Faculty Mentoring and Unraveling the Mystery of Tenure and Promotion

Evaluation for tenure and promotion is a combination of faculty and administrative evaluators, typically including a departmental faculty committee, Head or Chair, College or University faculty committee, and Dean or Director.  Expectations may vary at each level. Mentoring for success at the departmental level is best done at the departmental level.  Some departments have great mentoring programs, and some do not.  Unfortunately, mentoring for success above the departmental level often is a missing link.  I will describe our approach to "Mentoring Beyond the Department".  It incorporates two rubrics. One rubric is based on quantitative metrics.  It is a comparison to the average metrics of successful and unsuccessful tenure and promotion packets, e.g. numbers of graduate students advised, courses taught, publications, grants, etc. The other rubric is based on qualitative expectations of faculty. This is determined by polling the exiting members of the college-level tenure and promotion committee as to the "relative weight" they place on qualitative parameters typically expected under the categories teaching, research and service.