It sometimes feels beside the point to worry about the formal processes governing tenure and promotion in academia given how much the institution of tenure has become irrelevant to the lives of many faculty who teach in adjunct or contingent situations. As with many issues, it’s a mistake to let situations that are mostly pertinent to a small number of wealthy, elite institutions be taken for the whole or dominate press coverage of academic affairs.
That said, “write about what you know” is still an important principle. I’m fortunate to work for a college that I think is still strongly supportive of tenure as its main approach to employing faculty, and I think we’ve done a fair job of formalizing some of our tenure procedures over the last decade. In that respect, I always keep a wary eye on what the Ivy League and a few other elite research universities are up to in their thinking about hiring, retention, tenure and promotion, because when they start to get a new bad idea to add to some of their existing bad ideas, it’s like when toddlers in day care bring every cold, sore throat, and illness they can catch home to infect everybody else. Sooner or later some academic administrator says, “Hey, the world-class universities are doing this new thing, we have to protect our reputation and keep up with them”, or maybe some senior faculty member who’s been off on a fellowship or at an institute comes home and says, wistfully, “Well, at Harvard, you know, they expect this when someone comes up for tenure, and hey, the rest of you losers don’t seem to care enough but dang it, this department has just got to up its standards!”
I can’t verify if one small element of this story about Harvard’s denial of tenure to Lorgia Garcia Pena represents that kind of incipient infection that might spread or not. Denying tenure to superb faculty, especially women and underrepresented minorities, is a Harvard tradition—you could build a denied-tenure mirror-Harvard for many departments that would be more influential, important and pedagogically transformative than the actual departments that Harvard retains. This particular propensity for self-sabotage still seems isolated to Harvard, thankfully.
Still, at one point, the article notes that the internal memo summarizing the upper administration’s reasoning for denying Garcia Pena tenure after unanimous approval at the earlier stages of the review includes “a low rate of response to the request for external letters of support”.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard faculty at elite institutions reporting that they’ve heard deans, chairs or other upper administrative leaders saying that a “low rate of response” might be considered at some point in evaluating a candidate for tenure.
Let me explain a bit what this means for any non-academic reader. Typically, when you come up for tenure, your institution solicits letters from external experts who work in your discipline and often in your specific field of specialized research interest to evaluate your scholarly work to date, anywhere from three to ten or more such letters. (Three is typical; the high numbers are generally, elite institutions trying to create a sense of prestige through ridiculously excessive and self-important procedural gyrations with a near-sociopathic disdain for the labor they’re asking faculty elsewhere to do on their behalf.)
Generally, a department chair and departmental colleagues consult to create a list of recommended external reviewers. Only rarely are there formal guidelines or rules for the selection, but most faculty would generally say that reviewers who have expressed antagonistic views in public towards the candidate’s work should be avoided, and scholars who have specific kinds of close ties to the candidate should also be avoided (former graduate advisors, regular collaborators). Some departments will look for a broader base of evaluations by seeking at least one reviewer from a different line of specialized work or even from a different discipline, while others will insist that all of the reviewers must very closely match the candidate’s scholarly profile and relative seniority. (Personally, I’m in favor of building diverse evaluation pools, especially for small liberal-arts colleges—I think having reviews from junior and senior faculty, from faculty in other disciplines who share the candidate’s specialized research interests, and so on makes for a better dossier. But I acknowledge that it’s easier to go wrong that way and get an evaluation that just misses the mark or doesn’t have an appropriate understanding of a candidate’s work.)
Here’s where this idea about rates of refusal enters the picture. When you solicit letters, sometimes you have to run through a fairly lengthy list to get to the requisite three or four or six evaluators. There are lots of reasons to turn down an invitation. I just turned one down a month ago because I’m on sabbatical in the coming year and I really want to focus on my work. Many of the people you’re inviting to write have visibility and a known reputation for probity and fairness and they get a lot of invitations. In my busiest year, I wrote seven letters for people at other institutions all around the world while also writing six such letters for colleagues at Swarthmore. Some people get ten to twenty requests annually for evaluations, and at some point, they just have to say no, especially if they take this work as seriously as they should. Sometimes folks are just kind of burned-out about this sort of wholly uncompensated labor: nobody knows or remembers that you’ve done it, the people who routinely refuse to do it are never noticed, and increasingly it feels like one more aspect of faculty culture and norms that institutional leadership relies upon but doesn’t respect or validate.
Those are the main reasons people refuse to write a letter. But sure, sometimes they also refuse because they already know (or strongly suspect) they will negatively evaluate the candidate and they don’t want to have any share of responsibility for costing someone their job. Or they think the candidate will likely get tenure and has a lot of friends and they don’t want word of a negative letter to get back to the candidate. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what percentage of refusals have that motivation, but my sense is that it’s not many. Mostly the people asking for reviewers avoid someone who is known to have a prior negative view of the candidate (not Harvard, where the upper administration clearly is willing to try and engineer a foreordained outcome) and that’s a precondition of this reasoning for refusal—you already know you don’t like that person’s work. Much of the time when you get a request you know very little about the candidate—that’s actually one of the valuable things about writing these letters, it keeps you in touch with your field. So at least some negative letters come about in a more honest way in the first place, through the work of evaluating the scholarship. I’ve never heard of anyone who said yes changing their mind and saying no at the last minute because they’re going to have to write a negative evaluation (not the least because people know that if you change your mind at the last minute, you’re creating a very serious logistical problem).
So if anybody does refuse out of knowing they’re going to write negatively, they’re often a person you didn’t want in the evaluation pool in the first place.
So back to why this would be a terrible practice if it spread (or has already spread) from places like Harvard. The worst aspect of it is that it offers a consequential interpretation of a gesture that has no actual expressive content. There’s no way to know what the refusals mean, even if there’s a very high number of them. You can get a lot of refusals if you ask too early (before people are done with the semester and they’re feeling harried), if you ask too late (because they’ve already said yes or have a lot of obligations for the fall), if you ask too many very senior people (who may judge this beneath their reputation or may be in failing health or may be retiring or may just have decided that they’ve done this too many times), if you ask too many people who are just recently tenured (who are frequently groaning under the new administrative service burdens typically heaped upon their backs). You can get a lot of refusals if you just get unlucky. Or if negative views are involved, sometimes it’s the chair of the tenure committee or the institution that’s drawing the negative views. Would I write for someone at Harvard, for example, even if I really thought well of the candidate? Probably not: why should I work on behalf of an institution that repeatedly craps on what the rest of the profession thinks?
It’s also a terrible practice in that it would likely have the effect of making more of us feel obliged to write more letters while further rewarding the people who never write them at all. E.g., the people who feel an outsize responsibility to do uncompensated work on behalf of ungrateful institutions for the sake of an abstracted professionalism that is being eroded away would feel compelled to do yet more. Maybe that’s the unannounced goal here, to cut down on refusal rates overall by making tenure candidates hostages. I doubt that any leadership would be that consciously awful in its thinking, but I’m know the reasoning here would backfire soon enough. You can only load so much on the mules before they’ll refuse to go any further.
I couldn’t find anyone (even Harvard) defending this as a formal evaluative criteria in their formal tenure and promotion standards. (Let me know if you’ve found an example.) So this may just be one of the evanescent ad hoc straws that get grabbed at when people who are orchestrating a bad decision behind the scenes need to pretend that they’re not sinking a candidate for indefensible reasons that can’t be spoken openly even in a star chamber deliberation. But if there’s any chance it’s real and it’s actually spreading, this is an idea that the ebbing power of faculty governance across American academia needs to stomp on hard.
Image credit: Photo by Brett Garwood on Unsplash
Being very old with, I hope, a reputation as a collegial kind of fellow, I get several of these requests each year and your comments about burdens ring true if the task is taken seriously- reading books and articles previously unread, looking at drafts if supplied etc. Tenure is however only one reason for being asked and in recent years, requests for comments about proposals to promote individuals- to endowed chairs for example- or to make appointments are also pretty frequent. One of the most pernicious forms of such enquiry include a demand that the referee "rank" the applicant against a list of academics at comparable stages of their careers. For some time I have refused to do this not least because a good reference is one which speaks to the future as much as it does to past performance. But no less unpleasant is that sense that you are being press-ganged into being a voting member of an appointments or promotion panel rather than the provider of an opinion and hence one who, in physical absentia, can be blamed for outcomes. I protested about this when pushed to "rank" a named candidate against a rather stupid list of comparators for a post in history at a university you name in your blog. My protest got nowhere of course. Amongst the points I made was the frequently compromised confidentiality of such procedures and I feel sure that you, like me, have been confronted by academics who are either grateful for or angry about things written which they most assuredly should never have seen. Unsurprisingly I and I think others are cagey when it comes to such approaches. It's hard work for sure but collegiality in many forms like examination is also hard work. Voicing usable opnions based upon serious research is hard labour plus potential exposure and it's no surprise that many of us resist such invitations.