Every summer and fall, along with the many other rituals of faculty life, comes this task: evaluating academics who are up for tenure or promotion at other campuses.
In the past 10 years, I have written several dozen such letters of recommendation and read hundreds more. Lately I have been the one asking scholars to write those letters on behalf of faculty members up for promotion in my science department. Here follows a list of frequently asked questions about tenure-and-promotion letters. My advice is aimed mostly at readers who have been asked to write these evaluations for the first time, or who expect to be the subject of them soon.
Who gets asked to write external letters? That seems like a simple question. It’s not—mostly because the answer depends on the culture of the institution or department. And that culture can change over time depending on the people involved in the tenure-and-promotion process at various administrative levels. For example, it used to be common practice in my department for advisers to be asked to write letters about their former Ph.D.’s and postdocs who were up for tenure elsewhere. Apparently the idea was that the advisers could provide some perspective on how the candidate in question compared with a professor’s other advisees.
Nowadays professors may or may not be asked to evaluate the tenure file of a former advisee, and if they are, their letter may well be viewed as too subjective and primarily useful for the purposes of context (advisers tend to have the longest view of a candidate’s intellectual development). At my university, it is common in some departments to secure 10 to 12 letters for a faculty member up for promotion, so a letter from an adviser (graduate or postdoctoral) is just one (or two) of many. In other cases there may be no letter from the adviser at all, particularly if it was easy to find plenty of other, more-objective observers.
In any tenure or promotion bid, most of the external letters are from experts in the candidate’s (sub)field, and ideally are not that person’s collaborators or friends. Finding the right people can be a challenge because it is the collaborators and friends who are most willing to take the time to write these letters. Scholars with little or no familiarity with a candidate may be more likely to refuse, particularly if they are receiving a lot of these requests. Doing the background work necessary to write a substantive letter for someone whose work you don’t already know well can be time-consuming.
The perfect letter writer, in my view, is someone who: knows the candidate’s work from that person’s publications, grant proposals, conference presentations, or other professional interactions; has nothing to gain or lose if the candidate is awarded tenure and/or promoted; has an appreciation that the stakes are high in these evaluations; and has a sincere interest in helping another institution and the discipline with a fair and thorough assessment.
In my departmental role of soliciting letters for our tenure-and-promotion candidates, I usually have only partial information about the evaluator’s level of interaction with the candidate (letter-writers are typically asked to reveal that information in their letter). And the only way I know if someone meets the rest of my characteristics for the “perfect” letter-writer is if I (or someone in my department) know the scholar or have seen other letters that person has written.
What documents do departments and institutions send to letter-writers to help them with their evaluations? That varies considerably from campus to campus. In my own experience of writing external letters, I have received all of the following at some point:
- A substantial collection of documents, including the candidate’s CV; examples of publications; teaching evaluations; the institution’s and/or department’s promotion policies; and statements from the candidate about his or her research, teaching, and service.
- The candidate’s CV and a link to a website where I can download the scholar’s publications.
- Just the CV.
- Nothing at all.
What do departments and institutions specifically ask external reviewers to mention in a letter? Some give no instructions beyond asking for an evaluation of the candidate’s scholarship. Others have a list of things they are seeking comment on: the quality and/or significance of the candidate’s work, the scholar’s productivity according to norms in the field and at peer institutions, the likelihood of the candidate continuing to be a productive scholar, the person’s national and international reputation (and whether it is significant), and the verdict on whether the candidate would receive tenure at the letter-writer’s institution. In some cases the department asks for a comparison of the candidate with others at a similar career stage in the relevant field.
Do letter-writers follow instructions and provide answers to these questions? That varies, too. One question I tend to ignore is whether a scholar would get tenure at my university, particularly if it’s being asked by a nonpeer institution. I also don’t do candidate comparisons (more on this below).
How long are external letters, typically? Keep in mind that even though I have read hundreds of these letters, I am writing only from my experience as a professor at a large research university. Based on that, I would say that a one-page letter would be viewed as cursory, but something in the two-page range (for a letter-writer who does not know the candidate particularly well) is reasonable. Longer letters (three to four pages) are fine if there is substantive information about the candidate’s scholarship. I have read (much) longer letters, most of them filled with unnecessary details about the candidate’s research. In some cases, the letter-writer seems to feel the need to provide a mini-tutorial on the candidate’s subfield and does not know a concise way to do that.
Some examples of things that can make a letter longer than it needs to be and that I personally don’t care to read:
- A lengthy paragraph about how knowledgeable, experienced, and glorious the letter-writer is. Be brief in conveying your expertise and how (and how well) you know the candidate. Some departments, in asking you to write a letter, will also ask you to send in your CV or write a brief biographical statement about yourself. Either of those is a good way to demonstrate your credentials.
- A rant about any of your pet peeves about our profession. It’s irrelevant to the candidate’s scholarship that you disapprove of citation indices and journal impact factors or that you disdain academe’s perceived focus on quantity over quality of publications.
- Any unnecessary praise of the candidate’s adviser or other collaborators. It’s irrelevant to the candidate’s record that you think his (or her) adviser is great—as if a Nobel Prize (for example) somehow transfers intellectual powers to all those who come in contact with its recipient.
- Any unnecessary personal details about the candidate, such as a paragraph about how nice she is.
Do promotion-and-tenure committees “read between the lines” in letters? Should you worry about your comments being misconstrued? You can’t worry about that (too much). Certainly you should try to be as clear as possible in your letter, but there’s no point fretting about the hard-core read-between-the-liners. All you can do is hope they are a minority on the committee. I have seen letters that I thought were an unambiguous endorsement of a candidate only to hear a fellow committee member say, “But if they really thought X should get tenure, they would have put the word ‘very’ in front of ‘spectacularly outstanding pioneering genius superstar.’”
The biggest potential minefield in terms of sending a message you don’t intend is if you try to compare the candidate to his or her so-called peers. It is nearly impossible to do that in a fair way. I have witnessed several instances in which a letter-writer wrote “X is a spectacularly outstanding pioneering genius superstar just like Z at Other Great University and I therefore support X 100 percent for tenure at Your University,” only to hear a committee member say, “But I think Z is mediocre.”
My best advice on this point: Write a sincere letter that has substance (examples, details) and includes an unambiguous statement of your opinion at the end and/or the beginning of the letter.
Are these letters even worthwhile? Why bother? In other words: Aren’t tenure committees going to do what they want anyway?
I believe that external letters are worthwhile if the letter-writers are chosen carefully for their objectivity and their ability to write a thoughtful, substantive review—and then of course if the letter-writers follow through by actually writing an objective, thoughtful, substantive review.
External evaluators can provide context and perspective that may be lacking within a department, particularly if no other faculty members are in a similar subfield. The department will have detailed knowledge of the candidate’s teaching, advising, and other professional activities, but may need external letters to round out the view of the candidate’s scholarship.
External letters are supposed to be confidential, but are they? In my experience, you have to assume that the candidate will either read the letter or be told the nature of it contents. That’s unfortunate if it means a letter-writer will be less than candid (as long as the “candid” statements are fair, of course). I deal with this in my own letter-writing by making sure that I write a balanced letter that contains statements that I truly stand by and could defend even if I had to say them out loud to the candidate in question.
I am sure I am leaving out some burning questions about these letters. Free free to pose any issues you think I may have missed in the comments section below.
