The Process of Tenure at Duke

Many argue that the decision to grant tenure is the most important one a university makes. But because the decisions of the Appointments, Promotions and Tenure Committee (APT) are made in secrecy to ensure the fairness of the process, there's often a veil of mystery surrounding the process. Sometimes, the decisions become lightning rods for both internal and external criticism.

These controversies can be misleading about how the APT process actually works and belie the fact that tenure decisions generally are made with broad consensus. As Provost Peter Lange told the Academic Council last fall, nearly all of the recommendations to the provost made by the APT Committee involve either unanimous or near-unanimous votes.

The committee is comprised of 13 of some of the most distinguished faculty members across the university. All the schools with the exception of the law school participate in the process. After the APT Committee makes a recommendation, the decision is passed on to the provost for a final review.

In 2001-2002, 18 junior faculty members came up for tenure. One candidate withdrew and one was not forwarded by the faculty to the APT Committee. Of the remaining 16 cases, 14 were approved by APT and two were turned down. Of the 14 approved by APT, Lange declined tenure in one case.

George Tauchen, who stepped down in 2002 as chair of the APT Committee, says he understands the stress the process places on junior faculty, having gone through it himself as a young faculty member at Duke. Tauchen, William Glasson Professor of Economics, said recent modifications to the process have freed up the committee to move quicker on certain cases. The modifications were suggested by the Holland Committee, which conducted a thorough review of APT and the tenure process at Duke. Tauchen recently spoke with Geoffrey Mock of Dialogue to explain how the committee works.

The APT Handbook for arts and sciences is available online.

DIALOGUE: When a case is forwarded to you, what's the first thing you do? TAUCHEN: The first thing we do is to select a committee member to conduct an initial review of the case file. That committee member would be someone whose research is somewhat related to that of the candidate. Their job is to make sure the candidate's file has all the required documents for the initial review. The first issue is simply to make sure everything is there. The university policies are quite specific about what documents should be included in the file. We will provide the department with a list of required documents to help them with the process. We need to see the dean's letter, the chair's letter, the departmental vote and review committee report, the candidate's teaching record, personal development statement, their CV, a list of theses they've supervised, etc. The candidate gets to designate their most influential written work for review. We require at least six external evaluations of the candidate. DIALOGUE: Who is chosen to do the evaluations? TAUCHEN: The department or academic unit selects evaluators; the candidate may suggest names as well, but the upper limit is three and usually candidates elect to name none or at most one. The evaluators must be experts in the field and "at arm's length" from the candidate. That would exclude co-authors, co-investigators, dissertation supervisors, former department colleagues, etc. The objective is to get reviews from individuals who do not have any kind of a stake in the outcome of the decision. Our committee isn't involved in the selection of the evaluators, but we spend a great deal of time checking those letters to make sure that they are truly arm's length and are from the appropriate individuals, that they really are experts in the candidate's area. We generally will not have any contact with these evaluators. One exception is, however, that we will either call or e-mail the evaluator if there was a key piece of information that was missing from their evaluations. As part of the file, we want to see all the contact the department and department faculty had with the evaluators. We have to have all the pertinent information related to the contacts between the department and the evaluators '" all the e-mail, phone logs, all that sort of thing has to be in there. That helps us ensure that the proper evaluators were chosen and that there is nothing that would disqualify any of them. DIALOGUE: Let's go back to the initial review. The committee's all together, and the reviewer has determined that the file is complete. What happens next? TAUCHEN: Then we can actually discuss the merits of the case rather than the technicalities of missing documents. If it's complete, we should be able to make a decision at that first meeting for most external cases. For internal tenure cases, we have to have a follow-up meeting with the dean of the school and the chair of the department before we can vote. We start with a discussion about the letters of evaluation and then our own reading of a document and the person's work. Because of the variety of expertise of the committee members, there will always be someone who is knowledgeable enough with the field to read for content most any kind of work that was presented. They would have the expertise. We simply go around the table and let everyone have an opportunity to talk. We usually go around the table two or three times. DIALOGUE: What piece of information carries the most weight? TAUCHEN: Keep in mind that everything is important. However, we place a great deal of weight on the outside evaluations from the experts. They are the individuals who are best suited for determining whether this work meets the test of being outstanding. The standard is very high at Duke. We're also interested in the candidate's trajectory. Is the candidate an upward trajectory? We're sitting here in year seven making a commitment that will last 30-35 years, so we have to be sure that the candidate has not only met the standard but is also on an upward trajectory and will continue to produce quality scholarly work. The best way to measure that is to look at the candidate's work in progress. Often times, evaluators would be sent the working papers or the drafts of manuscripts for books and then they would comment on that work because they know we want to have this information about trajectory. There are other things we consider, such as the dean's letter, the chair's letter, the departmental committee report, the candidate's own personal statement and the documentation on teaching. With the deans, chairs and committee, we don't want to rehash the letters of evaluation. They are to write their own independent statement separate from the evaluation. Paraphrasing the evaluation is not helpful. We do factor all those in the decision. DIALOGUE: Are there any issues you are not allowed to discuss? TAUCHEN: We consider the candidate's research, teaching and service record '" that's it. We don't check into personal records or what's called "institutional factors," such as the strategic importance of the field to the department or university. These are off limits to the committee but can be discussed between the provost and the deans. If it's a vibrant field and the person's hired into it, then all that matters is whether the person has produced work that is outstanding as judged by experts in that subfield and is on the kind of trajectory we seek. We may not grow that subfield beyond that, or we may decide to grow it more. That's a university decision. Issues of equity in terms of numbers, race, gender, etc., are also off limits. DIALOGUE: What happens when the decision isn't so clear-cut? TAUCHEN: Usually that would arise when the outside letters of evaluation were mixed '" some said the work was outstanding while others said it was just above average or there was a low level of productivity. The committee would discuss these issues and we would also at that point take a very serious look at all the candidate's materials '" personal development statement and their written work. And then the discussion would continue on all aspects of the case. When it appears that further discussion will not change anyone's mind, we'll take a vote. The vote is secret. DIALOGUE: What does it mean that so many of the committee's votes are unanimous or near-unanimous? TAUCHEN: I think it means that the tenure process is working as it should. The departments are providing the proper mentoring and guidance to the candidates so the candidates are assembling what are very strong cases. Then the departments are doing their jobs of weeding out the cases that do not appear to make the threshold. There are departments that would in the past have passed bucks '" they're not doing it now. DIALOGUE: A number of small reforms were recently introduced to speed up the process and streamline it. Have they worked? TAUCHEN: One change is that we stop requiring the dean and chair to come on every tenure decision, so the university could consider the appointment of a very distinguished person from outside who already had tenure at Stanford and then the dean and chair would not have to come over and talk about this person. That generated a lot of delay and busy work in terms of scheduling. The deans are very busy, the chair is very busy, there was just a lot of needless busy work created by that so we eliminated that. We also implemented rules to allow us to proceed on a case that was possibly technically incomplete because it lacked some small little item that wasn't really necessary to the decision. In these cases, we now can move on to make a decision even without that piece of information. DIALOGUE: Where do the delays in the process come from? TAUCHEN: Generally it comes in the course of checking the evaluations. If it turns out there aren't six arms-length evaluators, it eats up a lot of our time. Then what happens is that we have to write for more letters. So we have to develop a list of letters, we have to identify the individual, see if they are available to do the review and then we have to mail the documents off and wait for those evaluations to come in. DIALOGUE: This is the one exception in which you do directly find the evaluator. TAUCHEN: Yes. The other problem that sometimes crops up is that the quest for an evaluation may not have been done using the standard for letters that we have. Sometimes they inadvertently add information that they shouldn't. Maybe a department is trying to make a tenured hire under a time constraint. What might happen '" and what has happened '" is that a faculty member, really not all ill-intentioned, might reveal to the evaluators in e-mails that the candidate is very serious and would even accept the job if offered. This is a problem. We don't want information like that influencing the evaluations. That's one reason why we want to look at all communication between the department and the evaluators. Even when the faculty member is very well intentioned, they have to follow the protocol. If they don't, it creates doubt about the whole set of evaluations and creates a whole set of delays in the process. What we would do in that case is we would then request evaluations from two or three experts using the standard request form and check for any variance between the letters that we got and those that came up from the department. It adds time to the process. DIALOGUE: Committee members are required to remain quiet about the cases they work on. Is that secrecy necessary to the process? TAUCHEN: It is. The committee members cannot discuss the case in any way outside meetings where we have a subject discussion. We can never reveal the names of the evaluators nor would we reveal to others the nature of the discussion that took place. DIALOGUE: How do you think that looks to a junior faculty member that is coming up? TAUCHEN: Having coming up myself I know what it like to sit there for several months while one's case is winding its way through the university. Every tenured professor here came up with tenure some place and knows what it is like to sit there in this never-never land. We understand that this is a difficult period for the candidate, so we try to keep the process as short as we can. And if the departments or academic units get us complete documents, that will substantially reduce the time it takes to reach a decision and reduce the stress. DIALOGUE: There have been concerns whether the tenure process is fair to people working in interdisciplinary fields, where often there are only a handful of people knowledgeable about it. TAUCHEN: The committee itself is an interdisciplinary body. So we would have individuals on there with all sorts of different disciplines, and many of them would have expertise in a new and growing disciplinary area. We handle these cases the same way we would in more traditional disciplines. However, to assist the process, the candidate may alert the dean that he or she is a multidisciplinary person and would like to have a review committee of some individuals from another department or university on their review committee and might ask that another set of the backgrounds of the evaluators be considered. Sometimes in the sciences, we have a different problem. We now have cases of candidates whose research are part of these major projects involving hundreds of people forming a team of, for example, high energy physics. In these cases, our responsibility is to develop appropriate standards for evaluating individuals who are doing big science because the only individuals who could give us solid evaluations would be in the same gigantic team of 200-300 scientists. In these cases, we may relax somewhat the rules about evaluators being at arms-length, because the only appropriate evaluators may be other scientists working on the same project. DIALOGUE: What do you tell junior faculty who are nervous about the process? What are the biggest misperceptions? TAUCHEN: I want to emphasize that every tenure-track job at Duke is a genuine tenure-track job, meaning that if the person meets the high standards then they will be granted tenure. We don't have any kind of tenure quotas for departments. If a department or a unit has several people coming up for tenure in the same year, their cases are treated completely independent of one another. So a candidate may come up for tenure and another from the same department later in the year, and we would never compare the second one to the first one. If someone even mentions it, someone else on the committee or the chair of the committee would say, "Out of order." We are not going to go there. I know there were units that had two or three people up for tenure from the same unit during one academic year, and there just were no comparisons between the candidates. DIALOGUE: Considering the amount of your time the committee takes, has it been valuable serving on it? TAUCHEN: Very much so. First I gained an appreciation for the great depth and diversity in the research that takes place across this campus. I acquired a deep appreciation for the humanities and for the careful crafting of their books and the extent to which they have to be involved with the original materials and the original texts. And in sciences I gained a better understanding of how the labs work, how the research is conducted, what the roles of the post-docs are, what the roles of the senior lab people running the operation are. I was really impressed by the level of external funding that is given to the sciences and to the medical sciences. I found that reassuring.