workplace transition: differing expectations of original research among institutions and according to job classification.When moving from one tenure track position to another, librarians are likely to encounter different formal tenure requirements and support mechanisms at a new institution. Small universities might weigh the successful completion of day-to-day duties more heavily, with less emphasis on research output. Often larger research institutions are the inverse, with a much heavier emphasis on what research is published or presented, and where. Since expectations can be informally relayed and not expressly stated in job postings or during interviews, understanding an employer's idea of what constitutes significant scholarship is often developed over the course of the first year at an organization.This column will discuss the two main characteristics that typically inform expected research output: the type of institution for which the librarian works and the classification of the individual's position. The authors draw on recent experiences assessing different research expectations when changing employers, as well as current research on the topic. Expectations can also change moving from non-research-intensive positions into tenure-track or continuing-status-eligible positions at the same institution, and librarians in these situations often will have to deal with differing expectations around output metrics or impact factors in their research. Successful librarians changing roles will recognize that research expectations are a continuum, and will be able to assess where their current job falls on the library research spectrum. Once readers determine whether their new position requires a low, medium, or high level of scholarship and service, they can then strategize to adapt their existing agenda to meet expectations.Lastly, the column will help early- and mid-career librarians identify and assess the resources and support available to assist them in continuing their research agendas, regardless of positional research and scholarship expectations. Formal mentors, peer researchers in one's professional network, and new colleagues can all help with the stated and informal expectations of research.

Creative strategies to perform an inclusive faculty search

During the academic year 2020‐2021, the Biology Department at Emory University conducted a faculty search that was designed to continue the success of the department in building an inclusive department. There were several actions taken to ensure an equitable search process despite the challenges and biases inherent in search processes that were likely further exacerbated by a raging global pandemic.The search was approved for two tenure track faculty positions with no formal limitation on the academic rank of the hires. The whole department invested in efforts to have a very broad search that would have the highest likelihood of identifying and recruiting outstanding scientists with a commitment to teaching who also showed evidence of actions toward the mission of diversity, equity, and inclusion.For this search, we modified aspects of our traditional search in several ways that included the strategy for the search, the ad that described the position, the composition of the search committee, which was expanded to include trainee members, and aspects of the process (performed largely virtually due to COVID‐19). We were fortunate to have strong support from leadership at all levels from the Department to the Dean and Dean’s Office to allow us to make changes aligned with the goals of the search.A successful search takes a great deal of time and effort dedicated from the search committee as well as all members of the department. The input from trainees, which was new to our process, was invaluable. We will seek to incorporate some of the lessons learned during this recent experience in future searches, with the caveat that we all hope to hold future searches in person. However, there are aspects of the virtual process that may enhance equity and, thus, should be considered for the future. Each search is unique with distinct challenges and opportunities, but there are concrete actions we can take to mitigate bias in the process.

Postdocs as Key to Faculty Diversity: A Structured and Collaborative Approach for Research Universities.

Over the past 50 years the diversity of higher education faculty in the mathematical, physical, computer, and engineering sciences (MPCES) has advanced very little at 4-year universities in the United States. This is despite laws and policies such as affirmative action, interventions by universities, and enormous financial investment by federal agencies to diversify science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) career pathways into academia. Data comparing the fraction of underrepresented minority (URM) postdoctoral scholars to the fraction of faculty at these institutions offer a straightforward empirical explanation for this state of affairs. URM postdoc appointments lag significantly behind progress in terms of both undergraduate and Ph.D.-level STEM student populations. Indeed, URM postdoc appointments lag well-behind faculty diversity itself in the MPCES fields, most of which draw their faculty heavily from the postdoctoral ranks, particularly at research-intensive (R1) universities. Thus, a sea-change in how postdocs are recruited, how their careers are developed, and how they are identified as potential faculty is required in order to diversify the nation’s faculty, and particularly the R1 MPCES professoriate. Our research shows that both Ph.D. students and postdocs benefit from intentional structure at various levels of their respective “apprentice” experiences, a factor that we believe has been neglected. Several key structural approaches are highly effective in these regards: (1) A collaborative approach in which leading research universities collectively identify outstanding URM candidates; (2) Faculty engagement in recruiting and supporting these postdocs; (3) Inter-institutional exchange programs to heighten the visibility and broaden the professional experiences of these postdocs; (4) Community-building activities that create a sense of belonging and encourage continuing in academia for each cohort; and (5) Continuing research based on outcomes and new experimental approaches. The California Alliance, consisting of UC Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech, and Stanford, has been engaged in such a program for almost a decade now, with most of the California Alliance URM postdocs now in tenure track positions or on the path toward careers as faculty at research intensive (R1) institutions. If this approach was brought to scale by involving the top 25 or so URM Ph.D.-producing R1 institutions in the MPCES fields, about 40% of the national URM postdoctoral population in these fields could be affected. Although this impact would fall short of bringing URM MPCES faculty ranks up to full representation of the United States population as a whole, it would vastly improve the outlook for URM students and their aspirations to take on leadership roles as scientists and engineers.

The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates. OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing. Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work). The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.