Incoherently Scattered Ponderings

Incoherently Scattered Ponderings 

Do your job badly

I recently attended one of those career-development lunches for junior faculty organized by university administration where they tell us how review process works, how the door of the dean is always open, etc. Typically those are quite boring and I walk away not getting much out of it, except free lunch and maybe meeting another jr. faculty member. But this latest one was quite entertaining - we had one of the panelists, who happens to be pretty high up - tell us in very simple terms the "truth".
Basically - spend as much of our time and efforts on research, do good job teaching, but avoid spending all the time on teaching. For example, developing a whole new graduate course is very time consuming, but doesn't help one's tenure case. Teaching an existing course well (at least well enough to get good student evaluations) will not consume nearly as much time, and is a better bet.
One of the junior faculty complained to this panelist that she was overwhelmed with service component. To which the panelist (unexpectedly) replied - well, if you can't say no to the chair, just do your committee work well, but just barely enough, or even do it badly! That would prevent you from serving on too many committees.
Of course, at this point other panelists rush to wrestle his mike away to tell us that service is very important, and that we should all do our best and be active in committees, etc. But I think the brutally honest advice given by this first panelist was quite refreshing to hear. Saying that research, teaching and service are all equally important and we should do all three equally well is a politically correct lie. The truth is that we all need to prioritize, and our "extra" efforts in areas of service or even teaching are not transferrable towards service.
So if I already have 92% approval rating in student evaluations, it may take me herculean efforts to get up to 98% or 100%, maybe even impossible. "Just barely" doing my committee job will leave me plenty of time to focus on research, advising graduate students and writing grants. Trying to be exceptional at committee work, and trying to be exceptional at teaching will have a serious negative impact on my research. What is "barely good enough" is debatable, and one has to walk a fine line, but it's clear that one could be serious about their responsibilities on, say, library committee, without allowing it to negatively impact their research efforts.

Incoherently Scattered Ponderings