Navigating the Tenure Process in a Mathematics Department

In this article, the authors share their knowledge and perspectives from being department chairs for a combined 13 years and now serving as associate deans with responsibility for managing the tenure process in their respective colleges. We’ve dealt with tenure cases in our departments and in the dean’s office, with both positive and negative outcomes. We are at different types of universities—the first author at a comprehensive master’s institution (and formerly at a small liberal arts college) and the second at a large public flagship university. All this experience has given us a broad perspective on the process and its potential pitfalls. While much of what we discuss is applicable across disciplines, mathematics does have some specific issues and we have tried to highlight those as needed. Our hope is that this article will help early-career faculty in their quest for the academic Holy Grail of tenure.

What Is Tenure?

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) defines tenure as follows:

A tenured appointment is an indefinite appointment that can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency and program discontinuation.

At most universities in the United States, tenure is granted after a pre-tenure probationary period, based on excellent performance in classroom teaching, published research, and service to the department and university. The relative importance of these three areas varies greatly from institution to institution, but normally one must be at least adequate in all three.

The standard academic ranks are assistant professor, associate professor, and professor. Assistant professors are typically the not-yet-tenured (“tenure track”) faculty. The rank of associate professor is usually achieved around the same time that one earns tenure. At many institutions, tenure and promotion to associate professor are tied, so that one earns both or neither.

One typically has one or two pre-tenure reviews, perhaps in one’s second and fourth years of employment at the institution. The probationary period for assistant professors varies by institution, but it is usually six years. When one applies for tenure in the terminal year of this period, there are two outcomes: tenure or termination of employment. If tenure is denied, typically a terminal one-year contract (a “mercy year”) is issued. If one applies for tenure “early,” then it may be the case that the candidate has the option to withdraw their dossier (without prejudice) before the final decision if it is going to be unsuccessful. This is the case at the second author’s institution; be sure to check your local rules and regulations.

What Tenure Isn’t

If you are fortunate enough to be granted tenure, then you will have a lot of freedom to pursue your teaching and research interests. Contrary to popular belief, however, it is not a “job for life.” In episode 14 of season 10 of the popular sitcom Friends, Ross learns that he is up for tenure (this is a surprise somehow), miraculously gets the good news that he has obtained it a couple of days later, and then goes on and on about how he can never be fired. Nothing about this description of the process and its timeline is correct, nor is Ross’s belief that he has permanent job security. Revocation of tenure is rare, but it happens. Tenure affords faculty the freedom to pursue research topics of their choosing, even if they are controversial, without interference from university administrators or state legislators. It does not give one license to break the law, violate university policies, or to harass colleagues, staff, or students. Tenured faculty can be fired for cause.

Moreover, there have been recent initiatives in several states to modify tenure (e.g., Florida). These mostly take the form of more robust post-tenure review policies in which tenured faculty are evaluated on their research productivity and the effectiveness of their teaching. Faculty judged not to be meeting standards may have their tenure revoked. This is a topic best saved for another article, but as it stands, the process for earning tenure has not been changed in any substantive way.

Building and Presenting Your Case

Most institutions have some sort of template for the promotion dossier. This may seem like a limitation, but it does have the advantage of standardizing the format across disciplines, which makes the task of evaluating files easier for various committees. Some of the items may not apply to you (e.g., patents), but that is perfectly fine. You may mark them N/A and move on.

While the format may be prescribed, the narrative you create is entirely up to you. This is your opportunity to explain to a nonexpert what your work is about and why it is important. What are the broad themes in your research and how do they fit into the larger discipline? Which of your results are particularly interesting and of interest to your research peers? It is tempting to “speak to the experts” here, but just as you should pitch a conference talk to third-year graduate students and reserve comments for the experts until the end, your research narrative must be aimed at the dean and the college committee (and, to a lesser extent, the provost and university committee).

You should not assume that your colleagues from other departments will understand how mathematics works or even what a proof is. (One of the authors had to tell a dean that “proofs” did not refer to the “page proofs” one gets from a journal.) You will want to talk to your chair about any clarifications that you want them to make in their letter. (See also the section “Pitfalls.”)

If your work has been funded by external agencies, be sure to tout this (and there may be a separate section of the template to list all of your funding). The faculty in your department will understand that an individual NSF grant in the $200K range is really great, but college committees populated by lab scientists will need to be educated about this “paltry” sum. If you’ve given invited talks at conferences, colloquium talks in other departments, etc., be sure to mention these as well.

You will almost certainly be required to write a teaching statement of some kind. How do you approach teaching? What does your ideal classroom look like? Which strategies have been particularly successful for you? Have you engaged in any professional development, for example through your campus teaching center or a professional organization (e.g., Project NExT)? Your student evaluations will be included; take this opportunity to point out the really good ones and explain the not-so-good ones (if you have any of the latter).

Many studies have demonstrated that student evaluations are biased against instructors by gender, ethnicity, and other characteristics (for an overview, see 2). You should ask your chair, and possibly your dean, how they will use student evaluations during the review process. Remember that evaluations tell you about how students perceive your teaching, and you should use the language of student perception when discussing them. They are a useful data point, but they do not provide a complete picture. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that having positive evaluations means you are a “good teacher.” Conversely, do not let the occasional bad review get you down. If your evaluations are consistently low, it may be a sign that something is not working and you should take steps to identify the problems. Your campus teaching center can help here, as can your senior colleagues who have more experience navigating the classroom environment on your campus.

The student comments may or may not be private (i.e., only visible to you), but in any case be sure to quote the really positive comments you have received. It is likely that your university requires regular peer evaluations of teaching for untenured faculty, and these letters will be included in the dossier. Be sure to interview your evaluators soon after they visit your classroom to discuss strengths and weaknesses and to plan strategies to improve where necessary. If you have mentored graduate students, be sure to talk about that process and the success your current and former students have enjoyed. Undergraduate research projects are also important to mention here. The takeaway should be that you are fully engaged with this part of your job and that you are committed to being an effective teacher. It will generally have more impact to show how you have grown as a teacher and learned from your mistakes during your tenure review period than to try to prove how great you are in the classroom.

Most departments try not to impose too many service requirements on untenured faculty (and if your department is asking too much of you in this area, you should have a chat with your chair). Still, you should seek to engage in departmental governance at an appropriate activity level, such as serving on a committee or two, organizing a departmental seminar in your research area, participating in outreach efforts, etc. If you feel you have too much on your plate, you should not hesitate to say “no” to another request for your time. While it is important to be a good departmental citizen, in our experience no one gets tenured on that basis. Research and teaching are almost universally the primary criteria.

For all three areas, write a crisp narrative demonstrating that you have met or exceeded your department’s standards for tenure and promotion. Remember, it is up to you to tell the story of your success.

Finally, a word of advice: do not overwhelm your reader. Years ago, the second author served on his college’s tenure and promotion committee. These were in the days when all of this was still done on paper and committee members would have to make their way to the dean’s office to read candidate files. One case under review (not in mathematics) consisted of three full banker’s boxes of material. Most of this was the paper copies of student evaluations (which were not required since summary tables were automatically generated), but it also contained every complimentary email the candidate had gotten from a student, every positive referee’s report, and much more. This was overkill and it only served to undermine the case by telegraphing a lack of confidence. By contrast, the second author’s entire tenure application fit into a 1.5-inch three-ring binder. The upshot is that committee members are busy and you should make your case as succinctly as possible.

External Referees

Letters from experts in your field are a crucial part of the tenure dossier. As the candidate, you should be given an opportunity to weigh in on who will provide these assessments. Typically, your department will solicit a list from you and then supplement it with a few additional names. Universities have explicit guidelines about the number of letters required and the proportion that must come from your list. For example, at the University of Florida, chairs must obtain at least five and no more than six letters, at least half of which must have been selected by the candidate. You will also be asked if you waive your right to view the letters. While this is generally not required, it is a good idea to do so since it affords your letter writers some leeway to be candid about your case. Besides, presumably you will suggest referees who will write a strong letter on your behalf, so there should be no cause for worry.

Your university will also have rules about who may write these letters. For example, it is common to exclude your PhD advisor and any postdoctoral supervisors. Your school may also forbid letters from coauthors and collaborators. While these people will certainly know your work well and would no doubt write strong letters, it may be difficult for them to be completely impartial and to provide an honest assessment. The references should hold positions at peer or aspirant institutions. This is not a hard and fast rule, but you will generally want to limit the number of writers from schools that your university views as not being in their peer group. Your institution probably has a list of their perceived peers; do not be afraid to ask for it.

So you will need to cast a wide net. Who are the senior experts in your field? Do you know them, at least a little bit? Have they been in the audience for one of your conference talks? This is where you need to be thinking about applying for tenure well before it happens. It is important to build professional connections and to promote your work. Posting papers on arXiv is important, but consider emailing folks in your field with the link when you do so. Despite the media tropes about mathematicians being strange loners with no social skills, we know the truth: we love talking about and learning new results in our discipline, no matter who discovers them. So do not be afraid to approach the senior people in your area at meetings to let them know what you’ve been working on.

If you are at a small liberal arts college, like the one where the first author earned tenure for the first time, external letters may not be required. This does not mean that you can’t get them anyway. At a more teaching-focused institution, there will still be committed scholars, some of them quite prolific. You want to be able to impress these folks as well, and the way to their hearts is to demonstrate continued commitment to your scholarship; you don’t have to be a superstar.

Committees, Chairs, and Deans

You’ve submitted your dossier. Now the review begins. The tenured colleagues in your department will hold a meeting to discuss the merits of your case. They will read your file, take a look at your papers, study your student evaluations, measure your service contributions. After the discussion, there will be a vote. This is generally done by secret ballot, but not universally. There are four options: yes, no, abstain, and absent (sometimes, people just don’t vote). The “abstain” is the most fraught. Some faculty will choose this option when they really want to vote no, but they also want to be polite. That is not the purpose of an abstention. Rather, it should be used only when there is an actual conflict of interest, such as a personal relationship with the candidate or a former advising role (some universities do hire their own students occasionally). But this is your chair’s problem to solve, not yours.

Your chair then takes this information and writes a letter summarizing the case. A good chair’s letter will include a description of your research understandable to a general audience and information about your publication record, including numbers of papers and the quality of the journals. If you have had external funding, your chair should highlight this. Strong endorsements from your external letters should be quoted (anonymously, of course). Your prowess in the classroom and your excellent student evaluations will add to the strength of your case. The chair will also summarize your service contributions and comment on your good departmental citizenship. The department vote may or may not be included in the letter, depending on your university’s rules (but it probably will be reported somewhere).

We have already mentioned student evaluations, but here is something else about them: department chairs are generally not going to comb through your evaluations looking for negative comments. Every faculty member gets negative comments; students complain sometimes! What chairs look for is red flags: consistent specific complaints, complaints from a majority of the students in a course, or comments that might indicate (sexual) harassment or any other Title IX issue. Chairs generally ignore whining and other negative comments that are vague or ignorant, so don’t fret over such things. Having a few students who dislike your class is just a humdrum part of the job, and the colleagues evaluating your case understand this.

The next step after the department chair depends on the size of your institution. If you work at a large university with multiple colleges, then your college will have a tenure and promotion committee to review the cases from all the departments and make recommendations to the dean. At a smaller school without separate colleges, the dossier goes to the senior academic officer, who may or may not consult with a committee.

A college committee acts much like a department’s tenured faculty—it reviews the files of each candidate and weighs the record against that department’s promotion criteria. This is extremely interesting work, and after you’ve gotten tenure, you should consider serving on your college’s committee. It requires an open mind and a willingness to learn about the publishing and research culture in other disciplines. This is also why it is important for your chair to write a strong letter pointing out why your case meets the standards for your discipline in a language that your colleagues across campus can understand. The college committee will vote and communicate the pros and cons of your case to the dean.

Now the dean writes a letter to the provost with a recommendation. In a large institution, there will likely be a university-wide committee to evaluate the cases and make recommendations to the provost. In our experience, this group rarely contradicts the dean’s suggestion, but it is certainly possible. Again, there will be a discussion of the pros and cons of your case, and the committee will vote on its recommendation to the provost. The provost will then decide if they accept this or not and communicate this to the president/chancellor.

Note that deans have the authority to override the recommendation of the department or college committee. This is where the departmental standards document is crucial. If you, the candidate, have presented clear and compelling evidence in your portfolio that you have satisfied the requirements and if the department votes against you 3-6 and provides criticism that is vague or otherwise does not directly address the specifics of your case, the dean may give little weight to the committee’s recommendation and provide a positive recommendation to the provost. Similar remarks apply to the provost—they have the power to make a decision contrary to the dean’s.

Finally, the Board of Trustees (which might have a different name at your university) will vote to accept these recommendations. This is almost always a rubber stamp approval, so if you’ve cleared the president, you should be good to go.

Pre-tenure Review

The pre-tenure review should be taken seriously. It provides an opportunity for you to get feedback from your colleagues about how they view your progress to promotion. These reviews take various forms, from an informal discussion with your chair to the completion of a draft of your tenure dossier (minus external letters). In the latter case, the tenured faculty will likely meet to discuss how well you’re proceeding. Take their suggestions to heart. Your colleagues voted to make you an offer to join the department and they want you to succeed. If there are any rectifiable deficiencies in your case, then you should make every effort to correct them. No matter how well you may be progressing toward tenure, there is probably something that could be improved; this is your chance to find out what that is. Recall that showing improvement and growth in teaching, based on feedback from students, colleagues, and your chair, is particularly important.

How your institution uses the results of pre-tenure review varies. At the second author’s university, the chair prepares a letter for the dean summarizing the progress of the candidate. The dean reads it and adds comments if they have any, and then the process stops. It does not “go on your permanent record” in any sense. It does not go into the tenure application later, for example. It is truly meant to be honest feedback, and so you should engage with the process in that spirit.

In contrast, the pre-tenure reviews are a mandatory part of the tenure portfolio at the first author’s institution. They occur in the spring of the second and fourth years and include reviews by the departmental tenured faculty, department chair, and dean. The letters from these three entities are included in the tenure portfolio, along with all the candidate’s annual evaluations by the chair.

Research for the Assistant Professor

While the tenured have much latitude in pursuing their own interests on their own timelines, the not-yet-tenured must focus on achievable goals on realistic timelines. We recommend a two-dimensional approach to success.

1.

Have multiple problems going at once: some that you are confident that you can solve, some that you think you can probably solve, and some that may stretch your knowledge or abilities. But don’t spread yourself too thin, either.

2.

Aim to have, at any given time, an article at each of the following five “pipeline” stages:

•

exploration,

•

exposition (writing up the results),

•

under review,

•

under revision,

•

accepted / to appear / recently published.

As soon as one article advances to the next stage, try to move the others along.

These axes are not orthogonal, and which axis is more important will depend on your institution. The first is the advice that the second author would emphasize at an R1; the second is what the first author would emphasize at more teaching-oriented institutions. In any case, both are worth at least keeping in mind. Those at teaching institutions might want to read the first author’s article 1 on how to be successful despite a more time-consuming teaching assignment.

Pitfalls

The tenured faculty in your department will vote on your tenure application. (At some small colleges, they might each write a letter instead of voting.) This recommendation, whether by vote or otherwise, is supposed to be on the merits of your case with regard to your teaching, scholarship, and service. However, faculty are people, not automata, and on some level they are deciding whether they want to continue working with you for the next 20 or 30 years. If your behavior in the department has given people a reason to question whether you value cooperation, for example, or if you have just plain been a jerk to a few of your colleagues, people are more likely to find weaknesses in your application. You need to be a “good citizen” in your department.

Unfortunately, sometimes your good citizenship is not enough. Math departments can have difficult faculty, and some departments are divided along disciplinary (“pure” vs “applied”) or ideological (traditional teaching vs active learning methods) lines. You many feel pressure to “pick a side.” In this situation, it is important to listen to others’ views and take them seriously; it is possible to show respect for both perspectives and agree with some bits but not others. In such an environment, it is especially important to pay careful attention to the department standards for tenure and work to meet them while avoiding getting caught in the crossfire of intradepartmental squabbles.

Once your application has moved beyond the department, the possibility of innocent misunderstandings increases. The college and university committees will be comprised of faculty from a variety of disciplines, and your own dean will probably be from another discipline. The different departments have unique standard practices and also use seemingly universal terms differently. For example, in mathematics the standard unit of peer-reviewed published work is commonly referred to as a “paper,” but this is not so in some other disciplines. For example, in history and philosophy, a “paper” is something one reads aloud at a conference. The term for published written work that seems to be universally understood is “article,” so we recommend that you refer to your papers as “articles,” or even “peer-reviewed published articles,” for clarity.

Conference proceedings pose another potential pitfall. In mathematics, such proceedings are typically a special issue of a journal. However, a social scientist told the first author that, in her discipline, “conference proceedings” refers to informal notes passed around among colleagues at meetings. Thus it is important to explain that conference publications are journal articles that come about via a conference. Your department chair should provide this context in their letter of support, but it wouldn’t hurt for you to mention it in your narrative. It may be wise to make sure that any journal or proceedings you choose to submit to is indexed on MathSciNet.

A note about interdisciplinary work: every university claims to value collaborations across departments. However, when it comes time for tenure and promotion, it can sometimes be an issue in your department if you’ve spent “too much time doing things that are not mathematics.” The authors take a dim view of this attitude, but if you decide to pursue interdisciplinary projects, you should make sure your department will take them into consideration at tenure time. Similar comments apply to strictly mathematical collaborations since some evaluators, either in your department or higher up, may be concerned if you do not have enough single-authored articles. What is “enough”? It varies by institution and is often a matter of opinion among the senior faculty. This is something to discuss with your chair and colleagues during the probationary period. If there is an issue, it should be pointed out during your pre-tenure review. You should be especially wary of publishing too much with your dissertation advisor as coauthor.

Rates of publication vary widely among disciplines, as do citation rates. Mathematicians have fewer citations than lab scientists, in no small part because there are far more lab scientists than there are mathematicians, hence more articles published and more citations overall. The AMS has statements concerning publication rates and alphabetical ordering of coauthors, and you should include these in your portfolio and also ask your chair to refer to them. See the section labeled “Information Statements of the AMS Committee on the Profession” here: https://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/policy-statements/sec-ams-policystatements.

Changing Institutions Pre-tenure

If your first assistant professorship is at an institution where you don’t really see a future for yourself, it is advisable to leave before your tenure decision. Once one has tenure, one tends not to want to give it up, and very few institutions will grant immediate tenure to a new hire. Furthermore, almost all advertised tenure-line positions are at the rank of assistant professor. One occasionally sees an ad for “assistant/associate/professor” but this is an exception.

We’ll let you in on a little secret: budget officers (either the dean or someone else in the dean’s office) rely on cannibalizing faculty lines in the following sense: when more senior faculty retire or otherwise leave, some money will likely be taken from that line for some other purpose. For example, if a faculty member retires with a salary of $100,000 and a new assistant professor starts at a salary of $75,000, the $25,000 difference reverts to the college budget and can be repurposed, either to help fund another position or to cover some other expense. So there is an institutional incentive to replace senior faculty with early-career faculty, both in academic and fiscal terms.

The second author actually did move three years into his first assistant professor position. He was in a strong department with great colleagues, but for various personal reasons the location was not the best for him and his family. Luckily, he was able to find another job that better fit the bill and he earned tenure at the new institution after three years. So it is possible to move pre-tenure successfully.

Two important points of caution. First, if you go on the market in year five or six of being assistant professor, hiring committees will wonder if you have been denied tenure or anticipate being denied tenure. Better to go on the market in year three or four. Second, the only universally transferable currency in academic mathematics is research indexed on MathSciNet. Hiring committees will not be impressed by your positive comments on your evaluations nor by your Teacher of the Year award from Western East State U.

Once you have tenure, it is possible to move between institutions, but the easiest way seems to be to move to an administrative post. That’s probably a topic for a separate article (both authors have experience with this).

What If It Doesn’t Work Out?

Tenure denials happen. Sometimes it is because the candidate truly did not meet the standards required by the institution—not enough scholarly activity, poor teaching, etc. If this happens in your case, then it may be that you landed at an institution that was a poor fit—perhaps your style of straight lecture didn’t match the expectations of the small liberal arts college where you got your first job. Or, in more extreme cases, perhaps academia is not the right career for you, and that was probably becoming clear to you during the probationary period. The remedy here is to look for a path that allows you to use your skills (and you do have them!) in a way that resonates with you. There is a tendency to view an academic career as the only legitimate path for someone with a PhD and that anything else is a failure. This attitude is shifting over time, but it is still rather prevalent. Opportunities abound in industry and government and there are many places where you can work on challenging problems where your mathematical skills will be useful.

Sometimes, however, a person gets denied tenure for dubious reasons. Your university should have an appeal procedure for such cases, and if you have met the standards for promotion set by your department and college, then you have grounds to proceed. The process varies among universities, so we will not venture to talk much about it here; you will have to look it up on your own. Lawsuits can be the ultimate remedy, but one question to ask before going that route is whether you will want to remain employed at an institution you were forced to sue to keep your job. Maybe, but maybe not. There is also a danger of too much publicity that could affect your ability to get hired into an academic position somewhere else. This is a risk you must weigh when deciding how to proceed. Is it worth it, or should you take your terminal contract year to reconsider your options and move on?

No matter how you proceed, this will surely be a source of discomfort for you. It is not easy to confront a change to the course you imagined for your life.

Parting Thoughts

We have both written many chair letters for tenure applicants in our departments. Now that we’re in our respective dean’s offices, those days are behind us, but we agree that it was perhaps the most important thing we did as chair. After all, our recommendations were helping to shape the future of our departments and we felt that we owed it to our colleagues to take the task very seriously and to give it our close attention. It is especially satisfying to see a person you were responsible for hiring successfully navigate their probationary period and earn tenure.

It’s easy for those of us who have successfully completed the tenure process to advise our early-career colleagues not to worry about it. Things rarely seem that bad in retrospect, but when you are going through the process, you will almost certainly feel some anxiety about it. Remember, though, that your senior colleagues are in most cases really just trying to be encouraging. They believe in you, so be kind to yourself and believe in you, too. If you’ve spent your time publishing good mathematics, being an effective teacher and mentor, and engaging in the life of your department, then you really shouldn’t have any trouble. Good luck!