After tenure: The marathon is over, the triathlon begins

On permanent positions and the informal rules of academic life

Congratulations on your permanent position.

The marathon is over — or so I thought. 

Welcome to the triathlon.

That was my first thought the first time I found myself second marking. 

Reading every student essay reviewed by colleagues, writing a report: was their assessment fair and accurate? I didn’t take shortcuts. I read everything carefully and wrote a thorough, honest report.

My colleagues were not amused.

There I went again. I had once more missed an unwritten rule. 

It wasn’t about the quality of the feedback or genuine checking. It was about ticking a box. 

Colleagues would do it like this:

"Well done. Perhaps tweak this one up a bit, that one down a bit. Sorted."

Everyone knew it was just for show. Except me.

And this wasn’t the exception. It was the rule.

Again and again, the formal purpose was quality control; the informal purpose was managing impressions.

Take student questionnaires. You might think the main question is whether students learned anything. But the items that really matter read like a popularity poll:

"How entertaining were the lectures?"
"How approachable was the lecturer?"

The message is clear: it’s not about what you deliver, it’s about how you are perceived. 

Once, a PhD student covered my lectures while I was away. She used my slides and even my detailed script. The students rated her as more approachable. The only variable that changed was the presenter. 

It was a perfect, if unintended, experiment in how perception overshadows content.

Or peer review. Surely there, content matters? A reviewer once wrote, alongside a list of technical objections:

"The author should have consulted me before embarking on this study. I am the expert in this area."

The problem wasn’t that my research was flawed, but that I had dared to do it without her blessing. Territorial marking, disguised as peer critique.

And research grants? That is the ultimate insiders’ game. The key question isn’t:

"Is this a brilliant proposal?"

But:

"Is this someone we already trust?"

It’s the academic equivalent of better the devil you know.

It was then that I began to see what all these moments had in common.

I had assumed that getting a permanent position meant that merit finally counted.

What I learned instead was this: content matters, but it is not the primary objective of the game.

The marathon is over. 

The triathlon begins.

 

And it turns out that success depends less on working harder or knowing more, and more on learning to tell when rigour is genuinely expected — and when satisfying the implicit benchmark matters more than the work itself.