A Guide for Arts & Sciences Chairs

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Tenure-Track Faculty & Faculty Promotions

You have a special responsibility to both guide and judge junior faculty during the years leading up to a decision on tenure. Although these need not be mutually exclusive functions, you need to differentiate between advice and advocacy as well as between impartiality and considered assessment. If you are about about to shepherd through your first tenure or promotion case as a chair, you should have a discussion with the Associate Dean for Faculty early in the process.

Mentoring Junior Faculty

Because you will eventually write a report evaluating the junior professor’s qualifications for tenure or reappointment, you should avoid being the primary person who guides a tenure-track faculty member in your department. (It is, on the other hand, a good idea for you to meet privately with each junior faculty member once or twice per year to discuss progress toward tenure, problems encountered, etc.) Rather, you should appoint a senior member of the faculty to serve as the mentor. In selecting a mentor, you should be sure that this person has a good relationship with the junior professor, is both a valued teacher and an accomplished scholar, is knowledgeable about the criteria by which junior faculty are judged in your department as well as in the College, and has a well-balanced outlook (see the criteria for tenure below) as well as considerable skill at achieving that balance. Characteristics that you should avoid in a mentor include discontent, over-emphasis on either teaching, scholarship, or service to the exclusion of one or both of the others, and low standards of achievement.

The mentor should meet with the junior faculty member regularly—perhaps once per month over lunch—for an informal chat about progress toward completion of scholarly work or improvement in teaching, perceived problem areas, other issues of concern, and general matters. The mentoring process should include classroom visits (both of the junior professor's classes by the mentor and vice versa) followed by a discussion.

Assessment of Junior Faculty

During the probationary period leading up to reappointments and, eventually, a decision on tenure, you and the tenured faculty need periodically to assess the professional progress of each junior member on your faculty. At minimum, this should be done once per year at a meeting of the department's tenured faculty. You should communicate the results of these assessments privately to each of the junior faculty members, with a frank discussion of both the positive side of their record and any perceived shortcomings. You should encourage the tenure-track professor to set realistic, yet ambitious, goals that will meet the expectations that you and the senior faculty have for a faculty member coming up for tenure. You should never make statements to the effect that success in reaching these goals will "guarantee" tenure and promotion. There are other factors, such as reputation in the field and future needs of the University, that will also play important roles in the eventual decision.

Tenure-track faculty members often ask how much each general area of effort contributes toward the ultimate decision on their tenure application. The official answer is given in the Faculty Handbook. The gist of this is that teaching and scholarly achievements should both be excellent and a reasonable amount of diligent effort should be expended in service activities (to the department, College, and University as well as to the profession). While one might find examples in the past where outstanding scholarship was sufficient for tenure, any junior professor with a subpar teaching performance is unlikely to be promoted now even with an impressive research portfolio. Availability to students is an important component of this: an instructor who hides away 2-3 days per week in order to work on a book, for example, is unlikely to be judged as a conscientious teacher. In the same vein, refusal to perform service at the level normally expected of junior faculty is also a negative factor in a tenure evaluation. Advice to the contrary may be given by some senior members of the faculty; you need to contradict this in no uncertain terms. On the other hand, it is obviously detrimental to a young professor to spend too much time crafting the material presented at each class meeting to the point that no time for scholarly work remains.

You should recommend a healthy balance to your junior colleagues: Professors need to work long hours, dividing their effort among teaching, research, and service activities such that they perform each in a meritorious manner. If you note that a junior faculty member is having difficulty with this multi-tasking, refer them to their departmental mentor and/or to the Center for Excellence in Teaching, which offers guidance.

Reappointments, Mid-tenure review, and the “Tenure Clock” of Tenure-track Faculty

Tenure-track faculty are appointed to their positions with limited terms, usually of duration one, two, or three years. In order to continue the appointment toward a tenure decision, you and the tenured faculty in your department need to evaluate the accomplishments and potential of the junior faculty member. This assessment should occur by mid-spring-semester prior to the last year of the appointment. (Each year, you will receive from the Dean’s Office a reminder of the timetable for submitting reappointment papers.) You then need to submit documents either to terminate the appointment or to recommend reappointment. Both require considerable justification based both on performance and on the needs of the department. Contact the Associate Dean for Faculty with any questions you might have about the procedures.

During a junior faculty member’s third or fourth year, the department needs to undertake a mid-tenure review. This is a scaled-down version of a tenure review. The faculty member fills out a form similar to the tenure application form, and submits a curriculum vitae plus copies of all publications, important teaching materials (e.g., syllabi), and other material relevant to the review. The department's tenured faculty then review the case and discuss the merits. The main question to ask is whether the junior faculty member is likely to be able to mount a meritorious case for tenure. If not, then the appointment to the faculty should end at the conclusion of the current term (usually the end of the following academic year). If the junior faculty member is progressing well in general but has a few shortcomings that need to be addressed, then the senior faculty should compile a list of recommendations to be conveyed to the tenure-track professor. After the mid-tenure review, both the junior professor’s mentor and the department chair should meet separately and privately with the individual to deliver the recommendations and to chat about any concerns that the individual might have.

The customary period before a tenure decision is made is 6 years after the initial appointment of a tenure-track assistant professor. The University will generally allow earlier decisions if the candidate insists, but that is not usually to the benefit of the individual unless a substantial record of scholarship, teaching, and service was established prior to coming to Boston University. The review process will implicitly involve a comparison between the accomplishments of the candidate vs. those of faculty members that have followed the normal schedule. The timetable (“tenure clock”) can be extended, however, if the faculty member takes a leave of absence and, in the process of requesting the leave, asks and receives approval to delay the ultimate tenure decision by one year.

A tenure decision in the 6th year requires that the tenure application process be started during the middle of the 5th year of appointment, with the departmental review being carried out during the spring semester and early summer of that year.

Promotions from Associate to Full Professor

The general criteria for promotion to full professor are that the individual has become internationally recognized as a leading scholar in the field, and that there is a substantial body of accomplishments in teaching, research, and service since the person became an associate professor. You are asked to identify candidates for promotion to full professor by the end of the fall semester each year.

The procedure for applying for promotion to full professor and for considering the merits of the case is similar as that for tenure.