Information on Criteria for Promotion to Full Professor
Jack Stone (jstone@spelman.edu)
Sun, 29 Dec 96 20:18:18 PST
We are a small department (5 faculty) at a small liberal arts college
who have been discussing the criteria for promotion to full professor.
In the area of scholarly activity, we are attempting to employ the
"context of the profession" in determining our criteria which
essentially means we are interested in the criteria employed by other
departments in comparable institutions. I have searched the net to
find such information and have found virtually nothing. I am aware of
an article in the JEL in 1991 which analyzed the vita of a sample of
faculty from a group of "elite" liberal arts colleges. We are interested
in the following kinds of questions:
1. What is the number of publications that is minimally
acceptable? Do departments essentially just count?
2. How important is quality? Are measures of this such as
rank of journal and citations used? Does a publication have to be in
a journal which is indexed in the JEL?
3. How are joint publications treated? Are they given the
same or different weights as single author publications?
4. Are tradeoffs employed? For example, if an article ranks
low on one dimension, can a higher rank on another dimension be
used to subsitute in the overall ranking?
5. Are any more or less rigid formulas employed or is the
process very subjective?
6. How important is OUTSIDE peer review?
7. Do other departments attempt to employ the context of the
profession in making such decisions?
I realize that many of the above overlap. However, if anybody knows
any sources of information about this, I would appreciate hearing
about it. In addition, I would be interested in hearing about practices
in other institutions. Or the names of other more appropriate mailing
lists if this is not regarded as an appropriate one for this issue? The
last statement is prompted by my experience on this list of never
finding a post about this.
Thanks.
Jack Stone