Earning tenure represents an act of institutional faith that the candidate will be a solid academic citizen. So when a tenured professor is deemed unworthy of the designation of full professor, that outcome suggests that something — or someone — derailed a promising academic career.
In our first three installments in this series on the path to full professor, we explored how to decide when to seek promotion, what to do when your bid is rejected, and how to recover from a failed application. In this final installment, we change the vantage point: Rather than focus on what faculty members should do to make their case, we turn to what the department’s obligation is to guide associate professors toward a successful promotion.
Certainly, the primary responsibility for building a strong case for promotion lies with the associate professor. But it seems only fair to hold departments accountable to some degree for a failed promotion — given that they are happy to bask in the reflected glory of a successful professor.
As disappointing and damaging as a negative outcome is for the candidate, it also has implications for the department as a whole. Critics may blame the failed promotion, at least in part, on inadequate or lax support from the chair and senior professors — raising questions about their collegiality. A department’s reputation may suffer if it has too many members whose careers seem stalled at the associate rank. Outsiders will wonder: Is the departmental culture toxic or is it tenuring too many serviceable but undistinguished people?
A faculty member who is angry about being denied promotion can roil departmental politics for years to come. But there are tangible costs, too: Associate professors stuck at that rank may (understandably) be less than inclined to sign up for departmental service beyond the bare minimum. After all, why bother devoting hours of your time on behalf of an ungrateful department or institution that you perceive as having abandoned you? Those neglected service duties may then get shifted to junior faculty members who are still climbing the academic ladder.
In short, an associate professor’s rejected promotion is a moment for reflection and action, not just for the candidate but collectively for the program, too. Did the chair and senior professors provide the necessary support to nurture and advance a colleague’s career? The chair should lead an effort to review that question and revamp any departmental practices found lacking.
What follows are some best practices for aiding associate professors on the path to promotion:
Offer clear expectations for distinguished performance. We all know that some departments do not spell out tenure expectations, but many are even less specific about what it takes to earn the rank of full professor. Every department should offer guidelines to help associate professors direct their efforts and set priorities.
The most-helpful guidelines differentiate between work that qualifies as “distinguished” versus plain old “satisfactory.” Winning a competitive external grant will always garner more attention and qualify as more distinguished performance than securing a small internal grant. The more explicit the guidelines, the easier it will be for candidates to concentrate on how to flourish based on their individual talents.
Behavioral specifications that outline what is expected for satisfactory versus distinguished performance tend to be the most helpful. For example, satisfactory teaching performance might be detailed as a specific threshold that student evaluations should achieve along with favorable narrative comments. Qualifications for distinguished teaching would have a higher threshold along with evidence of having a transforming impact on students. Both the associate professor and the chair should examine institutional and departmental promotion guidelines carefully to compile a winning case.
Establish academic promotion as a continuous process. After the stressful hurdle of earning tenure, it’s all too common for academics to lose steam. (Post-tenure depression is a real thing.) Departments that treat the faculty career as an ongoing effort are more likely to see their associates earn the top rank.
The time to think about promotion to full professor is well before a portfolio of materials is submitted to a review committee. A good practice adopted by some institutions: Provide clear feedback in annual evaluations about whether faculty members are “on track” for their next promotion.
Use post-tenure reviews to guide associate professors. Across academe, it’s become fairly routine to require post-tenure reviews. One of our universities, for example, reviews the teaching, scholarship, and service of associate professors every four years, while full professors are evaluated every five years. The question is: Are those reviews meaty or rote? For a post-tenure review to be helpful, it needs to specify the steps a candidate should take to build a successful case for their next promotion (e.g., continue giving conference presentations, submit working papers for peer review and publication, finish a moribund book manuscript or begin another).
If your institution lacks an official post-tenure-review process, your department could create an internal version aimed at helping would-be full professors to assess their progress toward promotion and sharpen their focus on the aspects of their record that need a boost.
Explicitly mentor associate professors. Here are some of the things that good mentoring of tenured colleagues might entail:
- A forward-thinking chair or director will advise associate professors on when is the best time to apply for promotion, and then remind them to do so — ideally, a year or two before the application is due so there’s time to assess their progress.
- Chairs and senior professors should take associate colleagues to lunch and devise a promotion plan that fully accounts for the time needed to assemble a persuasive portfolio.
- Senior professors have a role to play in sharing their perspectives (and “war stories,” as appropriate) on promotion with associate-rank colleagues. Such insights can be very helpful, given that people may have different strategies for how they arrived at the top rank. Sharing these experiences in a group meeting may also provide some momentum for a favorable review when the time comes for voting.
- Talking in detail about the promotion process sends the message that senior colleagues want the promotion candidate to succeed and are ready to contribute to a favorable outcome.
Hire well to start with. Sometimes in the hiring process, departments are so preoccupied with filling an immediate need in a certain content area that they pay less attention to whether the candidate is a good fit and has the potential to build a distinguished career. Aim to hire faculty members for the long run: Search committees need to hire the best candidate possible rather than settling for a satisfactory alternative candidate just to hold onto a departmental line.
How the department can help. Aside from clear policies and collegial support, here are some practical ways that departments can boost an associate professor’s odds of promotion:
- Allow the candidate a simpler teaching schedule. For example, letting an associate professor teach two sections of the same course on occasion will give that faculty member more discretionary time for research, writing, and service — and for the data gathering needed to assemble a persuasive file.
- When associate professors are within striking distance of the top rank, don’t overload them with too many internal committees or service responsibilities. Likewise, make sure the committees they do serve on are high-profile ones that showcase their institutional commitments and leadership skills.
- Encourage scholarly collaborations. Many successful academics realize that one way to advance a scholarly agenda is to find a good collaborator. Midlevel colleagues can revitalize undistinguished scholarly productivity by finding an inspiring co-author, co-investigator, or collaborating artist. The partner need not be someone in the same department — long-distance collaborations happen all the time. However, working with someone close by can sometimes ensure projects stay on track.
- Make introductions. It’s not only what you know but who you know. A departmental welcome wagon at the junior level should foster peer and administrative relationships for the new hire across the campus. That effort need not end with tenure. Forward-looking chairs can encourage their campus contacts (a dean, a vice provost) to invite an associate professor to help with an important project or institutional initiative (especially if it says “strategic planning” or “mission statement” in the title) that will allow the latter’s skills to shine.
- Double down on all of these efforts for Black, Indigenous, and other faculty of color. One of the great challenges in successful diversity hiring is creating and maintaining a welcoming environment. Extra efforts may be needed to retain Bipoc faculty members in what may sometimes feel, to them, like a discouraging context. Encourage these candidates to talk with other successful Bipoc full professors.
- Groom future leaders. A savvy department chair is always on the lookout for a good successor. Ask a midcareer colleague to consider taking on the role of assistant department head or other low-key administrative roles. That way, they learn the ropes of steering the department regarding curriculum and course planning and have substantive leadership contributions to report in their promotion application.
- If you want associate professors to aspire to the top rank, celebrate those who do. Psychologists know that successful role models are effective when it comes to influencing the choices and behavior of others. Host a wine-and-cheese party or a dinner for new full professors and publicly praise the key highlights of how they succeeded.
Of course, as we acknowledged in an earlier column, some people will fall short. How colleagues subsequently treat failed candidates matters a great deal, as faculty dissatisfaction at their plight can fester and affect the climate in even the most functional of departments. Whether or not these colleagues try again for the brass ring, they should be treated respectfully. Wise departments allow for a period of recovery before encouraging an associate professor to plan another run or to shift their career on the campus in new directions (e.g., renewed teaching efforts, more service over scholarship, maybe even a lateral move into midlevel administration).
Postmodern academic life has shifted the faculty role from what used to be a clearly individualistic ideal toward a more collective one. Department members spend significant time working together to accomplish a shared mission and vision, including curriculum planning and assessment strategies. It stands to reason that we should adopt a collectivist approach to personnel decisions, too. If it takes a village to raise a child, it may take a department to build a full professor.
