What Is Tenure?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Laura and today I'm going to talk to you about what is tenure. A tenured professor is a professor who actually holds a professorship in the university; who is not an assistant professor; who is not an adjunct professor or part time professor; the one who is actually been hired by the university for a long time position. This is obviously; these immunities coveted by everyone who wants to be a professor; they all want to have tenure; at least if they like the school in which they're working. To get tenure is something else. Getting tenure requires many years of research and applied study in your field; you know, gathering things together; being very organized. If you want to be a tenured professor, you pretty much just have to be organized period. You have to get; everything to get from the very beginning of your career because it's going to be very hard for you if you end up in the university where you are up for tenure review and you don't have any of things in a row from, you know, five years ago when you started teaching; you have lost all of your information; you'd have to go back and find it all. It's very difficult and you probably not going to get it together in time. So the best way to get tenure is to actually start the process from the beginning onward. You're going to want to start from your very, your very first teaching assignment and keep everything in files; keep everything on your computer. Make sure you update your files and you update your resume and your, your research or your bio-research work and everything as you're going along. And when it finally comes up for, you know, review time, you're going to want to really make that crunch time. So you're going to want to sit down with all, everything you've done; you know, in the last few years since you've been teaching and make sure you have everything to present; all of your research work; all of your essays typed and published; all of your honors and awards. They all need to be present so that the review committee can look at you and say, "Wow, you know, this person absolutely is to have tenure because we can see everything that he or she has done in their career and for the university since they've been working here. So that is tenure in a nutshell."