Promotion & Tenure

The College's P&T policy is posted at https://policy.ku.edu/CLAS/promotion-tenure.

 

2024–25 application cycle, College instructions for external evaluation letters

posted February 7, 2024, by Ben Eggleston, Senior Associate Dean

The information given below about external evaluation letters should be noted by department chairs and the following four groups of faculty members:

  1. pre-tenure faculty members who are required to be evaluated for P&T in the 2024–25 academic year (Their department chairs will be notified of this status by March 1.)
  2. pre-tenure faculty members who may wish to be evaluated for P&T in the 2024–25 academic year even though that is earlier than their mandatory year (i.e., they wish to “go up early”)
  3. associate professors who may wish to be evaluated for promotion to full professor in the 2024–25 academic year (There is no mandatory year for being evaluated for promotion to full professor.)
  4. faculty members in other job-title categories who may wish to be considered for promotion and whose promotions require review by the College Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure and the University Committee on Promotion and Tenure (Common examples include specialists and clinical faculty.)

For any faculty member in any of these four groups, the department chair should soon begin the process of identifying potential external reviewers. The following documents govern this process:

Please note that step 2 of the “Process for Obtaining Evaluation Letters from External Reviewers” states that lists of proposed external reviewers must be submitted to the Dean’s Office for approval, must be submitted by April 15, and may be submitted early. The lists should be submitted to Senior Associate Dean Ben Eggleston at eggleston@ku.edu, and early submission is encouraged.

When asking the candidate to list potential reviewers, the department chair should ask the candidate to closely review the section of the College P&T policy called “Requirements and Exceptions for External Reviewers” – specifically, the section pertaining to conflicts of interest – and should ask the candidate to state the nature of their relationship (if any) with each proposed reviewer on the list that they submit. Similarly, when constructing the department’s list of proposed reviewers, the department chair should also review those conflict-of-interest requirements and state the nature of the relationship (if any) between the candidate and each proposed reviewer, insofar as any relationship may be known to the department chair or other faculty members involved in this process, without consulting the candidate. This information, from both the candidate and the department chair, should be included with the lists of proposed reviewers that are submitted.

After proposed lists are approved and when department chairs are soliciting external evaluation letters and agreeing on deadlines with the writers of those letters, they should bear in mind that the deadline for the submission of P&T dossiers to the Dean’s Office, including completed initial-level evaluations, is likely to be on or near October 3, 2024. Therefore, to ensure departmental receipt of the external evaluation letters prior to the department-level evaluation process, department chairs may wish to ask reviewers to write and submit their letters by late summer – for example, perhaps by August 15.

 

2023–24 application cycle, update regarding Requests for Information

posted November 9, 2023, by Ben Eggleston, Senior Associate Dean

The College Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure met this week. Any promotion and tenure candidate who has not yet been contacted regarding a Request for Information (formerly called a “check-back”) may assume they will not receive an RFI.

 

2023–24 application cycle, College instructions for preparation and submission of dossiers

posted September 10, 2023, by Ben Eggleston, Associate Dean

The application forms for the promotion & tenure process, as well as the primary, authoritative instructions for that process, are posted on the “Promotion & Tenure” page at KU’s central Faculty Affairs website: https://facultyaffairs.ku.edu/promotion-and-tenure. The following instructions are specific to the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. There are no major changes from last year’s instructions.

  1. The candidate (the faculty member applying for promotion and/or tenure) should provide the required files to the candidate’s department in accordance with the department’s procedure for evaluating promotion & tenure applications.
  2. The department should complete the steps of the initial-level evaluation process, including completion of the several documents associated with that process.
  3. The department chair or other department officer should verify that the electronic files of the dossier (both the candidate-produced files and the department-produced files) are organized as follows:
    1. The top-level folder should be named Lastname, FirstInitial - Department or Unit Name.
    2. That folder should have the following subfolders:
      • Candidate Documents
      • Candidate Response Forms (do not include this folder unless needed, which is rare)
      • Initial Review
      • Supporting Materials
    3. All files should be in these subfolders; there should be no files at the same level as these subfolders.
    4. For more detailed guidance about dossier organization, see p. 2 of the Initial Review Checklist posted at the Faculty Affairs website mentioned above.
  4. The files should be copied to a secure cloud-storage service such as KU’s One Drive for Business service, or SharePoint.
  5. The department chair or other department officer should submit the files to the College Dean’s Office.
    1. The deadline for submission is 12 noon on Thursday, October 5.
    2. A link to the files on the cloud-storage site should be emailed to Jill Mignacca at jmig@ku.edu.
  6. The instructions above pertain to candidates who are appointed in only one department. For candidates with joint appointments, the following provisions apply:
    1. The candidate should provide the required files to each department that will evaluate them.
    2. Only the candidate’s primary department needs to submit the candidate’s materials to the College Dean’s Office, along with its own department-level evaluation. All other departments only need to submit their department-level evaluation to the College Dean’s Office.
    3. If one of the candidate’s other units is outside the College (e.g., a research center), that unit’s evaluation of the candidate should be sent to the next level in that hierarchy of review (e.g., the Office of Research), not the College Dean’s Office. 
  7. Applications will be evaluated by the College Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure (https://collegedean.ku.edu/college-committee-appointments-promotion-and-tenure-ccapt).
  8. CCAPT is scheduled to meet during the week of November 6. It is anticipated that candidates who will receive a Request for Information (RFI) will be notified of that fact on November 10. It is anticipated that CCAPT will have the RFIs written and sent by November 17.

Questions may be directed to:

 

2023–24 application cycle, College dossier submission deadline

posted August 14, 2023, by Ben Eggleston, Associate Dean

The deadline for the submission of P&T dossiers to the Dean’s Office, including completed initial-level evaluations, is Thursday, October 5, 2023, at 12 noon. One week later – October 12 at 12 noon – is the deadline for the submission to the Dean’s Office of a “Candidate Response to Negative Recommendation or Marginal/Poor Evaluation from the Initial (Unit) Review Committee.” Further details of the submission process will be provided at this webpage by September 15.

 

revised CLAS policy

May 3, 2019

A revised College policy on promotion and tenure was posted in the Policy Library today. There are four main differences between this version of the policy and the previous one:

  1. This version has a new “request for information” procedure for the College Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure. This is found in section III.H.2, “Intermediate Review Level.” The purpose of this procedure is to provide more guidance for CCAPT about requesting additional information, and for candidates and departments about replying to such requests.
  2. The name has changed from “Statement of Promotion and Tenure for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences” to “Promotion and Tenure Procedures for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.”
  3. The URL has changed to https://policy.ku.edu/CLAS/promotion-tenure.
  4. The format has changed from a PDF file to web text.