The "Survival Guide for New Faculty Members: Outlining the Keys to Success for Promotion and Tenure" provides new faculty members with practical, down-to-earth wisdom and suggestions for successfully working through to tenure and promotion. The authors--both successful and experienced administrators and experts in higher education--have provided…

In this article, the author explains why giving early tenure to assistant professors is not really a great idea. Usually, tenure is granted only after a faculty member has reached his fifth year of service to an institution. However, if he or she is doing fine work and presents no indication of any problems for the future, an institution may award…

The author discusses the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance that has taken place in literary criticism over the past five decades, and the resultant surge in published offerings to what has become a diminishing audience. The question of supersaturation applies to the institutions that demand and reward humanities…

The definition and nature of scholarship is undergoing a transformation across North American medical schools. Some medical schools have adopted broadened views of scholarship that recognize and reward nontraditional scholarly works. This study investigated whether nontraditional scholarly works such as MedEdPORTAL publications contribute to…

University faculty is typically evaluated on their teaching, service and scholarship. Recent literature, faculty comment and legal rulings have called for the inclusion of collegiality as a fourth evaluation category. Collegiality may be thought of as any extra-role behaviour that represents individuals' behaviour that is discretionary, not…

Tenure clock extension policies are increasingly available for faculty who need extra time granted on their "clock" due to special circumstances, such as family responsibilities or health issues. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the formal policy has been available to faculty for over 10 years and is the focus of study by…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) provide a thoughtful empirical analysis of 22 different measures of individual scholarly impact. The simplest metric is number of publications, which Simonton (1997) found to be a reasonable predictor of career trajectories. Although the assessment of the scholarly…

Universities generally have clear expectations for teaching and scholarship, and often a faculty member's publications, research and scholarship are the primary factors in tenure and promotion decisions. Many universities do include service as one component in annual reviews as well as in assessing progress toward tenure and promotion.…

Expectations and the way they are communicated can influence employees' motivation and performance. Previous research has demonstrated individual effects of workplace climate and individual differences on faculty productivity. The present study focused on the characteristics of institutional performance standards, evaluation processes and…

This article presents findings from a case study related to the risks associated with the choice of traditional, tenure track faculty to teach online. Education offered at a distance via the World Wide Web is on the rise; so too is the demand for university faculty members who will teach those courses. While traditional academic and professional…

As part of its Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has hosted two meetings to explore how peer review relates to scholarly communication and academic values. In preparation for an April 2010 workshop, four working papers were developed and circulated. They…

The productivity of faculty members often figures prominently in annual evaluations, post-tenure reviews, and decisions about tenure, promotion, merit pay, release time, awards, and other kinds of recognition. Yet the procedures and instruments that institutions use to assess productivity and merit vary, leaving little that unifies the evaluation…

This article presents the results from a survey of political science department chairs regarding the tenure procedures and standards at their colleges or universities. The findings reveal that only a small fraction of the colleges and universities in the United States refuse to offer tenure or are attempting to limit tenure. We also find general…

The tenure system is a tenure of one's own making. It can be flexible, supple, and responsive to the diverse needs and life situations of faculty members, or it can be rigid and uncompromising. The tenure years need not be a time of high anxiety, but for that to happen, institutions will need to make structural changes in the tenure system. In…

In higher education in the United States, teaching and research in the fields of language and literature are in a desperate condition. Laboring on the age-old axiom "publish-or-perish," thousands of professors, lecturers, and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays, and reviews. Over the past five decades, their…