The very first house I bought was a condominium, and the purchase price included 10 hours of service by an electrician. The idea was that each owner would want to customize the unit with special lighting fixtures and built-in appliances, and covering the cost of the electrician was intended to be a selling point. I was just starting out as a college professor and far too strapped for cash to afford luxuries like special fixtures and appliances, so my 10 hours of included service lasted me for several years. Each time one of my unit’s floodlights would burn out, rather than climbing up on a ladder myself, I’d call the manager’s office and have the electrician come do it for me. After having done so four or five times, I heard the manager sigh and say, “You know, an electrician is certainly capable of changing lightbulbs; it just seems to me that you’re wasting a perfectly fine electrician by having him do so.”
A major role of every academic leader is to help faculty do well. For those of us who work in institutions where becoming a productive scholar is an absolute prerequisite to earning tenure, “doing well” implies developing a scholarship agenda, and “working” a plan.
Ensuring that new faculty get off to a good start is a very important component of any successful plan. All too often we spend limited travel funds and go to extraordinary efforts to recruit promising candidates only to see them leave our institution because they realize they are not on track to earn tenure. Some, realizing they will not do well, leave as they approach their three year review. Others stay until they fail their sixth year “up or out” review. Both cases represent a lose-lose situation.
