It starts innocently enough when an unfamiliar name pops up in your email queue. Opening the message, you read a flattering passage lauding your scholarly reputation. Then you spot the string attached: The praise is from an administrator on some other campus who thinks you are ideally positioned to evaluate a tenure candidate. All you have to do is donate your time and talent to help make an “objective” judgment on this faculty member’s career.
Writing letters of recommendation is the service-to-the-profession ritual that faculty members seem to dislike the most. Practically once a year, someone in these pages writes an essay calling for the elimination of such letters in the hiring arena. But we see promotion-and-tenure letters — evaluating candidates’ scholarly record as part of their advance to associate or full professor — as even more complicated and vexing to write.
Are these external validations of someone’s scholarship even necessary? It’s not in our power to decide. But you would think, after decades of P&T cases, that higher ed at least would have ironed out the many problems inherent in the commissioning, writing, and use of such letters. Alas. Our aim here is to suggest ways to make the letter-writing process less onerous and more valuable — for the reviewer, the candidate, and the administrator who initiated the exercise.
But first, let’s examine some of the pitfalls.
Objectivity is often a reach. Ideally, for the critique to be “objective,” this ritual demands that the external reviewer and the promotion candidate not have any prior association — they didn’t emerge from the same doctoral program, they aren’t friends, they haven’t collaborated on any work. Of course, the reviewer may know, to some degree, the candidate’s scholarship, especially if it’s of high impact. Ironically, if a reviewer in the same field declares no knowledge of the candidate’s work, the critique may already feel compromised.
In addition, the administrator charged with selecting and approaching the reviewers may not know if they have any prior relationship with the promotion candidate. And some people attempt to influence the process by submitting names of potential external reviewers who are the tenure applicant’s mentors (or allies of mentors), co-authors, graduate-school chums, and other professional friends.
The scope of evaluation requests varies by department and institution. Most often, the instructions ask reviewers to limit their evaluation to the quality of the candidate’s scholarly record. Some may specify a time frame to consider; for example, you might be asked to focus only on candidates’ work in the few years since their most recent promotion. Occasionally, the reviewer will be asked to consider the candidate’s teaching prowess and even institutional service record.
Some requests will discourage you from commenting on the promotion decision itself; others may ask you how you would vote on the case.
Evaluation guidelines are patchy. No universal standards exist for any major personnel decision in higher education. Local norms govern what is regarded as successful performance in an academic role. In the absence of any local standards, reviewers tend to fall back on the rules and regulations of their own institutions, or they derive universals of their own. That’s not a problem when the applicant is a scholarly powerhouse who would pass muster even at institutions with the most stringent criteria.
But the borderline cases are much trickier, and thus more time-consuming for the reviewer. You have to gather as much information as possible about the department’s and institution’s tenure standards. What are the explicit expectations for tenure? Which publications count, and which don’t?
You have to decipher context and impact factors. Faculty members conduct research under widely different conditions. Obviously, a resource-rich environment — with a lot of grants and research assistants — should make it easier to achieve a scholarly track record. Such abundance ramps up the expectation that the scholar under review has produced high-impact work, while the lack of it can make a tenure candidate’s publishing success look far more impressive. Articles published in top-tier journals will carry more weight than in less-selective ones. But it’s foolhardy — and even cruel — to expect a candidate who teaches four or more courses a semester to publish regularly and in high-impact outlets.
Higher education has various indexes to track how scholarly work is used. For example, the h-index reflects the numbers of publications and of citations per publication; someone with an h-index of 20 has 20 papers that have been cited at least 20 times. The i10 index reflects the number of articles with at least 10 citations, so an i10 index of 28 indicates that 28 articles have been cited at least 10 times each. Here, too, reviewers have to consider institutional context and be cautious in relying on those metrics in the evaluation.
In short, context matters and the reviewer must make many small judgments along the way to writing a fair letter.
Finally, the pandemic has complicated tenure evaluations. In an ideal world, any assistant professors who handled the perilous Covid pivot without abandoning their posts would earn extra credit toward tenure. We all know that some scholarly production suffered for some people during the pandemic, for all sorts of social, economic, and health reasons. Where one might expect a successful tenure candidate to have a steady stream of publications, the Covid era may have suppressed that person’s output.
Trouble is, some institutions provide little or no guidance on how an external reviewer should treat production downturns caused by the pandemic, which further compromises these judgments.
Those are the key challenges. In most cases, institutions expect the reviewer to tackle all of those issues free of charge, with little more than a “thank you” in return. You can’t even expect to find out whether your assessment made a difference in the case, or was even considered.
Assuming that this ritual remains a fixture in tenure-and-promotion decisions, how can we make it better? Here are some easy steps that departments and institutions could take to improve the value of this part of tenure review and make it less burdensome for recommenders:
Share more internal information about tenure standards with the reviewer. Particularly when an institution has some distinctive performance criteria related to scholarship (e.g., average number of publications expected during the pre-tenure period), it is helpful for the reviewer to know how the applicant’s track record measures up to local standards. What sorts of publications count in the tenure candidate’s department? Is a book or monograph required? How many journal articles? Do pedagogy-oriented articles count, and how much? What about book reviews or even podcasts?
The point is: The department should be doing that legwork, not expecting it of the reviewer.
Set a substantial lead time before the letter is due. Ideally, the reviewer should have a modicum of control over when to finish this task. Many of these requests arrive in the summer, when a faculty member’s work schedule for the next academic year is in flux. Offering a long window of time to do the review is helpful.
Check (and double check) for conflicts of interest. Ask the reviewer to verify in the letter the degree of acquaintance that exists between the recommender and the applicant.
Compensate the reviewer. To do a fair-minded evaluation, especially in borderline cases, requires a significant investment of time. As a reviewer, you have to go through a lot of data provided by the tenure candidate and the institution. You may feel compelled to read or reread some of the scholar’s work. At best, a good review and a careful write-up will require several hours of your time.
It is rare for institutions to offer even modest remuneration in return. Somehow a “thank you for your evaluation” letter does not quite do justice to the intensity of the work involved, which is very likely why some people decline to perform this service. It adds insult to injury when reviewers are left with little idea of whether their free labor carried any weight, or was even considered, during the tenure case. We have both had that happen, after taking the time to write tenure letters.
Years ago, one of us received $100 for writing a detailed review letter. These days, most places expect the work to be gratis. If the request has no cost, the resulting evaluation simply may be perceived as having no value. If an institution actually paid external reviewers, it would be less likely to ignore the contents of the letters, and the reviewers it approached would be less likely to decline.
Accept the reviewer’s conclusion. No second-guessing. If the results of the external review are inconsistent with what the department was hoping for, the process will be messier, but the outcome should not be challenged. Accept it as is. Don’t follow up with questions about whether the reviewer understood the complexity of the case — or, worse, exert pressure to alter their letter.
Close the loop. In our experience as external reviewers, we have often not been told the outcome of the candidate’s tenure bid. In rare instances, you might receive a letter of appreciation from a successful candidate, or a note from an administrator alerting you to the decision. Most of the time, a reviewer will get an acknowledgment for participating — a brief thank you — without revealing the outcome. Departments would end things on a much better note by telling the reviewer how the story ended.
Accept a “no,” and don’t read into it. Administrators and tenure committees get nervous when a professor declines to evaluate another scholar’s work for tenure. What, they wonder, does that “no” mean? Was the reviewer just too busy? Or does the refusal indicate a negative judgment of the candidate? Institutions should tread carefully when interpreting such unexplained behavior.
For reviewers: Don’t feel obligated to do this just because you have been asked, praised, and deemed qualified. Especially if you receive a lot of these requests, decide on an appropriate number of letters you are able to write for the academic year, and deflect any additional ones.
Ultimately, we believe academe needs to have a candid discussion about the merit and importance of soliciting external evaluation letters: Do they still have a place in the tenure process?
