If renewal of probation, tenure or promotion is in the cards for you in the coming year, following are some tips to help you prepare.
You can elect to go for tenure or promotion in any year if you believe you have met standards that apply to you. You must seek renewal of probation in the final year of your initial probationary appointment or seek tenure, and you must seek tenure in the final year of your renewed probationary appointment.
Be sure you know which standards of performance (standards) apply to you. For renewal and tenure, the standards in effect at the time of your appointment apply. If standards change before you go for tenure, you have the option of choosing to use new standards. For promotion, the most recent standards apply.
There are seven categories in the standards that form the basis for tenure and promotion. The standard of performance for renewal of probation is satisfactory progress toward meeting tenure standards across the majority of categories, one of which must include teaching or research/practice of professional skills. The standard of performance for tenure and promotion is to meet the standard in all categories.
Read standards carefully and work to understand the meaning of all terms. “The candidate must hold a Tri-Council grant” means something very different from “There must be evidence that the candidate can obtain Tri-Council funding.” If your standards are vague, you should ask how they have been interpreted in the past. Your Dean, Department Head, faculty mentor, or a colleague recently through the process, should be able to provide you with further advice.
The responsibility to prepare a case file is shared between you and your Department Head or Dean in a non-departmentalized college. The committee chair (Department Head or Dean) gathers the information and documentation for the committee to consider. You are entitled to a list of what has been gathered. It is then your responsibility to submit any other information to the chair you think is necessary for the committee to consider. You are also responsible for writing a self-assessment.
Keeping your case file to an appropriate length is wise. However, you will need to educate your reader (your file will be read by others outside of your discipline). Your self-assessment is an opportunity to help Review Committee members understand the information in your case file. Explain the publishing culture in your discipline – is it a book every two or three years, or is it several shorter papers annually? Explain the nature and importance of your contribution to multi-authored publications – is being listed first significant or are authors listed alphabetically?
It is important to demonstrate scholarly independence and momentum. There are compelling reasons for continuing to publish results from your PhD thesis, and/or with your PhD supervisor. However, the various standards require that tenure and promotion candidates provide “compelling evidence that a body of high quality scholarly work has been completed beyond that demonstrated at appointment.” Review Committee members need you to explain how independent you are and how you are building on work begun in your thesis.
For tenure, and promotion to full professor, independent external reviewers will be called upon to judge independently whether you have met standards that apply to you. Your standards will describe the process for selecting external reviewers, and while you will not know who the external reviewers will be, you will have input into deciding on a group of potential reviewers.
Notify your Department Head or Dean as soon as possible that you intend to go forward for tenure or promotion, but no later than June 15.
By June 30, you should have been advised to provide anything you want included in your case file and it needs to be in by August 1.