PhD Comics: "Comforting"

The new PhD Comics is about post-election comfort, especially as it applies to tenure. I am amused. :)

Quote of the Day: Tenure and Sea Squirts

I love this quote from philosopher Daniel Dennett (from 1991): "The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it fi nds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"

(Tip of the cap to this paper by Pablo Echenique-Robba. And thanks to Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers to pointing me to this paper. (I might have actually seen it before, but I didn't pay any attention to it until I saw it on that blog.)

Tenure

I received a letter today telling me that I now officially have the Oxford version of tenure. It's known as "reappointment to retirement age" and is in fact rather different from the US version of tenure. In particular, the bar is much lower than is the case for tenure in the US, and it's pretty much a box-ticking exercise. (In Oxonian language, I am no longer in my "probationary" period.) Now hopefully I will be a full professor soon. I'll let you know when that happens.