Setting Good Standards for Promotion

Dean Dad observes that many faculty members have wildly different ideas about who should be promoted.

Some folks believe that promotions should be effectively automatic for the people with a certain number of years served — a sort of longevity bonus by another name. Others don’t go that far, but do want a set of clear, bright-line criteria that take most or all of the judgment out of the process. Some believe in clear sets of categories, but shy away from bright lines. And some believe that anybody a given department recommends should be a slam-dunk.

The problem in a unionized system is that “raises are across-the-board,” so “a full professor has nothing left to shoot for, other than her own intrinsic motivators,” he argues. Similarly, awarding promotions on the basis of seniority is generally a bad idea because, once a faculty member has tenure, there’s no external motivation to go the extra mile. From an administrative perspective, allowing each department to set its own promotion standards is too confusing, because “it means that you have as many different promotion standards as you do departments,” he writes. And tenure only complicates the issue.

Dean Dad likes the way a proprietary university he once worked at does things:

any given professor would be evaluated each year on a given set of criteria . . .. Each criterion would get a percentage weight. You’d get a score in each area. The weighted total score would convert to a certain number of points towards the next rank. When you accumulated enough points to get the next rank . . . you got it.

If you had a hot streak, promotions came faster; if you taught and went home, they came slower, but they weren’t surprises. People could decide whether it was worth their time to go the extra mile — some did, some didn’t.

Best of all, “hitting the top rank didn’t take the sting out of the system, since a given year’s point total also determined that year’s raise.” Full professors were rewarded for productive years, and “slapped on the wrist” for unproductive ones, he writes.