The other day Geoff Challen posted a blog entry about his negative tenure vote. Having spent roughly equal time on the getting-tenure and having-tenure sides of the table, I wanted to comment on the process a little. Before going any further I want to clarify that:
- I know Geoff, but not well
- I wasn’t involved in his case in any capacity, for example by writing a letter of support
- I have no knowledge of his tenure case beyond what was written up in the post
Speaking very roughly, we can divide tenure cases into four quadrants. First, the professor is doing well and the tenure case is successful — obviously this is what everybody wants, and in general both sides work hard to make it happen. Second, the professor is not doing well (not publishing at all, for example) and the tenure case is unsuccessful. While this is hugely undesirable, at least the system is working as designed. Third, the professor is not doing well and the tenure case is successful — this happens, but very rarely and usually in bizarre circumstances, for example where the university administration overrules a department’s decision. Finally, we can have a candidate who is doing well and then is denied tenure. This represents a serious failure of the system. Is this what happened to Geoff? It’s hard to be sure but his academic record looks to me like a strong one for someone at his career stage. But keep in mind that it is (legally) impossible for the people directly involved in Geoff’s case to comment on it, so we are never going to hear the other side of this particular story.
So now let’s talk about how tenure is supposed to work. There are a few basic principles (I suspect they apply perfectly well to performance evaluations in industry too). First, the expectations must be made clear. Generally, every institution has a written document stating the requirements for tenure, and if a department deviates from them, decisions they make can probably be successfully appealed. Here are the rules at my university. Junior faculty need to look up the equivalent rules at their institution and read them, but of course the university-level regulations miss out on department-specific details such as what exactly constitutes good progress. It is the senior faculty’s job to make this clear to junior faculty via mentoring and via informal faculty evaluations that lead up to the formal ones.
If you look at the rules for tenure at Utah, you can see that we’re not allowed to deny tenure just because we think someone is a jerk. On the other hand, there is perhaps some wiggle room implied in this wording: “In carrying out their duties in teaching, research/other creative activity and service, faculty members are expected to demonstrate the ability and willingness to perform as responsible members of the faculty.” I’m not sure what else to say about this aspect of the process: tenure isn’t a club for people we like, but on the other hand the faculty has to operate together as an effective team over an extended period of time.
The second principle is that the tenure decision should not be a surprise. There has to be ongoing feedback and dialog between the senior faculty and the untenured faculty. At my institution, for example, we review every tenure track professor every year, and each such evaluation results in a written report. These reports discuss the candidate’s academic record and provide frank evaluations of strengths and weaknesses in the areas of research, teaching, and service (internal and external). The chair discusses the report with each tenure-track faculty member each year. The candidate has the opportunity to correct factual errors in the report. In the third and sixth years of a candidate’s faculty career, instead of producing an informal report (that stays within the department), we produce a formal report that goes up to the university administration, along with copies of all previous reports. The sixth-year formal evaluation is the one that includes our recommendation to tenure (or not) the candidate.
A useful thing about these annual evaluations is that they provide continuity: the reports don’t just go from saying glowing things about someone in the fifth year to throwing them under the bus in the sixth. If there are problems with a case, this is made clear to the candidate as early as possible, allowing the candidate, the candidate’s mentor(s), and the department chair to try to figure out what is going wrong and fix it. For example, a struggling candidate might be given a teaching break.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is quite a bit of scrutiny and oversight in the tenure process. If a department does make a recommendation that looks bad, a different level of the university can overrule it. I’ve heard of cases where a department (not mine!) tried to tenure a research star who was a very poor teacher, but the dean shot down the case.
If you read the Hacker News comments, you would probably come to the conclusion that tenure decisions are made capriciously in dimly lit rooms by people smoking cigars. And it is true that, looking from the outside, the process has very little transparency. The point of this piece is that internally, there is (or should be) quite a bit of transparency and also a sane, well-regulated process with plenty of checks and balances. Mistakes and abuses happen, but they are the exception and not the rule.
Phil Guo, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian gave me a bit of feedback on this piece but as always any blunders are mine. Sam pointed me to The Veil, a good piece about tenure.