Various Lies

Thursday, May 28, 2009

A Call to the Academic Blogosphere

Dear Academic Blogosphere,

I work with a junior, non-tenure track assistant professor. He has been faculty for a couple of years, and comes from an engineering background. He is from South East Asia. He is an incredibly talented programmer with a marvelous imagination, vast amounts of tenacity and drive. He is also completely lost working in an academic biomedical environment. The politics, the power plays, the rules & regulations are basically beginning to crush his spirit.

Our boss is aiming to get him on the Tenure Track by the end of the year, and I know he can succeed with a little guidance and pushing. He won't get this from his Chair though, nor is likely to get much support from his "colleagues".

I am working on him as hard as I can, but I only have limited time. I've got him whipped into some sort of shape (yeah, I'm being hyperbolic) with regards working with his postdoc and research assistants. But... I need help getting his head around American Biomedical Academia in general...the mind set, the politics...the...J'ne sais quai of the whole issue.

So...dear Academic Blogosphere...suggestions. including books I can treat him too. I thought of "The Prince" by Machiaveli, and "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, but that's more my line of work than his...

5 comments:

Arlenna said...

Hmm, basically: trust no one, with ANYTHING; get every commitment they make in writing; make them commit to space for you in writing; get as many grants as you can as soon as possible so you have the most money and they can't hold anything over on you; find the good people and cherish them (both those who work FOR you and colleagues/mentors); publish everything ASAP again so they can't hold anything over on you; and don't trust anyone. Did I tell him not to trust what anyone says? No matter how obsequiously nice they seem?

tideliar said...

OK, cool. SO my advice so far is on track. He is worried he is not working hard enough...in the last 2 years he has built a system wide institutional science database and cloned it for human resource management. This year alone he has two first author papers and is PI on an R01 and Co-I on two more.

I think he's gonna be OK...

Successful Researcher: How to Become One said...

Another book that comes to mind is D. Kennedy, Academic Duty which gives some examples (pretty mild though) of what is academe like behind the scenes.

tideliar said...

thanks for the suggestion. i was thinking of giving him my copy of "Good to Great" too. compassion + ruthless drive for success...

Successful Researcher: How to Become One said...

Just to make things clear: Kennedy's book is mostly about how things should work in the academe but he also provides some examples of what happens when they do not work this way. Of course, Good to Great could help too. Perhaps Gladwell's Outliers could also be of interest. Speaking of more academic stuff, see e.g. this book, but it should be noted that it does not really address the US specifics that much. As for the biomedical specifics, see also this book. Finally, the posts on my blog also could be of some interest :)