Tenure Standards Research Articles

Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards

We study the implications of stricter tenure standards in law schools, an environment in which 95 percent of all tenure-track hires receive tenure. To do so, we construct a novel data set of the articles and citation counts of 1,712 law professors who were granted tenure at top-100 law schools between 1970 and 2007. We first show that pretenure research records are highly predictive of future academic impact. We then simulate the effects of applying stricter tenure standards using predictions of law professors’ future academic impact at the time of their tenure decisions. We find that increasing tenure denial rates to the same level as hard-science departments—which would require increasing denial rates by 30 percentage points—could more than double the median posttenure academic impact of the faculty that law schools initially tenure.

Türk Pazarlama Akademisine İlişkin Boylamsal Bir Çalışma: On Yılda Ne Değişti, Ne Değişmedi?

This article compares the findings of two surveys of the Turkish marketing academia undertaken in 2007 and in 2016. As a follow up replicating Erdogan and Uzkurt's study (2007), this 2016 study aims to reveal the current status and problems of the marketing academia in Turkey as an emerging country, by adding a longitudinal dimension. The same questionnaire was used for both surveys carried out. The data collection procedure included both an online survey and a drop-and-collect survey, with the participation of faculty members with all types of academic titles working in the Turkish marketing academia. 108 and 132 usable questionnaires were collected in 2007 and 2016, respectively. The research findings indicate that the problems experienced have remained fairly similar in almost all dimensions, while the publication performance has increased during this period. The findings about research and teaching interests indicate that marketing academics primarily concentrate on such fields as consumer behavior, marketing research and marketing strategy. The teaching and research interests have also differed depending on global trends and changes in tenure standards in the Turkish marketing academia. Another key finding regarding the issues of the field, with vital implications for marketing education, is the perceived gap between marketing theory and practice. The fundamental issue related to education is cited as the decreasing student proficiency in Turkey.

Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards

Academic departments decide on tenure standards with limited evidence about their accuracy and efficacy. We study the implications of stricter tenure standards in law schools, an environment in which 95 percent of all tenure track hires receive tenure. To do so, we construct a novel dataset of the articles and citation counts of 1,720 law professors who were granted tenure at top-100 law schools between 1970 and 2007. We first show that pre-tenure research records are highly predictive of future academic impact. We then simulate the costs and benefits of applying stricter tenure standards using predictions of law professors' future academic impact at the time of their tenure decision. Of faculty members not tenured under stricter standards, only 5 percent have greater future academic impacts than their counterfactual replacements. Moreover, increasing tenure denials by 10 percentage points would increase the academic impact of a school's median professor by over 50 percent.

Barriers to the advancement of women of color faculty in STEM

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight critical issues facing women of color (WOC) faculty and to synthesize the research literature in order to offer recommendations for action to address inequities using an intersectionality framework.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a qualitative meta-analysis. Relevant articles were obtained through a search of the EBSCO and Google Scholar databases entering in combinations of specific keywords. In order to be included in this review, the manuscripts had to be published between the years 2001 and 2017; in a peer-reviewed journal; and available through the university library system.FindingsThe majority of manuscripts in the meta-analysis revealed high teaching and service loads, ambiguous standards for tenure and lack of culturally responsive mentorship are challenges experienced by WOC faculty. Moreover, there is limited research that examines STEM WOC faculty experiences at minority-serving institutions and in leadership roles. Further research is needed to examine the long-term efficacy of mentoring strategies and institutional transformation efforts for WOC. These numerous challenges cumulatively undermine institutions’ abilities to implement institutional transformation that impacts WOC in higher education.Originality/valueThe recommendations provided are based on the results of the meta-analysis and are intended to promote systemic change for STEM WOC faculty in institutions through intersectional and transformational approaches.

The More Things Change…: Exploring Solutions to Persisting Discrimination in Legal Academia

In May 2014, a conversation about gender discrimination among law school faculties exploded on the email listserv for the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section of Women in Legal Education. This conversation drew in dozens of participants from schools all over the United States and included teachers who were just starting out and those nearing retirement, drawing in clinical faculty, legal writing faculty, library faculty, and podium faculty. The topics that were raised ranged from the discriminatory actions of colleagues and students, to the marginalization of particular subject areas in the curriculum, to structural hierarchies in the profession, to the role of class in exacerbating other inequalities. The conversation went on for several weeks, and many of the participants urged that we needed to harness the feelings of anger and frustration expressed by so many and work together to channel that energy into productive change. As one step, a group of faculty members from all over the country, inspired by a suggestion from Professor Meera Deo of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, banded together to propose a at the 2015 meeting of the AALS that would draw from empirical data, legal research, litigation strategy, and personal experience to both further conversations about the persistence of discrimination in the legal academy and activate strategies for addressing continuing problems. The program had a unique structure to permit the inclusion of as many voices as possible in the conversation. The program began with a three-person panel similar to more traditional AALS presentations. The second part of the program was made up of three-minute statements by speakers who were selected in response to a call for circulated by the program organizers. The Articles in this symposium issue represent some of the ideas that emerged from this crosscutting program. The Articles are presented here in the order that the speakers offered their remarks at the AALS program. Several themes run through the Articles included in this Symposium. First, long-standing, but not inherently necessary, law school structures and systems perpetuate race and gender discrimination. Several of the contributions discuss the ways that the skills-doctrine distinction on law school faculty magnifies inequality. Others consider how the tenure standards applied at most schools reinforce the effects of implicit and explicit bias. A second current running through many of the Articles here is the intersectional nature of discrimination. Whether it is because of race, class, or sexual orientation, the discrimination that women in the academy face is often exacerbated by other forms of bias. A third theme that many of the authors touch on is that legal academia is at a pivotal moment to address some of the structures that continue to perpetuate discrimination. Changes in the legal market and in legal education are pushing law schools to reexamine many of their calcified assumptions. We should seize this opportunity to challenge our institutions to make real change that will root out persistent discrimination. I. The Discriminatory Consequences of the Skills-Doctrine Divide Several Articles in this issue consider a topic that has increasingly become the subject of heated debate in the legal academy: the status divide between doctrinal, tenure-track professors and legal writing, clinical, and library faculty members. In Podia and Pens, Kristen Tiscione and Amy Vorenberg highlight the inequities created by the two-track system that exists in law schools, whereby those who teach lawyering skills occupy a second-class status compared with podium teachers. (1) Skills teachers tend to be paid less, have less job security, and have lower status within their institutions. Given that women are over-represented in skills teaching positions and under-represented among tenured and tenure-track faculty, this two-track system significantly exacerbates gender inequality in law schools. …

Contributors to the High-Impact IS Journals (1977-2014): An Aid for Setting Research Standards

Interest in the rankings of contributors to academic literature is evidenced by the numerous publications across most business and economic disciplines. This study presents the most prolific authors 1) over the entire history of the 11 high-impact IS journals and 2) over the ten most recent years for each of the journals. We include the number of authors who have published in the journals but who may not be considered prolific based on our classification; this data is important and especially critical for IS departments that set research standards. Identifying and ranking authors in the IS discipline is interesting for several reasons. While some may be curious to see how they perform compared to these researchers, a more beneficial application of the findings in this paper pertains to establishing realistic promotion and tenure standards. Although 11,204 authors published in the 11 high-impact journals, 7,734 (69%) of those authors published only once in these journals in the 1977-2014 period. This fact is essential for any IS department that sets promotion and tenure guidelines. Using our findings will help colleges and IS departments establish reasonable and attainable promotion and tenure standards based on the actual performance of others in the discipline.

Publish or Perish? Examining Academic Tenure Standards in Public Affairs and Administration Programs

Academic tenure is a topic of great concern in the field of public affairs and administration. Especially for pre-tenured faculty members, institutional expectations profoundly influence individual decisions regarding what to research and how, and where to publish results. For academic programs, the stakes are also high: negative tenure decisions affect morale and represent lost resources that may not be easily recovered, while positive decisions on marginal cases may have long-term impacts on department performance. This suggests an imperative of establishing and communicating clear tenure expectations. Yet little is known, aside from anecdote and myth, about public affairs and administration tenure standards. A survey of the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration’s member institutions elicited responses from 144 academic leaders (54% response rate). One portion of the survey specifically addressed this fundamental question: What are NASPAA member institutions’ tenure expectations for public affairs and administration faculty members?

Assessing Junior Faculty Research Productivity in the IS Field: Recommendations for Promotion and Tenure Standards for Asian Schools

Assessing Junior Faculty Research Productivity in the IS Field: Recommendations for Promotion and Tenure Standards for Asian Schools

NOVEMBER 2013 PLACEMENT ADS

NOVEMBER 2013 PLACEMENT ADS

Promotion and Tenure for Community‐Engaged Research: An Examination of Promotion and Tenure Support for Community‐Engaged Research at Three Universities Collaborating through a Clinical and Translational Science Award

Community-engaged health research, an approach to research which includes the participation of communities, promotes the translation of research to address and improve social determinants of health. As a way to encourage community-engaged research, the National Institutes of Health required applicants to the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) to include a community engagement component. Although grant-funding may support an increase in community-engaged research, faculties also respond to the rewards and demands of university promotion and tenure standards. This paper measures faculty perception of how three institutions funded by a CTSA support community-engaged research in the promotion and tenure process. At three institutions funded by a CTSA, tenure track and nontenure track faculty responded to a survey regarding perceptions of how promotion and tenure committees value community-engaged research. Faculty view support for community-engaged research with some reserve. Only 36% agree that community-engaged research is valued in the promotion and tenure process. Encouraging community-engaged scholarship requires changing the culture and values behind promotion and tenure decisions. Institutions will increase community-engaged research and more faculty will adopt its principles, when it is rewarded by promotion and tenure committees.

Tales from the Trenches: On Women Philosophers, Feminist Philosophy, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) provides a good occasion for reflecting on the history of women and feminist philosophy in the society. I’m not in a position to provide anything like a real history. But I can offer some memories and impressions of my own experiences. These will of necessity be personal and idiosyncratic. But they might nevertheless shed some light on certain historical events while also revealing something about how the women and feminist philosophers of my generation encountered the society’s practices and how some of us sought to change them. I belong to the generation of women and feminist philosophers who did their graduate work in the 1970s, the generation who sought to enter the profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We had a tough row to hoe. In graduate school, many of us labored alone as the sole woman in the cohort or class. And many of us pursued our work in departments that had not a single woman professor, let alone one interested in feminist Tales from the Trenches: On Women Philosophers, Feminist Philosophy, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Fear and Loathing in the Fog: The Perceived (and Persistent) Vagaries of Tenure Standards Among Mass Communication Professors

Perhaps nothing strikes more fear into the hearts of all tenure-track professors than the process itself. Are four papers in this journal good enough? Are eight papers in another okay? What if someone doesn’t like me or my area of research? These issues have plagued academia since the first essay was penned by the first researcher hundreds of years ago. While personal bias and journal preference continue to infect honest tenure reviews, solutions exist. This does not mean we have a magic bullet to solve issues of bullying or elitism. However, if we are honest in our desire to improve the Academy, we should avail ourselves of every possible tool for improvement. This essay is based on a survey sent to 2,500 mass communication educators. Of the almost 500 respondents, roughly 10% took the time to express emotions that ranged from fear and confusion to outright rage and anger, all because what ought to be clear is not. The author offers 10 ideas of how academia can improve its evaluation of new faculty, as well as a few suggestions regarding the unnecessary inclusion of personal issues in a process that ought to be about creating better researchers and teachers.

Book Review of Challenges of the Faculty Career for Women: Success and Sacrifice

Book Review of Challenges of the Faculty Career for Women: Success and Sacrifice

Redesigning the American Law School

American law schools are an integral part of a vertically integrated system of production in which the end product is lawyers. Law schools are having rapidly increasing problems “selling” their “products” to potential employers/purchasers. Even if the law schools do not voluntarily cut back on the numbers of admitted students some states will decide there should be no public subsidy for educating students for employment areas such as law where there is no demand. Even though many private law schools will be affected negatively, publicly-funded law schools will also be dramatically affected due to declining state budgets and competition for scarce resources from areas of public expenditure with far more powerful lobbying support and, in fairness, greater and more demonstrable and immediate needs. For publicly funded law schools there is significant danger in the fact that there is no shortage of lawyers in America after decades of rapid expansion. Several potential shifts in ABA accreditation standards and policy will have significant implications, including approval of credit for distance learning, rapid movement toward assessment of law schools based on what are called “output” measurements, and even a decision that scholarly productivity measures are an inappropriate factor for the American Bar Association (contrasted with the AALS) to rely on in assessing the accredited status of a law school. These three accreditation prongs will have enormous effects that include significant faculty reductions, higher faculty workloads, changes in tenure standards, and large-scale eliminations of the traditional law school research library. For the (many) law schools that choose to remain oblivious to the altered operational context, their adaptations will be ones developed in a crisis context as their applicant pools shrink, angry graduates are increasingly unable to find employment even while faced with educational debt equivalent to a home mortgage, and less expensive competitive institutions emerge that offer alternative approaches to legal education.

Tenure Standards in Political Science Departments: Results from a Survey of Department Chairs

ABSTRACTThis article presents the results from a survey of political science department chairs regarding the tenure procedures and standards at their colleges or universities. The findings reveal that only a small fraction of the colleges and universities in the United States refuse to offer tenure or are attempting to limit tenure. We also find general agreement regarding the standards for evaluating teaching and service and that research expectations vary according to the highest degree offered by a department.

Supporting Faculty Grassroots Leadership

Various factors are making faculty leadership challenging including the rise in part-time and non-tenure-track faculty, the increasing pressure to publish and teach more courses and adopt new technologies and pedagogies, increasing standards for tenure and promotion, ascension of academic capitalism, and heavy service roles for women and people of color. This article focuses on describing actions taken by institutional agents and aspects of campus environments which are supportive of grassroots faculty leadership. While there are many conditions which inhibit faculty leadership (i.e., part-time and contingent faculty trends, rising publication standards, etc.), our study demonstrated certain campus conditions or characteristics can overcome the forces of change including counting leadership as service, creating campus networks, addressing dysfunctional department dynamics, fostering role models, supporting faculty who question or challenge decisions, ensuring flexibility and autonomy, and altering contingent faculty contracts to include service and leadership.

A Context for Extramural Funding at State Comprehensive Universities: Tilting at Windmills or Fighting the Good Fight?

Once upon a time, colleges hired professors to teach students. It was a simple world. But in the 1800s, the German model of higher education began to influence American higher education, and we embraced the notion of faculty members who would both develop knowledge and transmit it to students. This expanded the job of the professor considerably, although the spread of this model across higher education was gradual. Indeed, it is still underway. Despite the widely held notion that a faculty member who is engaged in his or her discipline offers more to a department and to students than someone whose professional development stopped upon completion of the Ph.D., there are still some academics who believe that research actually detracts from teaching. However, this view seems to carry less and less weight—at least where standards for tenure, promotion, and merit are concerned. In fact, there are few faculty positions where expectations for scholarly activity have not increased over the decades.

What Scholarship of Teaching? Why Bother?

Excerpt: Since its ‘launch’ a couple of decades ago, “scholarship of teaching” has been increasingly acknowledged on many campuses in and beyond North America. It has been incorporated into mission statements and strengthened the professionalisation of teaching and concomitant interest in faculty development, peer review and the teaching portfolio. Boyer (1997) reported that the need to recognise and find an appropriate balance between different forms of scholarship has led the majority of campuses in the United States to revise their standards for tenure and promotion, while there have also been changes...

The Challenge for Excellence at the University of Louisville: Implementation and Outcomes of Research Resource Investments Between 1996 and 2006

In the decade beginning in 1996, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget doubled, whereas NIH funding at the University of Louisville School of Medicine increased nearly sevenfold. The schools of nursing and dentistry, the other Health Science Center schools at Louisville, experienced comparable growth. The University of Louisville was thus one of the fastest growing research enterprises in the country during this period. While there was an infusion of state funds, the authors believe that the magnitude of the research growth depended more critically on development of an effective strategic plan with closely monitored outcomes. This process included first the identification of programs of distinction deserving of investment and then the reallocation of resources from units that were not research-intensive to those that were. The strategy focused on (1) the recruitment of endowed chairs and their teams (thus the popular name for the program "Bucks for Brains"), (2) the implementation of new promotion and tenure standards, (3) the creation of research-productivity linked salary incentives, (4) the implementation of posttenure review, and (5) an effort to improve research infrastructure, including core facilities, and physical plant. The authors describe how the investment by the Commonwealth of Kentucky was structured and how accountability to the state facilitated this growth. This description of how postsecondary education reform and the infusion of modest resources through the Research Challenge Trust Fund were leveraged into a substantial return-on-investment at Louisville could serve as a guide to schools during this time of NIH budgetary constraint.

Second Thoughts on the Notion of Raising Standards

The publication of the report from the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion provoked a range of responses, but none so vehement as those to our recommendation that departments consider alternatives to the monograph as the gold standard in tenure cases. It was possible for some to read the recommendation of the task force as a devaluation of the monograph in favor of a lower standard for tenure. Although the task force was perceived rightly as challenging what has been called the tyranny of the monograph or its fetishization in con texts of review (the subject addressed by my colleague Donald Hall in this issue of Profession), it was by no means our intention to recommend that standards for tenure be lowered. The premise of that perhaps inevitable misunderstanding is that there can be no accomplishment higher than a published book and that the prevalence of the demand for a monograph in tenure reviews is in fact an indication of rising standards in scholarship. In truth, it is not immediately evident why the dominance of the monographic form is a bad thing. But in analyzing the monograph phe nomenon, we on the task force had to not only look at the inherent value of the monograph form but also attempt to identify and assess the full im plications of the monograph's domination for the entire system of evalu ation?from the admission of graduate students to tenure and posttenure merit reviews. Realizing in the end that we had strong reservations about