I missed this when it was published a few days ago, but Curt Rice’s skepticism about Norway’s newly proposed tenure track positions in academia is worth reading. I’ve heard and read enough bad stories about being on the tenure track (the stress, the uncertainty, the rampant opportunities for exploitation and abuse since you’re being evaluated and threatened (with not getting tenure) by your colleagues every year) that I’m not convinced tenure track positions are the best way of helping young scholars into academia. On the other hand, we may be able to build the system differently than they have in the US, and this is certainly the time to make sure that we build it better. There’s also an ongoing debate about tenure track positions in Sweden, where they were recently introduced, Finn Arne Jørgensen wrote on Twitter. There’s certainly lots of careful thinking to do if we’re going to get tenure track positions right!