My guest today, David Helfend, is the professor you dreamed about having in college, but never

actually found. Someone who was impossibly knowledgeable, exquisitely articulate, and whose

greatest passion in life is teaching. I keep insisting, although it's getting harder

and harder, maybe just because I'm getting tired, that being a first-rate researcher and

being an excellent teacher and mentor are not fundamentally incompatible.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire, with Steve Levitt.

David Helfend has been a faculty member at Columbia University for 41 years,

chair of the astronomy department for nearly half that time, and served as the president of the

American Astronomical Society. He's got over 200 scientific publications, written a popular

book entitled A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age, and won a bundle of teaching awards.

David, you've taught at Columbia University for many years. Let me ask you about tenure. How do you

feel about academic tenure as an institution? Well, when I was in graduate school, I decided

tenure was a bad idea. For you personally or as an institution? No, in graduate school,

I watched the tenured faculty, and this was back in the early 70s, so norms were a little

looser than they are now, and the behavior was pretty appalling. The non-tenured faculty

walking on egg shells and working 20 hours a day to become tenured faculty. It didn't seem

to correlate with anything that really should be valued. I decided I was not going to participate

in the system, and so I got to Columbia, and I became a faculty member, and five years went by,

and I was informed I was being put up for tenure, and I said, well, thank you very much, but I

not going to do this. They all patted me on the head and laughed, and went ahead and put me up for

tenure. I was offered tenure, and I wrote back to the provost, and I said, well, I'm sorry, but I

don't intend to participate in the system, so I would like to have a five-year contract that has

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