A Smart App

4 thoughts on “A Smart App”

1. When are you going up for tenure? Can you tell us a bit about how the tenure process goes in your department and university?

   I can share the process in mine:
   1) In spring of year 5, departmental promotions committee meet, look at your CV, and decide you are ready to send out for external letters of evaluation. Executive cte (all tenured profs) vote to send out for letters
   2) Requests for external letters of evaluation, with your CV and 3 relevant papers, are sent out to external reveiwers, This part is stressful in my department, as you don’t have any input who they choose, but generally the department does a good job of soliciting from prominent people in your area who do know about you. If nobody knows about you, well, that too is information…
   3) Letters are back by early Fall. If they look good, executive cte votes to promote and the request goes to the university cte. That is the tricky part. Each division (physical sciences, arts and humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences) has its on committee composed of faculty from different departments, and they really scrutinize your dossier. For this level, department has prepared an extensive dossier for you, containing research and teaching statement, all about your teaching (evals, peer review), publications, grants, letters, and a representative paper. This is the step at which people do get denied, because the university cte goes through your record with a fine-tooth comb. If the letters are not super strong, you are toast.
   4) If you pass the university cte, you are pretty much tenured. However, you don’t really get promoted until the Board of Regents meet in July and rubber-stamp your promotion, and you are officially an associate prof with tenure as of the new academic year!

   Good luck!

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   1. This is much like ours, GMT, except that candidates do have to provide six names of potential letter writers (more if they wish.) The department committee, consisting of all tenured faculty members, must propose six additional ones. The candidate then provides a statement of any personal relationship with the proposed reviewers. The committee then chooses three from each list, for a total of six. The candidate never learns which of the twelve were chosen. Letters are only then solicited.

      There is always an ongoing debate as to how to interpret letters; letters from people in Europe are almost always much more critical than those from Americans. One German professor even once asked “Do you want a European letter or an American letter?”

      The year I was promoted (1974) was the first year that this system, more or less, was in existence. Prior to that, the department chair made a recommendation to the upper administration. The candidate never knew the process was underway unless and until she or he received a notice of promotion or of termination after a terminal year.

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   2. This is very interesting. Our system is quite different. Stage one is completely absent, for example. Somewhere around May, I will start assembling my tenure portfolio on my own and without any input from the department. In August I will submit it. Then, the personnel committee at the department will analyze it and decide if it recommends me for tenure. That’s the only thing the department does: it looks at the dossier and makes a recommendation. Everything else is up to the candidate.

      After the departmental personnel committee makes a recommendation, the dossier goes to the Chair who also needs to make a recommendation. If there is a feud between the personnel committee and the Chair, there might be an issue for the candidate.

      Then, the dossier moves to the college level. After that (if the college recommends you for tenure), it goes to the university level.

      You said that at your school the department prepares an extensive dossier for you. I’m surprised because at my school we are left to grapple with the dossier in sad loneliness.

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      1. You said that at your school the department prepares an extensive dossier for you.

         It sounds like a favor, but it really isn’t. I do submit the CV, research and teaching statements, and representative publications. The full dossier is prepared by others so you would not see the external letters of evaluation, the Chair’s cover letter, some sort of internal documents where someone muses about your research and its importance to the college and university etc. I saw a few of the colleagues’ dossiers prepared by our department admin, and I was quite appalled at how ill-formatted they were (three pages were in Times New Roman, another 10 in something like Cambria…) I would have much rather preferred to prep the whole thing myself, trust me; nobody cares about my tenure case more than me, I was quite disappointed with what I saw as an example.

         Good luck!

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