First Person

Getting Promoted

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person The Rejection Letter I Wish I Could Send If we had to make up a story for why you might be interested in our position, then interviewing you was too risky. Peer Review Hirings and Firings The new law school at the University of California at Irvine gets some high-profile hires ... and other appointment news. Ms. Mentor Does This Make Me Look Old? Advice on how best to dress, and act, when you look as young as your students. Career News Gone, and Being Forgotten Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Dennis Baron

Last year I wrote a series of articles for the Career Network about the hiring process at my institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It seems a fitting next step to write about our promotion and tenure process. I hope that this look at what happens in one Midwestern English department may have some relevance to professors and administrators in other departments -- whether they're the ones being promoted, or the ones doing the promoting.

Many readers have heard -- or experienced firsthand -- horror stories about promotions gone bad, institutional attempts to undermine tenure, or vendettas conducted against blameless colleagues up for promotion. I myself went through tenure three times before I got it, but I have no horror stories to relate, no promotion ax to grind.

My own experience with the tenure process makes me well aware of the toll it takes on junior faculty members. It can be nerve-racking even with a rock-solid case. I have neither the time nor the expertise to advise you on the particulars of your own promotion case. There are lawyers who specialize in promotions in trouble; some work for the university, others for the candidate. But I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, and so I cannot offer an opinion about the legalistic jockeying that promotions can trigger.

Instead I offer my own subjective observations and interpretations of how promotions work in my shop, with digressions on some of the wrinkles and roadblocks that make the process interesting, or in some cases terrifying. While the examples I give are true, I have omitted some details and camouflaged others to preserve the confidentiality of the promotion process, and to protect the sensibilities of those involved.

I learned almost nothing about being promoted when I was a tenure candidate. I was so preoccupied with feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and self-pity that I couldn't even make eye contact with my colleagues, let alone pay attention to the details of the cruel game being played with my life. My later promotion to full professor came quickly and without pain -- a welcome change from the wild tenure roller coaster -- but it, too, left me clueless about the promotion process.

I learned about promotions when I became a department chairman, and I became responsible for developing cases and moving them through the three levels of review: department, college, and campus. At an orientation session for department heads, administrators told us that tenure represented a million-dollar, lifetime commitment on the part of the university, so departments in making tenure decisions should seriously consider these two questions: Will the candidate develop a national reputation for excellence? Will the department do better by hiring anew?

I came away from the orientation thinking that the systems of promotion we work within are imperfect but well-intentioned, balancing the interests of the institution and the individual faculty member. In an ideal case, these interests coincide, and the promotion goes through without the slightest friction. In practice, though, I found that few promotion cases are ideal; most have a rough edge here or a fault line there. Perhaps a publisher has dragged out the acceptance process, or an external reviewer remembers a perceived slight at a conference some years before. Maybe one department colleague objects to the candidate's innovative teaching style, or another resents the circumstances surrounding her hire.

If on balance the candidate's teaching and research are on the cutting edge, these irregularities won't be a problem. But if there are too many glitches in a record, requiring too many explanations, the case for promotion will be harder to make.

Consider this case:

Smithers presented a strong tenure case to the English department. Her book was about to be published; she was acquiring a national reputation; she was directing dissertations; and her teaching and service were exemplary. Five outside evaluators wrote letters praising her scholarship as innovative and field-extending.

The tenured faculty members of the department voted unanimously to recommend her tenure, but the dean's committee wanted to know why the chapters in Smithers's book had the same titles as the chapters in her dissertation. After all, the committee reminded me when I was called before it, the dissertation got Smithers her tenure-track job; the book, which should be a totally new piece of work, was what would gain her tenure.

My task as department head was to defend the case my department had approved. It helped that I believed strongly in the candidate's merits. So I tried to educate the dean's committee on how the department judges excellence, and to prove to them what to me went without saying: that Smithers's book was much more than her dissertation. In English we find it normal for an assistant professor's first major research project, typically a book, to derive from the dissertation. Other disciplines -- German, for example, or the sciences -- expect a new research project, completely unrelated to the candidate's graduate work, since they assume that graduate work reflects the interests and strengths of the director of that work, not of the candidate.

But graduate work in English is different: The dissertation is a solo effort, a piece of original, independent scholarship. Topics are not dictated by dissertation directors but thought up, researched, and realized entirely by the candidate. But I agree that the book must be more than the dissertation, the equivalent of a brand-new research project worth four years or more of additional effort.

In writing her book, Smithers not only revised her dissertation extensively, she also did new research, and added a significant amount of new material, including two new chapters not present in the dissertation. I read a few passages from the dissertation and the book out loud to the committee, illustrating differences in content as well as sentence structure. I pointed out that the book was setting out to prove an entirely different thesis from the dissertation. But while Smithers created a new work with only distant connections to her dissertation, she saw no need to rename her chapters. The dean's committee grudgingly relented, and the case squeaked through by one vote, but I came away with the distinct feeling that, like Hamlet's mother, I protested too much, that the committee thought that Smithers and I could be putting something over on them.

In the end, Smithers got promoted because she deserved to. But I learned an important lesson: When writing up the promotion dossier, I must always anticipate the questions that can be asked about a case, even if the answers seem obvious to me. Smithers's book was twice as long as her dissertation, so it never occurred to me that anyone could think it was the diss warmed over. Since then, I explain in every candidate's dossier how the book derives from the dissertation, and exactly how it differs. I've had other cases with problems, but this particular issue hasn't come up again.

Speaking of the first book, if you're an assistant professor of English at a Research I university and you haven't written that book yet, I suggest you get busy.

Getting a tenure-track job is stressful enough, but once you've got one, there's precious little time to sit back and relax: The tenure clock is running, and promotion is right around the corner. Tenure decisions are typically made in the sixth year, and even if you haven't unpacked your books or cashed your first real paycheck, those six years flash by in but a moment.

OK, you may be thinking, you know you have some writing to do. But how does tenure actually happen?

In the old days, tenure often came out of the blue: You'd be walking down the hall and your department head might stop you to say, offhandedly, "Say, I'm glad I ran into you. You've got tenure!" That actually happened to a friend of mine in physics. He had no idea he was even being considered for tenure at the time. Perhaps later in the day the same department head accosted a less-successful assistant professor in the coffee lounge with an equally genial, "Hawking, it's time for you to look for another job."

Most colleges and universities have long since developed explicit procedures for tenure and promotion, and an appeals process when tenure is denied. At the University of Illinois, our promotion candidates often get more information than they can assimilate. Each year our provost publishes a detailed "Tenure Rules of the Road" booklet and posts a set of frequently asked questions on his Web site. Here's what you can learn from such information:

• Your publications on your CV should be listed from earliest to most recent.

• You have to request copies of your student evaluations directly from the instructional-resources office.

• Your department will prepare a list of external reviewers who will be asked to evaluate your scholarship, and you may contribute some names to this list.

• You may also name a couple of external reviewers who should not be asked to comment on your work.

Here's what your department head can learn from the administration's handouts:

• Promotion dossiers can't be longer than 30 pages -- and even that is too long.

• "Microscopic fonts," less than 10-point type, will draw special disfavor from campus committees.

• External reviewers should be full professors at peer or better institutions.

• The department can override the candidate's reviewer blacklist if it really needs to.

But even with this wealth of information, promotion candidates have little idea what goes on from day to day, or week to week, as a promotion moves through the system. Some prefer not to know, taking a "wake me when it's over" approach to the whole, painful business. After all, the road to tenure and promotion remains the most stressful aspect of academic life.

Not getting a job might seem like the end of the world. Not getting tenure can be more like the end of the universe, so watching your promotion unfold over the course of a year may be a torture best avoided. But once you're in the loop, you can't not think about the promotion, and throwing light on the process may dispel some of the paranoia that many promotees experience.

Sure, things are going on behind your back when you're being reviewed, but more often than not they are tedious clerical and procedural details rather than life-or-death evaluative decisions, and they aren't typically conspiratorial in nature. Of course there are some promotions that fail, but in every case that I have observed, departments and committees have made every effort to look for reasons to promote, and they turn down promotions only with great reluctance.

So in the interests of baring it all, in my next installment we will meet some "typical" promotion candidates and follow their cases through the system. Along the way we'll consider the promotion dossier (who writes what to whom, and to what end?); candidate input (it's your promotion, and you have to work for it); the role of the department head (it's my promotion too, and I have to work for it); choosing external reviewers (make sure they're not all from the same ZIP code); the departmental evaluation of research, teaching, and service (you have to make your colleagues understand you); college and campus promotion committees (quality control that really does work); and the appeals process (hopefully you won't need it, but you should know it's there), as well as what to expect when you finally get that well-deserved promotion (it's rather like finishing your dissertation: a sense of relief, followed by the harrowing realization that your real work has just begun).