T-t-tenure Review?
Ever since becoming a full professor, a not-insignificant portion of my summers are taken up by writing tenure recommendation letters. These requests typically start to trickle in at the end of the spring semester, hit their stride at the very beginning of the summer, and typically end around June or July. Most of the deadlines for these letters are in August or September, although I have dealt with both October and later deadlines. Since tenure review is anonymous (and should remain so), I don’t want to be very specific about actual numbers, but I tend to get up to almost a dozen letter requests each year.
First a note to institutions who request these letters: the earlier you can send your request, the better it is for your letter writers (and, by extension, your candidates). Having been on tenure preparation committees for our own assistant professors at the UMD iSchool, I know that a potential reference declining to write a letter has to go into the candidate’s record, so I really want to avoid having to say no. But if you ask me with less than a month to go before the deadline in the middle of a semester, I may have to.
Anyway, given this background, I felt it could be useful to shed some light into the tenure review process for new or aspiring assistant professors. What goes into a tenure reference letter and how are they used in the tenure review? I’ll try to answer this question from my own viewpoint in both writing and reading such letters. As always, this post represents my own personal opinions and experiences as an almost 15-year veteran of the U.S. academic system; it is not the official stance of my institution or any of the organizations I am associated with.
In all of the U.S. and Canadian tenure review processes I am aware of, the names of your tenure referees as well as their letters are confidential. You will never know who wrote a letter for you (unless they tell you). In some circumstances, you may get to some anonymized excerpts of the letters in a report at the end of the process. Many times you will not even get that.
The key for me to be able to write a letter for a candidate is that I know the candidate, at least by name. Sure, I can read a CV just as well as anyone, and I suppose I have a better view of my research field than many people given my varied experiences as papers chair, associate editor, and conference organizer. However, my research field is not very large. If I don’t know of a candidate by name and reputation, that is already a strike against them. And yes, I realize that this is not a very equitable situation.
Of course, if I don’t happen to know a person and feel that I cannot write anything intelligent about them (perhaps their work is so far afield from mine that I cannot judge the contents of their CV), then I will politely decline serving as a referee. Again, a potential referee declining often goes into the candidate’s record, but this is much better than the candidate receiving a negative letter.
What can you do about name recognition as a candidate? It’s simple: you need to get your name out there. The COVID pandemic has been disastrous for many early-career scientists (ECRs) because it effectively put a halt to in-person conferences where networking opportunities abound. However, in a way, the opportunity to give online presentations via Zoom is actually more equitable than physically having to travel everywhere to speak because it eliminates many cost, ability, and opportunity barriers.
One of the pieces of advice I received when I was an assistant professor was to do a “pre-tenure tour” where I would travel around and give talks at important institutions a year or so before my tenure review. The thinking is that your tenure letter writers are likely to be drawn from these “important institutions”, and thus you will benefit from having visited them. Disregarding the aforementioned barriers for a moment, this is not a bad idea, and it is often as easy as emailing a colleague at your target institution to the effect of “hey, I’m going to be in the area, do you think I could give a talk at your university?” As long as you ask well in advance and don’t require funding or honoraria up front (before you pounce on me for encouraging unpaid labor, speaking fees and even travel funding for academic talks are uncommon in my field, especially for ECRs), this is usually an easy “yes” for your colleague. If you want to save on travel costs, you could do this in combination with an existing trip: look around in the immediate physical vicinity of where you’re going and see if there is a likely institution nearby. Or you can explore virtual talks if travel is not an option for you.
Of course, these “pre-tenure tours” are a bit of a gamble: there are likely many potential letter writers and you would have to do a pretty impressive tour to have a chance at visiting them all. On the other hand, each visit - physical or virtual alike - is an invited talk that counts as a line on your CV. That is never a bad thing, and you never know what the exposure of your research to your colleagues will lead to in the future, such as finding new collaborators on research projects and papers or even job opportunities. And having the chance to meet colleagues outside of the bustle of a conference or the stress of a formal interview can be quite nice.
Besides working hard, there are a few other things you can do leading up to your tenure review. One is to become intimately familiar with your institution’s rules for who can serve as a tenure referee, because the procedures vary slightly. For example, at my old university, former collaborators could serve as referees, whereas my current university only allows referees who have a strict “arm’s length” relationship to the candidate. Knowing this may have an impact on how you strategize collaboration with senior people in your field. Perhaps you need to “save” a couple of people for potential refereeing, especially if your field is small.
Another useful piece of information is to know whether you as a candidate gets to have some input on who is chosen. For example, perhaps you get to suggest six names, three of which will be asked, and the senior colleagues managing your tenure review get to choose three. This should all be clear from your institution’s tenure and promotion guidelines. At my old university, I was allowed to informally communicate with would-be tenure referees to ensure that they would be willing and available to help. At my current university, this is a big no-no; there should be no communication, informal or otherwise, between the candidate and would-be referees with regards to their promotion or tenure review. Knowing the rules at your place will prevent you from unintentionally “tainting” your referee pool. Again, forewarned is forearmed.
Finally, here is a potentially contentious note on your collaboration patterns as an assistant professor: my recommendation is that you stop collaborating with your Ph.D. advisor and postdoc mentor until you are awarded tenure. The reason is that I have several times seen colleagues point out situations when a tenure candidate has had a continued pattern of collaboration with their former advisor and mentors. This raises the question of whether the person is capable of independent research or needs constant supervision from a more senior colleague. From the candidate’s point of view, it can seem wasteful to stop a productive collaboration just because of how it can be perceived by some fictional tenure referee, and you should certainly finish all of your outstanding projects with your former mentors. However, my advice would be to not start any new projects with your advisor and instead focus on your own students.
As a corollary, this point also extends to academic couples. It is probably better to avoid collaborating with your spouse until after tenure to avoid any questions about your capabilities as independent researchers. Come tenure review time, you do not want to appear an inseparable unit where referees cannot tell one person from another. Finally, once your would-be referees have accepted writing a letter for you, what happens next is outside your immediate control and depends on the body of work you have amassed as an assistant professor. At this time, the only thing you really can do is sit tight and wait. If something momentous happens from the time you submitted your tenure packet to the actual review - such as a major publication or grant coming in - it can be worth sending an update if your institution’s process allows for that. Otherwise, now it’s time for the waiting game. Good luck!
Tenure review is shrouded in mystery, and a lot of assistant professors (rightly) fear the process because of its finality and potential impact to their careers. Some of the details I have outlined above can seem very unfair, and I am probably guilty of perpetuating inequitable practices in academia merely by giving some of this advice. However, at the same time I feel that demystifying the process as much as possible can only help.
It may be some consolation to worried assistant professors everywhere that in all of the places I have worked, senior faculty are invested in the success of their junior colleagues and are - for all intents and purposes - cheering for them. They may not say so to your face, and they will constantly be challenging you to do your best work, but secretly they are hoping you will be able to submit a “slam dunk” tenure case.
Let me add a final note: most people who are not on the path to get tenure tend to get dropped sometime around the three-year mark. Again, this can sound a little brutal, but it is typically a better outcome than the trauma of tenure denial. It also means that if you’ve made it to your final year, your colleagues likely think you have what it takes to get tenure. Take solace in this fact.