At Your Service.

The author discusses her own experience with trying to start an academic program as an assistant professor, and puts that experience in the larger context of assistant professors trying to gain tenure. The author recounts how her and another assistant professor developed an academic program that become very popular at their university, but though the program was a success, the two were getting criticism from the administration for not working on enough research projects. The author was denied tenure status, by the university's administration, which she asserts happens to most assistant professors who put service obligations ahead of their own research.