- What does it typically take to be promoted to associate and full professorships at your institution?
- What role does teaching performance play in such decisions? And how is it measured?
- What are the incentives to undergo a promotion process, apart from the obvious ones like tenure and possibly higher wages?
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Standards for promotions
My department is developing its strategy for the next five years. As part of this strategy work, we are working on a "promotion strategy" and we are discussing standards for promotion to associate and full professor positions. Needless to say, there is a wide array of opinions amongst my colleagues on this point. In order to obtain a broad survey of current best practices, let me ask any reader out there:
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3 comments:
Nobody has replied to this, and I am underwhelmed. In Danish academia it has become increasing important to be able to obtain external funding for research, and it has now become one of the criteria in the process of assessing applications for full professorships.
Personally, I am not in favour of this development. Others may disagree.
And by the way, teaching is not considered particularly important at the level of full professorship.
The standards at Sydney University are defined at http://sydney.edu.au/provost/docs/2012_policy/Promotions_Policy_2012.pdf. As youc an see, they are on paper symmetric between teaching and research (in practice, I think there is still a balance towards research, but poor teaching or lack of interest in teaching can be a real drawback).
In brief, to be promoted to full professor (level E in local terminology), you need to be already performing as expected for someone at that level in teaching and in research, and also show that you are on-the-way-there in service (that is, significantly better than expcted for those at your current level of Associate professor); alternatively, you can show that you are much better than expected for Professors in research, and on-the-way in teaching and service, or you can be much better than expected for Professors in teaching, and on-the-way in research and service. The expectation for full Professor is to be a "leader" setting an agenda and having impact. Grant funding is seen as evidence of respect for one's research, and someone who doesn't win grants would need to find quite strong alternative evidence of their impact and reputation.
Hans and Anonymous from Sidney University,
Thanks a lot for your feedback. It will be most useful as we discuss a draft of our school-of-CS promotion strategy at the first school meeting of the coming year. This will be a very tricky discussion, not least because our current draft sets rules for CS that are substantially more demanding than for the rest of the university as a whole.
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