On July 22–24 2024, USC Marshall hosted the third annual Tenure Project Conference, a three-day event that welcomes junior faculty for panels, workshops, and networking aimed at aiding the next steps in their careers. The 114 junior faculty participants hailed from universities across the country, in addition to 65 senior faculty members, who shed light on their own tenure process and inspired and equipped attendees with the understanding and tools to achieve tenure.
Schools determine tenure based on several years of teaching excellence, research, publications and other criteria. All faculty face hurdles within the tenure process. Across the board, however, Black, Native, and Latinx faculty are still experiencing far lower tenure rates than their white colleagues according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA HR).
The founders of the Tenure Project, faculty from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington, are working to shift this reality by increasing representation and creating a supportive community among junior and senior faculty.
Sarah Townsend, vice dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and associate professor of management and organization, led Marshall’s planning efforts for the conference and set the tone in her introductory remarks.
“We have an agenda packed with sessions and workshops where our phenomenal senior faculty will lead you in discussions of the important issues affecting Black, Latine,* and Native junior faculty on the often rocky road to tenure in U.S. business schools,” Townsend said to the audience.
Townsend hopes the discussions and networking opportunities will enable attendees to form connections that inform their career aspirations.
“My personal goal for the conference is to ensure that junior faculty attendees are able to build relationships at the conference that enable them to support each other when they’re not at the conference, relationships that can help them through the tenure process,” Townsend said in a previous interview.
A dean’s panel, moderated by Marshall Dean Geoff Garrett, and featuring Ian O. Williamson, Dean of the UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business, and Frank Hodge, Dean of the University of Washington Foster School of Business covered a number of topics, including how institutions can attract underrepresented groups to academic fields.
“[Business schools are] the single largest part of higher education in the U.S. and all around the world,” Dean Garrett said. “If we want universities to be engines of social transformation, business school is actually the right place to start.”
Williamson, like his colleagues, affirms his commitment to make societal change. In fact, he sees universities as leaders in the field.
“Universities have always been the lightning rod for every social issue this country has ever dealt with,” Williamson said. “We have a system and a mechanism and a conversation and experts that can help guide our society through this in a positive way.”
On each day, attendees broke off for morning and afternoon workshops, including a session on the role of serendipity in success, led by Associate Professor of Clinical Management and Organization Christian Busch, and another on the importance of sponsorship led by Greys Sosic (Senior Vice Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs) and Rosalind Chow (Carnegie Mellon University).
