So far in this series on the tenure and promotion process, I have been following the fortunes of Allison Porchnik (not her real name) as her tenure case in the English department unfolded at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I've already told the story of how Porchnik's case nearly stalled in the collegewide executive committee, although ultimately it was approved by a narrow vote and sent on to the provost's universitywide promotion and tenure committee. Another promotion also ran into trouble in the college committee. It was the bid of an associate professor of English -- I'll call him Virgil Starkwell -- for promotion to full professor. To resolve questions that arose in Starkwell's case, the dean decided to ask for additional external evaluations.
The university had hired Starkwell in the late 1960s, when faculty jobs were plentiful. The story goes that the dean at the time drove around to the big graduate schools in the Midwest and the Northeast, offering jobs to anyone with a pulse and a dissertation nearing completion.
Of course that's not what actually happened: There were real faculty searches then, just as there are now. But in the '60s, colleges and universities were expanding, and most graduate students who wanted them found decent academic jobs. Whatever his selection methods, the dean at the time even managed to hire faculty members who turned out to be the department's brightest stars.
Tenure was almost as easy to get in those days as a job, but at the turn of the '70s, the expansion suddenly stopped, standards tightened, and assistant professors began being turned down for tenure. The handful of faculty members who had managed to become associate professors without a published book, and who showed no sign of being able to produce one after tenure, remained "lifetime" associate professors, stuck at that rank for the rest of their careers.
Starkwell was one of several department members hired in the golden years whose research seemed to stall out after he got tenure. He worked consistently to lay the groundwork for his book. That done, he'd be ready for the actual writing. But there was always one more article to read, one more language to learn, one more manuscript to track down in an obscure provincial library, if he could only get over to England. So not much got written.
Along the way, though, Starkwell had become a solid department citizen. A little retro perhaps, when it came to new turns in the curriculum, but always a beacon of personal integrity, Starkwell could deal fairly and efficiently with colleagues and students, and he had managed to head just about every department committee as well as serve in a number of key administrative roles.
Then after 20 years of scholarly doldrums, Virgil Starkwell got his scholarship back on track. One day, like Rip van Winkle awakened, Starkwell burst through his writer's block. He crafted a new topic, bought a personal computer, and started to publish. The publications were not ones to shake up the field, but neither could they be ignored: a well-regarded edition of a neglected poet's opus, an appreciation of a mainstream novelist, an essay on European modernists in a not-too-shabby literary quarterly.
These publications found readers, even fans: a literary lion praised Starkwell in a high-brow British newspaper. Another Starkwell article found a home. There was a contract for a monograph from a second-tier university press. So Starkwell, with a service record that was legendary, a revived scholarly career, and retirement not too far off, went up for full professor. The promotion would mean a nice bump in salary. It wouldn't cost the university much -- maybe $25,000 or $30,000 over the next five years, a mere pittance compared with the million-dollar investment that comes with tenure. That salary boost would only partially make up for the minimal raises he received in the lean years, and it would eventually boost his pension. But the money was only part of his motivation: In going for the promotion, Starkwell also sought the satisfaction of making it to the top faculty rank.
Starkwell's external reviewers praised his strong dissertation that had once influenced their own work and, though never published, was still being cited. They acknowledged the long slack period and remarked positively but not effusively on the new scholarship. The department supported the promotion, earned through noble service and the new publications.
But the college committee balked. Promotion to full professor at my university usually follows national recognition of scholarly achievement. Of course there are precedents at most institutions for rewarding extraordinary service combined with stalled scholarship suddenly turned around. Nonetheless, the committee members wanted an explanation for what they viewed as 20 years in the wilderness.
Mostly they wanted a trigger for the promotion. Why now? they asked. Why not wait to see whether this burst of energy would be sustained? Did we really want to promote a consistent underperformer? Give Starkwell a handsome raise, they suggested, to reward the new productivity and encourage him to continue. But promoting him would cheapen the title of full professor, some of them insisted, and the committee was having none of it.
My response to the committee's objections was unequivocal: The promotion was the right thing to do. And it was right to do it now, so that the institution could benefit from Starkwell's renewed energy in the few remaining years before his retirement. The committee wasn't convinced, but the dean was sympathetic. He decided to postpone a vote while he contacted two additional reviewers for Starkwell.
That took time, and while Allison Porchnik had the comfort of knowing that her promotion had moved on to the next level, Virgil Starkwell spent a depressing month wondering whether his efforts had been wasted after all.
When Starkwell's new reviews came in, they didn't differ appreciably from the first round of reports. Reviewers contacted by a dean late in the game know that a promotion is in trouble, and if they're at all sympathetic, their words may be just a little more upbeat. In any case, the additional reviews confirmed for the dean, and for at least some of his committee, that while the new scholarship didn't shift any paradigms, it was both solid stuff and likely to continue. The overall record, in their view, represented promise fulfilled and therefore warranted promotion. The college committee's vote was split, but it did favor the candidate, so the dean finally supported Starkwell's promotion to professor and moved it up to the next level of review.
Both Porchnik and Starkwell met with opposition in the college committee, but as it turned out, although both sweated the long months of waiting, neither case was problematic for the provost's committee. Porchnik won tenure and Starkwell won promotion.
To illustrate what can go wrong at this level, however, I'll share a few cases that were problematic. The provost's committee, made up of faculty members appointed from across the campus, reviews promotions to associate and full professor from all of the university's colleges. The committee meets through the winter and makes most of its decisions by the end of March. But the provost doesn't announce the final promotion results until early May, because some cases raise issues that take extra time to resolve. In the mean time, long, cold months go by with no news.
For most promotion candidates, no news is no news. But questions are raised about a few promotions every year, and the provost, like the deans and the departments, occasionally turns a promotion down. If a member of the provost's committee has concerns about a case, the committee chair queries the dean, who refers the question to the department. Until recently, these questions came down from the campus committee in writing. The department head would respond, in writing, to the dean, who would in turn write back to the provost's committee.
The procedure is a little more direct now: The committee summons deans and department heads to appear in person to answer questions. I haven't been a member of the campuswide committee, nor have I been summoned to appear. But I have had to write responses to its concerns.
The provost's committee has a reputation for raising issues of pedagogy. They did so with a faculty member I'll call Professor Mellish, whose low student evaluations mirrored the disdain she felt for all but the top students in her classes. But that was before my time as chairman. What the committee wanted to know from me -- in the promotion case of Judy Roth (not her real name) -- had nothing to do with teaching. The committee members were upset that the English department hadn't picked more prestigious external reviewers for her work.
The provost all but insists that reviewers be full professors from universities much farther up the food chain than we are. But Roth had two "weak" reviewers on her list. In my written comments to the committee, I elaborated on the reviewers' credentials, which were, in fact, beyond reproach, and I noted that these reviewers came from Roth's own list of potential referees.
While I did advise her to follow the provost's instructions when it came to recommending reviewers, I couldn't simply ignore the list that she had carefully and deliberately prepared. Roth's promotion got through, but I was warned that if we didn't tighten up on choosing reviewers, the department's promotion cases would suffer.
The provost's committee was also skeptical about Miles Monroe (another alias), questioning his ability to conduct sustained scholarly research. Monroe had just managed to have his book accepted for publication the week that my department had voted on his tenure bid. While some colleagues in the department might argue that a last-minute acceptance is the next best thing to an actual book, we would all prefer to see a record of sustained research and publication over the probationary period, not a flurry at the end that looks like a hasty effort to make up for lost time.
Committees upstairs are always suspicious that such last-minute efforts signal candidates who can produce only if their jobs are at stake. The committees argue that once you award tenure and take away the threat of unemployment, these late bloomers will go back to sleep.
Maybe so, but in my experience if the last-minute work is high quality, then there will be more high-quality work to follow. I won Monroe's case by demonstrating the strength of his book, and the likelihood that it would make a significant reputation both for him and for the department.
I may have won that case, but after a series of candidates with cliffhanger acceptances from publishers, that argument got stale, and eventually one of our candidates for tenure got turned down. But that must be another story, for another column.
Not all tenure decisions have the right outcome, and not all tenure decisions have a happy outcome. Next I'll talk about what happens when a case fails: the avenues of appeal, the issues of morale, the overall effect on the candidate and on the department of a promotion shot down.
