Doing Economics

6.1 How Much and What Kind of Service to Do?
As I mentioned above, some departments, schools, colleges, and
institutions
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will deliberately try to protect their junior faculty’s time by
having junior faculty do little to no service. Whether this is a good thing or
a bad thing depends entirely on the culture of the institution. I have closely
observed institutions where the leadership was keen on saying to whoever
would listen that they were protecting their junior faculty’s research time by
excusing them from service commitments—a statement which, while
strictly true, also concealed a means of asserting existing power structures
by depriving junior faculty of a voice when it came to faculty governance.
At other institutions, people in leadership positions will say the same thing
and mean it, but they will also let junior faculty do as much service as they
feel comfortable with.
In some other departments, junior faculty will be asked to do their fair
share of service. This is especially true in smaller departments (e.g.,
departments with fewer than 12 to 15 full-time tenure-track faculty
members), where the fixed costs of running the department are borne by
fewer individuals. In departments where junior faculty are asked to do their
fair share, the best-case scenario is one where this is explicitly recognized
come tenure time, and where standards of excellence in teaching and
research are thus adjusted as a result. Unfortunately, the opposite scenario,
where the senior faculty are completely checked out and expect junior
faculty to do all the heavy lifting, is not uncommon.
How much service should you do, if you are given the occasion to do so?
When starting out on the tenure track, you should do no more service than
what is expected of you, and when considering the marginal decision to
take on one more piece of service, you should really consider a handful of
factors. The first factor is that, like teaching, no amount of excellence in
service can substitute for a research agenda that falls below your
institution’s threshold for what constitutes “good enough for tenure” when
it comes to both research and teaching. The second factor is whether a

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