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Navigating the Treachery of Promotion and Tenure

Dr. Anne Schoening

At the University of Toledo, President Lloyd Jacobs recently announced that he will interview all faculty members up for tenure before making his recommendation to the Ohio school’s board, not just rubber stamp departments. Jacobs did not discuss his decision to conduct the 30-minute interviews with the faculty senate before making the announcement, and faculty are not happy.

The situation at Toledo represents just one example of how convoluted the tenure process can be. “We are forced to give clear goals and objectives to our students,” said Dr. Marilyn Grady. “Why aren’t we doing that for our promotion and tenure process?”

Grady, a professor of educational administration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, compares the process to an indoor sport. “In Nebraska, they shoot animals,” she said. “At other schools, they shoot young professors and talk about the kill.”

Grady and Dr. Anne Schoening, assistant professor of maternal/child nursing at Creighton University NE, spoke about the challenges inherent in promotion and tenure and suggested how to improve the process in separate presentations at the University of Nebraska’s annual Women in Educational Leadership Conference held in October.

Grady based her presentation on more than 25 years of “observation, conversation and study” of the challenges that new or junior faculty experience. “One of the things I care about a lot is promotion and tenure issues,” she said.

After witnessing the saga of young faculty at a Big 10 medical school where she was teaching, “I began to be aware of the idea that the standards we had weren’t standards at all; they were just covers” for bad behavior, she said.

Schoening, who based her presentation on research on women at doctoral schools, has a personal stake in the issue. She teaches labor, delivery and postpartum nursing, a job she was hired for with a master’s degree. She got a doctorate in 2009 at UNL and is now up for tenure at Creighton.

Depending on the demographics of a particular department or unit, young faculty looking for advice and support in the process can discover some surprises. Some older colleagues received tenure without the current requirements for publications, grants or research. Some were even able to avoid peer or committee reviews. They got tenure simply because it was “time.”

While these older faculty might be very supportive of their young colleagues, they have little real experience to share about the process. It’s no secret that promotion and tenure has changed over time.

Preparing the tenure application

From her years of experience, Grady offered some observations and suggestions for faculty seeking tenure.

• Build files that document teaching effectiveness beyond just student evaluations. Keep samples of students’ work in the files, with their permission. “In our college we’ve gone from numbers to evidence,” she said. And don’t wait until you’re up for tenure to begin building a file. “I spend more time now, even as a tenured professor, documenting what I did than doing it,” Grady said.

• Follow the leader. One professor wanted to do different things than his colleagues were doing. “I told him, ‘Do what you have to do to get tenure and then you can go back to what you really want to do,’” she said. Tenure committees don’t look kindly on non-tenured renegades.

• Know the expectations of those who have hired you. Realize that these expectations can change from person to person. “Even professors hired at the same time may have different performance expectations,” said Grady.

• Know who can help or hurt you. Some schools have created formal mentoring programs for new faculty on the promotion and tenure track that help clarify the “unwritten” rules. Mentors may be senior faculty or those who recently received tenure. Formal programs can include workshops for new faculty and meetings throughout the year.

But Grady cautions to watch out for informal offers— particularly from senior faculty—that are cloaked in helpfulness but are really not. She called them just openings for the “vultures, jealous peers and effete snobs” to suck in a junior professor and either tie up her time on projects unrelated to her research or diminish her work among those making tenure decisions.

“Make alliances cautiously,” she warned. “The academy is a political environment.”

• Know the pitfalls in your workplace. There may be faculty who preach collaboration and teamwork, but that stops at the door of research. They fear that there’s only a limited amount of research opportunities and they don’t want you wading in their waters. Their attitude is one of “I’ve got mine, you get yours.”

• National meetings can help you create a network of scholars in your discipline that can act as a support system and provide guidance. They can also provide opportunities to collaborate on publications.

• Know and understand the peer review process. What are your school’s rules for external letters, for specific materials? Eliminate ambiguity and make sure that your fi le contains all the necessary materials.

• Learn the line of scholarly inquiry in your field, the scholarly outlets and the production cycle of the journals. It can take as long as 18 months for an article to be published after it’s submitted. Meanwhile, that tenure clock is ticking.

Choose publication topics that are fresh and publishable. Because of the long publishing timeline, make sure you’ve got several manuscripts in the pipeline at once.

Tenure not seeking women

The process’s Byzantine nature has gender ramifi cations that adversely affect women. Women receive more than 50% of all research doctorates granted to U.S. citizens but 34% do not seek academic careers. Is it because women don’t choose to work in those settings, Schoening asked.

Over time the number of women who become full professors declines dramatically from those who’ve earned doctorates. At doctoral institutions, women are 34% of fulltime faculty and 25.8% of those currently tenured, but only 19.3% of full professors.

Do those numbers represent a choice that women make in an effort to balance work and family? Or is it something more sinister, such as gender bias?

Because women receive doctorates at an average age of 34, they are twice as likely to be single and childless as their male faculty colleagues, said Schoening. “Research still shows that we bear more responsibility at home and we’re more likely to put our career on the back burner for our children.”

Then there’s the salary issue. Across all institutional types, full-time female faculty earn 2 to 9% less than men at the same rank. It’s far worse at doctoral institutions, where women earn only 78% of what their male colleagues do. Even women who are full professors earn 10% less than men.

Women are also likely to work more hours a week at teaching rather than conducting research. In scientific literature few women are listed as principal investigators. Publishing also refl ects gender disparities. Men generate an average of nine publications over a two-year period compared with women who publish only six.

Other barriers, particularly at doctoral institutions, include a lack of mentorship and guidance, likely due to fewer women at the highest ranks of either faculty or administration.

The climate for mentoring and pay equity is much better at community colleges and liberal arts colleges, Schoening reported. Women are about half of all tenured faculty and full professors in community colleges, where they earn 94% of what their male counterparts earn. But the downside is that doctoral institutions pay better.

Literature on female work patterns reveals that their careers are simply different than men. With early female academics, marriage and family compete with careers, and expectations affect our work life signifi cantly more.

“Your biological clock is ticking at the same time your tenure clock is ticking,” she said. “Many women put off childbearing until they get tenure.” Often that’s too late, which can explain why women faculty are twice as likely to be single and childless compared with male faculty.

Women who marry early—and those who have babies within five years after earning their PhDs—often choose less demanding positions that are part-time or off the tenure track while the children are young. Schools benefit because the jobs pay less and it’s easier to not renew their contracts.

Women benefit because the jobs are plentiful and they offer a flexible way to work. The dark side is that these nontenure track positions trap women in dead-end jobs.

Women who have children older than six after they’ve earned their PhD—as well as single, childless women—are more likely to take a tenure track position. The positive side? These groups earn tenure at higher rates than men.

Give equity a chance

Obviously there’s a problem in search of a solution. Schoening suggested ways to end the disparities.

Increasing the number of weeks of family care and disability leave can give young faculty some much-needed breathing room. Schools who want to retain young faculty can add time to the number of weeks guaranteed in the Family Medical Leave Act and pay those on leave.

Paid disability leave for pregnancy would go a long way to help young faculty balance the financial ramifications of taking time off. So will developing emergency care short-term leaves where faculty can use their own sick time for sick kids. Allowing them to bank days off to use for family illness increases flexibility.

Stopping the tenure clock is one of the most common interventions. But too often, tenure decisions are based on established standards and stopping or extending the clock is not an option. The AAUP recommends that young faculty get written assurances about future tenure decisions if the tenure clock is stopped—with a new timeline.

Creating active service with modified duties and temporary part-time appointments is another option. This can include releasing the faculty member from teaching responsibilities while requiring her to continue her scholarship and service.

Women faculty spend more hours a week on teaching and advising compared to their male colleagues. They also spend a fair amount of time in committee work and service and less time on scholarship and research, despite the latter being the basis for most tenure decisions.

A temporary reduction in the service requirement, job sharing and part-time tenure track positions are also viable options. With job sharing, the length of the tenure clock is doubled, offering more time to demonstrate having met the school’s standards.

Family friendly childcare policies contribute to work life balance. Such things as on-site childcare, flexible hours and correlating the school’s calendar with local school calendars so that breaks fall at the same time are things that cost little money to set up but pay big dividends in retention.

Schools and departments must set clear standards for promotion and tenure. For those on the tenure track, mentoring is a valuable tool for navigating the waters.

Schoening also suggests that schools provide increased rewards for teaching, broaden the definition of “scholarship” and develop clear department specific tenure requirements. There should be no “invisible” requirements. But at the same time, the responsibility is on the faculty member to know her rights and the institutional norms.

Until women have an equal shot at earning tenure, the academy is destined to remain doomed to heed only the dominant male voice and to remain ignorant of the solutions to the challenges that women are ready and willing to provide.

Contacts:

mgrady1@unl.edu  or 402.472.0974

aschoening@creighton.edu  or 402.280.4777

Santovec, Mary Lou. (2009, December). Navigating the Treachery of Promotion and Tenure. Women in Higher Education, 18(12), p. 26-27.