Spelling it Out

As I have been writing letters as part of the tenure and promotion evaluation of assistant professors at other institutions, I have been struck by the great variation in the "tenure code" documents I have been sent to help me write my letters. Typically, these documents outline an institution's or a department's criteria for tenure and promotion, but the level of specificity of these documents varies a lot.

At the vague end of the spectrum are documents that state that the candidate must show evidence for "scholarly achievement" (or words to that effect). This is useless for my purposes, and I just write my evaluation however I think best. In my experience, these documents are the most common type.

At the definitive end of the spectrum are documents that state that the candidate must have x papers every n years in "respected journals" and at least y grants from external funding agencies. In these cases, which I rarely encounter, I don't really understand the point of an external letter. If the candidate met the criteria and is going to get tenure, why ask for anyone's opinion? Does it matter if I think the x papers were flawed and uninteresting? If not, then don't waste my time. If it matters, then rewrite the document to include some vague statement about "scholarly achievement".


The definitive tenure criteria likely result in fewer tenure appeals than the vague tenure "criteria", and the vague ones surely result in higher levels of anxiety and uncertainty for tenure-track faculty, but the definitive ones have problems as well. For example, unless there is a way to specify the quality of the "respected journals" (probably by impact factor, for lack of a better measure) and the contribution of the candidate to a multi-author paper and whether it is good or bad to have lots of co-authors (including students), there is little point in specifying the number of papers that must be published in n years unless that really is all that matters.

In that case, these documents might as well just say: To obtain tenure, a candidate must have their name somewhere in the author list of a paper published in some journal that someone respects.

I am actually ambivalent about these documents, speaking from the point of view of a letter writer. I know they must exist, but there really is no good way to construct them to be useful to the letter writer (or the candidate): too vague is useless, and too specific is strange and leads to more questions (most of which can't be answered).

As a candidate, you have to find out the 'unwritten' information by figuring out the norms of your department and institution. This is typically accomplished by having an effective mentor, by talking to other assistant professors, and by having a candid talk with your department chair and mentor at various stages along the road to the tenure evaluation. You can also attend informational talks given by deans or deanlets, although, as an assistant professor, I found such workshops disturbing because the information in them conflicted with what my department chair had told me about some issues (e.g., the selection of letter writers). Even so, I identified these conflicts of information, talked to the chair about them, he talked to the dean, and all was eventually sorted out.


As a letter writer, I don't know the 'unwritten' information, and I'd rather not guess. All I can do is try to write a fair letter based on what is in the record and on my perception of the quality of the candidate's research. The people at the candidate's institution will have to sort the rest out for themselves, depending on what they think my criteria/standards for tenure are likely to be; i.e., they can discount my letter (if my criteria seem too harsh), take it seriously (if they think my opinion is well supported), or pick out the parts that agree with their own opinion.

Mostly, I just need to finish these letters so I can stop obsessing over them (one in particular is much more difficult to write than I expected), and then I can move on to my next adventure in Professional Service Activities.

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Difficult Cases

Requests for letters of evaluation for tenure candidates started arriving during the summer. The process typically starts in the late spring or summer, when the dossier is assembled and the letters are requested, with letter due dates in the early fall so that departments can vote and pass their recommendations along up the administrative chain.

I almost always say yes to requests to write letters for tenure cases. In fact, I think I have only said no once, for someone who was too far outside my field and who had (in my opinion) been quite unproductive. I thought it best if people who were more expert in that field evaluated whether the quality of the papers more than made up for the low quantity of papers; I did not feel confident that I could do this.

Also, I was given a very short amount of time to write the letter, and could not have done a thorough job. I think it is important for these letters to contain something new and informative that cannot be gleaned from reading the CV, so writing these letters can take time.

Declining to write a letter for someone's tenure evaluation can be seen as a blot on their record unless you have a really really good reason for declining. Department and university P&T committees may pore over decline-to-provide-a-letter explanations, trying to determine if the declination reflects a negative opinion. It may not, but some suspicious faculty may still wonder: OK, so this person is really busy preparing for their Senate confirmation hearing, but if they really thought the candidate was great, wouldn't they take the time to write the letter anyway?

So I try to write the letter if it seems at all reasonable to do so in terms of my expertise and/or time.

Although most letters are easy to write in terms of content, some letters involve a bit of agonizing over wording and tone. For me, the most difficult letters to write are:

1. letters that are not entirely positive. In these cases, there is always a question of whether to accept or decline writing the letter in the first place. I think it is important to be certain that a negative letter is also a fair letter. If my opinion is not positive, is there a good reason for this? Do I have the necessary expertise to evaluate an individual's record? Can I be objective, or am I unduly influenced by an irrelevant dislike of the individual or his/her research topics?

2. letters for institutions that are not peer institutions. It is common to be asked to comment on whether the candidate would receive tenure at our own institution. If the candidate is at a peer institution, this is not typically a difficult evaluation to make. For candidates at institutions that have less emphasis on research and/or that have less awesome facilities and/or a smaller graduate program (and rare or no postdocs), this evaluation is more difficult. I've written before about how it can be challenging to state that the individual in question would probably not receive tenure at my institution, but is a good candidate for tenure at Lesser University. By definition, that's a rather patronizing and obnoxious statement. I have seen P&T Committees agonize over such statements, even if the rest of the letter is positive and even if the letter writer is at a university that is famous for eating its young (faculty). These statements are not to be made lightly or without justification.

3. letters for candidates up for early tenure for reasons that are not obvious. Faculty up for early tenure are evaluated by the same criteria and standards as those up for tenure at the normal time; you can't give them a break for not having as much time, nor can you hold them to a higher standard. Some assistant professor superstars get early tenure because they have such outstanding records; it's easy to write glowing letters for them. But what do you do if you get a dossier for someone who looks like they are on track but could really use another year or two to demonstrate that better? What if you look at someone's CV etc. and you have no idea why they are up for early tenure? Unless you are totally off-base with your criteria and standards, perhaps there are some departmental politics at work and you don't know what these are. These are difficult letters to write because you might have been able to write a really positive letter in another year or two, but as it is, you can realistically only write a somewhat vague letter about how this person shows some promise. In these situations, I just write what I think anyway, and let the department sort out its own political situation however it wants.

The letters from senior faculty at other institutions are just one element of a tenure dossier. I think it is worth putting effort into writing the letters, I don't believe that any one letter will either sink or save a candidate. It's just another data point, so I might as well make it a useful and interesting data point, without either over- or under-estimating the value of my opinion.

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Summer Letters

You would think that summer would be a time when I did not have to pore over anyone's CV or read letters of reference and such, but no; not this summer (or last summer or, apparently, next summer).

So, I read 58 letters of reference this summer. For the most part, these were the usual "X is great, blah blah blah" letters, so when there was something a bit different, that something really stood out. For example, after reading one particular letter, I wondered

WHO WRITES THIS KIND OF THING IN A PROFESSIONAL LETTER OF REFERENCE THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THE RESEARCH ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF A PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE?:

Bob and his wife have spent many vacations over the years in Bavaria, organizing their walking routes to coincide with the locations of breweries.

Apparently someone does write this kind of thing; I saw it with my own eyes.

Why would I care that Bob likes beery Bavarian rambles, or even that he has a wife? Was the letter writer grasping for things to mention about Bob? Was the letter writer drunk on Bavarian beer when writing the letter? Are we supposed to think that Bob is a cool guy? Oh how we wish we could go hiking in Bavaria with a wife and drink beer, just like Bob?

The Bob-Bavaria-beer statement was completely irrelevant to the purpose of the reference letter. The letters were for moderately senior to very senior professors being nominated for an award related only to research accomplishments. The nominees need not have any hobbies or interests outside of research, and need not have any particular interest in Bavaria or beer. We, the committee reading the letters, need to be convinced that the nominee's research accomplishments are enduring, extensive, and awesome; that's all.

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