Best Practices - Review and Promotion

This post is part of a series on contemporary best practices for promotion and tenure reviews in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our free best practices checklist, recently released.

What are the most successful practices for faculty promotion and tenure cases at universities today? 

Faculty promotion and tenure decisions have an enormous impact on an institution’s identity and success, so it makes sense that evaluation processes would be universally complex and slow.

However, along with promoting careful review, most institutions’ processes also generate a morass of tedious and frustrating work separate from the actual activity of evaluation. Candidates, administrators, and reviewers waste hundreds or even thousands of hours every year on inefficient processes for submitting, distributing, and accessing materials—squandering time desperately needed for the staggering numbers of strategic imperatives newly critical to the survival and growth of higher education institutions.

Existing processes also often compromise the security of confidential documents, make it difficult to ensure the right processes are being followed for every candidate, expose the institution to legal risk, generate unnecessary costs, and leave institutional leaders without access to information critical for strategic planning.

Assess your school’s practices

Interested in improving promotion and tenure review at your institution? Use this free best practices checklist to see how your processes compare to what the most progressive colleges and universities are doing.