Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme.

And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them.

Let’s start with research, or as all these documents refer to it, “scholarly activity”. TPCs all assume this means published peer-reviewed work. These specifications are followed by a lot of convoluted language to talk about “creative work”, which is mostly for the benefit of professors in Music or Fine Arts or perhaps those who engage in fiction. What is quite inconsistent and/or not well spelled out at all in these documents are two things: work on knowledge translation/commercialization and work done for public policy purposes (to the extent that either of these things do not result in publications).

Now this may seem strange to you. You may well ask yourself “wait a minute…aren’t universities always trying to commercialize research? Don’t they always talk about spin-offs? Don’t they boast to municipal and provincial governments about the benefits of having reservoirs of expertise in areas of public policy on their doorstep?” Yup. They do all those things. They just don’t, for the most part, choose to explicitly recognize those things in their TPCs. Professors can always add these things to their T/P dossier of course. And it might count. But it’s not guaranteed to do so. Or, in some cases it might get counted, but only as “service” (more on that in a second). This is going to become a much more significant issue in the near future as universities start getting involved in more national security-related research, which for obvious reasons doesn’t always end up with publishable results. If the TPCs aren’t aligned to make this work attractive to professors, universities may find their staff unwilling to actually perform all the research that their GR departments have been lobbying for.

What about teaching? Well, it’s interesting: what universities believe quality teaching consists of is all over the map, mainly because no one trusts student evaluation of teaching, ostensibly on the supposed grounds that such evaluations are, on average, racist and sexist. (I could go on at length about how slanted the evidence base for this view is, and how interesting it is that such views, while common in North America, are basically absent in Europe, etc., but I will save it for another day – all you really need to know is that there are good surveys and bad surveys, and the existence of bad surveys is increasingly taken to mean that all surveys are bad, at least if you are using them for high-stakes purposes like T & P.) Thus, some practices like self-evaluation of teaching and peer evaluation of teaching – which, to be frank, are at least equal to student evaluations in terms of their dodginess, only biased in professors’ favour – make up a lot of what goes on to test a professor’s teaching ability.

What is interesting to me though, is how the development of new courses is treated in this process. Sometimes, it is ignored completely and sometimes it takes quite a central space in evaluation – practice seems to vary widely on this topic. What does not vary widely is how professors are evaluated on their contributions to program curricula as a whole. Quite simply, they aren’t judged on that at all, at least not as part of the teaching criteria (on the whole to the extent this would get counted, it goes under service). This is pretty interesting when you think about it. It’s reflective of a view that curricula is just a grab-bag of individual courses, and that as long as professional incentives are in place to make the individual courses good, then “program quality” will take care of itself. The idea that it is the program rather than the individual courses that matter, or (perhaps worse) that individual professors have a collective responsibility to develop programs that work for students – well, it might not be absent completely in our universities, but it’s certainly not something that is incentivized by TPCs. 

And now let’s turn to “service”, which is basically a bin where you toss anything that isn’t research or teaching. Service to the university, to the local community, or to various disciplinary communities all get caught up in the same bucket, which – universities ALWAYS hasten to add – will not get you tenure in the absence of teaching and research chops, but might put an otherwise marginal application for TP over the top if it’s good enough. Just to reiterate: this is where the technology creation and technology transfer goes. This is where curriculum reform goes. It all goes in the “not quite as important pile”, the pile that only really matters if someone’s research performance isn’t good enough.

To be clear, this isn’t just an issue of university administrators dictating an overly-conservative set of TPCs. To a large extent TPCs are a reflection of the preferences of academics themselves. These are, for the most part, the standards to which they have indicated that they want to be held. But I think it’s time for a re-think. Apart from TPCs, universities genuinely don’t have that many levers to nudge academic staff to do specific things. And from what I can see, there are far too many activities which should be mission-critical to a modern university engaged in society and the economies which faculty are actively disincentivized to do because of too-narrow TPCs.   

Personally, I think the solution to this challenge is a no-brainer. Have an open discussion at your university about what kinds of professorial activity you wish to encourage (or perhaps more accurately, which ones you don’t want to discourage): my guess is that you will see widespread appetite for change. Details matter, of course, and it might take some time to hammer them out. But this is one of these areas of university life where the lack of change is mostly down to simple inertia – a sharp push in the right direction might be all it takes to get sone quick improvements.