The Appendix to the Faculty Handbook describes the general IC guidelines for file preparation for tenure and/or promotion, including policy regarding the solicitation of “evaluative letters from qualified peers concerning scholarly/professional activity” (Part I, #6).
The procedures for this solicitation in the School of Humanities and Sciences are as follows: typically the Dean assigns the responsibility for solicitation of the external letters to departments. Depending on departmental circumstances, solicitation is initiated by the department chair or the chair of the personnel committee. Solicitation of external letters should occur after the Dean has reviewed (typically with the candidate and the department chair) the list of proposed external referees. Departments initiate the list review meeting, but because H&S requires completed files to the dean’s office before other schools, the dates on page three of the Faculty Handbook Appendix must be correspondingly earlier in H&S (click here to review the current year's H&S deadlines).
In coming to the approved list, the most important criteria are knowledgeability and disinterest – a difficult but not impossible combination. The School of H&S seeks external referees who are expert enough in the discipline or sub-discipline so that they can make helpful statements about the quality of the candidate’s scholarship and professional activity. As well, the School wants to be confident that these authoritative sources are disinterested to the extent possible. For those reasons, departments generally do not solicit letters from dissertation advisors or committee members, coauthors, and so on. Further, in the brief biography which accompanies the list of referees that the Dean, the department chair, and the candidate review together, any “personal” contacts with the referees must be noted, in addition to professional credentials.
In summary, the external letters should help reviewers to come to conclusions about whether the candidate has met criteria articulated in the Faculty Handbook and department personnel documents. The touchstones are expertise and disinterest, qualities which should be as important to departments as they are to subsequent reviewers.
The Faculty Handbook file preparation guidelines also describe two other kinds of evaluative letters: those from alumni concerning teaching (Part I, #7) and those concerning service to the college, profession and community (Part I, #8). The Provost’s Office has supplied a common template for evaluative letters from alumni concerning teaching and evaluative letters concerning service. The guidelines for these solicitations are straightforward and again the H&S Dean assigns responsibility for these solicitations to the department. Review of these lists (for letters from alumni and concerning service) should occur at the same meeting as the review of the list of external evaluative letters. Though the Handbook guidelines use “no later than April 1 of the year preceding the tenure and/or promotion review” as the outside date to review these lists, the earlier submission of files in H&S requires a correspondingly earlier review of the lists; consult the H&S calendar for the current year's deadlines.
