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Tenure: writing and thinking about service

tl/dr: You may need to write a service statement for tenure. It looks like effective ones use specific evidence to talk about your goals, accomplishments, and plans around service in your professional, university, and broader community.

In our last episode, we were talking about tenure in general, and since then much of my energy has gone into CSCW reviewing. Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that one thing I’ve found I need for the tenure package is a “service statement” [0]. The official Cornell guidance is delightfully terse: the dossier should include “statements from the candidate about his/her research, teaching, advising, service, and (if applicable) extension.” [1].

So I went off searching and asking for advice and examples [2]. Here I’ll give a few tidbits from that quest that are hopefully useful to other folks who are writing or thinking about service, followed by a mostly-reasonable draft of my own statement (comments welcome!).

Jon Kleinberg, who’s co-department chair and who handles tenure for information science, amplified a bit: “service: both in your research community outside Cornell — e.g. program committees and similar things — and also inside Cornell — things like serving on committees locally”. That was a nice, useful structuring suggestion, and I covered them separately (though Phoebe Sengers did a nice job of integrating both around a discussion of her overall service goals). I added a broader community aspect as well; in my case, I argued that this was primarily through software artifacts and public service via NSF reviews.

The Vet School has a little more guidance on what, specifically, to talk about: “The statement should document the quality and relevance of the clinical service and will include accomplishments, self-evaluation, steps taken to improve service, and future plans.” Combined with Jon’s advice, this basically set my overall structure.

The “steps taken to improve service” part of the vet school guidelines also reminded me that it might be useful to talk about specific training I’ve engaged in, whether it’s on the CV or not: a diversity workshop for hiring service; ed tech workshops for teaching; NSF funding workshops for research. Showing that you’re working to improve and setting yourself up for future success seems like an important goal, since part of promotion is about future potential.

That said, you also need to demonstrate current competence. Tanzeem Choudhury‘s service statement did a nice job of making specific claims around service impact backed up with specific examples from her service activities, which I largely emulated. Phoebe talked in detail about how she participated in and organized service activities [3] that served her goals and talked about tangible outcomes, which also felt strong.

There’s surely more to the story, but based on my poking at this I’ll call out the following bits as useful to think about.

  • It was handy to think about the different kinds of service: service to the professional community, the university (department, college, and university level), and the broader community.
  • You can tell the story around service using goals and rationales, the activities you’ve engaged in (both service itself and prep/training work), the accomplishments and outcomes that have come from them, and the plans you have going forward.
  • Finally, you should think about specific evidence you can marshal both to link the elements above and to demonstrate that you have significant “excellence and potential”, to use the words from the tenure policy. Thinking about  your noteworthy and distinctive goals, activities, accomplishments, and plans has value.

And, when I say “useful” or “has value”, I don’t just mean accomplishing an administrative busywork task. (a) It’s not just busywork: the tenure committee really does need you to help them think about this. (b) It’s probably worth spending a little time reflecting on what you do and why for service, how it shapes you and you shape it, and the cost-benefit story around it.

Hope this was useful, would be happy to get some comments on my statement, and have a good weekend.

— Dan

[0] Those of you waiting for a continuation of the CHI trip report… don’t hold your breath.  Now I understand why these are less common than they used to be; almost every thing I do is higher priority.

[1] Cornell is in part a public, land-grant university with an explicit public mission for several of its colleges; “extension” is a term often used to refer to those aspects.

[2] To be fair, Cornell does organize workshops that talk about tenure, tenure dossiers, and related topics in ways that have been useful. Your institution may have similar things; consider going earlier rather than later in your career, giving you more time to act on the advice.

[3] Phoebe also spent less time in the statement on standard kinds of conference-level reviewing and organization service, and more on activities  focused on her “invisible college” both within CHI and across disciplines. I don’t do as much of that kind of work, but now as I write this, it occurs to me that talking about my work and involvement with the Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST) might be useful.  (Since I want to publish the draft more like now, I’m going to publish it with an “insert CSST story here” bit.)

==============

Service statement

In this statement I’ll talk about how I’ve addressed the service expectations for assistant professors, first covering service to my professional community, then to the university community, and finally to the community at large. In each case I’ll talk about my current activities and, to the extent I can predict them, future plans and goals.

Professional service

As an assistant professor, my primary service focus has been toward my professional community. This choice was based on both practical and moral considerations. From a practical point of view, one way junior researchers come onto the radar of more senior members of the community is through interacting with them as high-quality reviewers, program committee members, and conference organizers. It also is valuable for Cornell for its members to be seen as effective contributors to and leaders of their professional communities. From a moral point of view, service to the professional community is important and impactful. Submitting and publishing consumes resources and it is only right to give back through reviewing and organizing. Further, reviewers and organizers have real influence on the conversation of research in a discipline. Good service increases the quality of published research, which is both an academic and a societal good; those who serve also have their voices heard in shaping the directions and methods of a field.

Thus, I have invested major effort in professional service, as documented in my CV. I have a long history of reviewing for most of the major conferences and many of the journals related to my professional interests. Starting in 2009 I began serving on program committees, and have served on the CSCW and CHI committees a number of times. (I’ve also served on many other conference ‘program committees’, though junior members of these committees are mostly reviewers; these include RecSys, WWW, IUI, and UMAP). I also started in conference organization roles for relevant social computing conferences in 2009 including co-chair for videos, demos, and doctoral colloquiua. My work in these roles led to me being named the technical chair for WikiSym in 2012, and I was recently chosen to be the general co-chair for CSCW, a leading social computing conference, in 2015. This gradual escalation in responsibilities and roles gives evidence that I am seen as a valuable, important member of my professional community.

(Insert CSST paragraph here in next draft).

My plan here is largely to keep doing what I’m doing. I will need to be a little more strategic in reviewing (though I now use some review assignments to mentor PhD students in reviewing) and I will need to take breaks from outside service to support university work. But on balance I have done well here.

University service

For university service, I have focused primarily on service within my department, both to demonstrate my value as a department member and because department-level service is more aligned and appropriate with the experience and qualifications of assistant professors. Further, my department has been very good about limiting my university service duties so that I could focus on the professional service described above.

Still, I have done a number of things for Information Science, CIS, and Cornell. At the department level I’ve served in a number of committee roles, including the graduate admissions, curriculum, and faculty recruiting committee; serving in these roles has given me useful experience for leading these committees as an associate professor. I also organized a professionalization seminar series for early-career PhD students and managed the department colloquium for two years. At the college level, I’ve represented the department at college-level events including BOOM (Bits on Our Minds, our undergraduate research showcase) and Cornell Days (orientation for incoming undergrads); I also served on the committee overseeing the transition in computing facilities for the department. For the university, I’ve done several one-off committees and panels that leverage my expertise, including a successful panel on how academics can leverage social media, working with the social media hub portion of the Tech Campus initiative, reviewing for the Institute for Social Sciences grant program, and participating in the Cornell Moodle courseware pilot.

Here, I expect to take a much larger role as an associate professor, chairing committees for the department and participating in standing college and university-level committees. For the department, I’m looking forward to being the director of either undergrad or graduate studies once I return from sabbatical; either would give me a chance to turn some of my service energy directly toward students in a way necessary for the department and rewarding for both the students and me. At the university level, I am hoping to find committees that leverage my knowledge of social media, technology, and education; working with the development of academic technology and MOOCs would be a natural fit.

Service to the broader community

My main contributions to the broader community are through developing software artifacts as part of my research that are both themselves used and that have influenced other systems. SuggestBot, a Wikipedia tool that helps people find articles to edit that need work and that are related to their interests, has been in continuous use for six years and has made hundreds of thousands of recommendations to thousands of editors. Pensieve, which supports reminiscing and reflection by reminding people about meaningful content they have created in social media, still has an active user community after four years, and has influenced the design of related tools such as Timehop (whose senior engineer Jon Baxter was a student lead for Pensieve). RegulationRoom, an online community that encourages citizens to participate in federal rulemaking processes, has influenced a number of socially relevant regulations around air passenger rights, home mortgage consumer protection, and distracted driving. I also serve both the broader community and my professional community through regular reviewing for NSF proposals.

My main plan here is to continue to work on socially relevant projects. I’m building relationships with companies, particularly Google and Facebook, looking to define questions that have both research depth and potential impact on products used worldwide. My work with Amit Sharma on recommender systems designed for social networks and social interaction (rather than for individual consumption), with Victoria Schwanda on using social media platforms to deliver positive psychology interventions, with Bin Xu on leveraging social media data to support relationship-building both offline and online, and with Liz Murnane on better models and techniques for motivating people to volunteer and participate in activities for social good all have real potential value beyond the research community.

I am also considering two broader service activities that would have both social and personal benefit. One would be to invest some of my energy in the new tech campus. Building the infrastructure to help train a next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs would have lasting social benefit, while gaining more knowledge and experience in this area would make me a better advisor for students in the long term. The other broadening activity would be a rotation as an NSF program officer. With the current rate of hiring in information science and the progress of the set of students I am working with, a rotation there in two or three years might be excellent timing. Like the tech campus, this would produce both social good, through helping manage and shape national priorities around research, and personal/professional good, through a better understanding of the funding landscape and through interacting with reviewers and other NSF officers.

Associate Professor in Information Science at Cornell and rotating Program Officer in Cyber-Human Systems at NSF.

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