Understanding voting dynamics can play a key role in an academic career. After all, the decision to hire you and grant that all-powerful tenure status is made by a group of faculty consisting of various blocs and interest groups. David D. Perlmutter, dean of the college of media and communications at Texas Tech breaks down the key groups: by-the-bookers, collegians, in-my-dayers, politicals/hobby horsers:
In this series about the players who can affect your career, I focused first on the chair and then on the head of the department’s promotion-and-tenure committee. Now I’d like to turn to the role played by tenured faculty members. How they vote is rarely idiosyncratic or random. There tend to be constituencies of like feeling and opinion. Understanding those constituencies early in your career and identifying which faculty members fall into which category will give you some sense of who will decide your fate, why, and what you might do to win them over
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