When a tenure‐track hire is made, we have every hope and expectation that this colleague will ultimately be successful in attaining tenure. The formal tenure review process occurs in the colleague’s sixth year – the distant future, as seen from the first year of a faculty appointment. However, the reviewed work requires ongoing attention from the candidate and the department. Later success depends on groundwork laid in the early stages.
At the time of tenure review, the Faculty Personnel Committee bases its recommendation on many factors documented in the dossier. Among the most important information in the tenure review file is the written input from the candidate’s department. The department statement provides unique perspective on all of the areas on which tenure decisions are based: Teaching, Scholarship, and Service. The Personnel Committee relies on the department letter for
- Assessment of teaching effectiveness, via direct classroom observation from the perspective of experienced faculty in a given discipline, and student course evaluations, to which only the Department Chair or the person asked to write the department letter has access
- Assessment of scholarly engagement from the viewpoint of established scholars in the discipline
- Assessment of service activities in the department—ranging from informal collegial cooperation to formal roles and responsibilities—from the perspective of experienced department members.
The purpose of this document is to provide practical guidance for departments to follow during the pre‐tenure years. Ideally, the pre‐tenure experience in the department is one of mentorship. The department review statements can be thought of as a documentation of the mentoring process. As such, department review statements will not come as a surprise to the candidate because the assessments contained therein, both positive and negative, will have been addressed and hopefully resolved in the course of the mentoring relationship. Everything we suggest here is motivated by the Committee’s desire for department review statements to reflect the high standards we as faculty members set for ourselves both in faculty excellence and in faculty collegiality.
FPC understands that each department works according to its own patterns, personnel and history. In some cases, the department responsibility for mentoring and evaluating pre‐tenure colleagues will fall entirely to the chair. In departments with several senior members, the responsibility might be shared. In any case, the document that the department provides for the candidate’s review should reflect views that are representative of the department as a whole. We leave it to each department to establish a workable mechanism for providing this representative voice. We ask that the review letter state clearly the manner in which departmental input was solicited and included in the letter. We emphasize that departments have a responsibility to the pre‐tenure colleague to provide consistency and continuity as the role of chair passes from one person to another.
In preparing the department letter for candidates, the chair or other colleague designated by the department will have access to:
- course evaluations
- candidate’s statement
- candidate’s CV
- candidate’s scholarly materials
- previous department review and tenure statements
- any supplementary teaching materials, including SIPs supervised and advisees lists because these pertain to department workload
Chairs do not have access to:
- committee, faculty, and student letters because of the privacy expectations of those letters
- FPC’s tenure statement because it might contain quotes from or summaries of external reviews
- external reviews
- advocate’s statement