Why I'm usually not on the list (and why I usually insist on being added to it)

The invisibility of most scicomm & research-in-society impacts, research, and teaching is not an accident, but it is a mistake.

Screenshot from the email that epitomizes this problem so completely

Dear Troublemakers,

I recently received an email from my department chair, reminding me (and all my colleagues) to respond to a request from our university research office to participate in a survey and focus group. Both are tools in a multi-institution study by “a global group of research universities to support the inclusive recognition of innovation & entrepreneurship (I&E) impact by university faculty in promotion, tenure & advancement guidelines and practices.”

Of course I was interested!

Despite being on sabbatical and having set myself a moratorium of no new projects, this topic is central to my work these days. And I have done institution-specific and academia-relevant research that should absolutely be on this table.

But as I scoured my inbox, I realized there was no email to reply to.

So I wrote to my chair and the Research Office staffer noting that I didn’t have an email to reply to.

My chair replied and forwarded the email she’d received:

Screenshot of an email sent to four department/unit heads and our VP of Research

So I searched again.

There was no email with a subject line “Reminder PTIE Visit and Survey.”

And then the Research Office staffer replied (see first image in this post): “Hi Bethann, Sorry I must have missed you on the list! Let me forward you that email.”

When I received the email, it was fairly detailed and included links to take a survey and register for focus groups. And it had never hit my inbox, because I’m not on the tenure track.

This is an extraordinary oversight, because, as I stated in my query to both people, “my research is pretty relevant to what they’re trying to figure out, particularly the UW-IMPACT research that I led a few years ago looking at UW’s mechanisms for (not) tracking impacts outside of standard academic metrics.” Worse, I am not the only non-tenure-track person at my institution working on these topics. We were likely all not on the list.

After receiving the registration email, I completed the sign-up and the 15-minute survey [1], then sent a pointed email to the Research Office staffer. I copied my chair on it, because it never hurts for all levels of administration to be reminded to not exclude non-tenure-track employees.

I’m going to share with you the full text of my email, for a couple of reasons:

1. I was succinct. 🤣

   
   

2. This context is vital for anyone in academia (all career stages, all job types) who (a) thinks academia could be better, (b) wants to work for that change, and/or (c) wants to better understand why academia continues to be so exclusionary.

Why I was certain I’d never been on the original list

I wrote:

"I will note that you likely didn’t include me in the list because of an academia-wide bias that is persistent at UW and beyond: a tendency to utterly ignore and exclude research-active employees and scholarly activities by employees if said employee is not on the tenure track.

While I absolutely hope that I’m wrong, and I was off the list due to sabbatical, not tenure/tenure-track status, if that’s true, it would be a rare occasion.

At UW in particular, and generally across academia, this exclusion bias is (a) an affront and (b) a major blind spot on the part of administrators at all levels. In my research (which has studied exactly these problems at UW and beyond), we repeatedly find that non-tenure-track faculty (like myself) and non-faculty employees of all sorts have disproportionately positive impacts on most of the axes that administrators assert they value and that their institutions’ missions are oriented towards. Meaning, non-tenure-track employees have at least equal, if not greater impacts—and administrators are ignoring them due to these biases!

I tell you this not to complain or sound cranky but to highlight that whatever UW claims to want to know about itself, all of our self-studies in the decade-plus I’ve been here have presented a profoundly incomplete picture due to this exclusion bias. I’m speaking up now—and in the survey linked in your email, and offering to join the relevant meetings during my sabbatical—because we need to acknowledge, embrace, and invest in the work done to achieve UW’s mission by all our employees.

I would actively like to be part of this PTIE conversation, since my research is acutely relevant and because it appears that once again, a major swathe of our employees’ contributions and perspectives may have been excluded."

I don’t know yet if this story has a “happy ending”

I don’t know yet, because:

1. The research that I did still hasn’t been published due to the funding for finishing it being sidelined by an administrative turn-over at my institution;

   
   

2. I haven’t met with the PTIE folks yet, though I’ve now been invited to have a 1:1 meeting with them, not just be a part of a focus group.

But, I can tell you that I think at least one small success has been achieved already.

After that more detailed email of mine above, the Research Office staffer replied saying they were “new to higher education and still learning the ropes when it comes to navigating meeting with faculty and such, so this feedback is also helpful for me to have so I can do my position better when I’m coordinating. As someone new to UW its important for me to know where biases lie on campus. Thank you!”

And, I say…welcome to higher ed admin! 🤣/😤

Higher ed admin can be all the stereotypes...but it is also really important and valuable work. I have sincere appreciation for (most) people taking on this work. And yet…

Administrators are excluding the people most relevant to their priorities

I genuinely don’t think this junior staffer had any say in who they were supposed to contact.

Someone much higher up the food chain (perhaps even the global research collective itself) drew the circle tightly around the most prestigious, best compensated and best supported faculty/employees.

This new staffer was almost certainly told, “Make a list of all pre- and post-tenure faculty, and recruit them to participate.”

And this staffer did as directed. They also probably didn’t have much awareness that there were any other kinds of faculty or any one else on a campus who would be research active or contributing to (let alone leading! ahem) work relevant to the study.

The affrontery and absurdity here is that the senior administrators do know we and our work exists. Even better worse, this study’s stated aims are:

Screenshot of introductory text in the study survey, with relevant text emphasized

The exclusion of everyone but pre/post tenure faculty runs contradictory to these aims for several reasons.

1. Other faculty and employee types are also reviewed for and granted promotions. (I.e., tenure is not the only kind of promotion!)

   
   

2. Mannnnnnnny other types of employees do work that is innovative, entrepreneurial, and relevant to tech transfer. Ignoring and excluding us significantly under-documents (and under-supports) work that is central to our institutions’ missions and the good of society.

   
   

3. Moreover, many of these non-tenure-track jobs are contingent upon doing innovative, entrepreneurial, and socially relevant, applied work. We are existing models for how to expand these hiring, retention, and promotion considerations to the historically more limited confines of tenure-track faculty roles.

Keeping us out of the conversations because we are in low-prestige roles is rude, ridiculous, and counterproductive. It’s long past time administrators stopped this nonsense and cast a much wider net of consultation, shared governance, and support/investment/recognition/enfranchisement.

Where to go from here?

In case you, dear reader, are someone new to the admin side of higher ed (or know someone who is), I’m going to share with you the resources I shared [2] with the new, well-intentioned staffer who immediately added me to the list (when I learned there was one and insisted upon being on it).

These resources are also very relevant to anyone in academia who wants their work to count, and/or wants to more effectively advocate for anyone’s non-tenure-track work counting.

These materials are just a starting point [3]. They are based on my own research and cite a lot of other folks’ work.

•  Use your power for good: An ethical framework for making a difference in the academy. This is a co-produced research paper detailing how academia impedes research impacts in society/science communication beyond academia...and what can be done to fix these issues. The paper starts by detailing the historical patterns in academic governance and reward systems that give rise to the barriers we’re talking about right now.

• A recording of my own promotion talk in which I discuss the results of the studies mentioned in that paper and that report (might be a more “fun”/lighter weight way to get an overview of this work and the systemic issues necessitating it). There are three recordings listed on that page; the one you’d be looking for is the second one: “Power for Good: Leveraging Scicomm Insights to Enhance Institutional Capacity.”

• Enhancing scicomm through institutional change: A “101” bibliography - a bibliography of the top research papers and other resources that I cite, assign, etc., when doing my own work. Some are specific to sharing science, but others are more general to overarching issues in academia.

• Behold, a deeply compelling science writing manifesto! A long but pointed analysis of the history of academia and how our prestige biases in this system contribute to inadequate training for students and faculty/staff, specifically in the realm of writing training for people outside English departments. While this might seem tangential, a lot of my analysis of historical patterns in academia is very relevant to who gets invited to the table.

Bottom line: Administrators need to stop willfully ignoring the majority of employees contributing to vital aspects of our shared academic mission. Until they do, I’m gonna keep making a fuss about it at my own institution.

How about you?

How are non-tenure-track faculty and other research/scholarly employees treated at your institution?

What do you know about the impacts their work is having and whether administrators recognize and support it?

Which of the resources in this post will you commit to reviewing, so you can contribute to improving how your degree program, unit, department, or institution operates?

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NOTES

[1] Because I had things to say, but also, because I have a policy of completing nearly every survey that crosses my path.

[2] I’m sharing with you all but one item I shared with the staffer. The last is an internal report on the UW study I mentioned. That’s not available outside the institution right now, since we’re still hoping for UW to allocate enough funding to finalize and publish a manuscript on our findings. And, I’d share with you another (an analysis of just how research administrators can stop impeding and cannibalizing people’s grassroots work to foster capacity for research impacts), except the people in charge of the journal who accepted our commentary seems to have stalled out on processing the article (likely to being over-committed on their own myriad projects and responsibilities). It’s been in accepted-but-not-published limbo for almost a year.

[3] It might seem overwhelming at first, but getting even a light intro to some of these topics could help you connect dots and feel more effective. :)