Will publications outside your job's AOS help with tenure?

In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Suppose:
A job advertises for an AOS in ethics, and AOC in epistemology.
My AOSes are broader: Ethics & metaphysics
My AOCs are broader: epistemology & X-phi

Will only publications in ethics (and perhaps epistemology) count towards tenure?
-Will metaphysics count?
-Will x-phi count?
-Will anything outside these fields count?

Great questions. In my department, it would count toward tenure. But I imagine things might be different elsewhere, maybe particularly at R1 programs where one is expected to be a leading figure (and graduate advisor) in the AOS you were hired in?

What do readers think?

Comments

[yes]

all publications count towards tenure (at least all those published since you were hired). I publish in two neighbouring FIELDS (outside of philosophy), and those publications counted in my bid for tenure. Part of the notion of academic freedom is that you are free to choose what you what research.

[R]

I would expect this to be a "yes" almost everywhere. But it really doesn't matter what the norm is, you need to know what's true at this particular department. And there's really no substitute for asking them. Ideally during negotiations of a job offer (or even during the on-campus if it comes up), but if you're already in the job you should make finding this out from a reliable source a priority.

[not the right question]

at lots of R1s, it doesn't make sense to talk about what publications "count" towards tenure. The evaluation is of your overall file and, at lots of places, mere numbers of publications is basically irrelevant once you're in a certain range. At my (elite-striving but not elite) R1, the single piece of the tenure file that is most important (by far) is external letters. That's because my university is striving in a reputational way, so they want to tenure people with the strongest reputations in their fields. Given this, it basically makes no sense to talk about whether publications "count" towards tenure. (At some universities, including my own, there is a max cap on how many papers you can send for evaluation to external letter writers, also.) You need to publish to get tenure, but what matters is the quality of the papers and whether your department or administration or some combination of the two can understand your file well enough to ask the right people to evaluate you. If you only have ethicists evaluating you, they are likely just not going to read the metaphysics papers, or at most, will very briefly say something like "this isn't my area but it seems good". If you work in too many different areas, there won't be people who can summary judgment about all your work, which is somewhat important, and you probably won't have a super strong reputation in any one subfield, which is also very important. It's just not about what publications count or don't (and I don't think my university is super unusual here).

That being said I have multiple AOSs including ones I didn't have when I got my job and my tenure case was fine/good, but that was largely because of extremely good will and very hard work from my department in understanding my (fairly technical) work and figuring out who the best letter writers would be, and also working to frame the work as unified and making sense in their own documents. My sense is that in the R1 world, the more you're spread out, going out on a limb, or just won't make obvious sense to other people as a researcher, the more you have to ensure that your department has your back and will work to find the right people to evaluate you, and the more you have to work to make sense to your department--talk to them about your work, explain the connections between your interests regularly, etc.

My guess is zero of this applies for any school that isn't hyperfocused on research prestige.

[小野猫]

Ask your chair and/or dean. It varies by institution.

[Bill V.]

AOC in a job ad is a request for you to be able to teach in an area, not publish in it. (Maybe there are exceptions, but I've never heard of any.)

For everything else in OP's post, as in all tenure discussions, there's a generally true answer and a local answer. The general answer is that most places will count any refereed publications in philosophy towards tenure in a philosophy job. As Marcus says, there may be a few R1s that think differently on this, and where if you don't have a tenurable publication record in the field they expect you to be a leader in, then you would have a harder time. (Excess pubs, beyond what is required for tenure, can never hurt you regardless of area, I would think.)

Which leads to the key point: The local answer is the one you need to care about. Ask your chair, department members on the promotion committee, the dean, folks on the university T&P committee, maybe the faculty development folks if they do trainings on getting tenure. Check any documents which outline the tenure process/standards at your university, and anything in your hiring letter. You need docs and multiple opinions at different levels because many different people will be involved in the decision on your case (most of whom are not in your discipline, though your department's recommendation may be heavily weighted in the overall decision).

Word to the wise: Speaking from my own experience of doing the opposite, it is much easier to just work on one main topic while trying to get tenure. Writing about several things both slows you down and leaves you in less of a strong position at the end since you have less of a track record in a single area and so less of an established reputation in any area.

[Tenured R-1]

Yes, absolutely and everywhere yes.

But make sure it's the kind of work that would past muster with insiders in that subfield.

I know of one case where an extremely promising young philosopher at a top department developed a side interest in a topic associated with a big historical figure. Unfortunately, his file was reviewed by a couple of scholars of that figure, rather than his main AOS, and they were insufficiently impressed (he's not, after all, a scholar of that stuff). To my knowledge, it cost him tenure.

[Thomas]

I was once at an institution where a colleague was denied tenure essentially for publishing too broadly. The argument used was that they did not develop a sufficiently deep research project because they were working in a variety of fields.

No one outside your department can tell you what your department will do - and you should look at past cases as well as asking your chair.