For anyone in an academic career, or considering an academic career, the question of tenure is of primary importance. Although this session only lasts an hour, almost every other session during the day has something to do with getting tenure. So if your questions about tenure don't happen to get answered in this hour, there will be lots of opportunities to ask them later on.
I'll start out by saying a few words about my background and then pass the mike over to Janie Irwin. After telling you something about herself, Janie will describe the tenure process at Penn State University. She is going to give you a fairly comprehensive overview. Not all departments are the same but it is useful to see a complete picture of how tenure is handled in a typical department.
When Janie finishes I will discuss some of the ways that other institutions differ from Penn State in handling tenure, and give you some of my own perspective on the tenure process. After that we'll open it up for questions. I am confident that virtually everybody in this room is good at asking questions, and I'm going to ask you to demonstrate that when we get to this part. OK, let me say something about myself. Obviously, my name is Maria Klawe. I'm currently the Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I used to worry that people did not know where UBC was. Now I don't have this problem since UBC was site of the three Bs summit last month, i.e. Bill, Boris, and Bryan. If you were watching TV you know how beautiful it is there.
I'm coming to the end of my five-year term as head. Before joining the University of British Columbia I spent 8 years at the IBM Almaden Research Center. What this really means is that I didn't go through the tenure process in the usual way - because I came as a tenured full professor. Believe me this is the easy way to do it, --- laughter--- but I don't recommend it for the following reason. I think that my husband, Nick Pippenger, and I caught the end of the wave where it was easy for senior people to transfer from industry into good academic departments. It is my impression that, for a whole number of reasons (one of which is that you young people are so incredibly good), universities aren't nearly as interested in hiring people at senior levels anymore. So even though this method of getting tenure worked fine for me, I don't recommend it as a general strategy.
During my five years at UBC I have been involved in a large number of tenure cases. I have a good sense of what happens in my department and in my Faculty (Science), and how decisions are made and what is important. Four people in my department came up for tenure this year and all were successful; however, there are still 11 untenured faculty members in my department. Thus I have been spending a lot of time over the past few years talking with my untenured faculty members about what's involved in the tenure process. It's wonderful to have all of you here today to talk about this issue. Now I'll turn the session over to Janie.
Two years ago I volunteered to become department head for a three year term. Of course we are becoming a new department and the department head situation has not been resolved yet. It's getting late but my guess is that I'll be serving another two or three year term as department head for this new department. And for those of you that are still wandering in, there are three handouts which I'm going to introduce and wave around but I'm not going to go into them in detail; they are for you to read at your leisure.
So you've got two copies of college criteria, one from a college of science and one from a college of engineering. As you read through those you will find that although there are a lot of similarities there are some not so subtle differences. You should make sure you understand your college criteria because your dean is going to be very important in this promotion and tenure decision process. And then there may also be department criteria, but typically those are the college criteria that are taken and copied with an additional title on the top of the department that you are in. They may be augmented somewhat from the college criteria but typically these two are the same. So you have samples there you should look at. When you get to your institution, the first thing you should do is make sure that you look at university and college criteria for the college that you are in. There are also usually lots of extra handouts that you can collect on the promotion and tenure process. You should familiarize yourself with all of that.
One thing that you have to be aware of in this process is that there are many review levels.
Then your folder goes to the college level. There is a committee at the college level that consists of senior professors in the college appointed typically by the dean. I don't know any of these committees that are elected by the college but that is a possibility. At Penn State they are all appointed by the dean. They do the same kind of evaluation process, looking at the letters that were supplied by the department committee and the department head, and make a recommendation to the dean. Then the dean takes the folder looking at those three sets of letters plus everything else that's in there. We're going to talk about what you want to start keeping track of for your dossier in a little bit here. He or she does an evaluation, probably he for most of us, and adds an additional letter to the folder and sends that folder to the university level committee. The university level committee is senior faculty from all units within the university. It looks at the folder with those four supporting letters, makes it's own recommendation, and forwards it to the Provost, President, or Chancellor depending on what you happen to have at your own university.
You will find that the criteria at these levels may differ. In particular, at the department and college level where I am, research is very important. You have to have excelled in research in order to go to the next level and the promotion and tenure process can stop at any level. It could stop at that level and the word could be no and it will not go any further. When I was going through this process myself and I was getting nervous because I hadn't heard anything, I'd go to my department head and he would say, "As long as you haven't heard anything, that means it's still in the system, so don't worry." And if you hear early, then that's typically not good news. As long as it moves forward it goes on to the next committee and you don't hear anything until it finally pops out the end and the board of trustees have approved it.
As I was saying, criteria vary at different levels. In particular we are beginning to see more emphasis on teaching, looking back at teaching effectiveness and teaching evaluations. That's becoming more important, particularly at the university level. So now you have to excel not only in research but you have to excel in teaching.
There is another aspect that is important and that is that you get feedback. It's important that you don't sit there for six years not knowing whether you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing. You really need to get feedback. I think written feedback is very important and I found out this does not happen in all universities. The process at Penn State is that every year I sit down with my junior faculty, actually I sit down with all my faculty but with junior faculty in particular, in a formal setting. I meet with them all the time but this is a formal appointment at the end of the year to do a yearly evaluation to talk to them about how they've done on the components that constitute the promotion and tenure file.
At the second and fourth year we have a formal process of letter writing. In the college of science the department committee, the department head, and the dean all evaluate a folder, your dossier, that is your curriculum vite at that point and write a letter saying what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. These letters are hard to read. They are not always, in fact they are never, all glowing. It's important to give you guidance at this point and so they say explicitly you should pay more attention to this or that. For example, "you should make sure that those papers that you are getting in refereed conference proceedings (which are very rewarding because you get to go and talk to your colleagues and present the paper) get turned around into archival journal papers. Something that a lot of us don't do as regularly as we should.
Those can be two and three page letters. They are long letters, not something that is just short and sweet. They are really evaluation letters. We are almost doing fifth year evaluations on everyone, that is written evaluations, I think it's important to get written evaluations because it's very easy for you to sit down with your department head and hear what you want to hear or for them not to be as perhaps aggressive as they should be in telling you the bad news as well as the good news. If you see it in black and white, you read it, you understand it, you take it to heart, so it's very important to get written feedback in the process. And if you don't have a procedure for that at your university I encourage you to go to your department head and ask for written feedback. Ihe e college of engineering, the college committee participates in the fourth year evaluation so they do a written evaluation as well. So once again there is an example where, even within a university, the process is different from college to college.
Ok, what do you want to put in your dossier? Well, there are four cells at Penn State: teaching, research and scholarship (I don't know how to differentiate the two so I always refer to them in one line), and service. Service counts about one percent where I am. I try not to ask my junior faculty to do service. It's tough because they are usually very good and very eager, very hard working, and the tendency is to let them do it because they do a great job, but it's not fair to them. Teaching has become more important over the past several years and I expect it to continue. I put it in the range of somewhere between 15 and 25 percent as far as how much it counts in the folder, and the rest is research and scholarship.
Ok, you need to prime likely candidates for recommendation letters. Now I say likely; at least where I am the candidate is not allowed to come up with a list of people that we write to for letters. In fact, they are not even allowed to suggest names, although if I get a piece of email with a some names in it I don't ignore it. That's not true at every institution. At many institutions you're are allowed to suggest names. That doesn't mean that those names cannot be augmented. So, how do you prime likely candidates? Well, you start to meet people and as you meet people who you think are people that might be able to write a supportive letter for you (they should really be at the full professor level; they can be associates but our deans prefer full professors), find out if they're interested in your work. If you do a particularly nice paper, send them a copy of it with a cover letter. Don't flood them every couple of months because they are all busy people. But every once in a while send them something. Or, this is one piece of service that you can do and I try to track all my junior faculty into it. In their fourth year I ask them if they want to be colloquium chair. Colloquium chair means you get to invite all your friends if you want, but if you plan it right what you do is you invite all those likely candidates to come to your home institution to give a talk. You get to spend a day with them, talking to them, and you have your students talk to them, and you get to show them your vision of research and they get to give a talk and th eir way is paid etc. So they end up maybe owing you a favor so that in your fifth year you can call them up and say, "Hey, I'd like to come and give a talk."
So in your fourth and fifth year you start to invite yourself elsewhere and sometimes you have to pay for it out of your own pocket. Sometimes you do it because you happen to be at a conference at a nearby site and you call up (I know it's uncomfortable but we need to do it) someone at a nearby institution and say, "You know, I'm going to be in the area. Would there be a chance that you would want me to come by and give a colloquium presentation?" I'm sure there are other ideas here--these are just ones I jotted down, but something you do need to start thinking about and you need some support from your department head at least in this area so that you have a chance to build up those favors.
What I wanted to do is close with a couple of case studies. I did the happy ending first, but I think I want to talk about the sad ending first so this is my case two. And both of these cases happen to be men. So if I slip and say "he", that's because both of these happen to be men. I haven't dealt with a case at Penn State myself of a woman going through the promotion and tenure process. In fact at the moment I'm the only woman in the department.
Make sure your research publications are significant. This particular person had made contributions in a number of areas, he hadn't just worked in one area, which could have hurt him because once again it made his research theme hard for these external letter writers to define, but he made enough solid, really solid, contributions in these areas that it didn't hurt him. In fact, it helped. And he got very strong letters of recommendation, and the case went through very nicely.
So, Maria, I'm done at that point.
How can you find out about these expectations? One very good idea, suggested by Mary Vernon, is to ask to see the CVs of people who recently got tenure. Because they were successful these people will probably be quite happy to show their CVs to you, and it will give you a good idea of what is expected.
The other obvious method is to talk to the department chair when you are interviewing. You should definitely make sure that you discuss this at the point when an offer is made. It's always a bit dicey about when and how to first raise the issue--do you want to come across at your interview as being really scared that you might not get tenure? Obviously not. You want to come across as being a realistic person who understands what the expectations of the department and the institution are. So the timing and style is something you should handle carefully.
Let me talk for a moment about how expectations at institutions differ. In particular I'll talk about two models representing how tenure is viewed at universities. In describing the two models I'm going to use some specific names of universities since I think it will make things clearer. I hope that nobody will find what I say offensive. Let me use MIT, Harvard, and Stanford and Princeton as examples of my first model. These are universities where a substantial number of very good people who are hired as assistant professors do not receive tenure. Individuals denied tenure often go on to receive tenure and be promoted at other outstanding universities and do exceptionally well for the rest of their career. I am not suggesting that there is something wrong with MIT and Harvard, etc.; they simply use a model in which a relatively small fraction of tenure-track assistant professors are expected to get tenure. They believe this model builds the kind of institution that they want, and can give you many reasons to justify their strategy.
This model obviously has some negative impact on the climate for junior people, but there are still excellent reasons to accept a position at such a university. There are often tremendous advantages in being at these universities even for a few years. Moreover, if you fail to get tenure it's not a death sentence. If you do get an offer from such a university you need to balance the advantages with the possibility that you may be on the job market again in a few years. You need to think through the consequences of having to move in relation to two-body problems, and for your children if you have them. Finally, while it is common knowledge that it is fairly difficult to receive tenure at the universities I mentioned, there are others with similar tenure policies that are less well-known. So ask!
The second model is that each person hired into a tenure track position is expected to get tenure, so long as they meet the expectations of the university. That happens to be the model at UBC where I'm department chair. It's the model at all Canadian universities as far as I know. It's often the model at many universities in the United States. The important thing is what are those expectations? Janie has been telling you the expectations at Penn State. I'll describe those at UBC for comparison; they are fairly similar.
First, we have the same kinds of levels, but you come up for tenure in your fifth year. Thus it's a shorter process and this makes it harder in some sense. In our university the crunch level is the faculty level, namely at the advisory committee to the dean. This committee is made up of the department heads and associate deans in the faculty. This committee reverses (positive) department decisions perhaps 15-20% of the time. I've never seen the committee reverse a negative department decision. My impression is that it's rare in any institution to see negative decisions at a lower level reversed at a higher level.
At UBC, like Penn State, the critical factors are research, teaching, and service. For research, UBC wants to see clear indications that individuals have established themselves as being in the top two or three among their peers in Canada, preferably as in the top two or three among their peers, in their research area, in North America. Now the whole question is, how big is the research area? If we say Computer Science, that's pretty hard. If you say working on interactive proof systems that's quite a bit easier. In any case, a lot depends on how well you have established the fact that you are a leader in some area. This has to do with what Janie was saying about focusing your research.
UBC looks very hard at the quality of where you publish your research. Thus it's important to concentrate on top journals and conferences. Each department head has to give an accurate description of the quality and prestige of each journal and conference in which a candidate has published, and this information accumulates over the years. Journal publications are particularly important. It is simply not enough to publish in the most prestigious refereed conferences, though such conference publications do count. UBC also looks at the letters of recommendation extremely carefully, as well as who wrote the letters. UBC expects letters from leaders in the field, especially from full professors at top departments.
As far as teaching goes, I've seen a noticable shift over the last few years. Five years ago, an outstanding researcher who was barely competent as a teacher might have gotten tenure without major problems. Today, such an individual would definitely not get tenured. Conversely, a candidate who is a superb teacher and a respectable researcher will probably get tenure today, but not five years ago.
Now I'd like to talk briefly about service since the situation is different in my department from many others. There are people here who know the people in my department. They know that our assistant professors put a huge amount of effort into service. This differs from Janie's department. Why is this? It's clear that service takes time away from research and teaching. There are two reasons. One is that we are building a department and we cannot build the department without everybody working. The technical staff work on it, the secretaries work on it, the students work on it, and so do all the junior people. We are trying to take a department that was quite small and sleepy, a department with some excellent people but not in the top ranks, and just sort of lift it up and make it one of the best departments in North America. That's a lot of work. Many of our junior people are phenominally talented, and we can't achieve our goal without their help.
How do I justify the amount of time my junior people are putting into service? First of all when they interview for the job they hear all about it so they know what they are getting themselves into. Second, I monitor what is happening in their research very carefully and if I see somebody having serious problems, I yank them out of service responsibilities immediately. I also spend a lot of time in educating the dean's advisory committee about our department and the fact that service contributions must be taken seriously. Are they taken seriously? We had four people come up for tenure last year and everybody mentioned it. They all made it through and service was an issue.
Thus it's critical to check out what the situation is in your own department. It's not the same from place to place, and it's not even exactly the same across departments in a single university.
Last but not least, a few more hints on how to get people to know you. Number one, don't wait for your fourth year to go and give talks in other departments. You should be trying to give a talk at each of the top 10 departments in your discipline within your first three years. You don't have to do them all at once. You do one here or there. It's very important for getting funding, it's important for generating those letters of recommendation at tenure time, and it's important for your research. You'll get feedback, you'll learn things, you'll make friends, and you'll attract undergraduate students to come and be graduate students with you. How do you do this? Call up someone you know in the department you'd like to visit and say "I'd really love to give a talk in your department. Could you set it up?" Few people are comfortable doing this the first few times -- but people still do it all the time. You can use this workshop to make it easier. Get to know each other here. You are all either in de artments already or you will be in departments. Invite each other to give talks.
Number two, getting on program committees and editorial boards. At UBC we like to see people serve on very prestigious program committees, and hopefully become a journal editor towards the end of the pre-tenure period. How do you make sure these things happen? The best way to do it is to let some friendly senior person in your field know that you would like to do these things. Senior people in Computer Science who are senior in the field are overloaded and overburdened with program committees and editorships. They simply have too much to do, so if they encounter talented responsible and reliable junior people who say, "I'd like to do this," they are delighted to make sure that it happens for them.
When you take on responsibilities like these it's essential that you do a very good job. Thus you should be very careful not to take on too many such responsibilities. The key to success in life is balance (at which I am a total failure). Nevertheless, this is the key. You need to do enough research, you need to spend enough time on teaching but not too much. You need to be smart about how to teach well and keep the time investment limited (you will hear more about this later on). You need to figure out what's the right balance of service for you and what you can do effectively in a limited amount of time.
Now let me say one more thing. Most of you are going to get tenure. Probably 80% of you, 90% of you, even 95% of you, maybe almost all of you. However, some people will fail to get tenure, and some others of us will fail at other things that are really important in our lives. So I just want to close my part of this panel by saying failure is a really good thing. Failure, even when it hurts and you go home and cry all night uncontrollably, is a really good thing. People who know me well know that I have failed repeatedly, over and over again, at things that matter to me. Why is failure good? Because it means that you are aiming high enough. And it means that you are learning. If you are not failing at things you are not living your life right. However, again BALANCE is the key.
OK, so now we are going to open it up for questions. We have about fifteen minutes. I ask you all not to be shy; we certainly won't be shy in giving you answers back. So, who wants to start this out. OK, please say your name and where you're from.
That's a really difficult one. Deans are certainly aware that it is a moving target and deans are often the people that must be convinced. I 'm not sure what can be done other than to realize it's a moving target. I recommend that when you are interviewing or when you are considering accepting a job, you should talk about this issue to the department chair and to the dean if you happen to see him or her. In our department, we made a strong commitment that though standards were changing we should, to a large extent, respect the standards and expectations at the time the person was hired. Obviously, it's a complicated issue and departments differ on how they deal with the problem. So again, it's important to find out. The bottom line, however, is no matter what is happening with the standards anywhere, the best that you can do is to do your best. There is a limit on what anyone of us can do. If you strive for excellence in research, for being a good teacher, and use the limited amount of time effectiv ly, that's your best shot. I just don't think there is much else you can do.
We have the concept of serious personal situations such as primary care giver after the birth or adoption of a child, a serious personal illness, provision of care for a seriously ill family member, or any similar situation. You write a letter to your department head, your department head writes a supporting letter to the dean and the dean writes a supporting letter to the provost so it is certainly possible for a years stay. Now as far as down the road, does it have a negative impact? I feel that it does not but I haven't been through the system to see that because it's only recently in place. So I think the verdict is out on that .
We have one more minute before we pass on to the next panel, so we will have one more quick question.