why was sean carroll denied tenure

I have about 200 pages of typed up lecture notes. That's a romance, that's not a reality. Of course, Harvard astronomy, at the time, was the home of the CFA redshift survey -- Margaret Geller and John Huchra. They made a hard-nosed business decision, and they said, "You know, no one knows who you are. Maybe you hinted at this a little bit in the way you asked the question, but I do think that the one obvious thing that someone can do is just be a good example. But the High-z supernova team strategy was the whole thing would be alphabetical, except the most important author, the one who really did the work on the paper, would be first. So, we had some success there, but it did slow me down in the more way out there stuff I was interested in. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. Was your pull into becoming a public intellectual, like Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris, on that level, was your pull into being a public intellectual on the issue of science and atheism equally non-dramatic, or were you sort of pulled in more quickly than that? They are . I love writing books so much. So, I wrote a paper, and most of my papers in that area that were good were with Mark Trodden, who at that time, I think, was a professor at Syracuse. So to you nit-pickers who, amongst other digs at Sean and his records(s), want . We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. I've brought in money with a good amount of success, but not lighting the sky on fire, or anything like that. Bless their hearts for coming all the way to someone's office. As much as, if you sat around at lunch with a bunch of random people at Caltech physics department, chances are none of them are deeply religions. Although he had received informal offers from other universities, Carroll says, he did not agree to any of them, partly because of his contentment with his position. So, it is popular, and one of the many nice things about it is that the listeners feel like they have a personal relationship with the host. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. I might add, also, that besides your brick and mortar affiliations, you might also add your digital affiliations, which are absolutely institutional in quality and nature as well. We never wrote any research papers together, but that was a very influential paper, and it was fun to work with Bill. I wrote a couple papers by myself on quintessence, and dark energy, and suddenly I was a hot property on the faculty job market again. There's always some institutional resistance. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. You nerded out entirely. I can do it, and it is fun. It was really like quantum gravity, or particle physics, or field theory, that were most interesting to me. You got a full scholarship there, of course. Not even jump back into it but keep it up. So, when it came time for my defense, I literally came in -- we were still using transparencies back in those days, overhead projector and transparencies. I'm surprised you've gotten this far into the conversation without me mentioning, I have no degrees in physics. I don't interact with it that strongly personally. What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn't freak out when Darwin is doubted I was ten years old. So, between the five of these people, enormous brainpower. So, I think what you're referring to is more the idea of being a non-physicalist. This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. No one has written the history of atheism very, very well. What mattered was learning the material. Double click on Blue Bolded text for link(s)! Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy - Apple But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. Sean, if mathematical and scientific ability has a genetic component to it -- I'm not asserting one way or the other, but if it does, is there anyone in your family that you can look to say this is maybe where you get some of this from? Then, I would have had a single-author paper a year earlier that got a thousand citations, and so forth. I talked about topological defects, and it was good work, solid work, but they were honestly -- and this is the sort of weird thing -- they said, after I gave the talk and everything, "Look, everyone individually likes you, but no one is sure where you belong." There was a famous story in the New York Times magazine in the mid '80s. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. Hopefully, this person is going to be here for 30 or 40 years. He is also a very prolific public speaker, holding regular talk-show series like Mindscape,[23] which he describes as "Sean Carroll hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers", and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. This is what I do. So, basically, giving a sales pitch for the idea that even if we don't know the answers to questions like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, the nature of right and wrong, whatever those answers are going to be, they're going to be found within the framework of naturalism. So, the fact that we're anywhere near flat, which we are, right? I'm very pleasantly surprised that the podcast gets over a hundred thousand listeners ever episode, because we talk about pretty academic stuff. Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial | Psychology Today It's said that the clock is always ticking, but there's a chance that it isn't. The theory of "presentism" states that the current moment is the only thing t. It's good to have good ideas but knowing what people will think is an interesting idea is also kind of important. 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. So, in the second video, I taught them calculus. [25] He also worked as a consultant in several movies[26][27] like Avengers: Endgame[28] and Thor: The Dark World. People were very unclear about what you could learn from the microwave background and what you couldn't. So, yeah, we wrote a four-author paper on that. More than just valid. It's just wonderful and I love it, but it's not me. On my CV, I have one category for physics publications, another category for philosophy publications, and another category for popular publications. Sean recounts his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and how he became interested in theoretical physics at the age of . I would have gone to Harvard if I could have at the time, but I didn't think it was a big difference. 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. [31][failed verification][third-party source needed]. [6][40][41][42][43][44][45] Carroll believes that thinking like a scientist leads one to the conclusion that God does not exist. And you take external professor at the Santa Fe Institute to an extreme level having never actually visited. Otherwise, the obligations are the same. So, I wrote some papers on -- I even wrote one math paper, calculating some homotropy groups of ocean spaces, because they were interesting for topological defect purposes. I think I probably took this too far, not worrying too much about what other people thought of my intellectual interests. I don't know what's going to happen to the future of podcasting. It was like suddenly I was really in the right place at the right time. So, I was not that far away from going to law school, because I was not getting any faculty offers, but suddenly, the most interesting thing in the universe was the thing that I was the world's expert in, through no great planning of my own. I explained, and he said he had read this paper that he thought was interesting, by Richard Gott, on time machines, close time-like curves in gravity. We just didn't know how you would measure it at the time. Let's get back to Villanova. So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. As far as class is concerned, there's no question that I was extremely hampered by not being immersed in an environment where going to Harvard or Princeton was a possibility. They soon thereafter hired Ramesh Narayan, and eventually Avi Loeb, and people like that. But it's absolutely true that the system is not constructed to cast people like that int he best possible light. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. George didn't know the stuff. I mean, Angela Olinto, who is now, or was, the chair of the astronomy department at Chicago, she got tenure while I was there. That's what supervenience means. Everything is going great. I want to say the variety of people, and just in exactly the same way that academic institutions sort of narrow down to the single most successful strategy -- having strong departments and letting people specialize in them -- popular media tries to reach the largest possible audience. Princeton University Press. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. I took a particle physics class from Eddie Farhi. By the way, all these are hard. I think new faculty should get wooden desks. It's sort of a negative result, but I think this is really profound. Benefits of tenure. I'll just put them on the internet. To tell me exactly the way in which this extremely successful quantum field theory fails. Whereas, if I'm a consultant on [the movie] The Avengers, and I can just have like one or two lines of dialogue in there, the impact that those one or two lines of dialogue have is way, way smaller than the impact you have from reading a book, but the number of people it reaches is way, way larger. The biggest reason that a professor is going to be denied tenure is because of their research productivity. Did you have a strong curriculum in math and science in high school? And if one out of every ten episodes is about theoretical physics, that's fine. For one thing, I don't have that many theoretical physicists on the show. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. Well, it's true. Yeah, absolutely. I worked a lot with Mark Trodden. It's rolling admissions in terms of faculty. But if you want to say, okay, I'm made out of electrons and protons and neutrons, and they're interacting with photons and gluons, we know all that stuff. And he goes, "Oh, yeah, okay." What It's Like to Be Denied Tenure - chronicle.com I didn't listen to him as much as I should have. What you have to understand is that Carroll isn't just untenured, he's untenurable. So many ideas I want to get on paper. There's no delay on the line. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. I never had, as a high priority, staying near Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. @seanmcarroll . Stephen Morrow is his name. You've got to find the intersection. A lot of people in science moved their research focus over to something pandemic or virus related. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. Some of them are leaders and visionaries, and some of them are kind of caretakers. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. I would certainly say that there have been people throughout the history of thought that took seriously both -- three things. So, that's a wonderful environment where all of your friends are there, you know all the faculty, everyone hangs out, and you're doing research, which very few of the physics faculty were doing. I said, the thing that you learn by looking at all these different forms of data are that, that can't be right. Harvard came under fire over its tenure process in December 2019, when ethnic studies and Latinx studies scholar Lorgia Garca Pea, who is an Afro-Latina from the Dominican Republic, was denied tenure. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. No one cares what you think about the existence of God. So, I recognize that. 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. There's a lot of bureaucratic resistance to that very idea, even if the collaborations are going to produce great, great topics. It's almost hard to remember how hard it was, because you had these giant computer codes that took a long time to run and would take hours to get one plot. But that's okay. [37] Euclid's laws work pretty well. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Now that you're sort of outside of the tenure clock, and even if you're really bad at impressing the right people, you were still generally aware that they were the right people to impress. "The University of Georgia has been . 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 . That includes me. Advertising on podcasts is really effective compared to TV or radio or webpages. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? Do you ever feel that maybe you should just put all of that aside and really focus hard on some of the big questions that are out there, or do you feel like you have the best of both worlds, that you can do that and all of the other things and neither suffer? So, it was explicable that neither Harvard nor MIT, when I was there, were deep into string theory. It's challenging. I'm not sure if it was a very planned benefit, but I did benefit that way. 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. They asked me to pick furniture and gave me a list of furniture. At Caltech, as much as I love it, I'm on the fourth floor in the particle theory group, and I almost never visit the astronomers. Is your sense that really the situation at Chicago did make it that much more difficult for you? You'd say, "Oh, I'm an atheist." But, you know, I did come to Caltech with a very explicit plan of both diversifying my research and diversifying my non-research activities, and I thought Caltech would be a great place to do that. But I'd be very open minded about the actual format changing by a lot. In other words, an assistant professor not getting tenure at Stanford, that has nothing to do with him or her. it's great to have one when you are denied tenure and you need to job hunt. I know that for many people, this is a big deal, but my attitude was my mom raised me, and I love her very much, and that's all I really need. I'm curious if you were thinking long-term about, this being a more soft money position, branching out into those other areas was a safety net, to some degree, to make sure that you would remain financially viable, no matter what happened with this particular position that you were in? It doesn't lead to new technology. But it doesn't hurt. Their adversaries were Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and an author, and Raymond Moody, a philosopher, author, psychologist and physician. So, I said, "Okay, I'll apply for that. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? Do you see the enterprise of writing popular books as essentially in the same category but a different medium as the other ways that you interact with the broader public, giving lectures, doing podcasts? Tenure denials - The Philosophers' Cocoon [57][third-party source needed], This article is about the theoretical physicist. So, I thought, well, okay, I was on a bunch of shortlists. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. The point I try to make to them is the following -- and usually they're like, sure, I'm not religious. In many ways, it was a great book. I was a credentialed physicist, but I was also writing a book. Good. It's the place where you go if you're the offspring of the Sultan of Brunei, or something like that. Again, I think there should be more institutional support for broader things, not to just hop on the one bandwagon, but when science is exciting, it's very natural to go in that direction. I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. I had the results. We had problem sets that we graded. You can see their facial expressions, and things like that. Why did you do that?" By far, the most intellectually formative experience of my high school years was being on the forensics team. When I knew this interview was coming up, I thought about it, and people have asked me that a million times, and I honestly don't know.

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