Overview
This page provides guidance for Department Chairs in conducting all types of faculty reviews. A separate page provides guidance for internal reviewers (including both department members and P&T committees), and you may wish to familiarize yourself with that guidance, as well. For more information, consult the individual pages for those types of reviews list in the navigation. See also Faculty Review at Lehigh for information about review portfolios, review cycles, and other general information.
General Guidance
As a Department Chair, you have a dual role in faculty review processes. On the one hand, you are responsible for ensuring the integrity and rigor of the process, and for helping the department to make fair, balanced recommendations. You also bring your own experience and expertise to the process, and your insight is critical for assessing strengths and weaknesses of the case. On the other hand, you are a mentor and support person for the candidate, so you must also guide them through the process with care and empathy.
Remember that some types of reviews (annual reviews, reappointment, and triennial reviews) are primarily intended as opportunities to help a faculty member ensure that they are making good progress toward tenure and/or promotion. As Chair, you should be honest and specific in your feedback. Don’t just tell the candidate that they’re on the right track if there are things the candidate should address in order to strengthen their case.
You should approach these reviews with an eye toward growth and development, not with a deficit mindset or an attempt to find holes in the professor’s record. Feedback and suggestions for improvement should be presented as constructive rather than punitive. Help make sure that your colleagues who will be participating in the review also understand this, and that they evaluate the candidate in the context of their goals and plans for career progression, as well as in the context of the college guidelines for promotion and tenure and the department Appendix.
In meetings with department faculty about the candidate’s review, remind your colleagues of the importance of considering perspectives other than their own, and encourage them to keep in mind the goals of both the candidate and the department. It is appropriate to evaluate the candidate’s dossier in the context of the opportunities they were given and the circumstances they are in. (This is especially true for COVID-19, but is also true for a range of other professional and personal circumstances.) You are evaluating both the candidate’s record to date and their potential for success in the future.
Remind your colleagues to evaluate the faculty member under consideration in comparison to the stated expectations for promotion and tenure. At the university level, these are succinct (R&P §2.2.1.5):
Excellence in teaching, research and scholarship, and service to the university are the criteria for reappointment, promotion, and tenure.
Therefore, use your college’s promotion and tenure guidelines, and your department’s promotion and tenure Appendix, which provide significantly more information about expectations. These documents are important in order to provide an equitable and transparent set of standards. There should not be “hidden rules,” and faculty members should not have to rely on rumors or conventional wisdom to navigate the process.
It is important for you and your colleagues to resist the natural tendency to compare the candidate to other professors who have recently, or will soon, come up for review. The file in your hands may reflect a very different set of experiences, histories, or pathways than those familiar to you. Your own expertise and experiences may not be a reliable point of comparison. Different journeys yield different priorities and perspectives, and these differences add richness and value to our shared work and life.
For review types that include a vote (reappointment, tenure, promotion), faculty members’ individual letters should align with their votes. If a letter expresses many negative opinions of the dossier but the faculty member votes “yes,” the letter should also explain the positive factors in the dossier and why the positives outweigh the negatives. Similarly, a “no” vote should be well supported by the letter, including specific reasons why the faculty member feels the dossier falls short of meriting reappointment/tenure/promotion. When letters are not well aligned with votes, it often makes it difficult for the Chair, Dean, and the Provost to interpret the basis for the faculty’s votes and to make their own recommendation.
The department summary letter should be reviewed and approved by the faculty members involved in the review (e.g., tenured faculty members for a tenure review). This written feedback to the candidate should reflect collective opinions and advice regarding research, teaching, and service.
Meet with the candidate as soon as possible after the letter is ready. Do not disclose the statements or opinions of individual evaluators. Remind the candidate that they are required to provide a written response or declination to respond to the summary letter. Make sure you meet with the candidate in plenty of time for them to write their written response before the deadline to forward the dossier to the next step.
Specific Review Types
Annual Review and Reappointment Review
Annual reviews and the reappointment review are critical checkpoints to help an untenured faculty member ensure that they are on track toward tenure. Therefore, the department discussion, as well as the department summary letter, should focus not only on the candidate’s record to date, but also on ways that the department will help support the untenured faculty member toward tenure.
Tenure Review and Promotion Review
The Department Chair plays a critical role in shepherding a tenure or promotion case through the department review and beyond. The Chair works closely with the candidate and department in developing the lists of external evaluators, provides guidance and support for the candidate in assembling their dossier materials, and communicates with the Dean about any unusual or unexpected aspects of the case.
The Chair should provide clear guidance to the candidate as they move through the steps of the tenure or promotion process. They should make sure the candidate’s dossier preparation is on track and that the candidate is aware of upcoming deadlines. Although it is the responsibility of the candidate to prepare their dossier, the Chair should be proactive in offering guidance and support, rather than waiting for the candidate to ask for it.
During the faculty meeting(s) with the faculty members who are participating in the review, the Chair plays an important role in keeping the conversation anchored in the dossier and free from bias with respect to the candidate’s time in rank, parenthood status, or protected characteristics such as gender or race.
The Chair should ensure that the tenured faculty members avoid nitpicking (“the journal title is spelled wrong in publication 16; if their CV isn’t accurate, how can we trust that their research is accurate?”), piling on (“your comment about their office hours reminds me of a time when they rescheduled a meeting with me at the last minute”), epistemic exclusion (scholarly marginalization rooted in disciplinary and identity-based biases), and other forms of bias. These behaviors exaggerate relatively minor demerits, draw attention from the salient aspects of the tenure case, and can lead to inequitable P&T outcomes. Moreover, they occur more frequently for female candidates and faculty of color.
If the department’s recommendation is positive, the Chair serves as a pivotal interface as the case moves from the department, which knows the candidate and their field well, to the rest of the university, where evaluators come from fields as diverse as Lehigh itself. The Chair’s department summary letter is critical for explaining the tenure case in language that non-experts can understand. The letter must provide context for the candidate’s record (for example, explaining how it does or does not align with the department’s criteria for excellence), articulate the role the candidate has played in the department, and clearly explain the department’s recommendation and why it arrived at that recommendation.
The Chair’s summary letter usually highlights quotes from the external evaluation letters to support the case for the candidate. If the external letters raise any doubts or concerns, the summary letter is the Chair’s venue for addressing, rebutting, or acknowledging those concerns. The text and tone of the Chair’s summary letter are often reflected in the letters provided later by the P&T committee and the Dean, so it is important for this letter to provide an accurate, clear portrayal of both the candidate and the department’s assessment of their dossier.
If the department recommendation is negative, it is the Chair’s responsibility to communicate this clearly and compassionately to the candidate. The candidate will likely feel normal, human emotions of anger, disappointment, and embarrassment. The Chair should not judge or push back against these emotions but should be supportive and understanding.
For tenure denials in particular, the Chair should also remind the faculty in the department that the candidate is still a Lehigh colleague for one more year, and may well be a professional colleague at another institution for far longer. However uncomfortable department members might feel about the outcome, they should not avoid the candidate in the hallway or exclude them from department meetings. The Chair may offer support such as funds to travel to conferences for networking or advice about conducting a(nother) academic job search. The AAUP’s Good Practice in Tenure Evaluation, Chapter 4, has useful, if somewhat outdated, advice in this regard.
Triennial Review
Before beginning the triennial review process, review the guidelines about the promotion plan and its role in the overall qualitative and developmental feedback process. Invite the Associate Professor to have a preliminary discussion with you about their promotion plan, if they wish, before the deadline for submitting the triennial review dossier.
Since the purpose of the triennial review is to help prepare the candidate for promotion, the department summary letter should focus not only on the candidate’s record to date, but also on ways that the department will help support the faculty member toward promotion. When you meet with the faculty member, feel free to discuss their big goals or dream projects. Be open to hearing about hidden work. Be curious about leadership showing up in less formal ways, and be ready to work with the faculty member to create new directions and support for them.
Notes
- This overview is intended to supplement the information contained in Lehigh’s Rules and Procedures of the Faculty (R&P). If there is a discrepancy between the guidance on this page and R&P, the provisions of R&P govern.
- Feel free to contact your Department Chair, Associate Dean for Faculty, the Deputy Provost for Faculty Affairs, or the Director of Faculty Affairs with any questions or concerns.