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A Call for Clarity

The first in a series on what assistant professors want and need to be successful in academe

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By CATHY TROWER and ANNE GALLAGHER

Yogi Berra once quipped, "You gotta be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Assistant professors on the tenure track couldn't agree more.

In national survey data collected from 2005 to 2007 by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, we found that pre-tenure faculty members are least clear about the standards for tenure and most clear about the timelines of the process. During recent interviews with 30 junior faculty members at six universities, we asked what would aid in their professional success. Every assistant professor we spoke with mentioned the need for a clearly defined, reasonable, and equitable path to tenure.

Here begins a series of five articles about what pre-tenure faculty members want and need to be satisfied and successful in their careers. Our conclusions are based on survey research and interviews we conducted at Coache, a research center housed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We'll focus first on the issue of clarity and fairness in the tenure process and, in future essays, look at collegiality, diversity, quality of life, and resources.

Tenure-track professors in our survey identified a confluence of four academic realities that cause them consternation and frustration. Let's take them in turn.

Vague and inconsistent tenure guidelines. Assistant professors want clear, specific guidelines about tenure requirements. Some, in fact, want a written contract with quantified and transparent standards by which they will be judged: "If I do this, I will get tenure."

Beyond excellence in teaching and scholarship, pre-tenure faculty members want to know: How much grant support do I need? In which journals should I publish? How much? Which type of committee work counts? What does "excellence" mean at my institution?

"You never really know where the bar is," one assistant professor told us in an interview. "I feel like since I started here the bar has been raised, which I encourage. But at the same time, you don't really know where that is."

Another assistant professor said, "I wish they would just make everything clear … the expectations. Everything wasn't written down. When I went up for my third-year review, I said, 'What protocols do you use? Do you have a manual that I can follow?' And they said, 'No.' They didn't even know how many copies [of my tenure file] I needed to make."

The majority of administrators, deans, and department chairs we interviewed expressed hesitancy about spelling out, as part of a contract or memorandum of understanding, the specific requirements for tenure. It is often accepted as de rigueur that pre-tenure faculty members should not receive concrete definitions of what excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service means.

"The faculty policy manual states what the expectations are — excellence in scholarship, excellence in teaching, and service (which is left pretty open)," one dean said. "It's the scholarship part that people would like to see be more contractual, and I completely understand when junior faculty say that it isn't transparent. … What they're looking for isn't just quantification but also information about where to publish. 'If I write five articles, and if I put two in top-tier journals and three in midtier journals, will I get tenure?' They would like a contract and I completely understand the impetus for that, but it isn't possible."

Lack of constructive feedback. Assistant professors want to know how they're doing (e.g., the timeline toward tenure; their progress as measured against standards). They also want acknowledgement from their chairs and department colleagues of major milestones.

"It would be great," said one tenure-track faculty member we interviewed, if administrators would "give a clear expectation, saying, 'You'll be good if you target this versus that at this stage. If you're only doing one article a year, this isn't going to be good.' Or, 'if your teaching evaluations are within this range, then you should actively seek out some kind of assistance.' Or, 'this is how many service obligations you should do this year.'"

Assistant professors want to know how best to use their time, and how to gauge whether to publish in certain venues and which research projects to pursue.

Said one department chair: "What I do with them is actually have a three- and a five-year plan. I say, 'What are your goals for the next level? And how would you do it?' Then I suggest that they do a timetable and we talk about it. … This process sometimes makes people think — 'OK, well, I'm really probably not going to be able to write that whole book in that period of time.' A lot of it's just about time management and choices about things … and advice about the process."

A culture of "don't ask, don't tell." Assistant professors say they operate in an environment in which tenured professors are mum or insist, "I did it this way, so should you." It seems to be expected that pretenure faculty members should know — whether by osmosis, socialization, or reading between the lines — what is expected of them. But that culture seems odd and unfair to many tenure-track faculty members.

"It's considered a weakness to ask questions," said one assistant professor we interviewed. "You're showing you're vulnerable. But I think it would be more stupid to not get tenure because I didn't ask."

And a senior professor who came up through the ranks at her institution said, "There is this pervasive and consistent attitude — a message that you are given all throughout your junior faculty years — about how you are not supposed to ask questions about expectations or requirements. You are just supposed to know. Ideally, we want an environment where junior faculty members can ask whatever they want."

Divergence between policy and practice. Sometimes what happens in practice seems to deviate from what is stated in campus policies — at least that's the perception. "You have to actually watch and see what happens to people ahead of you in the process," said one assistant professor, "because what is said in the policy is not always what happens."

A senior professor explained the contradictions this way: "Part of the tenure process, while it is based on these three criteria, is also about [being] 'clubable.' … The senior faculty are undecided on whether they want you in their club. … This is an elite club and you need to find ways of making the senior faculty feel comfortable with you, and that certainly introduces arbitrariness and contingency into the process."

Another senior faculty member agreed, "I've talked to a lot of junior faculty members who have gotten wildly divergent messages from faculty in their own department about what they are expected to do for promotion to associate professor."

So what can colleges and universities do to ensure a transparent tenure process and a fair application of promotion standards?

Adopt formal written policies. Institutions should provide written, universitywide, accessible tenure policies that include timelines, pertinent deadlines, a clear distillation of the criteria against which one is evaluated, and the protocol used when considering tenure cases. Disseminating the policy widely — to tenure-track faculty members, senior professors, department chairs, and administrators — promotes transparency and consistency in terms of how tenure cases are decided.

Within Coache, Kenyon College is one of the institutions we look to as a role model for the clarity of its tenure policies. It uses explicit language in its faculty handbook about the criteria for evaluation, stating that "teaching excellence is the sine qua non for retention and advancement" and that "nothing can extenuate poor teaching." The handbook specifies five essential elements of effective teaching, five for scholarship, and eight for service.

Another good example is California State University at Fullerton, which provides a Web site with policies, time lines, flow charts, coversheets, and checklists. Pre-tenure faculty members receive full performance reviews against specific criteria during their second, fourth, and sixth years and abbreviated reviews in years three and five.

Offer workshops. Several institutions have added sessions on tenure review to their orientation programs for new faculty members. Others periodically offer workshops and Q&A sessions for assistant professors.

At Stanford University, the provost meets annually with tenure-track faculty members to explain the institution's tenure process and criteria in depth. Every other year, that meeting is followed by small-group sessions, led by experienced senior professors from different disciplines, who have served on promotion committees and are equipped to give advice on how to navigate the process at Stanford.

At Duke University, the provost holds a similar workshop, and invites the deans and the current or former chair of the campus promotion and tenure committee to answer questions.

Michigan State University provides a workshop called "Survive and Thrive in the MSU Tenure System" that walks participants through the process and suggests ways to track and document their accomplishments. The morning concludes with an hour during which assistant professors ask questions and raise concerns with a panel of chairs and tenured faculty members.

Interpret tenure policies. Most institutions strive for clarity and transparency, yet assistant professors remain insecure about the tenure process, in part because the requirements cannot be quantified specifically for every individual in a one-size-fits-all policy.

But individual schools and departments can, informally, clarify the ambiguity that results from a university's desire to leave room for interpretation and flexibility. That might mean providing assistant professors with a clear explanation of how specific policies are interpreted by the dean on a school level and by the chair on a departmental level. Some chairs invite tenure-track professors to lunch individually, and as a group, to create open forums where they can ask questions.

Many of the tenure-track faculty members we interviewed could think of at least one senior colleague whom they felt comfortable approaching for advice and affirmation — fodder for our next article on collegiality.