Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . No one had quite put that together in a definitive statement yet.
Sean Carroll | Department of Biology | University of Maryland Carroll has blogged about his experience of being denied tenure in 2006 at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and in a 2011 post he included some slightly tongue-in-cheek advice for faculty members aiming at tenure: bring in grants, don't dabble and don't write a book because while you are writing a book or dabbling in other pursuits . Then, we moved to Yardley, not that far away -- suburban Philadelphia, roughly speaking -- because there's a big steel mill, Fairless Works. Because the ultimate trajectory from a thesis defense is a faculty appointment, right? Several of these people had written textbooks themselves, but they'd done it after they got tenure. I did also apply, at the same time, for faculty jobs, and I got an offer from the University of Virginia. I looked around, and I'm like, nothing that I'm an expert in is something that the rest of the world thinks is interesting, really. I put an "s" on both of them. Why is there an imbalance in theoretical physics between position and momentum? I got the dimensional analysis wrong, like the simplest thing in the world. Never did he hand me a problem and walk away.
How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. I was an astronomy major, so I didn't have to take them. I think I would put Carl Sagan up there. Chicago, to its credit, these people are not as segregated at Chicago as they are at other places. Sean, when you start to more fully embrace being a public intellectual, appearing on stage, talking about religion, getting more involved in politics, I'd like to ask, there's two assumptions at the basis of this question. None of that at Chicago. I wouldn't say we're there yet, but I do think it's possible, and it's a goal worth driving for. We had problem sets that we graded. So, I was sweet-talked into publishing it without any plans to do it. I wrote about supergravity, and two-dimensional Euclidian gravity, and torsion, and a whole bunch of other different things. The idea that someone could be a good teacher, and do public outreach, and still be devoted and productive doing research is just not a category that they were open to. Some of them are excellent, but it's almost by accident that they appear to be excellent. And guess what? I had done a postdoc for six years, and assistant professor for six by the time I was rejected for tenure. Were you thinking along those lines at all as a graduate student? Answer (1 of 27): The short answer: I was denied tenure at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. So, if you're assistant professor for six years, after three years, they look at you, and the faculty talks about you, and they give you some feedback. I was on a shortlist at the University of Chicago, and Caltech, and a bunch of places. By reputation only. But the anecdote was, because you asked about becoming a cosmologist, one of the first time I felt like I was on the inside in physics at all, was again from Bill Press, I heard the rumor that COBE had discovered the anisotropies of the microwave background, and it was a secret. This is so exciting because you are one of the best interviewers out there, so it's a unique opportunity for me to interview one of those best interviewers. Also, I think that my science fiction fandom came after my original interest in physics, rather than before. Someone like me, for example, who is very much a physicist, but also is interested in philosophy, and I would like to be more active even than I am at philosophy at the official level, writing papers and things like that. We don't know the theory of everything. But by the mid '90s, people had caught on to that and realized it didn't keep continuing. As a ten year old, was there any formative moment where -- it's a big world out there for a ten year old. So, two things. Moving on after tenure denial. In other words, like you said yourself before, at a place like Harvard or Stanford, if you come in as an assistant professor, you're coming in on the basis of you're not getting tenure except for some miraculous exception to the rule. I literally got it yesterday on the internet. That group at MIT was one, and then Joe Silk had a similar group at Berkeley at the same time. Everyone knew it was going to be exciting, but it was all brand new and shiny, and Ed would have these group meetings. In 2004, he and Shadi Bartsch taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago on the history of atheism. Certain questions are actually kind of exciting, right? The Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey we thought of, but number one, it cost money, and number two, no one in my family really understood whether it would be important or not, etc. Was that something that you or a guidance counselor or your mom thought was worth even considering at that time?
The University of Chicago Magazine Look at the intersection of those and try to work in that area, and if you find that that intersection is empty, then rethink what you're doing in life." But maybe it could. For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. So, it was difficult to know what to work on, and things like that. As a result, he warns that any indication of interest in these circumstances may be evaporates after denial of the tenure application. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Anyway, Ed had these group meetings where everyone was learning about how to calculate anisotropies in the microwave background. Having been through all of this that we just talked about, I know what it takes them to get a job. but academe is treacherous. A complete transcript of the debate can be found here. I just did the next step that I was supposed to do. And that's okay, in some sense, because what I care about more is the underlying ideas, and no one should listen to me talk about anything because I'm a physicist. Well, I think it's no question, because I am in the early to middle stages of writing a trade book which will be the most interdisciplinary book I've ever written. It will never be the largest. We started a really productive collaboration when I was a postdoc at ITP in Santa Barbara, even though he was, at the time -- I forget where he was located, but he was not nearby. And he said, "Yes, sure." It doesn't lead to new technology. I had the best thesis committee ever. Who was on your thesis committee? You nerded out entirely. But Sidney, and Eddie, and Alan, and George, this is why I got along with them, because they were very pure in their love for doing science. I mean, infinitely more, let's put it that way. So, I would like to write that as a scientist. Alan and Eddie, of course, had been collaborators for a long time before that. And now I know it. We certainly never worked together. I guess, my family was conservative politically, so they weren't joining the union or anything like that. Whereas, if you're just a physicalist, you're just successful.
Has Contemporary Academia Outgrown the Carl Sagan Effect? We make it so hard, and I think that's exactly counterproductive. You know, there's a lot we don't understand. I'll be back.
What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll Explains Presentism and Let's go back to the happier place of science. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. But still, the intellectual life and atmosphere, it was just entirely different than at a place like Villanova, or like Pennsbury High School, where I went to high school. Everyone could tell which courses were good at Harvard, and which courses were good at MIT. So, the fact that it just happened to be there, and the timing worked out perfectly, and Mark knew me and wanted me there and gave me a good sales pitch made it a good sale. Not necessarily because they were all bookish. Sean Carroll, a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago writes a somewhat bitter guide on "How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University."While it applies somewhat less . The reason is -- I love Caltech. You didn't have really any other father figures in your life.
Russell Wilson denies he wanted Pete Carroll and John Schneider fired In footnotes or endnotes please cite AIP interviews like this: Interview of Sean Carroll by David Zierleron January 4, 2021,Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,College Park, MD USA,www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/XXXX. We haven't talked about any of these things where technology is so important to physics. And at least a year passed. Again, uniformly, I was horrible. Being with people who are like yourself and hanging out with them. I was very good at Fortran, and he asked me to do a little exposition to the class about character variables. But you're good at math. We've already established that. Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, how to scientists make decisions about theories, and so forth? More than one. And a lot of it is like, What is beyond the model that we now know? So, then, the decision was, well -- so, to answer your question, yes -- well, sorry, I didn't quite technically get tenured offers, if I'm being very, very honest, but it was clear I was going to. In other words, the dynamics of physics were irreversible at the fundamental level. So, I'm really quite excited about this. And at some point, it sinks in, the chances of guessing right are very small. I see this over and over again where I'm on a committee to hire someone new, and the physicists want to hire a biophysicist, and all these people apply, and over and over again, the physicists say, "Is it physics?" Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. But the thing that flicked the switch in my head was listening to music. I thought I knew what I was doing. Sometimes we get a little enthusiastic. I don't think I'm in danger of it right now, so who knows five or ten years from now? He is not at all ashamed to tell you that and explains things sometimes in his talks about cosmology by reference to his idea about God's existence. People like Chung-pei Ma and Uros Seljak were there, and Bhuvnesh Jain was there. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. That was my first choice. Well, Sean, you can take solace in the fact that many of your colleagues who work in these same areas, they're world class, and you can be sure that they're working on these problems. They have a certain way of doing things. Given the way that you rank the accelerating universe way above LIGO or the Higgs boson, because it was a surprise, what are the other surprises out there, that if they were discovered, might rank on that level of an accelerating universe? Again, and again, you'd hear people say, "Here's the thing I did as a graduate student, and that got me hired as a faculty member, but then I got my Packard fellowship, and I could finally do the thing that I really wanted to do, and now I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for doing that." They are clearly different in some sense. Then, I went to college at Villanova University, in a different suburb of Philadelphia, which is a Catholic school. It's not overturning all of physics. No, no, I kind of like it here. I think it's gone by now. Santa Barbara was second maybe only to Princeton as a string theory center. Ed would say, "Alright, you do this, you do that, you do that." But they imagined it, and they wrote down little models in which it was true. But honestly, no, I don't think that was ever a big thing. Maybe going back to Plato. But there's plenty of smart people working on that. Tenure denial, seven years later. That's almost all the people who I collaborated with when I was a postdoc at MIT. What about minus 1.1? So, to say, well, here's the approach, and this is what we should do, that's the only mistake I think you can make. Do the same thing for a cluster of galaxies. Every year, they place an ad that says, "We are interested in candidates in theoretical physics, or theoretical astrophysics." Let's sit and think about this seriously." November 16, 2022 9:15 am. Sean attached a figure from an old Scientific American article assertingthat sex is not binary, but a spectrum. Sean, given the vastly large audience that you reach, however we define those numbers, is there a particular demographic that gives you the most satisfaction in terms of being able to reach a particular kind of person, an age group, however you might define it, that gives you the greatest satisfaction that you're introducing real science into a life that might not ever think about these things? That was, I think, a very, very typical large public school system curriculum where there were different tracks. I started a new course in cosmology, which believe it or not, had never been taught before. But it's less important for a postdoc hire. You're old. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. The discussion with Stuart Bartlett was no exception. No one wanted The Big Picture, but it sold more copies. I do this over and over again. I wonder, Sean, given the way that the pandemic has upended so many assumptions about higher education, given how nimble Santa Fe is with regard to its core faculty and the number of people affiliated but who are not there, I wonder if you see, in some ways, the Santa Fe model as a future alternative to the entire higher education model in the United States. Not to mention, gravitational waves, and things like that. I certainly have very down-to-Earth, standard theoretical physics papers I want to write. But mostly -- I started a tendency that has continued to this day where I mostly work with people who are either postdocs or students themselves. He wrote the paper where they actually announced the result. It's not that I don't want to talk to them, but it's that I want the podcast to very clearly be broad ranging. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. We have this special high prestige, long-term post-doctoral position, almost a faculty member, but not quite. Furthermore, anyone who has really done physics with any degree of success, knows that sometimes you're just so into it that you don't want to think about anything else. And it was great. And I do think -- it's not 100% airtight, but I do think not that science disproves God, but that thinking like a scientist and carefully evaluating the nature of reality, given what we know about science, leads you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. And part of it was because no one told me. I don't want to say anything against them. The bad news is that I've been denied tenure at Chicago. His article "Does the Universe Need God?" And I said, "But I did do that." I think that if I were to say what the second biggest surprise in fundamental physics was, of my career, it's that the LHC hasn't found anything else other than the Higgs boson. I don't agree with what they do. We did briefly flirt with the idea that I could skip a grade when I was in high school, or that I could even go to a local private school. They are . Rice offered me a full tuition scholarship, and Chicago offered me a partial scholarship. Why is the matter density of the universe approximately similar to the dark energy density, .3 and .7, even though they change rapidly with respect to each other? You can't be everything, and maybe what I was a cosmologist. Well, sorry, also one string theorist: Barton Zwiebach was there. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. On that note, as a matter of bandwidth, do you ever feel a pull, or are you ever frustrated, given all of your activities and responsibilities, that you're not doing more in the academic specialty where you're most at home? I don't know how public knowledge this is. For similar reasons as the accelerating universe is the first most important thing, because even though we can explain them -- they're not in violation of our theories -- both results, the universe is accelerating, we haven't seen new particles from the LHC, both results are flying in the face of our expectations in some way. There are so many people at Chicago. But no, they did not tie together in some grand theme, and I think that was a mistake. He offered 13 pieces of . There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. It's never true that two different things at the higher level correspond to the same thing at the lower level. Powerful people from all over the place go there. So, I got really, really strong letters of recommendation. This particular job of being a research professor in theoretical physics has ceased to be a good fit for me. As a result, I think I wrote either zero or one papers that year. But there was this interesting phenomenon point out by Milgrom, who invented this theory called MOND, that you might have heard of.