Tenure Criteria and the Job Search

A recent First Person essay in The Chronicle, “How Tenure Decisions Are Made,” by Michael Bugeja, my colleague down the road at Iowa State, and the subsequent discussion in the Chronicle‘s discussion Forums raise a number of important issues that should be of interest to academic job seekers.

The original essay caught my attention for several reasons, not least of which is Bugeja’s interest in attracting and retaining faculty in Iowa, a challenge with which I have some familiarity. The Forum discussions, though, raise a number of concerns about the breadth of his rhetoric, even as he opens with a discussion about understanding an institution and its priorities as one considers possible employment there, and then one’s potential bid for tenure.

My institution is in no way a research university. It is a small, teaching-oriented comprehensive baccalaureate college with a couple of small graduate programs and a very large, regional degree-completion program for adults who generally already hold an associate’s degree of some kind. Our campus has about 1,000 mostly residential, traditional-aged students, and the majority of our tenure-track faculty members are primarily involved with that particular student population.

So when we evaluate candidates for tenure, what do we look at? Bugeja writes that, “Typically, research earns promotion and tenure. Teaching is secondary, and often for good reason: You took a job as an educator. You’re expected to be competent in the classroom. If you are not, you’re gone on that basis alone unless your research involves grantsmanship or recognition of such high caliber so as to exempt you.”

While that is probably true at Iowa State, at a university like mine, teaching will be the determinative factor in almost every tenure decision. And you’ll probably need to be more than just “competent,” although determining how to measure that factor is an ongoing challenge at any institution that cares at all about teaching. If a candidate for tenure can’t demonstrate a solid level of student engagement in his or her courses, and adequate preparation of those students, that will probably be the death knell of his or her career here.

Scholarship is important as well, but truthfully, pretty much any evidence of scholarly or creative involvement will suffice. I doubt we’d tenure someone now with no publications — that person would need to be a true star in all other areas of evaluation — but (depending on the discipline) a couple of solid essays or papers, and a small number of conference presentations would do. A late colleague of mine used to talk about “evidence of an active and engaged mind,” and that is a formulation that I have since found to be useful.

You will also need to have a solid record of institutional service. Bugeja writes that, “Finally, you’ll note that I failed to focus on the importance of committee service in promotion and tenure decisions. A good department chair or governance document should shield you from too much service.” But taking such a comment to heart would be disastrously wrong for faculty members at a small institution like mine (and I can say from experience at four such institutions that that is generally the case there and not a quirk of my current university).

A lot of institutional service is, indeed, to borrow Samuel Johnson’s remark on Shakespeare’s love of puns, “the fatal Cleopatra for which [faculty at small institutions lose] the world and [are] content to lose it.” Still, at a place like mine, a great deal of the texture of institutional life, from the quality of campus events to the effectiveness of the co-curriculum, depends on the faculty’s willingness to pitch in and help.

Not every potential faculty member is interested in the kind of life led by faculty members at institutions like mine, and that’s fine. But it’s important to understand that different institutions have different priorities, and try to be as informed as possible about these priorities as you’re considering the shape you hope your career will take.