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May 18, 2008

Some Personal Good News

I'm pleased to share the good news of my tenure and promotion to associate professor. Some frequently asked questions:

1) You weren't nervous about the tenure vote, were you? [This question has been posed in a variety of forms, all with an implicit skepticism about a negative outcome.] Being recently hired as a lateral assistant professor, I had some reason to believe the faculty would generally support my tenure application, and I felt good about my application on paper. However, tenure is a major decision by a faculty, and faculty politics can be complicated--especially in an environment where I was a relative newcomer. So personally, I never assumed tenure was a foregone conclusion.

2) What role did blogging play? I don't have a precise answer to this question. In preparing my materials, I treated blogging as a "plus factor." In other words, I felt like my application should stand on its own merits even if blogging was completely stripped out of the application. As a result, my hope was that blogging would enhance the application but not act as a substitute for some other obvious deficiency.

3) How are you going to celebrate? To celebrate both tenure and my recent milestone birthday, next month I'm going on a 2 week guided river rafting trip down the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. I'll blog more about that trip over the summer!

Posted by Eric at May 18, 2008 01:10 PM | Life as a Law Professor