Report of the Committee to Consider a More Flexible Tenure Probationary Period

A. Charge
In the fall of 2004, the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs convened the Committee to Consider a More Flexible Tenure Probationary Period to explore the range of issues associated with changes in the rules governing time to tenure. The Committee was invited to formulate and submit a set of recommendations to the Provost, including a proposal for making any necessary revisions to Regents’ Bylaw 5.09 Procedures in Cases of Dismissal, Demotion, or Terminal Appointment and Standard Practice Guide 201.13 Rules concerning acquiring the protection of Regents’ Bylaw 5.09 by accumulating years of service. The full charge is reproduced in Appendix I.

B. Summary of Recommendations
To ensure its continued excellence, the University of Michigan must attract outstanding faculty and provide them with an environment in which they can thrive. This goal has become more difficult to achieve, as the university must cope with intense competition from peer universities, the changing nature of scholarship and publication, and a more diverse set of experiences and backgrounds among the faculty themselves. Our existing tenure process, which dates to the early 1940’s, is too rigid to accommodate these pressures. While the Committee strongly supports the institution of faculty tenure, we believe that reform of our policies on tenure will benefit both the University and individual faculty members.

The Committee recommends that the University adopt policies that create more flexibility in the tenure probationary period. Our central recommendation is that each school and college identify a presumptive time of tenure review and then create fair and consistent policies that may accelerate or postpone the tenure review for faculty members depending on their situations. To permit such policies to develop in the schools and colleges, two crucial changes need to be made in University policy: 1) revising Regents’ Bylaw 5.09 to extend the maximum probationary period from the current eight years to ten years, so that schools and colleges have the freedom to provide longer tenure probationary periods when that is justified by their policies; 2) oversight of school and college policies by the Provost or Chancellor to ensure that school and college policies define fair and clear criteria for decisions about accelerating or postponing the timing of the tenure review. We also recommend a new policy to make it possible for faculty members to work part time and remain on the tenure track, accruing years of service on a prorated basis. These recommendations are intended to adapt the institution of tenure to the realities of contemporary scholarship and faculty life.

C. Background
Creating more flexibility in tenure-track careers has received national attention for many reasons. For example “An Agenda for Excellence: Creating Flexibility in Tenure Track Faculty Careers,” was released in preliminary form in the fall of 2004, with a final report in the spring of 2005 by the American Council on Education (ACE). This report is part of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded project, “Creating Options: Models for Flexible Tenure-Track Faculty Career Pathways.” University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman is a member of the project’s National Panel of Presidents and Chancellors. The report says:

“As they shape long-term fiscal and strategic plans for their institutions, college and university leaders need to evaluate and act on all aspects of faculty career cycles. They need to do so to attract and retain those who are most talented in order to maintain excellence in teaching and cutting-edge, innovative research and to provide incentives for older faculty to retire with satisfaction and financial security, thereby accommodating the next generation of scholars and teachers. Central to meeting this challenge is finding ways to create more flexible career paths for the tenure-track professoriate to enter, thrive in, and retire from academia.”
(from the report’s executive summary, available at http://www.acenet.edu/bookstore/pubInfo.cfm?pubID=330)

1. Changes in academic fields, funding and scholarly publication

2. Differences among individual experiences that lead to differing rates of accomplishment

3. Intense competition to recruit and retain excellent faculty

1. Changes in academic fields, funding, and scholarly publication

Joint appointments. The University of Michigan derives considerable advantage from its wide use of joint appointments and interdisciplinary research. When untenured faculty members hold joint appointments, they experience more than the usual pressure to meet the academic expectations of two (or more) groups of colleagues and students. Trying to meet these multiple demands often makes for a challenging tenure probationary period. Some schools and colleges discourage joint appointments before tenure, in order to protect assistant professors from these amplified expectations. However, it may make sense to permit (or even encourage) joint appointments where those make sense for a faculty member’s academic interests and trajectory, and to provide more time for the faculty member to meet those multiple demands.

Publication challenges. For both technical and economic reasons, outlets for scholarly publication have changed dramatically over the last generation. University presses that publish scholarly monographs have diminished in number, and have become far more focused and limited in their publication lists. This has placed tremendous pressure on assistant professors in disciplines that have historically required publication of a monograph to clear the tenure hurdle. For reasons that may be unrelated to the quality of their scholarship, they may simply not be able to publish a book in a fixed period of time, given the economics of book publishers. Similarly, journal publication is changing in the face of the sea change in information technology and the plethora of channels for disseminating research. While in some fields, journal publication is increasingly shifting to electronic forms, many journals that publish in hard copy experience increasing delays between submission and publication of research articles. When these delays extend to several years, as they do for the premier journals in some disciplines, assistant professors who need national reputations for research excellence are severely disadvantaged. When untenured faculty respond to these delays by pursuing publication in less rigorous or prestigious outlets, simply to speed up the process, that serves neither the faculty nor the discipline well.

Funding limitations. Funding for research in the sciences, biomedical sciences and engineering is increasingly directed to larger, multi-investigator projects. As junior faculty attempt to compete for such funding, it may take more time to establish the collaborations that enable untenured faculty to compete successfully for funding. In medical schools in particular, the challenges of funded research have led to faculty positions that combine instruction, research, and clinical service. When faculty members are carrying significant loads in all three domains, it is especially challenging to develop a demonstrable record of accomplishment in a limited time frame. In recognition of this challenge around the country, medical schools have been the most likely to build more time into the tenure probationary period than the standard seven years (see Appendix III for more information).

All of these considerations may make it more challenging than it has been in earlier years to put together a record of accomplishment that will earn tenure for an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in a fixed period of time. For reasons that have little to do with the talent or effort of the faculty member, the conditions of scholarly and creative work have changed. Our tenure review process should acknowledge these changes. One implication is to make it possible to extend the time of the probationary period for faculty members, so that the forces mentioned here do not torpedo the careers of highly promising scholars, researchers, and artists.

2. Differences among individuals that lead to different rates of productivity

Career paths. Faculty members may begin their careers as assistant professors immediately after earning a PhD (or indeed slightly before earning a PhD) at a comparable institution. However in many fields, new PhD recipients begin their careers as postdoctoral fellows (or in similar positions), and many of these fellows may spend two or three years, or even longer, in non-teaching positions designed to launch their careers as independent researchers and scholars. When these faculty members begin their time on the tenure track, they already have several years of experience and publication, and in many cases have access to funding to continue and build their research. Although they hold the same title as assistant professors who have not served as postdoctoral fellows, they do not have the same situation. In other cases, assistant professors have begun their careers in other institutions, with extensive experience in teaching or research in another location. When these individuals begin their time at the University of Michigan as assistant professors, they are able to draw on their teaching and research experience elsewhere to build their careers here. Whether because of postdoctoral research or teaching experience, these assistant professors have a considerable running start on their careers here. It is not clear that it makes sense to keep them on the same schedule as other faculty members who begin their careers directly after graduate school.

Mentoring. For many reasons, some assistant professors receive excellent mentoring and advice from their senior colleagues, while others receive little or none. These differences are often attributable to whether individual assistant professors find close colleagues with similar research, scholarly or creative interests. But the differences may also be attributable to differences in school, college, or departmental norms and practices. The sizable variations in level and quality of advising may contribute to differing rates of success of untenured faculty members in meeting the expectations of their senior colleagues.

Family circumstances. The lives of untenured professors vary in the personal and family demands that they experience. Faculty with major care-giving responsibilities for young children, or partners or parents who are seriously ill, or dependents with significant disabilities find it very challenging to be as productive professionally as those with fewer responsibilities or demands. Faculty who experience major health or personal emergencies are similarly prevented from devoting the time and energy to work as those who are spared these challenges during the tenure probationary period. The University of Michigan has adopted policies that permit some faculty members to exclude time from their probationary period (usually one year) in light of the demands of child birth, dependent care, health problems and other personal emergencies. Many eligible faculty members who could benefit from such accommodations have taken advantage of this flexibility. During the period when some of these policies were restricted to women, faculty members who might have benefited from the policies did not take advantage of them (1). Sometimes this was because of lack of knowledge about the policies. But sometimes it was because the faculty members feared discrimination in future promotion and tenure decisions. The recommended policies are intended to mitigate that fear, and to provide help to all faculty who have substantial responsibilities for care-giving, dependents, or serious personal emergencies to manage. While there is considerable evidence that women faculty are particularly burdened in this way, many men need and can benefit from policies that recognize, and make adjustments for, the demands of family life. Because individual circumstances and experiences vary in ways that influence rate of progress and productivity for individual faculty members, it may make sense for tenure policies to vary as well. Such flexibility may make it more likely that the University becomes a place where faculty members can establish thriving careers.

3. Competition to recruit and retain excellent faculty

To attract and retain excellent faculty members, we need attractive working conditions. The University of Michigan must be able to recruit faculty who have the opportunity to go to our peers, and to retain the outstanding faculty who begin their careers at the University. More flexibility to accommodate variations in circumstances and experience may help us to achieve this. Several factors need to be considered as we contemplate changes in these policies that will maintain our ability to compete for faculty.

Supporting ambition and risk taking. Scientists, artists, and other scholars may respond to an inflexible tenure clock by strategic choices of projects to pursue that are manageable within a fixed time period. These choices may artificially limit the choice of methods, access to data or artifacts that are difficult and time-consuming to obtain, or complex collaborations that might enrich the quality of the work. With a more flexible clock junior faculty may be willing and able to take more risks and try more ambitious projects. If they do not pan out, there would still be time to recoup and pursue more traditional academic pursuits. This flexibility may attract some faculty who are seeking opportunity for work at the frontiers of their disciplines, and encourage others to pursue more ambitious lines of scholarship and creative work.

Fairness and Equity. With a one-size-fits-all policy, the University can maintain that its policies are consistent and in that sense fair. With customized policies that accommodate to differences in circumstances, the University can respond in a more tailored and nuanced way to individual faculty issues. Treating people differently in ways that correspond to their circumstances is, in that sense, fairer.

Nimbler response to competition. Those faculty whose performance is outstanding from the outset of their careers are often highly desirable to our peer institutions, and the University of Michigan may have to compete with outside interest. With more flexible tenure policies we may find it easier to review such faculty for tenure to preempt other offers.

Building the diversity of the faculty. More flexibility may make the University more attractive to faculty members who have career trajectories that do not fit the normal mode. Whether the variations occur at the beginning of one’s tenure-track career, or in the midst of the tenure track, the University should be a place where people who have taken differing paths can find room to thrive.

II. Policy Recommendations
In this section we describe policies that can move the University and its schools, colleges, and regional campuses toward more flexibility in the tenure probationary period.

A. Create more flexibility in the tenure probationary period
Our key recommendations here are to create policies in each school and college that specify a presumptive time of tenure review (which will usually be exactly the same as it is now – year six of the probationary period in most schools and colleges, year five or seven in others), and then to create policies that permit deviations from that presumptive time, either to accelerate the tenure review or to postpone it. In order to permit such policies to develop in the schools and colleges, a few crucial changes need to be made in University policy.

University policies

These changes need to be implemented at the University level.

• Recommend change in Regents' Bylaw 5.09 to extend the maximum probationary period from eight to ten years. This change creates more freedom for schools and colleges to provide longer tenure probationary periods for some of their faculty members when this is justified by school and college policies [see below].
  
  
• Changes in school/college promotion and tenure policies (as described below) must continue to be reviewed for consistency with University policy and for fair treatment of faculty members, and approved by the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs on the Ann Arbor campus and by the Chancellors on the Flint and Dearborn campuses. Although some differences across schools and colleges are expected and desirable, each campus will want to ensure some consistency of practice and will want to ensure that adequate oversight mechanisms are in place to prevent arbitrary or discriminatory treatment of faculty members.

School/College policies

These changes need to be implemented by every school and college.

• Each school/college will determine its presumptive time for tenure review (which may be exactly what it is right now, although some schools/colleges may wish to change the presumptive timing of the tenure review)
  
  
• Each school/college will create guidelines to determine when cases may be brought forward for early review (one or more years before the presumptive time for tenure review). The standard of achievement in scholarship or creative work for early tenure review will not be higher than the standard for review at the presumptive time. A decision to review earlier than the presumptive time requires the agreement of the faculty member.

• Each school/college will create guidelines to determine when cases may be brought up for later review (one or more years after the presumptive time for tenure review). The standard of achievement in scholarship or creative work for later tenure review will not be higher than the standard for review at the presumptive time. A decision to review later than the presumptive time requires the agreement of the faculty member.

• Each school/college will develop an internal process for notifying tenure track faculty of their expected date of tenure review, both at the time of initial appointment, again at the time of third year review, and again in the year preceding the planned tenure review. 

• If any school/college changes the presumptive time for tenure review from its current time to year 8 or 9, that school/college may wish to make more frequent use of the rank of Associate Professor without tenure. In that case, the school/college will need to adopt guidelines and criteria for promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor without tenure. Note that promotions to untenured Associate Professor will continue to require provostial and Regental approval.

This policy framework creates opportunities for flexibility in schools and colleges, but requires no change in any school or college whose faculty does not choose to become more flexible. Each school or college would have the option to continue to review everyone at the same point in the probationary period, and to limit deviations from the presumptive time of tenure review. However the framework makes it possible for schools and colleges to either accelerate or postpone the tenure review, provided that they do so consistently according to clearly articulated criteria.

This approach to a more flexible tenure clock puts an increased burden on the departments, schools and colleges to insure clear and effective communication with each faculty member about school and college policies and practices. This will also create challenges for jointly appointed faculty members, who will have to navigate the processes of more than one school or college.

One important question is what happens when a faculty member is reviewed for tenure early or at the presumptive time and the decision is negative. In current practice, some schools and colleges permit a second review in a subsequent year if the first tenure decision is negative. Other schools and colleges do not permit a second review; negative reviews in these places are followed by immediate notice of non-reappointment. One possibility is to continue to permit differences among the schools and colleges in their handling of this matter. Many committee members believe that the University should establish a common policy on whether second reviews are permissible, and if so under what circumstances. We recommend further conversations about this practice.

The Committee also discussed the implications of these recommended changes for sabbatical policy. If some faculty members remain in untenured positions for more than seven years, those faculty members would be entitled to sabbaticals before earning tenure under our current rules. We recommend further conversations about whether sabbaticals should be granted on the basis of years of service, without regard to the tenure clock, or whether only faculty members who receive tenure should be eligible for sabbatical leave.

B. Policies on excluding years of service from tenure probationary periods

The University currently has policies that exclude time from the accumulation of years of service on the tenure clock. These policies exclude time from the clock for childbirth, demands of dependent care, health crises and other personal emergencies. These policies are widely regarded as family-friendly and are an important reason that the University is attractive as a prospective employer, especially for women faculty. We recommend retaining these policies, which demonstrate our continued commitment to flexibility for work/life balance.

University policies

• Preserve existing policies that exclude one year of service from the tenure clock for childbirth or dependent care.
  
• Permit more than one year of exclusion for multiple births or dependents.

• Eliminate the current policy that excludes years of countable service for appointment fractions less than 80% (if the recommendations on part time appointments are adopted; see #3 below).

• Preserve the possibility of excluding year(s) of service for medical or personal emergencies, but make these decisions at the level of the school/college unless the school or college wishes to extend service beyond 10 years (at which time they would require provost's or chancellor's approval).

School/college policies

• Each school/college will have the flexibility to postpone the tenure review when appropriate under its own guidelines to accommodate individual circumstances that are not covered by University exclusions. These guidelines must be applied consistently and fairly to prevent grievances and lawsuits.

C. Part time tenure track appointments

In current University policy, years of service either count on the tenure clock or they are excluded entirely. Another mechanism for increasing flexibility is to introduce part time tenure appointments in which years of service would be counted proportionately to the appointment fraction of the faculty member. Thus a full-time faculty member on the tenure track could shift to a part time appointment and remain on the tenure track, accumulating years of service toward a tenure review. This would provide a way for faculty members to slow down their time to a tenure review, while remaining contributing members of the faculty. It would also eliminate the situation in which faculty members with ongoing part time appointments never qualify for a tenure review. Faculty members may choose this part time option in order to balance work and family demands, or to balance the demands of academic work and other personal or professional commitments.

University policies

Recommend a policy that establishes part time tenure track and tenured appointments, which addresses the matters listed below:

• Faculty members who hold part time appointments accrue years of service on the tenure clock at a rate equal to the appointment fraction. Thus, for example, one year of service at 50% counts as one half year on the tenure clock. 
  
  
• Faculty members are entitled to move from a 100% fraction to a reduced appointment fraction upon request for a specified period of time. If a faculty member requests a part time appointment for a period longer than two years, the approval of the Dean is required. At the end of the specified period of reduced appointment, the faculty member is entitled to return to a 100% appointment.
  
  
• Any total appointment fraction of less than 100% is considered part time. Definitions of appointment fraction apply to the total appointment fraction, including part time assistant professor appointments combined with part time research, clinical or administrative appointments. Faculty appointments combined with other appointments accrue years of service equivalent to the total appointment fraction.

• Appointment fractions of 50% start the tenure clock, and must continue at 50% or higher for the faculty member to stay on the tenure track. This means that current faculty members in some schools with appointment fractions between 50 and 79% will begin to accrue years of service on the tenure clock.

• Timing of mandatory tenure review and notice of non-reappointment will be calculated based on the accumulated years of service, rounded to the nearest integer.

• As stated in current University policy, faculty members who are hired into tenure track titles at less than 100% fractions are not guaranteed to have the option of increasing their appointment fractions to 100% at some later time (Standard Practice Guide 201.39-1 Principles and Practices Governing Tenure for Faculty Members With Divided or Partial Appointments).

• Regents' Bylaw 5.09 would be revised to permit a faculty member with four or more years of part time service to have 13 years in their tenure probationary period (while for all other faculty the limit would be 10 years). This would require a tenure review no later than the faculty member's 12th year of service in a tenure track position. This provision would permit faculty members who choose a sustained period of part time work to have a longer period of time in which to accrue years of countable service.

School/college policies

• Schools and colleges will need to compute the accumulated years of service, and develop consistent policies for handling partial years of service in calculating when faculty members will come up for tenure review.

• Duties for faculty members will be assigned commensurate with appointment fraction.

Comparisons with other Universities

The cumulative effect of these policy changes in flexible timing of the tenure review, part time tenure track and tenured appointments, and exclusions from the tenure clock will be to place the University of Michigan at the forefront of our peer institutions with respect to faculty appointments. Since our ability to compete for excellent faculty is a crucial driver of this initiative, we need to consider how these policies will compare to other universities. We have searched for research and data about policies at other Universities. Our findings are described in Appendix III. This initiative would make the University of Michigan a national leader, recognizing and responding to the changes in faculty work.

III. What next?

The Committee recommends a series of conversations about these recommendations and the tenure probationary period, described in Appendix V.

The Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs on the Ann Arbor campus, and the Provosts on the Flint and Dearborn campus will ultimately make final recommendations to the President and Chancellors, and to the Regents.

The committee hopes that the proposed University policy changes will be adopted by the end of the next academic year (2005-2006), so that the schools and colleges may begin consideration of changes in their policies in the academic year 2006-2007.

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(1) “Tenure Clock, Modified Duties, and Sick Leave Policies”, Center for the Education of Women, University of Michigan, 2004.