Sharing my publications with colleagues

[the-tenure-track-prof]

Hi all,

I am a first year tenure track assistant professor. I`ve gained my education and research experience in R1 private and public universities and since my early years I`ve always excelled in research. I am right now in my first tenure track faculty position at a teaching university.
Because it is a university, the administration always claims that it encourages research but the reality is something else. I`ve discovered during my first year that none of my colleagues does or did any research in the past or published. They even don't know what statistical software is available on campus.
Because I take research very seriously and for me, it is my life, I`ve decided to pursue research quietly with a colleague who is from another school at the same university with the same passion for research, but with colleagues in the same department, I almost force myself not to talk, the same way that someone would force himself not to drink water when he is thirsty. As an academician who "grew up" in Research universities, it feels extremely weird to be put it nicely.

I realize that being in the academia is about prioritizing my activities and my plan is to secure tenure first and then I would think about pursuing a position in a university where I can do more research, pursue grants and talk about my research with faculty members who understand what I am talking about.
My question for now is: I am on a tenure track right now, should I or should I not share with my colleagues' new research/publications and conference papers as a way to let them know what I am doing to help me with my tenure?. Or should I just talk about what they talk about: teaching.

Thanks in advance.

[dismalist]

It's always good to keep one's hand in. I would not share, on account of others' envy. Keep your activities closely held, not necessarily secret. Then, use the publications for gaining tenure, or another job, when the time comes.

[Volhiker78]

I'd only bring it up in conversations with your colleagues if they ask what you are doing outside of teaching. Even then, keep it brief and avoid getting into too much specifics.  If they want more details, then you can share your publications.  Until you know your colleagues better or until you receive tenure,  I'd be a little cautious.  Keep your facuty web page up to date so people can see your accomplishments in a Research Section of your page and also view an up to date vita.   

[doc700]

I am at an R1 university and do spend a lot of my time on research, as do my colleagues.  We do discuss science generally and people know about each other's programs; I also have close research collaborations with a few faculty members.  All of this said, the general "small talk" in faculty meeting is still almost always on teaching.  Its easy conversation since we teach the same students, even if our research programs are very different.  Its a casual thing to ask someone about to be friendly, even if you don't recall the details of their latest project. So at least in my experience, even at an R1 where everyone is doing research, there is still a lot of teaching small talk!

[writingprof]

I published regularly while at a teaching university and said nothing except when directly asked. As the years passed and I noticed various things, I came to understand that my colleagues held two assumptions, both damaging.

1) If WritingProf is doing something, it must not be that hard. They could do it themselves if they wanted to.

2) If WritingProf is publishing, he must not be a very good teacher.

They were wrong on both counts; I was just working harder than them, constantly, whereas it was never quite clear how they spent their 158 non-classroom hours each week. Presumably they were sleeping for part of it. The rest remains a mystery to me.

[Hegemony]

I've found that conferences are the place to share research. Your colleagues are probably too busy to attend closely to your research, and too far away from it in their own fields for it to matter much. So it would just be a matter of politeness for them to hear about it. I'm at a place where the majority of people are researching and publishing away, and we don't share much as a matter of course. Some folks have someone who's especially close to their field, and they agree to trade article drafts or whatever. And sometimes there are works-in-progress series, which are a lot of hassle for everybody but can be quite interesting. But in my experience, at the tenure-track level, it's not the norm for people to share their research with their colleagues in general.  Really people are too busy and too much in their own little worlds.

I think the thing to do is to cultivate some friends in a similar field, whether at your place or people you went to grad school with or folks you meet at conferences, and trade work with them when you want to trade work. (However, when someone sends you a draft of their 60-page article, or of their monograph, and eagerly awaits your detailed comments, the time commitment may clarify why people trade their work so infrequently.)

[JCu16]

I published regularly while at a teaching university and said nothing except when directly asked. As the years passed and I noticed various things, I came to understand that my colleagues held two assumptions, both damaging.

1) If WritingProf is doing something, it must not be that hard. They could do it themselves if they wanted to.

2) If WritingProf is publishing, he must not be a very good teacher.

They were wrong on both counts; I was just working harder than them, constantly, whereas it was never quite clear how they spent their 158 non-classroom hours each week. Presumably they were sleeping for part of it. The rest remains a mystery to me.

This sounds strikingly familiar to my current experience. Can someone enlighten me what people are doing in this situation? Granted, I get there is more to life than work, but I still manage to do woodwork, go fishing etc, and still have time to spare (I don't watch TV or shows via streaming though).

It's always good to keep one's hand in. I would not share, on account of others' envy. Keep your activities closely held, not necessarily secret. Then, use the publications for gaining tenure, or another job, when the time comes.

Sad as it is to say - I would agree with this - when I've shared what I'm working on or talked research in general its been met with envy or dismissal. The way I deal with this now is to have collaborators in lots of different places, both in other departments, and through my broader network. Makes my grant COA document suck to keep together, but it keeps my research flowing and sane.

[the-tenure-track-prof]

The university I work at right now is not the type of university where faculty members are busy with their own research. In fact, the basic research equipment such as up to date statistical software and internal grants are barely available. I know that except for one faculty, none of the faculty I know publish or present at conferences. As someone who comes from a research university, this looks and feels a bit odd (dare I say wrong too) to me and I need to get used to this but I still think that faculty members must publish. A faculty member who is one year ahead of me on the tenure track told me that she never published or wrote a paper since she was hired (she thoughts she will be fired too) and she`s almost guaranteed now to receive tenure from what I understand because the program needs faculty members as it has not been fully staffed for the pst 6 years (lost number of faculty members in the past few years).
I realize that this is an opportunity to work less and still receive tenure but I am not really feeling comfortable with this and feel that it is morally wrong when I compare this to the work that faculty members in other universities have to do and what universities demand from them to do.
I`ll take your advice to continue to do what I enjoy doing which is research and just will not talk about it unless I am asked and even then will talk about it succinctly.

[traductio]

I know that except for one faculty, none of the faculty I know publish or present at conferences. As someone who comes from a research university, this looks and feels a bit odd (dare I say wrong too) to me and I need to get used to this but I still think that faculty members must publish.

...

I realize that this is an opportunity to work less and still receive tenure but I am not really feeling comfortable with this and feel that it is morally wrong when I compare this to the work that faculty members in other universities have to do and what universities demand from them to do.

I'd be very, very careful with the judgments I've highlighted in those two statements. A teaching university has a different mission than a research university, and it's likely your colleagues are holding up their moral obligations (as they perceive them and as the institution perceives them) by teaching. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong about teaching, and you will not endear yourself to your colleagues if they think you're judging them.

[Parasaurolophus]

I'd be very, very careful with the judgments I've highlighted in those two statements. A teaching university has a different mission than a research university, and it's likely your colleagues are holding up their moral obligations (as they perceive them and as the institution perceives them) by teaching. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong about teaching, and you will not endear yourself to your colleagues if they think you're judging them.

Indeed, there's absolutely nothing morally wrong with "working less and still receiving tenure", especially when the expectations are different. Maybe it's unfair, but not all unfair situations are morally wrong.


FWIW, I hear you. No publication whatsoever is required at my university, but I continue to publish up a storm--partly because I hope to move one day, if at all possible (omg please!), but also partly because it feels wrong for me not to do so. Not wrong in the moral sense. Wrong in that I'm not currently the kind of person who can just give up on the research aspect of my field. I love research, and I love my (extra-departmental!) research community, and I'm pretty good at it, so it's a reliable source of pats on the back. (And, although I put quite a bit of effort into my teaching, my dirty secret is that I also regularly sacrifice teaching on my research altar.)

But yeah. Don't impose your research on your colleagues unless they invite you to do so. Build yourself a network of like-minded fellows instead, and impose your work on them while they impose theirs on you!

[traductio]

FWIW, I hear you. No publication whatsoever is required at my university, but I continue to publish up a storm--partly because I hope to move one day, if at all possible (omg please!), but also partly because it feels wrong for me not to do so. Not wrong in the moral sense. Wrong in that I'm not currently the kind of person who can just give up on the research aspect of my field. I love research, and I love my (extra-departmental!) research community, and I'm pretty good at it, so it's a reliable source of pats on the back.

This was me too -- I was at a university where if you were any good, you left, so the university was forced to tenure a lot of really mediocre (or terrible) people. (It's in a location most people think of as undesirable, although I loved it in many ways.) I had a friend who got tenure at Michigan, so I looked at his CV and said, "I'm gonna do that." I got tenure and left for a much better place -- colleagues who aspire to be interesting, who are curious about the world, and who are someplace they want to be.

[jerseyjay]

I am at a teaching university with a 4:4 load. Perhaps up to 20 years ago, absolutely no research was necessary for tenure--you just needed to show scholarly engagement, which could include book reviews, conference presentations, etc. Then about 15 years, they made it so you had to do some research, for example some articles in my field (history). Now, about seven or eight years ago, they ramped things  up; still not the same as a R1, but something between an article a year or a book and some articles in history. (Of course, they did not reduce the teaching load and they actually decreased the funding that was made available for travel, conference, etc., in this period.)

The point is, my colleagues are a mixture. There are some who regularly publish, and there are some who have never published anything in 30 years. There is tension, but it is also related to other changes in the school, its mission, its funding, and the general state of academia.

I think the key is to be respectful of each other, and do the other aspects of the job (service and teaching) well in addition to research. 

If one acts like spending a lot of time on teaching and service is a waste of time, or one thinks that research is more valuable, then that is obnoxious and wouldn't go over well.  I will talk to my non-researching colleagues about my research, in a general way, but I do not rub their faces in it.

I am somewhat turned off by the sense in some of the posts in this thread that people who are not researching are some how wasting their lives. What do my colleagues who do not spend much time on research do with that time? Well, first of all, they probably spend quite a bit of time on their work (teaching and service). That said, I have colleagues or friends who do things like:
-volunteer for a homeless shelter;
-take care of elderly relatives;
-follow opera;
-serve on boards of professional associations;
-do freelance consulting;
-read widely in their field and develop new classes;
-work for their church or temple or mosque;
-work for the union;
-work for local political campaigns;
-write popular books;
-write pulp fiction;
-write for the local paper.

Personally, I prefer research to some of these. But that is because I find doing research on topics that I find interesting to be fun. I find that some academic's research seems pointless to me (not the subject, but their approach to publications in general). But I do not think that any of these choices less morally (?) acceptable than what I do.

I also have colleagues who have done a fair amount of research, but have since shifted to spend their time doing something else that they find more meaningful.

None of this is a moral question. Nor is it an ethical question: so long as somebody fulfills their professional obligations, I don't it matters ethically what they do, even it is is drinking and watching soap operas. I might not agree with their choice, but that's their business.

Finally, I think that there is enough garbage, nonsense, and boring unoriginal research published for the sake of publishing that I for one will not bemoan the fact that somebody who does not want to and does not have to publish is not publishing stuff.

[Katrina Gulliver]

Agree with JerseyJay, especially about mission-creep (as teaching institutions demand more research, and indeed research institutions have higher bars for tenure than they did a generation ago).

I did note this line in the OP though:

My question for now is: I am on a tenure track right now, should I or should I not share with my colleagues' new research/publications and conference papers as a way to let them know what I am doing to help me with my tenure?. Or should I just talk about what they talk about: teaching.

OP's assumption is that this would help with tenure. Maybe it wouldn't. As others have noted, being seen as focused on publications can be seen as not focused enough on students. The collegiality vote when it comes to tenure is as much about fitting in as standing out. Sending a message that one is trying to publish one's way out, to a job at a research institution, is unlikely to win many fans. Don't sent the message that you're trying to leave when you've just arrived.

[Ruralguy]

Just talk to people about their work. If they teach, talk about their teaching, if they do mainly research, ask them about that. Just relate to people on their terms. If someone hasn't published in 20 years, there's probably no point in leading with your recent publications, but also don't assume they wouldn't care. Some folks are taken to the "mostly teaching" road by circumstances in their lives, and perhaps there's nothing they'd rather do than chat about what's new in their field since they haven't talked to a grown up about research in years. In other words, don't make assumptions about people...don't write people off as not caring or being immoral or whatever. But also just know the social graces. Nobody likes a braggart anyway.

[Wahoo Redux]

You know OP, I'm also at a teaching university and I totally understand what you are saying.

However, remember that the major R-1 researchers have a much lower teaching load, probably 2/2 or even 1/2, and frequently can apply for different fellowships and course releases on top of that, and they probably are paid well enough so that summer teaching isn't really a concern, so their research expectations are much different from those of us with a 4/4 or, as I have, a 5/5.

Personally I've found that, as long as one is not pretentious or ostentatious about it, your colleagues will probably appreciate your publishing.  If they don't, it's just defensiveness.