Doing Economics

particular piece of service gives you an occasion to become known to those
who will weigh in on your tenure decision—your departmental colleagues,
your colleagues at the college level, and your dean, but also your
prospective external review letter writers—for doing good things. The third
factor to consider is how onerous a given piece of service will be for you,
and whether and how much you expect to enjoy performing that service.
From the foregoing, a few general principles emerge for pre-tenure
academics:
1. Everything else equal, between departmental- and college-level
service, prefer departmental-level service, and between college-
and university-level service, prefer college-level service. This is
because your departmental colleagues are going to be the ones to
directly assess your performance for tenure, and serving on
committees with them will give them an occasion to get to know
you outside of looking at your publications and your teaching
evaluations. Obviously, this assumes that you do a good job and
pull your weight.
A useful if coarse and imperfect way of thinking about what
kind of service to do is this: As an assistant professor, prioritize
departmental service. As an associate professor, you can expand
your service activities to college-level service. As a full professor,
you can expand your service activities to university-level service
and beyond.
2. Avoid serving as program director. Though most departments will
avoid having junior faculty serve as director of undergraduate or
graduate studies, some will not. For junior faculty, this is the kind
of service that should be avoided like the plague. This is because
although the vast majority of students, undergraduate and
graduate, will require little to none of your time, the job of a
director of undergraduate or graduate studies is to serve as
backstop for problem cases, which can (and likely will)
monopolize a great deal of your time.
3. Prefer service that is concentrated in time. For junior faculty,
there is nothing better than serving on a committee that meets
only a few times, or doing service circumscribed to a given period

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of time. Graduate admissions committees tend to meet a few
times from December until about February, with little or nothing
to do the rest of the academic year. Serving as graduate placement
director will usually require that you hold a few preparatory
sessions for your department’s job-market candidates in the fall,
and serve as a resource for them between January and late March,
if that.
4. Prefer service that will allow you to become known to your
prospective external review letter writers. This comes in several
flavors, namely local, and national, or international. One version
of this is that if your department has a seminar series, you should
volunteer to organize or co-organize it. It can be quite a bit of
work to invite people to come give a talk in your seminar,
coordinate their flights and hotels, take them out to dinner, and
process reimbursements, but usually the size of the effort required
is commensurate with a department’s resources. That is, if your
department has the resources necessary to invite four or five
external speakers per semester on the one hand, then it has the
resources to provide you with the help of an administrative
assistant to do the paperwork, and you only need to select whom
to invite and where to take them out to dinner on your
department’s dime. On the other hand, if your department only
has the resources necessary to invite one or two external speakers
per year, you will not have that much paperwork to do to make
those one or two visits happen. The obvious upside is that by
volunteering to organize a seminar series, you can choose to
invite people who are likely to be asked to write your external
review letters for tenure (e.g., editors of journals in your field,
senior researchers who have written on the topics you are
currently working on, and so on).
Another good service opportunity for early-career researchers is
organizing a session on a given topic at a conference. Many international,
national, and regional conferences solicit such sessions, where three to five
papers on a given topic are presented in an effort to feature the state of the
art on that topic. If you are an early-career researcher, this is can be a

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golden opportunity to get to know senior researchers in your area, and to
get them to hear about your work.
3
By that token, you may be tempted to think of putting together a special
issue of a journal. I would strongly caution anyone—especially junior
faculty—against doing so, as there is little to no reward to be derived from
it. In most cases, not only will the senior scholars who respond favorably to
a call for or solicitation of papers for a special issue not submit their best
work to that special issue, but your interactions with them will also often be
of a purely virtual nature. Worse, deadlines are often soft for such special
issues and people treat them as such, and as a junior scholar, you effectively
have little to no coercive power over senior scholars who are ultimately
doing you a favor by contributing to your special issue.
Everything I have said in the previous paragraph is multiplied tenfold for
edited volumes.
4
As your place in the profession becomes more secure once you get
tenure, the scope for service increases, and once you get promoted to full
professor, the sky is the limit. There are many ways to contribute to an
institution’s mission and service, though not as outward-facing as teaching
and research, can certainly be very gratifying.