TENURE AND PROMOTION PROCESSES

Both tenure and promotion decisions are evaluations or reviews conducted by peers of a faculty member’s professional activities, which lead to significant status changes. Tenure can be considered as a change from a probationary or fixed length appointment to an indefinite appointment. Such a change provides the fac­ulty member with greater freedom in his or her professional activities or greater economic security, or both, although further promotions depend on continued research productivity and contributions to teaching and service.

Promotions are changes in status, such as from assistant to associate or from associate to full professor. The tenure decision and first promotion mark the tran­sition between tenure-track assistant professor to associate professor. Most often tenure and promotion to associate professor occur at the same time, although some universities make these decisions separately. In the committee’s survey, of 407 departments in RI institutions that responded, 318 (78 percent) granted tenure and promotion to associate professor together in a single decision. Disaggregated by discipline, Table 5-1 shows that 72 to 79 percent of departments decide tenure and promotion together, with the exception of chemistry, where 85 percent of 74 responding departments make one decision.

These decisions typically take place in the sixth year. Among the 407 responding departments, the modal response was 6 years elapsing between hiring and the tenure decision, with a range of 2 to 12 years. Fully 83 percent of depart­ments indicated the tenure decision was made in the fifth or sixth year. As shown in Table 5-2, similar results were found within each discipline, with the exception of mathematics, where about one-quarter of departments responded that untenured faculty come up for tenure in 2 to 4 years.

From the vantage point of most tenure-track assistant professors, tenure may be the seminal event in their professional lives. Certainly, the first several years of academic life are spent building a dossier that will establish the case for granting tenure. The tenure decision grants substantial job security, validation of quality of work, possible monetary rewards (via salary adjustments), and increased insti­tutional resources and authority. Universities typically have an “up or out” policy after a given number of years as a tenure-track assistant professor. If not granted tenure, the faculty member must leave his or her position for another position not on the tenure track or for employment outside the university. Faculty who believe they will not be granted tenure may choose to leave before facing the decision.

A second promotion marks the transition between associate professor and full professor; it is optional because some faculty may simply stay at the associate professor rank—although this was truer in the past than for current faculty. This decision also occurs several years after the first promotion.

These decisions are made, first, by a tenure or promotion committee com­prised of departmental colleagues, typically followed by evaluation at succes­sively higher administrative levels, such as a college — or school-wide committee, a dean, a provost or vice president for academic affairs, and the president of the institution. Exactly who is involved differs depending on the university, but such oversight is typical. The first decision would be made by the tenured departmental faculty, and administrators can support or reverse lower level decisions. Candi­dates generally provide a full curriculum vitae (C. V.); a statement describing their research accomplishments and goals, teaching history, teaching evaluations, and service to their department, university and profession; and copies of selected publications. Outside evaluations of research contributions of the applicant are generally solicited by the department from leading researchers located at other universities in the applicant’s field. Sometimes internal evaluations are solicited from the same or other departments as the candidate’s department.

Number of Years

NOTE: Numbers refer to percent of responding departments.

SOURCE: Survey of departments conducted by the Committee on Gender Differences in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty.