Stop “Working Toward” Tenure. Start Engineering It.

Stop Chasing Balance.
Start Engineering Tenure. 

An op-ed on what research universities say they reward, what often drives tenure decisions, and why junior faculty should build systems rather than chase balance. 

One of the most persistent myths in academia is that junior faculty should strive for balance. Ask a room full of newly hired professors what advice they have received, and some version of the same message inevitably emerges: balance teaching, research, and service. It sounds sensible, responsible, and fair. In fact, it sounds so reasonable that few people ever stop to question it. Yet after years of observing promotion and tenure decisions, mentoring junior faculty, and reflecting on my own career, I have become convinced that this advice is not merely incomplete. In many cases, it is actively misleading. 

The problem is not that teaching and service are unimportant. Universities could not exist without dedicated teachers and faculty members willing to serve their departments, colleges, universities, and professions. Students deserve excellent instruction, and our academic communities depend on people who contribute their time and expertise. But acknowledging the importance of teaching and service is not the same as pretending they are evaluated in exactly the same way as research. At most research universities, they are not. 

What often goes unsaid is that teaching and service become major factors in tenure decisions when they create problems. A faculty member whose teaching is consistently poor, whose students are deeply dissatisfied, or whose colleagues question their willingness to contribute to departmental responsibilities can certainly damage a tenure case. But once teaching and service meet expectations, additional effort frequently yields diminishing returns in the promotion process. Research is different. Nobody receives tenure because their research caused no problems. Research is judged by positive evidence of achievement: publications, funding, graduate students, impact, visibility, and an emerging reputation as a scholar. Teaching and service generally need to clear a bar. Research largely determines how high the tenure case rises above it. 

Figure 1. Balance is the advice. Momentum is the reality. 

This is where the conventional wisdom becomes especially dangerous. By repeatedly telling junior faculty to balance teaching, research, and service, institutions create the impression that all three activities contribute equally to career advancement. As a result, many talented faculty members devote enormous amounts of time to polishing courses, creating new assignments, serving on extra committees, and volunteering for every worthwhile initiative that comes along. These activities are valuable, but they do not necessarily move a tenure case forward at the same rate as the successful development of a research program. Universities often celebrate balance rhetorically while rewarding research productivity in practice. 

Once faculty members begin to recognize this reality, however, they frequently fall into a second trap. They abandon the first balancing act only to adopt another one. The new advice sounds more sophisticated: balance grants, graduate students, publications, and professional reputation. At first glance, this appears to be better guidance because it focuses on research. Unfortunately, it suffers from exactly the same flaw. It assumes these are separate priorities competing for attention when, in reality, they are components of a single interconnected system. 

Consider what happens when a faculty member secures a grant. The funding allows them to recruit and support graduate students. Those students perform research, generate results, and develop new ideas. The results become publications. The publications increase visibility and professional credibility. Greater visibility improves the likelihood of attracting future funding. What initially appeared to be four separate accomplishments reveals itself as a feedback loop. Funding creates students. Students produce papers. Papers build reputation. Reputation helps generate future funding. Momentum in one area creates momentum in the others. 

Figure 2. The research engine turns separate outputs into a reinforcing system. 

The implications of this perspective are profound. Faculty members often spend years trying to optimize each component of their research portfolio individually. They wonder whether they should write more proposals, recruit more students, publish more papers, attend more conferences, or network more aggressively. These are understandable questions, but they often distract from a more important one: What is the bottleneck in my system? Engineers instinctively understand this way of thinking. When a system underperforms, we do not attempt to maximize every component simultaneously. Instead, we identify the constraint that is limiting overall performance and focus our efforts there. 

For many engineering faculty members, funding is frequently that constraint. Funding is not simply another item on a curriculum vitae. It creates capacity. It allows graduate students to be supported, equipment to be purchased, collaborations to flourish, and new ideas to be pursued. Without funding, attracting strong students becomes more difficult. Without students, sustained research productivity becomes more difficult. Without productivity, visibility grows slowly. Without visibility, future funding becomes harder to obtain. The system either gains momentum or loses it. There is rarely a steady state. 

A faculty member who views grants, students, papers, and reputation as independent obligations remains busy managing all four. A faculty member who understands the system begins building a research enterprise. That distinction is profound. 

At this point, some readers may worry that I am arguing for the neglect of teaching and service. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, some of the most successful faculty members I know are exceptional teachers and generous contributors to their institutions. The difference is that they understand how teaching and service can strengthen rather than compete with their research enterprise. They see connections where others see separate obligations. A course can become a recruiting mechanism for future researchers. A classroom innovation can become a scholarly project. Service in a professional society can create collaborations and increase visibility. Committee assignments can provide opportunities to build networks and influence decisions that matter. 

When viewed this way, teaching and service stop being isolated responsibilities and become contributors to a larger system. 

Figure 3. Teaching and service can act as multipliers when they create talent, ideas, networks, and visibility. 

This realization eventually led me to adopt a simple filter when evaluating new opportunities. Whenever a committee assignment, workshop invitation, initiative, collaboration, or service request appears, I try not to ask whether it sounds important. Almost everything in academia can be made to sound important. The better question is whether it strengthens the engine. Will it help recruit students? Will it create a path toward new publications? Will it increase professional visibility? Will it improve funding prospects? If the answer is yes, the activity may deserve serious consideration. If the answer is no, then it should face a much higher bar before demanding my time. 

This approach can feel uncomfortable because academics are conditioned to say yes. We want to be collegial. We want to help. We want to contribute. Those are admirable instincts. But junior faculty do not have unlimited time, and every commitment carries an opportunity cost. Every new obligation consumes time that could have been devoted elsewhere. The challenge is not determining whether an activity is worthy. The challenge is determining whether it contributes meaningfully to the long-term trajectory you are trying to build. 

Figure 4. The opportunity test makes the trade-off explicit before a new commitment consumes time. 

What concerns me most is that universities continue to promote the language of balance while often rewarding the outcomes generated by momentum. Junior faculty are encouraged to excel simultaneously at teaching, service, student mentoring, committee work, publishing, grant writing, networking, and professional engagement. When everything is declared important, nothing is prioritized. The result is predictable. Faculty become extraordinarily busy while making surprisingly little progress toward the activities that will ultimately define their careers. 

The greatest threat to a junior faculty member is rarely laziness. Most junior faculty work astonishingly hard. The real danger is misallocating effort. Academia offers endless opportunities to be productive without creating momentum. Meetings, committees, reports, reviews, initiatives, and administrative tasks all produce the comforting sensation of accomplishment. Yet many of these activities do not compound. They do not create future opportunities. They do not generate leverage. They simply consume time. 

Two faculty members can therefore work equally hard and end up in very different places. One can spend a week extinguishing fires, attending meetings, answering requests, and completing committee work, only to begin the following week with another collection of demands. Another can spend the same number of hours developing proposals, mentoring researchers, producing scholarship, and building collaborations that create new opportunities months or years later. Both are working. Both may be exhausted. But only one is building an engine in which today’s effort increases tomorrow’s capacity. 

Figure 5. The same effort can produce either more demands or more opportunities. Not all effort compounds. 

That, ultimately, is why the language of balance bothers me so much. Balance sounds virtuous. Balance sounds fair. Balance sounds like the advice responsible senior faculty ought to give. But it can obscure a fundamental difference between activities that consume capacity and activities that create it. A faculty career cannot be built indefinitely by adding more obligations to a fixed number of hours. At some point, the work itself has to begin producing the resources, people, ideas, credibility, and opportunities that make future work possible. 

This does not excuse poor teaching, selfishness, or neglect of one’s academic community. Quite the opposite. Teaching must be taken seriously, students must be treated responsibly, and faculty must contribute to the institutions and professions that support their careers. But those obligations do not require pretending that every academic activity carries identical strategic value. Honest mentoring requires acknowledging that it does not. 

The faculty members who thrive are therefore not necessarily those who achieve perfect balance. More often, they are the people who understand leverage. They know which activities satisfy immediate obligations and which create future capacity. They recognize bottlenecks. They connect activities that others manage separately. Most importantly, they understand that an academic career, like any complex system, acquires power when its components begin reinforcing one another. 

Figure 6. The engineering view of tenure: meet expectations, build momentum, and create future capacity. 

If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, it would not be to balance teaching, research, and service. I would tell myself to teach conscientiously, so that students succeed and teaching strengthens rather than undermines my career. I would tell myself to serve responsibly, so that colleagues respect my contributions and I remain connected to the academic community. But I would also tell myself to be fiercely protective of the time required to build a research enterprise capable of generating students, publications, visibility, funding, and, eventually, opportunities that I could not have predicted at the beginning. 

That is the distinction I wish we made clearer when advising junior faculty. The objective is not to neglect teaching or service, nor is it to transform every worthwhile activity into a transaction. The objective is to understand that a sustainable academic career requires more than effort. It requires a system in which some of today’s work creates the capacity to do more consequential work tomorrow. 

Engineers already understand this principle. We do not distribute resources equally among every component of a system and call that good design. We identify the objective, understand the constraints, locate the bottlenecks, strengthen the critical connections, and design for the outcome we want. 

Academic careers deserve the same discipline. 

Stop chasing balance. Start building momentum.
Stop managing disconnected activities. Start designing a system.
Stop working toward tenure. Start engineering it.