Promotion and Tenure Committee Report to Faculty Senate
Jeff Poet, chair
March 19, 2015
The 8-person P&T committee comprised of faculty from the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences, the College of Professional Studies, the Craig School of Business, and the College of
Fine Arts (plus Senator Bensyl as our Faculty Senate liaison) has been meeting each Tuesday
afternoon during the spring semester to establish processes, review packets, review letters to
candidates, to discuss observations of the current procedure, and to make recommendations for
changes to the current procedure.
The process followed by the committee is similar to the process used last year and in years past
under the leadership of Dr. Kelly Henry, Dr. Ali Kamali, and Dr. Dan Trifan. The committee
reviewed 11 packets. All members reviewed all packets. Two committee members had primary
responsibility for presenting the packet to the full group for discussion. As applicable, separate
votes were taken by secret ballot regarding tenure and promotion. Seven committee members
voted on each packet. P&T committee members who served on a candidate’s departmental
committee were asked to recuse themselves from the vote but not the discussion. A letter was
drafted by the chair. Letters were reviewed the following meeting by all committee members and
appropriate corrections and changes were made. All letters were hand-delivered to the candidates
or to their departments on Thursday, March 5, well ahead of the deadline. As of Tuesday, March
17, the packets are awaiting transfer from the secure storage room in the library to the Provost’s
Office.
Comments and recommendations regarding the review of packets:
1. We have some impressive colleagues! Through my work on this committee, I now know the
accomplishments of some colleagues across campus of which I would otherwise be unaware.
The good work of colleagues should be better communicated across campus.
We recommend that the monthly Board Reports be made readily available to faculty.
2. Some colleagues far exceeded the expectations for promotion as stated in the Policy Guide and
the departmental guidelines. With no current reward system (be it Faculty Performance Review,
the Distinguished Professor Program, or something else), the committee was unable to give
tangible recognition to these individuals for their exceptional work. While not making these
additional decisions lightened the workload of the committee, the committee would have
welcomed the opportunity to give special commendation to particularly worthy candidates.
We recommend that a system be instituted (or reinstituted) to acknowledge and reward the
meritorious work of candidates whose work goes well beyond the minimum requirements
of the Policy Guide and departmental guidelines for promotion.
3. This year, there was no consideration of packets of full professors for merit. While such
consideration would increase the workload of the committee, the committee supports the idea of
a merit-based system to reward particularly-deserving full professors, with the understanding that
such a system should not come at the expense of the cost of living allowances of the rest of the
faculty.
We recommend that a system be constructed by which exceptional full professors can
receive tangible rewards (additional money to the base salary) for exceptional teaching,
scholarship, and/or service with this committee involved in the evaluation of such
consideration.
4. Portfolios reaching the committee do not all adhere to the Policy Guide limit of two inches.
Discernment should be exercised by the candidates in constructing their packets. Mentors should
encourage candidates to make choices. Mentoring and early levels of evaluation should be
bringing this lack of compliance to the attention of the candidate. As we consider the possibility
of electronic portfolios, the temptation to include more and more information (whether pertinent
or not) will need to be addressed.
We recommend that a short checklist of physical and organizational expectations be
distributed to candidates two weeks before the submission deadline.
5. Several problems have been identified at the earlier levels of evaluation of the packets.
We recommend that (a) chairs are reminded to carefully avoid perceived or real conflicts
of interest when assigning departmental committees or requesting external reviews; (b)
chairs are reminded to be vigilant in ensuring that outside review letters are physically in
the packets before moving them onto the committee; (c) committees, chairs, and deans are
reminded that they are to evaluate the packet subject to the criteria and not simply
advocate for the candidate; and (d) when feasible, departmental review committees not
include members of the campus P&T committee.
6. In reviewing portfolios, the committee is occasionally confronted with unusual timelines for
consideration.
We recommend that in cases where candidates are submitting portfolios either sooner or
later than the typical timeline, a letter from the provost indicating eligibility to apply be
included in the front of the packet and, additionally, that any unusual circumstances be
clearly outlined by the candidate in a cover letter.
7. With regard to promotion from associate professor to professor, the Policy Guide is woefully
vague and unhelpful in establishing requirements in the area of scholarly/creative activity. The
policy guide states that a successful candidate must demonstrate “a pattern of consistent,
significant, professional growth.” Departments have provided guidelines to clarify discipline-
specific expectations. The timeline (or lack of timeline) in departmental guidelines appears to not
support the general Policy Guide statement. Several years ago, it was clarified that a packet for
promotion to professor could include all materials back to and including the year in which the
packet for promotion to associate professor was under review. (Previously, the Policy Guide
stated that only materials while at the rank of associate professor were considered, resulting in a
“lost year.”) For candidates promoting through the ranks on the fastest timeline, this is not an
issue. Difficulty in the interpretation of the Policy Guide arises when a candidate has been at the
rank of associate professor for an extended period of time, substantially longer than the
minimum of five years.
Consider the following fictitious example. (The details of this example are completely made up
and any resemblance to actual persons either living or dead is unintentional.) Suppose that
departmental guidelines require four peer-reviewed publications at the rank of associate
professor to meet the publication requirements for promotion to full professor. Further suppose
that a candidate has been at the rank of associate professor for 15 years and had three
publications shortly after promotion, nothing in the way of publication for 14 years, and got a
fourth publication one month before applying for promotion. Such a candidate has met the
department guidelines of four peer-reviewed publications as an associate professor, but the
candidate has not (in the opinion of this committee) demonstrated a pattern of consistent,
significant, professional growth. To bring about consistency between documents and consistency
between the three areas of evaluation, the committee makes the following recommendation. The
University should expect no less from senior faculty requesting promotion from associate
professor to full professor than it does of junior faculty requesting promotion from assistant
professor to associate professor. Junior faculty are expected to produce quality results in all three
areas in a five-year window, and in their case, failure to do so results in a denial of tenure and
termination of employment.
We recommend that the Policy Guide be changed to reflect that, as in the teaching area, the
service and scholarship/creative activity portions of the portfolio for those seeking
promotion to full professor be restricted to only those activities of the immediately
preceding five years, and that departments rewrite their guidelines for promotion to full
professor to reflect this change.
8. This committee was charged with considering a partial or complete changeover to electronic
portfolios. There are many pros and cons for such a conversion. Many documents exist in
electronic format and the additional steps of producing hardcopies and organizing a physical
portfolio are inconvenient and cumbersome at best. The committee identifies two major
drawbacks to electronic portfolios: (1) the organization of such a portfolio must be tightly
controlled to make the evaluation of portfolios manageable and efficient. In particular,
standardized file names must be adopted to make even the simple evaluation of the presence of
all required elements achievable; (2) the current expectation/temptation to include everything
including the kitchen sink is going to need to be addressed. The change of format should not be
viewed as an invitation to include yet more items in the portfolio. Training will be needed to
instruct candidates on how to choose items for inclusion in an electronic portfolio, and to instruct
departmental committee members, chairs, deans, and campus committee members when and
when not to construe the absence of an item is a negative.
To the best of the knowledge of the committee, all student teaching evaluations (including
comments) are currently available on Class Climate to individual faculty members. It seems that
these evaluations are organized in electronic format similarly to the typical portfolio (sorted by
semester first, then sorted by course). The two pertinent issues here seem to be (a) the granting
of access to the selected reviewers and (2) security (by which we mean the prevention of others
seeing the information and the privacy of other information on the Class Climate system). The
committee suggests that we proceed incrementally, beginning with the student evaluation portion
of the portfolios.
We recommend that for the 2015-16 academic year, steps be taken by IMC, IT, and others
to enable the secure access by designated University personnel involved in the portfolio
evaluation process to the electronic student teaching evaluations in Class Climate for all
candidates for tenure and/or promotion.
We further recommend that, in light of the successes and frustrations of the electronic
student evaluations, the 2015-16 Promotion and Tenure Committee be tasked with
developing specific procedures and a model electronic packet for possible adoption in 201617.