Promotion and Tenure Timeline

Department of English
University of Missouri
Columbia, Missouri

[approved by departmental vote: 19 March 2002]

Year 1

October: meet with the Associate Chair to select a mentoring committee, consisting of 2-4 tenured faculty members. [1]

January: first annual salary report is due. This will cover teaching and service during the first semester and research during the previous five calendar years. [2]

Winter semester: at least two peer evaluations of your teaching should be done by members of the mentoring committee. [3]

Year 3

During this academic year at least two additional peer evaluations of your teaching should be done by members of the mentoring committee. [4]

April: work with mentoring committee to prepare materials to submit to the Chair for the third-year review. [5]

Year 4

Mid-September: final deadline for the Chair to submit the third-year review.

Year 5

March - April: finalize the membership of your promotion and tenure committee (3-4 tenured faculty). Most of the members of the p/t committee should be full professors, if possible. You will then need to provide the committee with the materials which they will use to make the case for initiating the promotion and tenure process. [6]

Before the end of winter semester: provide your p/t committee with a list of (no more than 10) possible outside reviewers of your published work.

Year 6

August - mid September: work with your p/t committee to complete the dossier of materials to be sent forward to the Dean’s office. [7]

Late September: the decisions of the department’s Personnel Committee and Chair are communicated to the candidate.

Late in fall semester: the decision of the College P&T Committee is communicated to the candidate and the department Chair. [8]

End of winter semester: official notification of final decision on promotion and tenure is sent to the candidate and the department Chair.

Notes

1.  Together with this timeline, each new assistant professor will receive a copy of “Department of English Criteria for Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor,” the College of Arts and Science’s “Promotion and Tenure Guidelines,” and the MU Faculty Handbook, section 7 of which covers the promotion and tenure review process. You should read these materials before your meeting with the Associate Chair, which will provide a good opportunity for resolving uncertainties you may have about the process and the criteria described in those documents.

Following the October meeting, you should ask the tenured faculty you have chosen if they are willing to serve on your mentoring committee. The Associate Chair can help identify appropriate alternative members, should that be necessary. The membership should be finalized no later than 1 December.

It is important to note that, at your request, the membership of your committee can be changed in subsequent years.

2.  You will need keep an up-to-date curriculum vitae for the purposes of the annual salary report, as well as for the third-year review and the promotion and tenure dossier. Your cv should include, among other things, complete bibliographical information regarding publications, including the name of the press or journal and the appropriate volume and page numbers; a section on work in progress or under consideration, along with a disposition of reviewers at that point; and an indication of the length (i.e., number of pages in typescript) of works in press or under review.

3.  The peer reviews done in your first and third years will be part of your promotion and tenure dossier. In addition, you should keep a teaching portfolio that includes, among other things, syllabi; samples of exams, quizzes, and writing assignments; all student teaching evaluations; and other pertinent evidence of the quality and range of your teaching. Also among the materials to be forwarded to the College P&T Committee will be a one- or two-page statement of your teaching philosophy. This statement will be the more cogent to the degree that it conforms with the evidence presented in the teaching portfolio.

4.  If you are on research leave during your third year, you should arrange to have these peer evaluations done either in the winter semester of your second year or very early (first two weeks) in the fall semester of your fourth year.

5.  In addition to your up-to-date cv, it is a good idea to provide the Chair with summaries of your performance in research, teaching, and service during your first three years. Such statements (each 1-2 pages long), written by the candidate, are among the required contents of the dossier forwarded to the Dean and the College P&T Committee at the time of the promotion and tenure review. They will be easier to write if draft copies are maintained and regularly updated during the probationary period. Similar statements are often required as part of nominations for campus awards and are an optional component of the materials submitted annually to the Salary Advisory Committee.

The third-year review consists of a letter written by the Chair commenting on your record in the areas of research, teaching, and service and your progress toward promotion and tenure. In cases where little or no progress has been made through the end of the third year, the Chair may recommend that a terminal contract be issued--i.e., that the appointment not be renewed at the end of the fourth year.

The Chair submits a draft of the third-year-review letter to the Personnel Committee (all tenured faculty), revises it if necessary, and then submits it to you. If you have no objections to the letter as written, then you provide the Chair with a brief, signed statement, addressed to the Dean, indicating your acceptance of the review. If you do have objections to the letter and the Chair is not willing to revise it to your satisfaction, you should write a letter to the Dean explaining what you disagree with and why. The Chair’s letter and your letter of response are the only documents that are forwarded to the Dean’s office, where they are kept on file. The third-year review will be included in the dossier that you and your p/t committee eventually will assemble for your promotion and tenure case.

Although a full-scale, formal review is required only in the third year, your performance is evaluated annually by the Salary Advisory Committee and the Personnel Committee. If there are very serious deficiencies, the Personnel Committee can recommend that a terminal contract be issued at any point during the five-year probationary period.

6.  At a minimum, you will need to provide your committee with an accurate, up-to date cv and copies of all your published work. Some committees may want to see more of the materials that eventually will form part of the p/t dossier.

The Personnel Committee will meet in April to consider all candidates for promotion and tenure. Assistant professors in their fifth year of service must be considered at this time. Each candidate will be represented at the meeting by his or her p/t committee. If the committee recommends in favor of starting the process, and if a majority of the tenured faculty agrees, then the p/t committee will be instructed to begin the process of identifying and soliciting letters from external evaluators. If the committee determines that the candidate’s performance in teaching and/or research has not met the department’s standards, and if a majority of the tenured faculty agrees with that judgment, the Chair will be instructed to award the candidate a one-year terminal contract for the coming academic year.

7.  For the contents of this dossier, see the “Content Outline for Promotion and Tenure Dossiers” provided by the College of A&S. This outline is updated annually, but the changes are generally minor and almost always take the form of additions rather than deletions.

The department’s Personnel Committee meets in the latter half of September to discuss and vote on promotion and tenure cases. Each candidate’s p/t committee presents the case to the Personnel Committee. The result of the vote is communicated in the Chair’s letter, which accompanies the letter written by the candidate’s own committee, as part of the dossier sent forward to the Dean’s office in early October. If you are an assistant professor in your sixth year, then your dossier will be forwarded to the Dean’s office whether the vote is positive or negative.

If the vote is negative in cases involving early tenure or promotion of a tenured associate to full professor, the dossier is forwarded only at the candidate’s insistence.

In October and November, the A&S Promotion and Tenure Committee evaluates all promotion and tenure cases that have been forwarded by departments in the college. That committee consists of six full professors, two each from Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Biological and Mathematical Sciences, elected by the faculty of the college to serve three-year terms.

8.  A negative decision may be appealed to the college committee, which may decide to change its vote. (A 3-3 tie counts as a negative decision, so at least four “yes” votes are required for a positive decision.) The case then goes to the Dean, whose decision is separate from that of the college committee and may be appealed, as well. From the Dean, the case moves to the campus p/t committee and then to the Provost: the decision of each may be appealed. Finally, the case goes to the Chancellor. Once the Chancellor has made a decision and heard all appeals, the results are considered final and are communicated to the Board of Curators for ratification.

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DATE: 21 March 2002

TO: English Department Faculty

FROM: Martin Camargo, Chair

RE: Promotion and Tenure Timeline

Attached is a copy of the annotated timeline that was approved at Tuesday’s department meeting. This document is supplementary to the official departmental guidelines that are spelled out in the one-page document that is still in revision. It replaces a longer document entitled “Promotion and Tenure Guidelines for Assistant Professors.”

The purpose of the timeline is to show at a glance the major steps on the path toward promotion and tenure. The purpose of the accompanying notes is to describe some of those steps in greater detail. As much as possible, the document is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The prescriptive component of the mentoring process is the particular responsibility of each assistant professor’s mentoring committee. The members of those committees not only advise the assistant professors but also assist the Chair, the Salary Advisory Committee, and the Personnel Committee in preparing the annual evaluations of their performance.