The real versus the ideal Some context In my very first professional presentation as a sociologist I made use of the anthropological terms “ideal culture” and “real culture” in describing the huge gap between the published/public statements on how tenure and promotion judgements were supposed to be made and how they were made.  The “ideal culture” as it existed in university statements regarding criteria for tenure and promotion were very far from what I collected in dozens of extensive interviews with faculty and department chairpersons in terms of the operative criteria, i.e., the “real culture.”  No big surprise there for any academic.  I have always been interested in this gap between what we say and what we do, the ought and the is, and so as I have pored through our survey data I was taken aback by how extreme some of the gaps appeared to be.  I will claim … Continue reading Closing the gap?