Between February and May 2022, three Carleton faculty members were awarded tenure. The essential qualities the Board of Trustees considered in approving the promotions, which took effect September 1, were excellence in teaching, excellence in scholarship or creative activity, and excellence in service to the college and the broader academic community.
When reaching out to ask the recipients about the honor, we found a universal sense of pride in both Carleton broadly and the accomplishment specifically. And, like a student in the wake of finals week, each interviewee seemed equal parts energized and lightened.
Wes Markofski,
Sociology
What does tenure mean to you personally and professionally?
It’s like reaching the summit of a mountain. You spend a lot of time and energy and investment in a rigorous, uncertain process of getting your PhD, finding a good position—as I did at Carleton—and then investing enormously in the development of your teaching skills, your research skills, and trying to do excellent work that is recognized as such by students, colleagues, and experts outside the institution. It confirms that your scholarship and teaching is significant and worth long-term support, which means a great deal.
In what sorts of research projects are you currently engaged?
I have a book coming out in the spring called Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America. It’s a culmination of 15 years’ worth of research on the “other evangelicals”: multiracial, progressive, and other evangelicals who occupy a contradictory cultural location between the progressive, secular left and the conservative, religious right.
Another big project I’ve been working on—“Protecting Sacred Waters: Mobilizing Indigenous and Western Meanings of Science and Spirituality in the Battle Over Line 3”—examines how indigenous activists, organizations, and communities have mobilized opposition to Line 3 in northern Minnesota using scientific evidence and spiritual/religious language in interesting ways.
What makes a liberal arts education so valuable, especially in this moment?
I do research on democracy and democratic theory, which shows that a healthy society requires citizens who are engaged, who bridge differences and sort truths from falsehoods, and who can critically engage in different modes of reasoning in political and public life. These are crucial things that a liberal arts education, broadly understood, really contributes to and centers in ways that are essential at this time.
Rob Thompson,
Mathematics
What does tenure mean to you personally and professionally?
I feel myself shifting from being a junior faculty member, focused primarily on new ideas and innovations, to a place where I can support younger colleagues who are looking to do the same. Carleton has a lot of new junior faculty members and by being a careful listener and collaborator I hope to help them think about what they want to bring to their department and the college.
In what sorts of research projects are you currently engaged?
I do applied and computational research. So instead of spending a lot of time trying to solve problems within a certain sphere of the discipline, I search out real-world problems that are amenable to certain sets of tools and interesting for students. I’ve led projects that involve reassembling fragmented objects—like a jigsaw puzzle. This past summer, for instance, I worked with students on computational geometric methods to reassemble archaeological bone fragments and stone tools.
What makes a liberal arts education so valuable, especially in this moment?
The work being done in industry and government is increasingly interdisciplinary. And that often requires professionals who can comfortably communicate and cooperate with each other in both technical and nontechnical terms, because you never really know what sorts of expertise it will take to understand a system or solve a particular problem. That’s why it makes less and less sense to study in a silo, especially at the undergraduate level.
Rika Anderson ’06,
Biology
What does tenure mean to you personally and professionally?
I’ve found that instead of needing to worry about whether I’ve published a certain number of papers or written enough grants, I can really focus on making sure that my students are getting the best possible research experience. It also means I have more freedom to change projects, either because a different direction makes more sense in the moment or because students are more interested in a certain approach.
In what sorts of research projects are you currently engaged?
I have a career grant to send students out to sea on research cruises over the next couple of years to see how microbes in deep, dark hydrothermal vents live and adapt. Thanks to funding from NASA, I’m also working with astronomers, geologists, chemists, and atmospheric scientists to understand how we can detect life on other planets. We do that by trying to figure out which gases are made by life.
What makes a liberal arts education so valuable, especially in this moment?
So many ethical, political, and cultural questions are wrapped up in our scientific challenges. I teach a genomics class right now, and we are wrestling with several ethical issues. What does it mean to have your genome sequenced? Who keeps that data? What does race mean in the context of biology and our genomes versus the cultural construct of race? We need a liberal arts background to address these sorts of questions competently.