A. Review by the CAS Appointment, Promotion, & Tenure (APT) Committee
The CAS Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure (APT) Committee is composed of senior members of the CAS faculty drawn from across the disciplines. It begins reviewing promotion to Professor cases in September and continues with tenure and promotion cases later in the fall. The CAS APT has access to all materials used at the departmental level for review, plus the departmental report and vote and any updates the candidate has submitted. Candidates may submit updates to their dossier throughout the process, but the APT cannot guarantee that it will review any materials that arrive after 12 pm the day before the initial case discussion takes place.
Members of the APT conduct peer teaching reviews of candidates’ classes. These should be scheduled in coordination with the candidate well in advance. They will not make unannounced visits.
The APT may request that the department chair or candidate provide additional information or further clarification of the dossier when they believe information is missing or unclear. It will make these requests through the CAS Tenure and Promotion Coordinator.
The APT should reach its judgment on the basis of all evidence available to it including reviewing the major research materials.
The APT Committee prepares a report summarizing the Committee’s review and the Committee’s vote is entered on the Part I: Unit Actions sheet. This report is added to the dossier and made available to the Dean for review.
If the CAS APT makes a negative decision with regard to tenure and/or promotion, the case is forwarded for review by the Dean in the usual way unless the candidate withdraws their application following the APT review.
The CAS Tenure and Promotion Coordinator will redact the APT report, and email it to the candidate, copying the department chair. A copy will also be sent to the candidate’s home address. These reports will be released as they are completed. The CAS Tenure and Promotion Coordinator also sends the unredacted APT Report to the department chair under separate cover, marked “Confidential.” These reports should not be circulated, but remain confidential to the chair. In order to maintain strict confidentiality, the department should not retain these reports in either hard copy or digital form in its local faculty files. The Office of the Dean is responsible for retaining the official tenure and/or promotion dossier.
Candidates who find factual errors in the redacted CAS APT report may submit corrections in writing to the CAS Tenure and Promotion Coordinator within five business days of receipt. Candidates should not write general “responses” or answers to reports, but only correct errors of fact. Please see the discussion of “Candidate Responses to the Department Report,” above. The same principles apply here.
B. How the APT is Asked to Assess Cases
In order to help candidates prepare the best dossier possible, we include here the guidance given to the CAS APT (via their handbook) on how to assess the candidate’s record in each key area: teaching, research, and service.
How should the APT evaluate the record of teaching?
The APT’s evaluation of teaching is an evaluation of the overall quality of a candidate’s teaching, not an evaluation of any one indicator of teaching competence. Good teaching, of course, is more than a performance in front of a classroom. The ultimate measure of excellence in teaching is the degree to which students have learned and developed academically, intellectually, and personally, as a result of their experience with that teacher.
The APT review of teaching should consider all forms of relevant evidence – the quality of the construction of the candidate’s courses and the materials and learning experiences provided to the students, such as those evidenced by syllabi and other teaching and learning aids; any unique pedagogies or pedagogical tools; and the quality of the assessment tools. The APT should review student evaluations of the candidate derived from standard forms, student letters, and any other available evidence. It should consider peer reviews of the candidate’s teaching, including those derived from in-class observations done by departmental colleagues and done by members of the APT. Further guidelines to APT classroom visits appear earlier in the handbook, beginning on page 10.
The APT should consider the quality of teaching in the context of standards and any unique aspects of the discipline and the demands and challenges it poses for teaching. APT members should also consider the special demands and opportunities of the courses the candidate has taught, for example whether they are required introductory courses that many students are likely to take because they have to do so rather than that they want to, or whether the course is an advanced-level course that students are likely to prepare for and want to take.
How should the APT evaluate the record of research and scholarship?
The goal of the research review is to determine whether the candidate has a sufficient record of high quality, independent, original research and scholarship to merit tenure and/or promotion. The elements that make a “sufficient record” are:
•The work, in our judgment, is of the highest quality; that is, the research has been conducted according to the highest standards of its field; its substance – whether findings, conclusions, theories, or creative productions – offer sufficient value added to work in its field that already exists; it should attain the highest professional standards of writing and presentation.
•The work, in the judgment of peers in the discipline or field, is of the highest quality as defined above. This means that a sufficient amount of the work should be published in books, journals, and other media that require peer review; there is other specific evidence that it is held in high regard, such as is found in book reviews, conference discussion of the work, anthologizing after the original publication, or awards and honors, among other possibilities; the confidential letters we solicit from leaders in the field offer sufficient high-quality and careful assessment that indicates the work is of the highest quality. Other evidence that peers in the discipline judge the candidate’s work of high quality includes but is not limited to: inviting the candidate to lecture outside of Boston University, to serve on review or editorial boards, to engage in other professional activities that place the candidate in a position to judge the quality of peers.
•The work is sufficiently original and independent in the sense that the candidate has clearly been responsible for work that makes a significant departure from previous knowledge or approaches.
•The work is having sufficient impact, especially on other scholarship. One of the chief ways of determining this is to examine citations and citation rates. An excellent book that is just about to be published and has not appeared in part in chapter or conference paper form has not yet had detectable impact.
•The work should conform to all norms of ethical and professional conduct.
•The amount of work that conforms to these norms reaches the standard for scholars in the field at major research universities.
In fields in which extramural funding is essential to carrying out a research career at the highest levels, a consistent and current record of appropriate funding is also necessary.
The research record must also offer a high level of confidence that the candidate will remain research-active at the highest levels through the future. That is, if it seems to have taken the entire pre-tenure period to construct a “just-in-time” record of publication, and there is not clear evidence that sufficient and high-quality future research is well under way, or there is other evidence that casts doubt on whether the candidate will perform at least to the level of the past in the future, tenure and/or promotion is inappropriate.
The listing of evidence and characteristics needed for tenure and promotion here is partial and serves only as an example. The specific kinds of evidence that are required for a judgment about quality, independence, impact, etc., vary across disciplines and may require special attention to evaluate appropriately in interdisciplinary fields. The APT must also be aware of the impact of fundamental methodological or theoretical contention in particular fields that may shape assessments of particular candidates.
How should the APT evaluate the record of service?
University communities cannot carry out many important functions if faculty members do not play their role in carrying out these functions. At a research university, all tenured and tenure-track faculty are expected to be heavily engaged in research, but being engaged in research is not an appropriate excuse for avoiding service as a citizen of the university and the larger profession, especially for tenured faculty members.
In the College of Arts & Sciences we try to “protect” assistant professors from doing a lot of service because they are still building their craft of teaching and scholarship, setting up their labs, finding their first graduate students and postdocs, and building the framework for their work they will use in later years. Nevertheless, tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor requires that a candidate has participated in the necessary work of the university on a regular basis, especially at the department level. They should also have participated at a modest level on a national or international level in their profession, for example, through manuscript reviewing, serving on committees of their professional associations, or serving on conference organizing committees.
Promotion to the rank of Professor requires evidence that candidates have taken seriously their role as more senior members of the department, university, and larger profession, including internationally. They should be participating at all levels, and have taken on leadership roles.
C. Review by the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences
The Dean has access to all materials used at previous levels of review, plus the departmental and CAS APT reports and votes, and any updates candidates have submitted. The Dean may also request that the candidate, chair and/or APT provide additional information or further clarification of the dossier. The Dean considers updated information in the dossier up to the time the Dean writes the Dean’s report.
Upon request by the candidate, the Dean’s review may include a half-hour conversation with the candidate. If a candidate is interested in having this meeting, they should contact the Dean’s assistant early in the fall semester of their review year. This conversation allows the candidate an opportunity to describe in person their main contributions and accomplishments, and what they expect their future contributions to be, as a teacher, a scholar, and a citizen of this university and of their larger profession, as well as to discuss concerns about their experience or opportunities here as a faculty member.
The Dean informs the candidate and the department chair of the Dean’s recommendation. The CAS Tenure and Promotion Coordinator creates a redacted copy of the report and emails it to the candidate, copying the department chair, and sends a paper copy to the candidate’s home address. The CAS Tenure and Promotion Coordinator sends the unredacted Dean’s Report to the department chair under separate cover, marked “Confidential.” These reports should not be circulated, but remain confidential to the chair. To maintain strict confidentiality, the department should not retain these reports in either hard copy or digital form in its local faculty files. The Office of the Dean is responsible for retaining the official tenure and/or promotion dossier. There may, however, be discussion in the unredacted version of the Dean’s report pertaining to the quality of the mentoring or review process in the department that should be discussed with the department in order to make improvements to these processes.
Candidates who find factual errors in the redacted Dean’s report may submit corrections in writing to the CAS Tenure and Promotions Coordinator within five business days of receipt. Please see the discussion of “Candidate Responses to the Department Report,” above. The same principles apply here.
If the Dean makes a negative tenure and/or promotion recommendation, the Dean informs the Provost, but the case does not proceed forward and is considered closed unless the candidate appeals the negative decision. The Dean informs the candidate in writing of both the decision and the faculty member’s rights with respect to appeal. The candidate’s right of appeal is exercised by submitting an appeal in writing to the Provost within ten business days of receiving the negative decision.