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University politics

Are tenure track positions (innstegsstillinger) really the solution?

Jill1 Comment

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!

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1 Comment

  1. Finn Arne Jørgensen

    I should add, as I did on Twitter, that my statement that you quoted can be misunderstood out of context. While there are some issues with the evaluation process, on the whole I think that I have one of the best jobs in the world in my field. Yes, universities will at times misuse the tenure track system, but that’s not so different from what we have now.

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