The T-word
Personal reflections on my academic path, past and future
Attention conservation notice: shameless navel-gazing ahead.
I lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had that center around tenure. When are you up? Do you think you’ll get it? How many pubs do you need? Does journal X count? Do you know so-and-so got it? The conversations are for the most part harmless small talk, but they happen more often than conversations about ideas. The frequency of these conversations demonstrates how central this status is for academics.
What does tenure actually give? Lifetime employment, a better title in some cases (associate vs assistant), a slight pay bump, more duties to the school, and also influence within the school. But people, of course, focus on the lifetime employment. In theory, this lifetime employment gives academics the ability to speak their mind. It should be a bulwark against personal, societal, and political pressures. It should be a license to take risks. But when the most risk-averse path is the one most likely to get tenure, what risks can we expect academics to take?
The system we’re in selects for and creates a type of person who is motivated by the status of tenure or peer respect above other things. Those who started academia for the research, and I think it’s many of us, end up becoming transformed by the social environment. People write papers because they need pubs, they work on trendy topics to citationmaxx, and they post inane things on LinkedIn to have “impact.” Tenure will never be enough status, as there is always the next promotion, award, and invited talk. Even a minor threat from the dean could motivate people to fall in line.
But where does that lead me? I’ve played this game pretty well, albeit with a rough start. I’ve suffered the indignities of being rejected, and of writing obsequious responses to the referees. But I’ve also had my share of luck and have had some pretty good ideas. And so it came to be that I received tenure.
Getting here proves I'm partly what I criticize (perhaps a symptom of the human condition). I could have taken more risks, in research and in life. I continued working on the same research projects year after year, so that eventually they could be published at good journals. I just wrapped up a paper I started in 2019, even though the main insights were clear as early as 2021. I continued to travel to the same conferences, presenting the same almost-finished work. And when people liked the work, I appreciated and craved the positive feedback, just like everyone else.
My research has been primarily about digital market design and regulation. And I think I know a lot about these important topics. But the majority of what I know is not what I’ve learned from doing my own research projects. Instead, most of what I know, I’ve learned from reading widely, talking to practitioners, and doing consulting. The fact that I’ve published the research serves mostly as a signifier to the rest of the world that I’m an expert.
My admittedly predictable expert opinion is that AI, and AI agents, will play a central role in market design going forward. As an expert, I face a choice of what to do with this knowledge. The predictable and expected path in my field is to write papers about AI, market design, and marketing. Perhaps I can find an early and limited use case of AI in a market, and estimate a causal effect. This is surely publishable and would get a lot of citations for being “first,” even if the estimate would have little external validity for future market designs. Or I can estimate an economic model, the details of which few are likely to understand. This would be impressive to some, but in the time it would take me to publish it, the world will have changed. I am not a nihilist about business and economics research about AI, some of it is truly worthwhile, but it does seem that the action and discovery is happening mostly in industry.
For me, the path that maximizes learning, impact, and dare I say fun, in the near term is not to pursue the status quo. I want to actually be a market designer incorporating AI into markets and I want to be a valuable part of the conversation.1 Market design is something that one does as part of a company with existing users, or as part of an organization. It is not a solo endeavor for an academic researcher. So if I want to do real market design, I will need to spend some time outside of academia.
A privilege of tenure at many academic institutions is the ability to take a leave of absence. In the near future, I will take advantage of this privilege to work on AI driven market design at the biggest marketplace in the world. I am stoked about this opportunity, which will simultaneously be a test of my expertise and an opportunity to deepen it. It’s hard for me to predict how this all works out. The experience could be transformative, or it could be a futile battle with corporate bureaucracy. Regardless, I will learn and report back.
To wrap up, three cheers to tenure, warts and all, and thanks to all who helped me along the way. I promise to use it to take risks, to do work that matters, and to have fun!
This blog and the Justified Posteriors podcast are part of the conversation!
It was not always like this. Somewhere around 2010ish, schools started to encourage faculty to engage with media, especially to get their research covered in the popular press. Suddenly, it became commonplace to see print-outs of news coverage of faculty research posted on bulletin boards near elevators and other public places on campus. Naturally, this "signal" was heard loud and clear and faculty (especially junior faculty) increasingly chased after newsworthy topics, creating a bit of a rat race. Today, faculty self-promote on social media, posting about publications, promotions etc. I tie this all back to the moment where the schools themselves decided that news coverage was important.
Sadly, I have never heard news coverage mentioned during a tenure meeting. On the contrary, candidates may be criticized at promotion time for work that's too cute and insufficiently rigorous. In short, I think junior researchers may be misguided if they think the pursuit of trendy topics is the path to tenure. On the contrary, a solid research agenda with rigorous work and novel intellectual ideas is still the recipe for success at tenure time. The challenge then - how to communicate this reality back to the scholars wasting time with media attention instead of intellectual pursuit?