It has come to our attention that junior faculty have been counseled by not to publish results from their PhD thesis, as 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” (our emphasis).  One reading of […]

Who judges your case file? – By your colleagues. How is your case judged? – By the standards that your department, college and university colleagues have written, and using the written case that has been prepared. Two important points to note. The first is that it will benefit you to provide a well-written and straightforward […]

The summative parts of SEEQ in aggregate form can be used in case files. But can SEEQ comments be included in the tenure/promotion package? The Association has been in discussions with the Employer for some time concerning the status of free-form comments in student evaluation forms. As long as the encrypted ID can identify the […]

It is surprising how often we evaluate a colleague’s research career by metrics like publication counts, page counts, or order of authorship, which border on numerology, rather than considering the actual contribution. Although time is the true test of research, the reason we do this is that the practicalities of our processes force us to […]

Practice of professional skills remains a troublesome category for members in many units, particularly the professional colleges.  Similar problems are arising with the new Academic Programming appointments. The intent behind these appointment categories was to relax research expectations as defined in Section 4 of the University Standards so as to allow certain kinds of colleagues […]

Interdisciplinarity: the agony and the ecstasy. The university encourages interdisciplinary research, and many colleagues enjoy the excitement of working with a team on a project with a great deal of potential. But there are also potential pitfalls to doing this early in your career. Interdisciplinary work really means building a new area of specialization that […]

The various University, College, and Department Standards contain language to the effect that your research must have made a “significant achievement”, that your contribution is “recognized as substantial” by authorities here and abroad, and there must be “evidence of leadership in the establishment and execution of a clearly defined program of research”. There is considerable […]

Read your standards carefully. Similarly, write your standards carefully. For example, “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.” The first phrase narrowly ties a candidate to actually holding Tri- Council funding at the point of the tenure/promotion decision. This […]