The Worst Mistake I Ever Made
by John McLaren
August 2000
When I was young I made far more mistakes than I care to remember. Perhaps that can't be avoided, since after all, the mistakes are often what really get stuck in the memory. In disastrous encounters with peers, elders, authorities and institutions, I made my way and learned a thing or two while developing some healthy scars along the way. I blanche when I think of the mistakes I made when I was younger. Perhaps that is the only way to grow up.
Nonetheless, I have no trouble in naming the worst mistake I ever made in my life. That I made in my professional life, in 1992, by accepting an offer as Assistant Professor in the economics department at Columbia University.
I think of the tale as worth a brief telling for a couple of reasons that extend beyond the world of academics, because it is a nice example of a group of talented people who together make a very ineffective organization, a phenomenon that my friends in the business world tell me they encounter all the time. In essence, each member of such an organization comes to expect the worst from all other members, an expectation that can be self-fulfulling and can be inherited from one generation of the organization's members to the next. In addition to this, within academia, it's also a cautionary tale for any subsequent young scholars who might stumble into the same fix.
A concept that is crucial in the academic world but not terribly well understood outside of it is the idea of 'tenure.' A faculty member who has tenure cannot be dismissed from his or her job except under extraordinary circumstances, such as felony or sexual harassment, or severe financial distress that forces the university to close that faculty member's entire department. Normally a young faculty member fresh out of graduate school will be appointed without tenure, but the most desirable jobs for such people are jobs in the 'tenure track,' which means that after a specified number of years of service in that position the faculty member will be reviewed by the tenured faculty for promotion to tenure. This review traditionally has a nasty 'up-or-out' feature: If at the specified time the faculty member is not promoted, he or she must hit the road and find a job somewhere else.
Thus, needless to say, power relations within academic departments are exceedingly well defined: Those with tenure have power, those without need to tread lightly. It is also obvious that there is a natural temptation for those with tenure to abuse their power, which ideally is held in check by a culture of collegial ethics that checks opportunistic behaviour. Untenured people need to be able to trust their tenured colleagues before they accept a job that may subject them to the whims of a powerful clique.
This is the nub of the problem in the department I entered in 1992. The tenured faculty there include some wonderful people, but several others as well, and -- to put it very, very, very delicately -- a commitment to principled behavior is not the department's defining characteristic.
The first sign of trouble occurred almost as soon as I arrived, although I did not notice it at the time. I was asked to sit on the committee that recruits new untenured faculty, the 'junior recruitment committee,' which sorts through young economists just finishing their PhD's in order to make recommendations to the department for hiring. The committee consisted of myself, one other untenured person, and the committee chair, who was tenured. The task was gigantic. We called faculty at two dozen other economics departments to ask for suggestions, and received one or two names from each, but we also had a few hundred applications that needed to be scanned and either followed up or officially marked as rejected by a member of the committee. We compiled a list of two dozen-odd candidates to be interviewed and attended the profession's annual conference, interviewing them all in two and a half days. After that, we worked on a shorter list of candidates selected for more serious, on-campus interviews, and for a while our lives were dominated by the visits of these second-round job candidates.
It is extremely interesting work, and there is no better way to get a sense of what is going on in the economics profession than to study the crop of new PhD's just emerging from graduate school; but what did not dawn on me until much later is that it was so overwhelming in its scale and so open-ended that it burned up all of my spare time and energy from November to February of my first year as an assistant professor. This is a disaster, because an assistant professor lives or dies by the research he or she gets done, and those first few years are your only chance to establish a reputation. I was asked to serve on that committee four times in seven years, and each time the experience was essentially the same. I lost a third of my research year to a purely administrative obligation. More subtly, and more importantly, only as my time in the department came to an end, an amazing feature of the process occurred to me: The composition of the Junior Recruitment Committee was always entirely untenured faculty, except for its chair. When I remembered the days when I was interviewed, by the hiring committees of twenty-six different universities' economics departments, I realized that they all as far as I could remember had been composed entirely of tenured faculty. I have since checked on that, and there is a kind of consensus in the profession: A task as all-consuming as recruitment in an ethically run department is the sort of task from which untenured faculty are normally shielded, so that they can focus on developing their research. At the Columbia department, the opposite is the norm: The job is rather reserved for untenured faculty.
There appears to be only one reason for this striking departure from customary practice: They are the only people in the department who cannot say 'no.' A good fraction of the tenured members have no intention of pulling their own weight and presumably would refuse if asked, but the untenured have no choice.
This tendency, to regard the untenured faculty as a vein of ore to be mined, extends to other areas as well. Untenured faculty are used very heavily in graduate admissions and undergraduate advising. Untenured faculty run a great fraction, perhaps most, of the weekly workshops that bring visitors from other universities to present their current research. Since they have no help on the secretarial or administrative elements of this, and since a prevailing apathy means that typically no-one answers emails asking for participation, this task tends to burn up a full day out of every week that could otherwise be spent on research. Thus, the task sinks a fifth of the typical work week -- and in the time that I spent at Columbia, for the workshop with which I was familiar, almost all of that cost was always borne by the untenured.
The next sign of trouble dawned on me more quickly: I began to be used as an all-purpose nice-guy utility infielder in the area of teaching. I enjoy teaching enormously, and quite apart from regarding it as a burden, I regard teaching quality undergraduates to be almost a perk of this job. All that I want from a student to begin with is curiosity; I can work from there. It is a great pleasure to convey fundamental concepts of economic analysis and their application to real-world problems to one who has never been exposed to them before. I worked hard on my teaching, and received favorable assessments from the students.
In return, the department rewarded me in an unexpected way: Each year it took one of my courses away from me, and assigned me a new one.
The first couple of years I didn't realize it was a pattern forming, but it became an annual ritual. I was told that I had done such a wonderful job on my undergraduate Industrial Organization (an upper-year elective) that I was a prime candidate for the more difficult and crucial assignment of Intermediate Microeconomics (a lower-year required course). After teaching that for one year, I was told that I had done such a marvelous job that I was one of the few people in the department who could be entrusted with the weighty responsibility of Principles of Economics (a freshman-level introductory course, prerequisite to all other economics courses and typically a course with approximately 200 students). And so on; each year I was approached by the department, told that (i) I was doing a superb job and the department was ever so grateful; (ii) the department was in a terrible bind, and it hated to ask me, but (iii) I was one of the very few people up to the task, and the department would be forever in my debt if I would help them out by taking on the new course.
It took me a while to realize that this little speech was really so much malarkey, and that the department had really just recognized me as an easy mark, much as the panhandlers on Broadway had around the same time. I was convenient; it was known that I cared about my teaching; and I was perceived as a nice fellow. Most importantly, of course, as untenured faculty, I had a great deal of trouble saying 'no.' As a result, I had on average a new course to prepare every year for six years until I finally became exasperated and made an appeal to the chairman to put a stop to this. In total, I taught seven separate full-semester lecture courses, plus a senior seminar course. This matters a great deal, because by far the largest amount of work in teaching a course is in the grueling process of planning, researching, designing, preparing lecture notes, and teaching the course for the first time. This habit of reshuffling my teaching was bad not only for me, but for the students, since I never had a chance to perfect most of these courses and my own enthusiasm for course preparation sank as course after course was taken away from me.
The standard teaching load in economics at strong research universities is three semester courses per year; at the top universities it is two. For most of my time at Columbia, the load was four, and thus above the standard; and with my problem I had an effective teaching load for those years of five, in the sense that I had four courses, one of which was always a new preparation. It is worth noting that a portion of one's evaluation for promotion to tenure is competitive in nature; the candidate for promotion is compared with other scholars at roughly the same age in the same field at similar institutions, and outside experts are asked to rank the candidate relative to those people on this comparison list. I could not help but think of two people who in my case would obviously be on that list, one who was in the tenure track at Harvard and the other at Princeton, and it occasionally pained me that they both had two-course teaching loads and little or no administrative work, while I had much more teaching, regular new courses to prepare, and continual, gigantic administrative assignments. I sometimes felt as if I was running a footrace with anchors chained to my ankles. (This, of course, teaches certain life skills denied to the others, but I wouldn't really recommend it).
I should mention as well that I soon cultivated a reputation among the department's graduate students as someone who actually would read drafts of dissertation chapters and provide detailed critical comments on them. This is a normal part of the process of advising graduate students, of course (it takes a lot of practice to do decent economic research and to write clear economic prose, and almost everyone who tries it needs a lot of guidance at first). However, faculty members who do the job seriously in that department are the exception, rather than the norm. It became apparent to me soon that a number of the well-known, senior members of the department would act as principal advisors to a graduate student apparently without ever actually reading the dissertation. This became clear from comments made to me by graduate students, by the kind of questions asked by a number of advisors at the dissertation defense of their own students, and by one case in which I found a disastrous and glaring mistake in a student's dissertation just before the student went onto the academic job market. In that case, I was not even on the student's official committee of advisors; but one serious read through the work by a competent research economist was enough to see that the basic argument was all wrong. Apparently the student's official advisors had never got around to doing that; they were simply ready to write glowing letters and send the student into the job market. This is all probably part of the reason that morale among the department's graduate students is so chronically low (an awfully angry petition was signed by most of the graduate students last year).
Because of this, I was asked increasingly by graduate students to be an advisor. At first, I was asked to be a second or third advisor; the main advisor was someone famous, but the student needed someone on board who would actually read the work. As I become better known in the profession myself, I was asked more often to be the main advisor. Because I have some difficulty saying 'no' even when I'm not on the wrong end of a hierarchical relationship, I wound up acquiring quite a bit of workload in this way as well. It is an awful lot of fun working with a good graduate student, mind you, and I was certainly not being asked because I was some kind of saint or genius; I simply gave enough of a darn to try and do the job right. By the time I came up for tenure I had been the primary advisor to four graduate students (who did quite well on the job market, by the way); I had also sat on many dissertation defense committees.
The stream of administrative tasks had no end. By the time I came up for tenure, I was working on the junior recruitment committee yet again, running the weekly International and Development workshop, whereby I was inviting and hosting a different scholar from another university each week to present research for the department's benefit; I was running a journal that had been started by a senior faculty member; I had a steady stream of graduate students for whom I was principal dissertation advisor; I was juggling the weekly headaches of my 200-student Principles course. I honestly had to exert a gigantic effort to get any research done at all. Nonetheless, somehow, through nights and weekends and a quantity of teeth gritting and elbow grease, I did. I'm pleased to report (at the same time as I blush to mention) that I scored a number of high-profile successes in leading journals, and built up a very strong international reputation for myself. My research output over my last five years there was among the best in the department, and I was invited regularly to present my research at top universities, even occasionally overseas. Somehow, I learned to dance with those anchors chained to my ankles.
Thus brings us to the final chapter of the story: My review for promotion to tenure. One pays one's dues for seven years, bites one's tongue, does one's work, and then is the time at which one is reviewed for the final 'up or out' decision. Here is what happened in my case.
It happened that in the spring of 1999, several months before my promotion review was scheduled, the department hired ten new faculty members -- very unusual in a department that rarely had much above thirty members. Essentially, the department is almost always hiring, and makes offers to new faculty each spring; usually two-thirds of these offers are declined, so sometimes a large number of offers are made in order to fill a small number of positions. In this case, to everyone's surprise, almost all of the offers were accepted. Among the new recruits were two young scholars specializing in research on international trade (specifically in the crowd-pleasing topic known as 'Heckscher-Ohlin analysis'), who were both hired with tenure. This is significant because the department already had a number of very senior and well-known scholars specializing in trade, and some young productive scholars who were very strong in that area; hence, it was not an area of weakness in which the department needed to hire. At the same time, although my own research has ranged across several sub-fields within economics, my best-known papers lie at least partially within the field of trade. The question thus came up: Should I be concerned? Could this affect my prospects for promotion?
I posed this question to the chairman, who was emphatic: Absolutely not. Internal promotions are based on performance only, and have nothing to do with field constraints. This was reassuring, because this is the accepted principle everywhere: Review for promotion to tenure is to be based only on the candidate's performance, and the department's current field priorities do not enter into it. At any rate, it would be hard for any sensible person to pigeon-hole me into the trade field; all of my papers spanned different sub-fields, with my research wandering into development (that is, the economics of the Third World), industrial organization, and political economy. I had never even taught trade except in a special Master's program. In addition, it seemed to be understood that I had one of the very best research productivities in the department over the previous five years, both in quality and in quantity, and I appeared to have the longstanding enthusiastic support of every faction of the department (even those members who despise each other). One of them liked to tell me he was a 'fan' of mine; another told me that one of my papers would still be read in forty year's time, and so forth: Had not I been told repeatedly (usually just before being asked to do something) that I was an indispensable and greatly esteemed keystone of the intellectual life of the department?
Imagine my surprise, then, to be informed that the tenured faculty had just voted, in effect, to expel me from the department. (I felt a bit the way Tommy in Goodfellas must feel, when he shows up to the ceremony to promote him to 'made man,' only to realize that it is the last party he will ever attend.) The chairman explained the reasons for this outcome succinctly, in words that will stick with me: "The department decided that after last year's hiring it is difficult to make the case to tenure one more person in international." In other words, despite this same chairman's emphatic reassurances a few months earlier that I could not be turned down for promotion based on a field constraint, here he was calmly explaining that I had just been turned down for promotion based on a field constraint. And I was out of a job.
It was peculiar on so many levels it is difficult to count. One is that my performance had been reviewed by the department twice before, one under this chairman and one under the previous chairman, and each time the conclusion was the same: The prognosis is very good; but you are working in several different fields at once; the department advises you to concentrate your efforts on your research in the trade field. And here I was being fired for the offense of concentrating too much on the trade field. The chairman, bright as he is, made no attempt to resolve this paradox.
Colleagues at other institutions were shocked that the department would have turned down an internal promotion case on the basis of the field in which the candidate was classified. This is essentially a violation of the understood norms of the profession. Untenured candidates, during the period of their tenure track, always understand that when the time comes for their promotion review, they will be judged on the basis of their performance alone. This means, of course, that personality, race, gender, and so on are not supposed to matter, but it also means that the department's semester-by-semester fluctuations in teaching needs are not supposed to matter. In the many subsequent conversations I had in this period with colleagues at other universities, I heard of one other case of a person being turned down for promotion for a similar reason; that had occurred twenty-eight years earlier at another university. This is rare and odd conduct.
At any rate, since I do need employment to pay the bills, I plunged myself into the job market. I was delighted with the response: I soon had three offers for tenured positions, at Boston College, an excellent university; at the University of Virginia, whose economics department has typically been at a similar level to the one at Columbia (it actually ranked higher than Columbia in the 1998 Journal of Economic Perspectives survey, based on research productivity); and at the University of Wisconsin, which is widely known to have a clearly better economics department than Columbia's. Thus, not only was I vindicated by this process -- I had a job as well! No trips to the pawn shop turned out to be necessary.
I actually wound up in a marvelous situation, much better than what I would have had if I had simply been tenured at Columbia, so one might argue that I should not complain. In effect, I was pushed out of a window and fell up instead of down. (A friend of mine has suggested that by this remark I am casting myself as Keannu Reeves in The Matrix, but I assure you that was not my intention.)
However, the happy outcome does not excuse poor conduct by my former colleagues, and it does not change the fact that I would have had a far less miserable seven years and a far better career even than I managed to have, if only I had accepted one of the other assistant professor offers I had received way back when I was getting started. For example, I had received a very generous offer from the University of Toronto. It is very clear that I would now have substantially more publications to my name if I had accepted that, instead of the putatively more prestigious Columbia offer, because the U. of T. holds to standard norms of treatment for untenured faculty. But I did not know then what I know now about the pathologies, the cynicism, and the lack of principle that rule at the economics department at Columbia. I did not know that by "Assistant Professor," the department traditionally meant "udder."
This attitude may have something to do, by the way, with the high turnover in untenured faculty in the department, and with the surprisingly high rate at which the department's junior members actually leave not just the department but academia itself. Of the thirteen people I can name (excluding myself) who had full-time untenured positions in the department over the 1990's but who are no longer in the department, at least six, and I suspect seven, are no longer in regular tenure-track positions in any academic institution (most are in the private sector). Depending on the one case of which I'm unsure, that is either a 46 or a 54 percent rate of exit from academia -- astonishingly high in an institution that fancies itself as an elite research institution. Could it be because the department so sours them on the academic way of life? (By the way, the department historically likes to fancy itself in or near the top ten, but that is really a matter of wishful thinking. In rankings based on actual research productivity, the rank is more like 22nd (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998). The folklore is that there is nothing in nature more dangerous than an animal that feels threatened; in academia the equivalent is a top-thirty institution that reckons itself a top-ten.)
As a last point, I return to the idea that the problems in this institution seem to be passed on from one generation of its members to the next. It used to be presumed that the problem with the department was that it was dominated by a number of distinguished but world-weary has-beens, who had done brilliant work decades ago but now were coasting toward retirement on a handsome salary (it should be pointed out that a couple of the very senior members remain highly productive). However, the attitudes I describe are alive and well in the next generation. The chairman I have described above is young and energetic, but apparently embraces the idea that untenured faculty are to be flattered and fleeced, and to do a disproportionate amount of the work. The two new trade economists I mentioned earlier are also young and energetic, but appear to me to have embraced the culture of the department with enthusiasm, and appear to have supported my ouster. The torch has been passed; the grand traditions of the department will live on.
POSTSCRIPT. I cannot resist mentioning that aside from all of the major human-generated difficulties I faced, I encountered many nuisances due to the nature of the infrastructure. A surprising one is in the computer I used: When I joined the department in 1992, I was given a 486 computer (which took more than two months to arrive, incidentally). It was fine in 1992, but I worked in that office until the year 2000 and the computer was never upgraded. As time went by there were fewer and fewer things I could do with the computer on my desk, and I needed to go into the main office of the department and stand in line with the undergraduates hired to do clerical work in order to use the shared main office computer. I requested an upgrade but it was denied as a matter of policy. This is another anomaly; the other universities that I know automatically upgrade faculty computers before they become obsolete.
However, most of the nuisances stemmed from the building in which the department is housed: The International Affairs Building, on 118th street in Manhattan. This is possibly the ugliest and dreariest structure in the hemisphere. It was built in the 1960's, evidently on a tight budget. I gradually realized that one of the several reasons I found it depressing to go to work in the morning was that building. As an example, one day the ceiling over my desk caved in, showering powdery debris over my obsolete computer and swinging a sharp sword-like metal rail down around where my forehead would be. I was away from my desk at the time, and so I still do have two eyes. As another example, once after working very late in my office I stopped by the sixth-floor men's room. The light was off, so I turned it on and entered. I knew that something was wrong immediately, and as I looked around, I realized that on every wall, on the floor, the sinks, and the urinals, were teeming cockroaches of varied sizes and colors. I froze for a moment and then bolted for the door. The memory still grips me occasionally, and I have never entered that men's room at that hour again. Much more recently there was a problem with mice in faculty offices, and I did see some of them making their way under colleagues' office doors at night.
There have always been problems with burglaries, and several faculty over the years have lost computers, leather jackets, and the like. Some of the burglars simply push the cheap ceiling paneling up and climb over the door into the office; the building is actually built so that only a step ladder, and not a key, is needed to enter any faculty office. (Ironically, the security guards often cannot get into faculty offices, because they cannot climb and do not have the right key.)
There are large and persistent stains on the ancient and drab carpets. The bookshelves built into office walls are so poorly constructed that they sometimes collapse under the weight of books. The temperature control is so erratic that some faculty keep both electric fans and space heaters in their offices to survive the extremes of hot and cold. On the weekends in the winter my office would sometimes become so cold that I used to try to type with my gloves and parka on. The elevators are badly congested, and during the day it can easily take ten minutes for one to arrive (a parallel congestion afflicts the email system). These elevators have large signs posted next to them that read 'PLEASE USE STAIRS.'
I know that it must seem peevish to list these really quite petty quarrels, but after a time it is also true that these small things -- the bugs, the mice, the cave-ins, the burglaries, the stains, the heat, the cold, the congestion -- actually do get into one's head, and press down on the morale. They did to me, and I am very glad to leave them.
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