I began seriously thinking about applying for full professor maybe about 6 months ago. I think I’ve mentioned that here, outlining why going up matters to me, but in any case I’ve been sure about my reasons for wanting to go up for a good long while, and the short version of those reasons are the following:
- No women are fully promoted in my department.
- Promotion to full comes with a nice bump to my base salary (not a million dollars or anything, but nothing to sneeze at when I wonder whether we’ll ever get a raise again, or whether they’ll just periodically do what they did last year, which was to give one-time merit-pay based on base salary).
- There’s no reason not to go up: if I’m denied, it carries no penalty, and I can go up again in the future if I’m denied.
- Being fully promoted will give me more clout in conversations about the future of the university/department, and it will give me more autonomy in terms of determining my workload, especially as it pertains to certain kinds of service obligations (though I know some other service obligations will crop up in place of those, the ones that will crop up are more meaningful and often less time-consuming in aggregate).
- If I go up for full and get it, I won’t need to think about whether I should or shouldn’t apply anymore.
Beyond thinking about those reasons, and thinking in a general way about what I’ve achieved over the past five years, though, I haven’t been very concrete about beginning the process of putting my stuff together. Because, you know, that would make it “real.”
But I decided I should set up a lunch with a fully promoted mentor, and once I did that, it occurred to me that if this was going to be anything other than a pleasant lunch I needed to come up with some concrete questions about the process. And that then led me to the faculty handbook.
The horror.
See, since I was pre-tenure, I haven’t really thought so much about the whole “jumping through hoops and documenting them” portion of this profession. I mean, I’ve been jumping through the hoops, but I haven’t thought about it that way. It’s the thinking about it that way that makes me Freak Out.
So going through all of the criteria, and all of the possible permutations of evidence that I could compile to demonstrate that I’ve met the criteria, made me Freak Out.
Here’s what I think right now, having forced myself to confront the criteria directly: I’ve done so much in the past five years, but I’m not quite sure if it’s enough, even if it’s more than a lot of people do. I’m concerned that the full professor dudes in my department will not support my application, no because anything is “missing” but rather because it’s my impression (though I’m not sure if this is a totally fair impression) that they see their role as a gate-keeping role. And the faculty handbook, in all its vagueness, and the fact that our department handbook offers little to no additional insight, can allow that interpretation of the role of the fully promoted colleagues who will decide on my application. And I’m wondering how much campaigning they will expect me to do in order to garner their support. And, frankly, I’m wondering what they actually expect me to have done.
Sigh.
Two things would make me feel a hell of a lot better – one of which is only partially in my control, and one of which is entirely beyond my control. 1) If I can get the book manuscript finished (the part in my control) and a contract in hand, I’ll feel secure that they can’t deny me on the basis of scholarship. (A book is NOT technically required, and I can demonstrate my progress toward the completion of the book even now, plus I’ll have published three or four full-length articles by the time I go up, as well as one short article, all peer-reviewed, and a couple of review essays. I think that shows consistent scholarly engagement, but will that be enough without a contract in hand?) 2) If I get the Big (for the humanities) Teaching Grant that I applied for, then I’ll feel totally secure about the teaching part of things (about which I already should be secure, but for whatever reason, I’m not). But if not… yeah, I guess what I’m saying is that I just don’t trust the people who will be evaluating me to recommend my promotion.
But whatever. I’ve got like 10 months to get myself on solid ground, and I have to believe that I can do that. And, even if I end up getting denied, ultimately, then I’ll be well on my way to resubmitting the application in a year or two.
Whatever. I needed to face the actual requirements, no matter how crappy they make me feel. Better to face them now so that I can do all the things to put forward the best application possible.
Ugh.
I’m surprised that you didn’t even mention the role of the outside peer letters. If you are a respected and productive member of your field, and your outside letters are enthusiastically in support of your promotion to full professor–saying things like, “Dr. Crazy would be an outstanding candidate for promotion to full professor at my institution”–then you will make it.
So I say, Go for itte!
Comradde PhysioProffe beat me to the point I wanted to make. I’ll just add that you have more control over the quality of your book, quality external reviewers should recognize, than you have over getting a contract—publishers can be weird. The bad news is that you have less than ten months; your material has to go to the external reviewers in late spring or early summer at the latest. If, in some bit of perversity, your department traditionally does not use external reviewers, then now is the time to propose a change.
I take it that the full professors in your department all vote on applications to full, and the department chair makes a separate recommendation. If memory serves, there is no college- or university-level promotion committee, and so the department and chair have more say than they might otherwise.
Ah, external reviewers. I will include external reviews in my application, but there is no “tradition” of such reviews within my department, and it is my sense that they may carry very little weight. While I’d love to be wrong about that, it is the case that “how things are done here” often means more at my institution than how one is regarded within one’s field or the quality of one’s work, regardless of what “options” the handbook lists for documentation (the option is there, but it’s just an “option” and there is no sense of a protocol for requesting those letters or what they should include).
Also, I know I don’t have control over getting a contract for the book, but I do have control over actually meeting my internal deadline for getting the complete manuscript ready to go under review, which is January/February, which would put me in good shape to have proof that it’s gone out to reviewers and has solid interest from a press, which would likely be enough (especially given I’ve already written one book, even though, of course, that book doesn’t “count” for this promotion, so effectively I’ve raised the bar for myself by publishing my first book prior to tenure, so the standard I’ll have to meet will be higher than the standard other people have to meet – awesome).
Yes, no college-wide or university-level committees: just the full profs in my department, and then the chair, who will be brand spanking new next fall – one reason I’m motivated to get myself fully promoted before whomever the new person is settles in.
We have a long history in my department, too, of people waiting 10-20 years to go up for full – though the last person to earn full did it after just six years (going up in the 5th post-tenure) and it’s common for people across the university to go up on that shorter time-frame. So the politics… they are funky (like a stinky cheese; not like George Clinton).
No advice or insight to offer, since I’m not even on the TT, but just wanted to say I especially like reasons #1, 2, and 5. In regard to #2, merit-based “bonuses” (that’s what they’re called at my institution, where they’ve appeared intermittently over the last 5 years) are dastardly; the governor sounds like he’s being oh so nice and rewarding to state employees who have “saved money” (perhaps by keeping our own/others’ salaries in check?), but, unlike with real raises, there’s no cumulative effect, and there’s the whole intermittent-reinforcement thing — you know, the one that keeps people playing slot machines. Ugh.
I’m glad you’re writing about this. In my previous department, I went up for full professor about 5 (6? dates are hazy) after tenure. In my first conversation about it with the department chair, I got softly discouraged, but then I learned that most of the other women fulls in the department had also gotten softly discouraged. And I read the handbook and decided I could make the case; once I did so, the dept chair was very supportive. Many of the fulls were surprised, though, because I was jumping “ahead” of quite a number of associate professors who’d been tenured anywhere from 3-10 years before me.
Once I came up for full, though, and got promoted, it started a line of other people coming up after me. Some of those long-serving associates have now finally gotten promoted, too, but those tenured after me didn’t feel compelled to wait any more.
All of which is to say, the waiting in line? A bad department culture.
Count me in the “go for it!” crowd–although the department culture does seem a bit problematic. Here’s hoping they all bow under the pressure of your awesome case. So irritating that they expect more of you than they do of themselves.
That sounds like crazy bullshittee. At my institution, the rules–vague and indistinct as they are–explicitly require the solicitation of external letters and establish the standards by which external reviewers are asked to assess the candidate.
First and foremost, if these are your wishes, everyone reading your blog should support you fully. Promotions really differ from department to department. They further differ across disciplines. In other words, readers comments lack the local knowledge to serve as good advise.
In my department some elements stay constant:
- everyone following the complicated procedures of applying for full professor gets promoted gender notwithstanding.
- We ask for several recommendation letters and call the letter writers for fine details. Yet, our faculty is in the dark about the niceties of recommendation letters language and terms.
- In our department your salary depends more on your political skills than your rank.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t post this to ask for people to tell me whether or not to go up, or to confirm that I have a strong case. Nobody who reads really can know. I’m going up. And, as I noted, I’m lunching with a colleague who’s in a good position to give me advice, and I’ll lunch with a few more before the time comes to submit things. I realize the blogiverse can’t promote me, though I do appreciate the support of the folks here. Really, I just wanted to write about this publicly because the process is so mystified (and mystifying) regardless of one’s institution. I don’t believe that is a good thing. Also, when I was questioning, “Why blog?” at the end of last academic year, the answer that I ultimately came up with is that there are very few voices that speak to the concerns of people at my stage of career, in part because the further along you go the less you feel like you can talk about publicly. This I can talk about. And so I did.
As for the gender thing: English is a feminized field, and mine is a feminized department. There are more women than men in my department on the tenure track, and the (large) majority of hires that have been made in the past 20 years have been women. And yet, not one woman is fully promoted. Is this because women have gone up and have been denied? No. It’s not. It’s that women haven’t applied. In part (at least) because they think they won’t or can’t get it. In part because of the messages they get from their fully promoted male colleagues (such as, “while you’ve done all of this service, you really aren’t ready yet,” or “you’ll know when the time is right; you’ll have a feeling”) and in part because they get shunted into activities that don’t actually “count” for full promotion, which then take away from those activities that do. So I just feel a bit at sea because 1) I’m going up relatively quickly (per department norms, not in terms of what I’ve accomplished) for the promotion, and 2) because I’m like this weirdo feminist trail-blazer, even though it’s the 21st century (which, frankly, boggles my mind). Nothing about me going up *should* be controversial. Problematically, it might be. (Though I hope not, and though I intend to make it a very easy decision for them.)
Finally: What you get paid certainly relates to your base salary. Yes, raises might be political, but it’s simple math that if two people get raises – even crappy ones – in a system in which raises are based on a pool that reflects a percentage of a person’s base, and one person has a base salary of $5-10K less (as a starting point), that person will get less of a raise than the person who makes $5-10K more. And if that goes on for decades, the gap just gets wider and wider between those who get to full promotion (a standard 5-10K bump) and those who don’t. Honestly: I have now surpassed colleagues of mine in terms of salary who started 15 years before I did, mainly because starting salaries for assistant professors go up as the years go on while associate prof salaries stagnate. Those are the realities of salary compression. But so if you don’t get fully promoted as soon as you possibly can, it can really mean that you make tens of thousands of dollars less over the course of your career, regardless of the politics of how raises are determined.
Go for it and good for you!
Comrade, my uni looks a lot like Crazy’s in terms of letters. It’s part of being at a university for which research is treated as nice, but not core mission. My uni was founded as a teaching university, and it’s only in the last dozen years or so that publication has become part of the culture, in large part pushed by the faculty they were hiring, who really *wanted* to publish. But now that funding for research has been almost totally cut, there may be pull-back. In other words, former teaching focus meant that previous generations of faculty never had any reason to establish a culture of outside review (how could an outsider evaluate your classroom/mentoring skills?), and the recent push in that direction has largely been cut off by the economy.
Even shorter: it’s less about the institution than about the institution *type*, and the history of that type.
The only potential downside to promotion to full proffie is greater service expectations. At least, so long as you’re an Associate Proffie, you can say no to things because “I need to get promoted.” (That’s my excuse anyway.)
On CPP’s point: I know people who teach at places like Crazy, Notorious, etc. where they don’t send the dossiers out for peer review. I think it’s nutty, but it’s far from unusual at directional unis and some SLACs. But, if you get a book contract Dr. Crazy, perhaps you could include the peer reviews that you will get along the way as part of your dossier for promotion?
I hate to stay with the external review issue, Dr. Crazy, but when you say you “will include external reviews” and that “there is no sense of a protocol,” you don’t mean that a candidate in your department will simply name the people whose evaluations will be solicited by the chair or the department personnel committee? Or, worse, that a candidate will actually contact external people, as though he or she were asking for letters of recommendation?
H’Ann, shockingly, it’s the associate (women) who do 99% of the service in this place. Which is why they don’t apply for promotion. (Also: my lunch confirmed my suspicions: my application will only be a “slam dunk” with a book contract in hand, thinks my Mentor, even though that will mean that I will have at least one if not two more scholarly books than every fully promoted man evaluating me except for the mentor with whom I spoke. In other words: I’d better set up a lot more lunches between now and September.)
ELP: No, it doesn’t mean that. It means that I have the option of soliciting them from people I know, and of including them, if I feel like it, and I get to tell the people what to write. In other words, it is far less a “true” evaluation of my work than a blind peer-review. And as far as I can tell, people haven’t typically bothered to include them.
Oh, and by setting up a lot more lunches, I mean with the rest of the dudes on the committee – not just with Mentor, though he was a good start.
Frankly, you have a system (or an anti-system) that impairs candidates’ ability to demonstrate how valuable their scholarship is. I was about to suggest you ask for a standard external review (that is, the department, with your input, chooses a handful of impartial experts in your field, and sends them your stuff). However, you should do something like that only if it would strengthen your case, and if no one at your university would know to give the resulting letters the weight they deserve, then why bother? You need to get promoted more than you need to use your candidacy to reform institutional culture.
Maybe I’m being weird here, but I think that external reviewers would be as helpful at schools like Crazy’s or Notorious’s as at schools that provide more time for research. People teaching 4/4 cannot publish as much as people teaching 2/2. I think faculty probably should respond to the challenges of a 4/4 load by emphasizing research quality over research quantity, and external reviews would help evaluate the quality.
Regarding the salary issue, a good rule of thumb for our profession is “Make full as early as possible
External letters only come into play at my institution for promotion to full (not for tenure or promotion to associate). They’re very important at that point, along with publications. Teaching? Eh – I get the feeling that as long as I haven’t hidden the bodies of dead students anywhere recently, they’d consider that evidence of good teaching.
I’m also with you on Associate rank meaning “get to do all the service ever”. I’ve never been sheltered from service, not even when I was an Assistant. At least with promotion to Full, I would have the option of serving on a few more committees of interest which, at times, have needed someone at the rank of Full. (And there’s only one Full Professor in my department these days thanks to the last decade’s wave of retirements.)
I’m planning on applying for full next year, too, so I’ll wish you luck and offer to commiserate in the paperwork of the process.
ELP – I don’t think you’re being weird at all. I totally agree with you about the value of external review as part of the process for upping quality, as opposed to valuing quantity (which might be terrible). But nobody here really wants to talk about “quality.” (Just as they didn’t pre-tenure… talking about the *value* of some scholarship as opposed to others might make people feel badly.) In spite of the fact that all of my (confirmed) publications are respectable scholarly ones, and that the book will be placed with a scholarly press (while I can’t control getting a contract, that’s the sort of book I’m writing and that’s where I will ultimately place it – the variable is the level of prestige of the press, not the type), those who will evaluate my candidacy don’t care all that much about quality. And it’s also worth noting that apparently the committee views scholarship as the distinguishing feature of a full professor, in spite of the fact that this is not how the university requirements read, and in spite of the fact that most of them have not continued to publish ANYTHING, let alone books, once earning full. And it’s further worth noting that Mentor suggested that I’d have a better case if I didn’t have a book manuscript in process with the current publications that I will solidly have upon going up – basically, the book manuscript could, he says, make people think that I should “wait” for the placement of the book before I can “earn” full, whereas they might not think that if I had no SECOND book at all. Awesome logic, that, yeah? Though useful to me to know that bias this far in advance.
Honestly, I’d be better off right now if either a) I’d waited on publishing my first book, even if it was totally “stale” and came out with a vanity press (which, let’s note, nobody ever told me), or b) if instead of working on a second scholarly book, I put together a (lame) anthology with no actual writing involved with a textbook press (because that’s a book, in the broadest sense).
But I chose to write and research and publish to the standards of the discipline, as much as one is able with this load, rather than playing the game of the current tenure and promotion process in my department, so it will mean that I need to make my case very carefully. I don’t think that it will hurt, though, that my teaching is very solid, and that since tenure I took a leadership role in a) totally revamping our major for the first time in 30 years, b) revamping the university’s general education program for the first time in at least 20 years, c) am currently leading the way in getting a real assessment plan established in the department, d) chaired the college’s curriculum committee in one of the most crucial years in recent memory for doing so, and e) lots of other crap, including grants (both internal and external). Basically, I’m willing to make my case and to dare them to deny me. I’m actually not discouraged or “upset” by the lunch I had today. I think “galvanized into action” is a better way to describe how I feel. (Let’s note: I told CF about all this today, and she is LIVID about the sexism and the lack of fairness and the paternalism and all the rest of it. I just feel like, you know what? FUCK IT. I WILL DO IT. It’s a feeling that has a lot in common with the feeling that propelled me into applying for grad school. Don’t get mad, get even, I say
)
For what it’s worth, the current problem with reforming this process, at my institution in my department, is that one doesn’t have a *voice* in the process until one earns full professor. Aside from the practical reasons for wanting the promotion (mostly, money), part of the reason that I want to earn full professor is so that I can initiate a conversation about clarifying the requirements and suggesting that they should adhere to recommendations made by the MLA about valuing multiple types of publication as “book equivalents,” especially in these tough publishing times. Not just saying that a book is a book is a book, but rather thinking about what other kinds of publications (a suite of articles, for example) might be as important as a book. But as much as I’ve *asked* for those clarifications and suggested them since earning tenure, there has been absolutely no movement on any of those issues. Maybe because my full professor colleagues don’t actually publish peer-reviewed articles. And I got no mentorship on what I’d need to make my own case for full, although I asked for it. So, basically, in order to make sense of what it means to go up for full in my department, I need to get full. It would be helpful if I had the ability to time-travel.
Whatever the case, I feel positive, if not confident. I will make as airtight a case as I possibly can (in other words: the BOOK is primary right now), but I also will put together a tight application package (and I did get good advice today about doing that), and I also am going to fucking lobby for myself. And if they say no, still? Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.