Overhauling the Academic Tenure and Promotion Process

A tenured job remains the coveted prize in academe. That leads us to some questions: (1) How are institutions making solid choices when it comes to whom they grant tenure and promote? and (2) How might we improve that? How might we make it more productive and streamlined?

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The Job Candidate Selection Process

First, we should consider a similar process preceding it: the vetting that search committees conduct to select job candidates. In addition to submitting a cover letter and CV, applicants are usually asked to send statements of teaching and research; writing samples; evidence of teaching effectiveness such as teaching evaluations, syllabi, and sample assignments; three letters of reference; a transcript; and, most recently, the contested diversity statement.

It’s reasonable to need much of this in the final stages, yet it seems like a game of charades to ask everyone initially applying for all this information. For example, if a search yields 75 applicants, that means the committee is asking for recommendation letters that 225 separate people probably authored. Does it make sense to waste time of that many people at such a preliminary stage of the process? Further, let’s say 75 people apply and each submits a 25-page writing sample. That would produce a total of 1,875 sample pages across the candidate pool. It would be almost impossible to carefully read all this, especially with everything search committee members do, including teaching, research, and service—and having their own lives.

Tenure and Promotion

Demands for excess in the search process lay the groundwork for an expectation of excess that saturates an academic career. If someone lands a tenure-track job, then the next time they have to prove themselves intensely is when they go up for tenure and promotion. If committees make one thing clear, it’s that the burden of proof lies squarely on the candidate. The time is tender; the stakes are high.

The elaborate range of what faculty are expected to submit includes, but isn’t limited to, a condensed one-page CV; a full CV; a personal statement; statements of teaching, research, and service; future goals in those areas; student evaluations; peer observations; former students’ letters; syllabi; assignments; photographs of successful student projects; evidence of scholarship with students showcasing mentoring; copies of all books; peer-reviewed publications; nonrefereed publications; conference presentations; exhibits; works in progress; consulting; invited talks; evidence of service on multiple levels including the program, department, university, community, region, discipline, and the greater public; annual reviews; internal review letters; external reviews from colleagues previously unknown to the candidate; the department chair’s letter; and even material that is generated by, and duplicative of, what the university has on file.

Regardless of the variability and idiosyncrasy across institutions, one thing prevails: the excessive quality that’s baked into the process. One fallout of asking candidates to submit what can amount to thousands of pages is that people come to evaluative meetings having zeroed in on different aspects of files.

The problem is the dominant narrative in academe, cultivated in graduate school—that faculty are never enough and there’s never enough—enough funding, resources, time, space, and so on. I, too, was steeped in a tyranny of perfectionism I’d been working hard to let go. I’d built levees to prevent future seepage of it into my life, yet the intense pressure of these processes often breaks those levees or surely threatens their strength. And it can take close to a year to receive official word of the outcome, making a hard-won accomplishment anticlimactic for the candidate.

As a public scholar, making my work highly accessible is a top priority. There’s value in translating knowledge to make concepts understandable. One dimension of teaching involves deciding how to distill the contributions of a discipline into class sessions. We’re curators editing a collection of sorts. What’s puzzling is why we haven’t harnessed this strategy for rethinking the processes for hiring, tenure, and promotion.

Improving the Processes

Here are ideas for improvement:

• Revamp guidelines. Candidates going up for tenure and promotion should only have to submit a few representative pieces that they’re most proud of in each area of scholarship, teaching, and service. The poet William Stafford wrote, “There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.” We’d benefit from borrowing this line of thought. It encourages faculty to more thoughtfully assemble a portfolio, carefully reflecting on the thread of their career trajectory.
• Consider presentations. Dissertations require an oral defense, and job interviews involve a teaching demonstration or research talk. So why shouldn’t candidates present a retrospective of their work, demonstrating things they want to showcase and responding to questions? If our career is predicated on curation, dissemination, and presentation, it seems this is a milestone where those skills should come into play.
• Create mechanisms for evaluating candidates with careers outside academe or at prior institutions. Just as places hire faculty for the expertise they bring, we should be honoring those experiences when it comes to tenure and promotion. I was told not to showcase much work I’d done at previous institutions, yet that information forms a far more comprehensive picture of a candidate.
• Make it easier for faculty to be external reviewers. They’re serving as consultants and should be compensated and need to be given a proper amount of time to do this. I’ve been asked to complete reviews right when classes for the fall semester start. We should rethink how much the institution sends to outside reviewers so it’s manageable and provides what people most need to know. Reviewers need context in which to evaluate so they’re making appropriate comments and comparisons.
• Mentor committee members. Serving on committees is a way we’re socialized into the profession and learn the processes and formal and informal rules. Without mentoring for how best to ethically and legally review files, much will remain status quo, risk being unprofessional, or focus on the wrong thing.

Rethinking and overhauling can breathe new meaning, purpose, and shape into these crucial processes.

Note: A version of this article also appears in Inside Higher Ed.