By Rob Jenkins - Chronicle Vitae. Over the past few months, a few of my peers at Vitae have weighed in on the future of tenure, and understandably so: Increasingly, we’re being asked to contemplate a world without it. We’ve been reading arguments against tenure for a while, of course. But there’s a real corporatist edge to recent contributions to the genre. These broadsides envision an Orwellian campus where freedom is servitude—specifically, intellectual servitude to the whims of education technocrats holding up their forefingers to test the winds of supposed market forces. See more...

By Fatimah Williams Castro - Chronicle Vitae. Just last week, one of my graduate-school deans invited me to present on a nonacademic career panel with three other alumni. It was the fourth such invitation I’d received from my university since I graduated with a doctorate in cultural anthropology three years ago. I’m happy to act as a resource for my alma mater—and for graduate students struggling to navigate their career options. But sometimes I wonder if I’m doing much good by showing up. See more...

By Kelly J. Baker - Chronicle Vitae. It's Day Three of our series on pregnancy, motherhood, and the academy. Stay tuned tomorrow for the final piece. Monday: Sarah Kendzior asked, Should You Have a Baby in Graduate School? Tuesday: Rachel Leventhal-Weiner described the myth of The Perfect Academic Baby.
At a conference several years ago, I dined with a female senior scholar. We discussed her panel and mine, and eventually our talk turned to our children. She had a teenager; I had a toddler. We swapped stories, then phones, so we could see pictures of our respective progeny. See more...

By Gregory Semenza - Chronicle Vitae. Is the Book Enough? Q (from hiddendragon): Life got in the way of publications. I will have a book and one chapter in another book, and a couple of small, relatively insignificant articles only. Other articles are in the works (in the review process), but will not be out for sure. I have other publications, but they’re from before I came here, so they won't count. I think the book, which is in production, will be out next spring or summer. Is that enough for tenure at an R1? Should I start looking for jobs? Get ready to go on the unemployment? Please help me cope. See more...

By Jonathan Rees - Chronicle Vitae. A few weeks ago, the Huffington Post ran a story—if you can call it that—about a professor at an unnamed university who put up an incredibly lifelike (and lifesize) photo of himself, hard at work in his office, on his office door. “Professor Fakes Out Everyone,” the headline read. Of course, that’s not technically true: If some Reddit user caught on, so would any student who actually tried to visit this guy during office hours. See more...