In the academy, when scholarly productivity is considered, many words come to mind such as: research, journal articles, books and chapters in books, experiments and conference presentations among others. The literature often uses the term research as a synonym for scholarly productivity. A review of related literature revealed that tenure policies and practices vary greatly from institution to institution. New tenure track faculty attempting to navigate the system, are reported to describe their experience with the tenure and promotion process as vague, elusive, unpredictable or undependable. In an attempt to better define the tenure process of their own department, the authors designed a national study to collect and report on procedures related to the evaluation of educational administration and higher education faculty. Because of the complicated nature of the tenure process, the researchers divided their study into three phases. Phase 1 (scholarly productivity) was conducted in the spring 2002. Phase 2 (teaching) and phase 3 (service) are scheduled to be completed during 2004. This article reports the results of phase 1. (Contains 4 tables.)