Tenure Track

Of the 1,638 Ph.D. chemists employed by the Top 50 chemistry departments in 2001, Nelson et al. (2001) report that only 18 or a mere 1.1% were African Americans. The fact that only one African American Ph.D. chemist was appointed as an assistant professor in a tenure-track position at one of the nation s top 50 chemistry departments in 2000 provides further evidence that African Americans continue to be virtually absent from these faculties (Bhattachaqee, 2003). In a report released by Dartmouth College (2003), a key finding was that faculty diversity tends to lag well behind student diversity. 

Includes self-employed and non-profit organizations. Includes one non-tenure track appointment. 

Actually, the department didn t have a vacancy. Because the university was under a federal consent decree, it had what is called a4>rogram. Under this program, if a person from an underrepresented group inquires alx)ut a position, the school will interview that person. Fortunately, I was offered a tenure-track position. I accepted the offer because I was in a nontenure-track position at a small historically white university. When I informed the department of my decision to leave, only then did they offer to convert my position to tenure track. 

Overall, the proportion of full-time instructional faculty with tenure has remained relatively stable-around 64%. Jones believes that the employment outlook for college faculty is expected to be good but competitive, particularly for tenure-track positions at research institutions (Jones, 2003). As in any job market, some doctorate recipients have difficulty finding suitable employment even when employment conditions are good. However, as one interviewee points out ... 

Also in the early 1970s, another angry chemist, Shyamala Rajendar, a 1965 Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming, was told that her assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota (which she had finally obtained in 1969 after several other staff positions, including research associate) was not on the tenure track after all. (That distinction was introduced about then before then, all assistant professorships were assumed to be what is now called tenure track.) She sued, sought, and got class-action status when she showed the pattern was industrywide, and finally in 1980 the university settled out of court with a special master appointed to introduce new practices and oversee some rectification of claims.17... 

Marjam Behar, National Institutes of Health I joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, in December 1962 to work with a group of physicians who were doing studies of cerebral blood flow, and they needed a chemist to do their metabolic studies. I didn t have a tenure-track position. As a matter of fact I was not in the faculty track, but as we advanced in the studies (I was there for 17 years), they made me director of the Core Facility for Analytical Chemistry. I had 12 technicians that I supervised and taught. I also taught residents, faculty members, and medical students who needed to learn bioanalytical techniques to pursue their research. 

I was the chemist in the department, we had a center grant, and I was part of the investigators in the center grant as the director of the Core Facility for Analytical Chemistry. But I was not in the tenure track, and it is difficult for a woman in one of these universities to get in the tenure track. If you are a chemist in a department of a medical school it is even more difficult. 

In 1997 (the most recent date for which data are available), women made up 25 percent of doctoral scientists and engineers at universities and 4-year colleges. That figure includes scientists who are tenured, tenure track, not in track, or in positions for which tenure is not applicable, such as postdoctoral or other appointments. Women ranged from being 6.5 percent of faculty in engineering to 59 percent of faculty in health sciences.3 Across all disciplines, 56 percent of women were tenured or tenure track,... 

Steven F. Watkins Out of about 30. Before they arrived we did not have any tenure-track women faculty. In fact, one of these women, who was a postdoc at National Institute of Standards and Technology and who, I am sure, worked day and night as a postdoc, mentioned to me one day that her work load had gone way up at LSU because all of the women graduate students wanted to talk to her about their problems. The central idea is that every group has to be comfortable in the academic environment. I do not know how you do it for every group. You identify and try to make provisions for women, for international students, for minority students. The white males can fend for themselves, I suppose. 

P G s reward and recognition system is best exemplified by our dual-ladder system for promotion. Employees in R D will choose, early in their career, whether to advance as a technical expert or as a manager of science. Both are equally valued, and this is important, so there is no stigma associated with one choice or the other. The management path for promotion is traditional and basically resembles all other industrial corporations, as well as the tenure track promotion system in academia. But the key here is that such a promotion system is public, not personal and private. It goes beyond a handshake and a raise and awards titles to individuals selected for advancement. Our titles include such terms as section head, associate director, director, company officers, etc. Others may use different titles, but the title used is far less important than its symbol, namely, the outward recognition of personal success. 

There are things that the universities can do to emulate what has been done in industry. For example, the University of California had a minority postdoctoral program, which unfortunately was cut out because of Proposition 209. That program prepared several minorities for tenure track positions at the University of California, Davis. This program also helped prepare other minorities for such positions at other universities. 

Figure 1 Annual number of jobs for scientists in the field of computational chemistry that were advertised in Chemical and Engineering News for the years 1983-2001. The positions available are categorized as to whether they were for government laboratories, academia (nontenured staff, tenure-track professorial, or postdoctoral appointments), industrial research lahoratories (permanent or postdoctoral appointments), software companies, or hardware companies. Having a separate category for hardware companies in our compilations stemmed from when these companies were more numerous in the 1980s, and they were hiring computational chemists primarily for marketing purposes. However, more recently as the hardware companies have had to consolidate, they have done little or no additional hiring. The data for software vendors include some postdoctoral-type positions primarily in the years 1988-1990. In a few cases, jobs advertised near the end of one year were also advertised early in the following year in these situations the positions are counted in both years. In cases of advertisements for an unspecified number of open positions, an estimate was made. Therefore, the data are approximate, but representative and consistent.

The modest peak at 1988 in Figure 1 was due in part to hiring by industry. And most of the growth since 1995 has been in industrial jobs. The rising demand for computational chemists reached a new high in 2000 when about three-quarters of the demand came from industry, principally pharmaceutical and biotechnology. In 2001, hiring by industry slowed a bit, which was offset by an increase in advertised academic positions. A few of the latter were for tenure-track faculty, but most of them were only postdoctoral positions, which tend to be short lived. 

Figure 3 compares the number of academic and industrial positions advertised in C EN. The academic curve combines tenure-track, staff, and postdoctoral data from Figure 1. The industrial curve combines data for the industry, software, and hardware categories of Figure 1. The number of academic job openings has remained fairly steady, with a small peak in the late...

I I Industry H Industrial postdoc B Software M Hardware I I Tenure track I I Academic staff Academic postdoc H Government... 

Having lived in New England, Florida, New York and the mid-west, I wanted to sample the west coast, but needed the money to get there. While at Harvard, I had become friends with John D. Roberts, who was one of the first people to get a Ph.D. from UCLA. He had accepted a teaching position at MIT after his postdoc year at Harvard. Upon my questioning him about the differences between UCLA, USC (University of Southern California) and Caltech and their relative proximity to the ocean, he suggested and agreed to help me get a temporary and part-time teaching position at UCLA. He also offered me a four-month postdoctoral stay at MIT so I could finance my move westward. By the middle of 1948, UCLA had offered me a tenure track position, and I have been at UCLA ever since. 

It took me 21 years to get a faculty position. I was always a research associate. That effected me financially too because since it was not a tenure-track position, there was no pension. And I was paid less than anybody else. On the other hand, there were certain advantages. Since I did not have a tenure-track position, I was not in competition with my male counterparts and that helped me to maintain excellent relations with the men. I was no threat to them. Also, I didn t have to teach, which meant a much more flexible working day. If a child was seriously sick, I simply stayed home. I couldn t have done that easily if I were teaching. The most important thing from the scientific point of view was that I was not under pressure when I was at Washington University, I could pursue long-range... 

Most of the bone marrow transplant pharmacist positions with research emphasis are tenure-tracked or tenured with a teaching hospital. These pharmacists have minimal to no direct patient care duties assigned to them. Pharmacists are responsible for the following ... 

I then became a research professor at Kentucky. Because I was successful at bringing in grants, they created a tenure-track position for me. 1 started in 1994 and got one of the fastest promotions ever in my department to associate professor and one of the fastest to full professor. In 2002,1 received the Gill Eminent Professorship in Analytical and Biological Chemistry. 

I thought it may be of interest, especially to academic chemists, for me to discuss some of my experiences in research on phosphorus chemistry in an industrial laboratory. In thinking back on my experiences as an industrial chemist, I found that there really isn t very much difference between industrial and academic research. I know that some of my academic friends think otherwise. The other day a professor friend called to tell me about two of his former students, who are husband and wife. The professor said that the wife had found an industrial position, but the husband was having difficulty finding a tenure-track teaching position. 1 asked him why didn t the husband also try for an industrial position. The professor s quick reply was "But he is much too good a scientist to go into industry "... 

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