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Promotion and Tenure Questions and Answers
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Below are questions which were submitted anonymously to ADVANCE Professional Development Consultants Professor Bruce Darling and Professor Lynn Riddiford, both former members of their college promotion and tenure committees.
Answers contained herein are the opinions and observations of the Professional Development Consultants and in no way guarantee career advancement as many factors can contribute to overall career success.
To view a question, scroll down or click on the question of interest to you.
Question 1: Retention Rates
I heard somewhere that:
- Around 50% of assistant professors who come to the UW do not end up going up for tenure (they leave, are counseled out, take a job at another university, industry, etc.)
- Of those that stay, around 95% end up getting tenure.Are there numbers right?? What are the actual number?
Bruce Darling:
I don't have figures for the overall UW, but the retention of new hire assistant professors within the College of Engineering is significantly higher than 50%. Within Electrical Engineering, of the group of faculty hired between 5 and 10 years ago (roughly), none left to go elsewhere, and all of them are now tenured Associate Professors. So for EE, the retention, promotion, and tenure statistics are all 100%, although the one caveat is that a very small percentage did not make the promotion on their first try. These were each cases that were put up very early, though, but which made it through on their second try.Lynn Riddiford:
I don't have the figures for the Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences but in my 4 years on the Council the denial of tenure in the Sciences was very rare. I don't know how many left before that juncture. In Zoology over the past 30 years, I think that we have only had one tenure denial and two people who left for other types of teaching opportunities before the tenure decision.BACK TO TOP
Question 2: Collaborative Work
How does the P&T committee view collaborative research? There are rumors that if most of your research is conducted with other PIs in your department that the research will not be given equal weight to independent projects. Is that the case?
Bruce Darling
If a promotion case showed only collaborative research of a new hire with only a few select faculty of the same department, then that would raise the question of how independent the researcher is. Unfortunately, no matter which extreme one takes, there will always be someone who will question that choice of direction. If someone writes only single-author papers, someone will ask why they can't collaborate. If someone writes only multi-author papers, someone will ask why they can't do anything on their own. The best guidance I can give is to assistant professors is to aim for balance - do some things on your own to show that you can, and also do some things in collaboration with others to show that you can. This addresses both concerns, and also has the nice advantage of building up both skill sets which is useful for longevity at a university.BACK TO TOP
Question 3: Publication Rates and Gaps
Another rumor that I have heard is that you need to be consistent in your publication record and that the committee does not like to see large (1 year or more) gaps in publications. Is that true? If it is, is it worthwhile to try to "justify" these gaps in your statement (e.g., maternity leave, began a new research program etc.).
Bruce Darling:
Small gaps in publication output are not of great concern, since everyone realizes that the time from submission to print can vary widely. One could easily pick up a year separation between journal articles just by the order in which they were submitted to various journals. What is of concern is if a faculty member's output is flat zero for an extended period of say, several years. That indicates a real problem. Any really big, obvious gaps in output (publications, teaching, grants, whatever) *should* be addressed in the dossier to explain what was happening.In some cases, a faculty member might be trying their hand in a new research direction that may be taking some time to get the proper foothold. The change in direction would be a very good thing to explain in the dossier. Venturing into new areas is generally seen as a good and productive thing, since it is a clear demonstration of someone going beyond their PhD or Post-Doc work. However, it ultimately needs to lead somewhere, and should not paralyze the remainder of one's on-going contributions.
There may also be some temptation to hold back a publication or two and save them for the promotion year. I personally do not recommend this, because holding back the publication of a research result has the effect of diminishing its impact. If you get to a result much earlier than the rest of the world, the impact of the research is much higher, since that result could then become the pioneering effort rather than risking its potential to be just another "me-too" publication.
Good advice that I have also heard is to develop a habit of doing some publication writing each day. Just make it into a routine. Instead of battling writer's block and waiting for the singular moment of inspiration, just start typing on whatever it is you are working on, and pretty soon a steady stream of output will naturally develop. It is much better to head off a potential problem early on with a corrective strategy than to rely upon excuses later on if things fall short.
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Question 4: Course Development
What are the channels for getting teaching relief in order to prepare new courses or new course materials?
Bruce Darling:
Relief from teaching a course is usually negotiated at the department level with the chair. Sometimes departments have an advertised buy-out policy for those with research funding, so that the research funds can pay for their salary instead of state funds and thereby relieve the need to teach that quarter. Different departments have different rates for this, but they usually are in the range of 40-60% of one's salary to buy out of a class. If a faculty member got a grant to develop some new curriculum, this could be, and often is, part of the deal. Relief from teaching a normal class load is also often part of the start-up package that is negotiated upon one's hiring into a department. It is very common, for example, to offer a new faculty a reduced teaching load for the first one or two years in order to give them the extra time to get their programs launched and to develop their new courses. Beyond career start-up packages, course teaching relief is sometimes negotiated between a faculty member and the department chair when the faculty member proposes some investment of time that would benefit the department in the long run, and which that faculty member would not have the time to pursue otherwise. A good example is writing a new textbook for a course, or developing the curriculum and course materials for a new course. Different departments have varying resources to do this, though. In some departments, the culture is to do this whenever a new required course needs to be developed, while in other departments teaching relief to develop new teaching materials is unheard of. This varies widely across the campus, but the bottom line is that this is something that is normally proposed and negotiated between the faculty member the department chair.
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Last Updated: July 08, 2005
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