Tenure and Promotion  ›  About this Theme

Guiding Principles

Tenure. Administrators and faculty alike acknowledge that, at most institutions, the bar to achieve tenure has risen over time. While it is impossible to eliminate anxiety from the minds of all pre-tenure faculty members, or the pressures exerted on their lives en route to tenure, academic leaders can improve the clarity of tenure policies and expectations, and the satisfaction of their faculty, without sacrificing rigor. After so much has been invested to recruit and to hire them, pre-tenure faculty are owed consistent messages about what is required for tenure and credible assurances of fairness and equity, that is, that tenure decisions are based on performance, not influenced by demographics, relationships, or departmental politics.

Promotion. While the academy has recently improved many policies for assistant professors, it has done far less for associate professors. Fortunately, new practices--some truly novel, others novel only to this rank--have emerged from COACHE's research on tenured faculty. These include modified duties such as reduced teaching load; sabbatical planning and other workshops; workload shifts (i.e., more teaching or more research); improved communication about timing for promotion and a nudge to stand for full; small grants to support mid-career faculty (e.g., matching funds, travel support); a trigger mechanism, such as a ninth year review; and broader, more inclusive criteria.

Hallmarks of Successful Models

We have learned from leading institutions on these benchmarks what practices promote faculty satisfaction. Some findings:

Be direct with faculty during the interview stage about tenure and promotion expectations, then reinforce relative weights and priorities in a memorandum of understanding, then discuss them again in orientation sessions. These are formative opportunities.

If collegiality, outreach, and service count in the tenure process, provide definitions, say how they count, and state how they will be measured.

Provide written information about where to find everything they need to feel comfortable with the tenure process and with their campus. Use intuitively-organized websites with links to relevant policies and people.

Conduct year-long faculty orientations and workshops to support effective teaching and research throughout their years as assistant and associate professors.

Host Q&A sessions or provide other venues where pre-tenure faculty can safely ask difficult questions.

Teach departments chairs to deliver plenty of feedback along the way--annually, and then more thoroughly in a third- or fourth-year review. Written summaries of such conversations are particularly important to women and underrepresented minorities.

Provide sample dossiers to pre-tenure faculty and sample feedback letters to those responsible for writing them.

Ensure open doors for early-career faculty to chairs and senior faculty members in the department. The most clear and satisfied pre-tenure faculty have such access for questions about tenure, for feedback, for opportunities to collaborate, and for colleagueship.

Be cognizant of the workload placed on associate professors. They often find themselves buried suddenly with more service, mentoring, and student advising, as well as more leadership and administrative duties that may get in the way of their trajectory to promotion.

Provide mentors. COACHE data confirm that just because a faculty member earns tenure does not mean that s/he no longer needs or wants a mentor.