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A plea to Deans in every field:When you send out a dossier for an external review, the written tenure criteria that are given to your faculty are the ONLY criteria you should be asking evaluators to use.
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Your cover letter is not the appropriate place to convey a totally different set of criteria that candidates have to meet in order to earn tenure.
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I keep seeing this happen and it's not OK.
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If your tenure criteria say something vague like "demonstrate excellence in research," your cover letter shouldn't say "In order to meet the criteria for tenure, faculty are expected to secure an NIH R01 and publish at least two articles per year in peer-reviewed journals" 4/
I understand that there may be a gap between the written tenure criteria and the "real" tenure criteria but if that's the case, you and your faculty need to work together to revise the written criteria.
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If we want to eliminate bias in the promotion and tenure process, we need to commit to transparency when it comes to where the bar for excellence is.
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When Deans urge external evaluators to pay careful attention to "criteria" listed in the cover letter -- and those "criteria" aren't part of the official promotion and tenure criteria for that School -- candidates may end up being measured against hidden yardsticks.
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Here's how I address this when I come across it as an external evaluator...
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First, I email the person who solicited the review:
"The cover letter you sent me mentioned XYZ criteria. I can't locate the source document for those criteria. Would you mind emailing it to me? Thanks so much."
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"The cover letter you sent me mentioned XYZ criteria. I can't locate the source document for those criteria. Would you mind emailing it to me? Thanks so much."
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If their reply makes it clear that there IS no source document and/or that the criteria listed were created by the Dean, I follow up with a polite reply:
"Are these criteria communicated to faculty members on the tenure track when they're hired?"
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"Are these criteria communicated to faculty members on the tenure track when they're hired?"
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If the answer is no, then I address this in my review. I state what the additional criteria were that were conveyed in the Dean's cover letter and I state that clarification was sought. Given that the criteria are not conveyed to faculty upon hire... (con't)
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I state that, "Consistent with “Good Practice in Tenure Evaluation” (2000), a joint report by the AAUP, the ACE, and the United Educators Insurance Risk Retention Group, my evaluation of ___'s dossier will not speak to..." (con't)
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"...whether or not I think they met the bar established in the unpublished promotion and tenure criteria you conveyed in your cover letter."
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Why do I do this instead of just ignoring the "criteria" in the Dean's letter?
Because the Dean's cover letter that is sent to external evaluators is rarely part of what faculty members have access to if they are denied tenure and they end up filing an appeal.
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Because the Dean's cover letter that is sent to external evaluators is rarely part of what faculty members have access to if they are denied tenure and they end up filing an appeal.
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I genuinely believe Deans don't mean any harm when they do this in their cover letters. But the potential impact on faculty members -- not the intent of Deans -- is what we need to focus on.
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I'd love to hear what other folk think. Is this something you've run across as an external evaluator? How did you end up handling it?
/end thread
/end thread
That should have been "folx" but auto-correct hates me. :)
