Your tenure file is as complete as it’s going to get, external reviewers have weighed in on your academic achievements, your department has voted, and your file has been sent on to the next level of review. You wait. What is going on while you wait? What happens during that next stage of tenure evaluation, while your academic fate hangs in the balance?
At many institutions, such as the major research university where I work, what happens next is that a campuswide committee of senior professors reads the tenure files and then discusses each candidate in a meeting (or, if there are many candidates, in a series of meetings over the course of a week or three), and votes on whether to make a positive or negative recommendation to the dean.
Depending on the size and organization of the committee, all or several of its members read the files in advance of the meeting and report on the salient features of a candidate’s record. Reading a tenure dossier carefully, including examining research papers or other scholarly work and poring over teaching evaluations and external review letters, can take an hour or two for a fairly quick read (for those who are not primarily responsible for reporting on the file) to more than five or six hours for a thorough read of all submitted materials.
In my view, it is important that members of the promotion-and-tenure committee not do independent “research” about candidates. That is: Don’t do Internet searches of the candidates, don’t look up their citation data (if the data are not provided in the file), and don’t check out the candidate’s Facebook profile. As a committee member, you may well have independent information about a candidate owing to professional or personal ties, but if those ties are significant enough, then you should not participate in that candidate’s tenure vote.
Members of the university-wide tenure committee do not take part in discussion or voting when they are in the same department as the candidate or are collaborators with the candidate (e.g., co-authors of papers or co-investigators on grants). Committee members should be as unbiased and objective as possible, using only the tenure file as the source of information for deliberation and decision.
Although direct conflicts of interests need to be avoided, ideally one or more members of the committee will have some knowledge of the candidate’s discipline, if not his or her subfield. A fair analysis of a tenure candidate requires that the committee members know (or learn) about the culture of the relevant academic discipline, particularly with respect to norms of publication numbers, venues, authorship order, conference presentations, invited talks, and student or postdoctoral advising.
Considerable variation in those features exists across academe, even within science and engineering fields. Whereas one academic discipline might value short publications in highly selective conference proceedings over peer-reviewed journal articles, another requires peer-reviewed journal articles (in high-impact journals) as the primary indicator of productivity. Similarly, one discipline might alphabetize author order, another always has the “brains behind the project” as the last author, and another considers the first author listed to be the most important. Some fields expect assistant professors to have advised one or more Ph.D. students through to the completion of their degree, but in other fields that would be considered unusual.
Because of such variations in academic culture, it is important that promotion-and-tenure committees consist of a diverse cross-section of faculty members with enough experience to be aware of the differences.
During a tenure-committee meeting, the members discuss each candidate in turn, talking through any complicated or perplexing issues. Even straightforward cases can take an hour or more to discuss, especially if the committee also has the task of writing a report on its decision. Furthermore, some cases that appear to be straightforward can turn out to be quite complex once the committee members start discussing the file, especially if there are ambiguous statements in the letters from external reviewers or if the department had a split vote.
A well-constructed tenure dossier for a productive faculty member doing creative research, high-quality teaching, and active advising is a joy to see. Alas, for some faculty members who fit that bill, their case gets complicated when the chair and administrative staff of their department do a poor job of putting the file together. Reviewing such files can be very time-consuming for a committee, whose members must proceed cautiously, as no tenure candidate should be penalized for the incompetence of those responsible for conveying the file to the next step of the review process.
A key document in the file is an informative and believable letter from the department head explaining the department’s recommendation of the candidate. One important way in which such letters vary is in how they deal with real or perceived weaknesses in a tenure case. Some letters ignore the weak spots completely and let the committee make what it will of critical comments in letters from external referees or of consistently below-average teaching evaluations. Perhaps that is intentional, or perhaps it is done in the hopes that the committee will overlook the deficiencies.
Other letters mention the potential problems but provide unconvincing explanations. One particularly unwise approach, when explaining consistently poor teaching evaluations, is to blame the students.
I am speaking about my own preferences here, but what I like to see in the letter from the department is an honest and useful evaluation. I want information that helps me put the candidate’s record in context, such as data or impressions of the publication venues. I do not want to read extended quotations from the external letters (I can read those myself) or streams of compliments that aren’t backed up with substantive information.
Ideally, if anyone voted against the candidate at the department level, the letter will provide an explanation. But I know that, in some cases, the reasons are unknown; faculty members may vote “no” but do not volunteer any explanations. In such cases, if it is not obvious from the file, committees may assume that the department contains some “reflexive no voters” who, for their own reasons, vote against even apparently strong candidates. A small number of unexplained minority no votes will very likely have no effect on the committee’s opinion.
That raises the question: Does the university committee always go along with the department vote? If a department votes unanimously to tenure someone, does the committee basically just rubber-stamp the decision?
In my experience, a unanimous yes vote from a department usually indicates a strong candidate. But that is not true in every case. And the university committee does not assume in advance that it will agree with the department; only after careful consideration of the file is it clear whether the committee will agree or disagree with the department.
There are many challenging aspects to evaluating a tenure file. I have mentioned a few: evaluating a field unrelated to one’s own and interpreting ambiguous or incomplete letters from departments. But another challenge relates to reading the letters of reference. Some letter writers may be selected (or at least recommended) by the candidate, and some by the department. The university committee needs to evaluate whether one set of reviewers is more, or less, objective than the other.
At some institutions, the candidate makes a list of possible external reviewers, and the department makes a separate list. There may be overlap, in which case the department can decide whether to label a particular reviewer as the candidate’s choice or the department’s.
Constructing a list involves complex issues for the candidate. Do you include your graduate and/or postdoctoral advisers? (Some institutions think that including those advisers is essential; others disregard their letters as too subjective.) Do you include people on the list that you are somewhat confident will be positive, or do you deliberately leave them out in the hopes that the department will select those people (thus giving their letters more independence and credibility)? Do you list superstars in your field, or do you avoid them because they might write terse letters that could be interpreted as unsupportive? And should you include foreign academics to show your international reputation, or should you avoid them because non-American referees stereotypically do not enthuse as much or as well as American letter writers?
All I can say is: Good luck with that. And ask around to find out what professors and administrators at your institution think about these issues.
The committee looks at all aspects of a file, discusses each candidate in a meeting, votes, and makes a recommendation. It is important for the panel to explain its decision, whether it is positive, negative, or split. The committee’s report should not be cryptic, should demonstrate that the members carefully read and considered the record, and should be consistent with the overall recommendation.
The university committee is just one step in a long process, but it represents a major responsibility for professors. I think a committee works best when its members serve for two to three years—to ensure some continuity and experience—but not for longer, so as to avoid the risk of burnout and complacency.
My personal experience with tenure-committee work is that it is extremely time-consuming and emotionally exhausting, but worthwhile and a great way to get a glimpse of a lot of excellent research and teaching. I am not eager to serve on one again, but I don’t regret having done so.
So if your dean invites you to share in this experience and describes it as “enriching” (code for long hours), say yes anyway, and then apologize in advance to your family and students.
Or, if your tenure file is being scrutinized by one of these committees, know that at least some are populated by conscientious (albeit highly caffeinated) professors who take this responsibility seriously; who understand that not all assistant professors are superhuman producers of insane numbers of publications, grants, and graduate students; and who are interested in learning about your research and teaching accomplishments.
