Though a student's days studying in the classrooms of Cabell Hall or tossing Frisbees on the Lawn are fleeting, some faculty members spend lifetimes at the University. With guaranteed permanent positions, some remain at the University for their entire careers. These faculty members have achieved positions that, ideally, only the brightest, most productive and most valuable achieve - they have become tenured.
The College's tenure process begins in the fall of each academic year. One of its key stages commences in just a few days. On Dec. 1, the College Dean's Promotion and Tenure Committee will begin its part of a process that determines 21 professors' futures.
"Tenure is the single most important thing about this profession ... it's incomparable job security," said Karen Ryan, College associate dean for personnel and planning and current chairwoman of the CollegeDean's Promotion and Tenure Committee.
A 'mysterious process'
Despite its importance, students often are confused and mystified by the tenure process, especially when a professor whom they adore does not receive tenure, College Dean Edward Ayers said.
Even new faculty members or those working toward becoming full professors usually do not understand the tenure process, History Department Chairman Charles McCurdy said.
"You really don't learn the ins and outs of it until [after] you start" your first job on the way to becoming tenured, McCurdy said.
Each department chairman explains tenure to new faculty members in their first couple of weeks at the University to help familiarize them with a mysterious process, he said.
"It's designed to be mysterious ... to protect the privacy of a lot of people so it can be a fair process," Ayers said. For example, specific votes of members of the various promotion and tenure committees are not revealed to ensure each person's ability to vote fairly and honestly.
The confidentiality associated with tenure is "designed to protect the integrity of the process and the community in which we belong," he said.
On the other hand, he added, it is a very public process because every decision made by every committee is heavily documented and accountable.
Research, service and teaching
"Tenure is about excellence ... excellence across the board," Government and Foreign Affairs Professor Larry J. Sabato said.
Excellence is necessary in three categories in order to be considered for tenure at the University. The College judges tenure candidates by excellence in research, excellence or potential for excellence in teaching, and service to the University community demonstrated by serving on departmental committees and doing daily work within academic departments.
Each of the components must be present, Ryan said. For example, "you can be a really excellent teacher and a mediocre researcher and you won't get tenure."
"There is no choice between being a great teacher or a great scholar," Ayers said. At a prominent institution of higher learning such as the University, tenured faculty members also must have national stature and be widely recognized in their fields, he said.
In the College, 404 full-time faculty members are tenured, comprising about 65 percent of the College's full-time faculty.
Data from 1996-1997, which compares the University to other Virginia colleges and universities, shows the University having a higher percentage of tenured faculty than most other institutions of higher education. In those years, 67 percent of full-time University faculty were tenured, compared to an average of 59 percent in the other colleges and universities in the Commonwealth.
At the University, ratios of tenured to non-tenured faculty shift from year to year among departments because quotas within departments do not exist.
"In terms of tenure, the gender breakdown [by percentage] is almost equal," Ryan said. The same is true for minorities, she said.
In other words, men, women and minorities all have the same chance of becoming tenured professors once they begin a career in academia at the University.
However, in terms of raw numbers, a smaller number of women and minorities are tenured simply because more men pursue fields in academia, she added.
Because tenure is such an important decision for both tenure candidates and universities, a detailed process exists among University schools to review each candidate in attempts to grant tenure only to the most qualified and valuable.
"To give someone a permanent, guaranteed position for the rest of their natural life is a critical, critical decision for the University," Sabato said. "It commits resources for decades and it cannot be taken back."
"It's sort of like getting married - you want to know what you're getting into," Ryan said.
The process revealed
The first step to obtaining a tenure-track position is to earn a Ph.D. After earning a Ph.D., including defending a dissertation, an individual begins searching for a job.
If the College is interested in a candidate, he or she is offered a job as an assistant professor, which carries a four-year contract.
In the professor's third year, he or she will undergo the Third Year Review, in which the department determines whether to renew the contract for an additional three years. In the Third Year Review, factors such as research interests and ability, teaching evaluations and contributions to the department are reviewed.
If a person does not pass the Third Year Review, he or she then leaves the University when the initial four-year contract expires to search for an appointment at another college or university.
If a professor stays through the Third Year Review, he or she comes up for tenure in the sixth year. If this step is missed and a professor has remained at the University for seven years without being reviewed for tenure, he or she automatically is awarded tenure. "It has happened in the past, in the old days of the University ... it doesn't happen anymore," Ryan said.
The Office of the College Dean keeps track of how long faculty members have worked at the University and periodically notifies the College's departments of professors who need to be considered for tenure. Each department chairman then works with tenure candidates to prepare tenure cases - compilations of research and records detailing the individual's strengths as an academic.
When compiling a tenure case, "the candidate does most of the work," Ryan said. And a lot of work it is: The dossier typically includes a professor's resume,research completed during the professor's stay at the University, articles and books written, three years worth of teaching evaluations, recommendation letters from external experts in the candidate's field, and a personal statement of four to five pages describing the candidate's research, aspirations and plans as a teacher.
Ayers maintained that many students do not realize that teaching evaluations and student letters are included in the dossier.
Students should be aware of the importance of their comments about professors, Ayers said. "Students have input every single year [which] we take very seriously."
He encouraged students to be thorough and specific when filling out teaching evaluations, whether their comments are positive or negative.
After the candidate compiles his or her dossier, each department's Promotion and Tenure Committee reviews the profile. This group's job is to recommend to remaining tenured members of the department whether to award tenure to the candidate. Sometimes, in the case of small departments, all tenured faculty members study and review applicants in one go-around.
Once the tenure committees have filtered candidates, all tenured department members debate and vote on each candidate, as the department chairman records the votes. Department members consider the dossier as well as other factors including how the candidate's research specialty fits in with the department.
This information is added to the original dossier, which is sent to the College Dean's Promotion and Tenure Committee by Dec. 1.
Typically, the committee receives about 20 cases each year, Ryan said. This year, College officials expect 21.
The committee consists of 10 to 15 tenured faculty members selected from a range of disciplines by the College dean.Each member serves for two years.
The committee chairwoman assigns each case to committee members who are believed to be best-suited to judge a particular candidate accurately. Typically, candidates and reviewers are matched by department or field, Ryan said.
Both of the evaluators and the committee chairwoman read the entire dossier - a tomb now consisting of at least three to six inches of paper - and then present the case to the whole committee, Ryan said.
The committee debates each case and drafts questions for the candidate's department chairman regarding the candidate's weaknesses and the usefulness of the candidate to the University in terms of research specialty. After this final Q&A, the committee votes, with a majority vote required, to offer tenure or not offer tenure to each candidate.
A detailed report of all the cases is compiled, including the votes and rationales for each decision, and the file is sent to the Provost's Promotion and Tenure Committee.
The final step
According to Ryan, the provost's committee is "more concerned that procedure has been followed, that it has been a fair and open process." If there are no apparent procedural or fairness problems, the provost's committee approves the dean's committee's recommendations.
However, if there was a close vote or a negative vote for a woman or minority, the provost's committee is "very likely to look closely at it," Ryan said.
The provost's committee makes a recommendation to the provost to either accept or reject the recommendation of the dean's committee. The provost - the University vice president who oversees all schools' fiscal and academic personnel management - either can approve the dean's committee's recommendation or ask the dean's committee to reconsider.
The order to reconsider "happens very, very rarely," Ryan said.
Of those College professors who come up for tenure each year, typically between 75 and 85 percent are granted final approval by the Provost, she said. The final decision is made in January.
If a professor is not granted tenure, he or she must leave the University and begin searching for a position at another college or university. The only exceptions to this are if a professor experiences a fundamental change in circumstances within the next year which allows him or her to be reconsidered for tenure.
An example of a fundamental change that could affect a prior tenure decision would be if a professor was awaiting a contract from a publishing company in his or her sixth year and was denied tenure because of the lack of a published book. He or she could be reconsidered for tenure after receiving the contract by the seventh year, Ryan said.
If the provost makes the final approval the faculty member now is granted tenure and guaranteed a lifetime of teaching, researching and experiencing life at the University.
Once a candidate receives tenure, Ryan said, it is expected that the professor will maintain excellent standards of teaching, research and citizenship. Although nearly all professors continue with their excellent records, if a professor does not maintain high standards, he or she is subject to post-tenure review, Ryan said. For example, if a professor decides to cease working on research, he or she will be assigned a heavier teaching load to compensate for lost research in the department, she said.
Only in cases of harm to students or illegal activity can a tenured professor be fired, she added. According to Ryan and Ayers, this happens extremely rarely. Neither one could cite a recent case of a tenured faculty member being fired. Usually, with such a detailed process, mistakes are not made, Ryan said, and the University is successful in awarding tenure only to the best of the best, ensuring their presence at the University for years to come.
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