Jarad Niemi

Tenure

This page is dedicated to helping newer faculty understand what the tenure process timeline is in the Statistics department. This page is mainly dedicated to the process of generating your P&T Dossier and CV. I am creating this page as I go through the process and trying to remember what happened in my past.

Before Promotion to Associate Professor with tenure review

Before discussing the Promotion to Associate Professor with tenure review, I thought I would focus on what you can do now to prepare for this review.

P&T Dossier

I highly recommend you download and start using the P&T Dossier template (use Word, see below) that you will need for promotion. If you update “Tab 2” at least every year, for your annual review, you will then have less to do (and are less likely to forget content) when it comes time to prepare your P&T Dossier. I keep my classes and student evaluations updated in this Dossier as soon as I receive them.

The P&T Dossier has a few “Tabs” and you, the candidate, are responsible for Tab 1 and Tab 2. Tab 1 can be filled in immediately and Tab 2 can be filled in as information becomes available, e.g. courses taught, student evaluations, MS/PhD committees, etc. The remaining tabs are used during the P&T promotion process for the department (Tab 3), college (Tab 4), and external reviewers (Tab 5).

In this Dossier, you need to indicate your advising (undergraduates and graduates), your publications and presentations, and grants. I suggest you construct a database (csv file) for each of these groups with appropriate columns to ease the counting process. For example, you could have a csv file that has all of your papers with an additional field indicating whether the paper is a refereed journal article, a refereed proceeding, etc. Then it will be a simple matter of running a script to count the number of each type of paper.

In addition to keeping your Dossier up to date, you should keep your CV up to date. If you have databases for various activities, you can use an R script to automatically include these in your CV. Then whenever something happens, e.g. a paper gets published, you update the database and then rerun the script to update your CV.

Annual review

Every year in the fall you will need to update paperwork in prepration for your annual review. The department will meet to discuss your case and then you will meet with the chair (usually in the spring) to discuss the results of the department meeting and his/her own thoughts. Our current chair, Max Morris, has his own form to complete which should be relatively easy to complete if you are keeping your Dossier, CV, and databases up to date.

Preliminary review (after 3rd year)

This review is an internal review aimed at determining whether you are on course for obtaining tenure. The primary document used for this is similar to the P&T Dossier (tab1 & tab2), so if you have kept it up to date every year this will be a relatively painless review. Currently the document can be found here.

This document will be reviewed by the P&T committee in October and by the department in November.

Promotion to Associate Professor with tenure review (after 5th year)

This process starts at the end of your 5th year unless you were given an extension or are going up earlier. The departmental P&T committee will likely meet the week after finals week to set a timeline and determine who your contact is.

The quick timeline is provided here with the subsections providing more detailed information. The dates listed here are dates provided to me and therefore should be used only as a rough guide for when your own deadlines will be.

  • 23 May: List of 5 reviewer names
  • 20 June: P&T Dossier to departmental P&T committee
  • 8 July: P&T Dossier to reviewers

List of 5 reviewer names (23 May)

The first thing the contact will want is a list of 6 reviewer names from you. The departmental P&T committee will come up with their own list and, I believe, 3 names are chosen from each list. These individuals are contacted and asked if they agree to be a reviewer. If they decline, I assume others are pulled from the two lists.

The reviewers are expected to be full professors from Peer Institutions or better. To determine what institutions qualify ‘or better’, use the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Eduation, click on LOOKUP to search for the particular institution if the Category includes ‘Better Doctoral Universities: Highest Research Activity’ you should be okay to use a reviewer from that school.

At this time, you will also be asked to provide a CV. I believe this CV is then sent when asking reviewers if they will review your P&T Dossier.

P&T Dossier (20 June)

The departmental P&T committee will request that you send them your completed P&T Dossier. You will need to complete this document by downloading the newest version of the LAS P&T Template in Word format. (If you do this in anything other than Word, you may be asked to redo it all in Word and therefore I suggest just doing it in Word.)

If you have been collecting information as it becomes available (as suggested above), then you will likely only need to provide updated statements for teaching, research, service, etc. Nonetheless, you will likely not have followed all the best practices. Here are the relevant best practices:

P&T Dossier sent to reviewers (8 July)

After receiving feedback from the P&T committee and anybody else, you will revise your P&T Dossier so that it can be sent to reviewers.