One key issue for tenure-track and tenured (TTF) colleagues is UBC’s tenure and promotion processes. These procedures have significant, sometimes hugely stressful, impact on our TTF members, and we think there are ways to improve them.
Valuing Service: First, we’ve tabled language to counter the ways that UBC dismisses the critical work of service that makes the rest of our academic lives possible. UBC recognizes in its definitions of service that this work is vitally important to the functioning of the university, and we all know this is true: grant committees, peer reviews, administering departments, hiring committees, DAC, SAC, Senate, professional associations, organizing conferences, accreditation processes, external reviews, graduate program admissions and all the rest. These all require academics to give time and expertise, and the whole academic universe would collapse without this work. But in tenure and promotion, service is explicitly treated as a second-class contribution that can’t move the dial for tenure and promotion files. We’ve proposed making service instead an additional factor to be assessed in tenure and promotion files. This proposed change does not mean that our research or teaching will be any less critical, but it will rather give us a more equitable and collegial process that treats service with the respect it deserves.
It’s no secret that UBC’s tenure and promotion process can take a long time and can feel opaque. Two more bargaining proposals seek to constrain one process that can slow down a file and also address actual practice around “optional” and “mandatory” reviews.
Referees: A slow upward creep in the number of external referee letters requested for many promotion and tenure files is risking both delay and unfairness. The Collective Agreement is already clear that four is the standard number of letters, but more than one Faculty is now inappropriately requiring six letters before a file can even begin its journey through the Department, DAC, SAC and the President’s office. This multiplication causes problems that can at least delay and possibly negatively impact a scholar’s promotion process, most obviously because identifying six appropriate referees who are at arm’s length takes time; finding six who agree to assess a file takes more time; and holding a file until all six letters are received, more time still. When some colleagues have this artificial extra burden and others don’t, we also risk inequities in the system. In specialized disciplines or those in which wide collaboration is the norm, lists of appropriate referees can easily be exhausted, creating problems in that moment and then again later for promotion to full professor. If four selected peer referees cannot be trusted to provide an accurate assessment of a file, the benefit of adding two more is not at all clear, especially given the delays and administrative burdens both on departments and on what one Head called “the ever-shrinking pool of tenured letter writers in the academy.” To ensure full and expert, fair and timely peer review of every file, we propose to clarify more explicitly that four letters is both the norm and the limit (as it is across Canada), with narrow conditions for an additional letter in specific circumstances.
Optional reviews: Our other proposal on tenure and promotion processes seeks to revise unnecessarily complex, confusing, and contradictory procedures, partly a holdover from the era when there were standard “periodic” reviews for promotion on a specific timeline and a smaller number of “non-periodic” reviews that happened off-cycle. We shifted in the last decade to “optional” and “mandatory” reviews, and we also eliminated mandatory reviews for promotion to full professor. This means that now all promotion-only reviews are what we call “optional” reviews. An increasing proportion of tenure-reviews now also happen early as optional reviews. These changes mean that optional reviews are now the norm, rather than the exception. It is crucial therefore that we also normalize this process to enshrine the fundamental collegial review that we rightly associate with tenure and promotion files.
Our proposal crucially affirms that every member has the right to have their file examined by a group of peers, and that the process should not be vulnerable to the whim of any one individual: currently a Head or Dean can unilaterally choose to terminate an optional review. Our proposal would make the current “mandatory” process of departmental committee and DAC and SAC consultation and assessment apply to all reviews, except that for optional reviews
*the candidate can opt to initiate and pause a review (thus, “optional”); and
*in the event of a paused or negative review, there are prescribed periods
before a file can be submitted again.
We think peer review is fundamental to tenure and promotion processes; it is neither fair nor fitting for the majority of UBC’s T&P processes to be controlled by single administrators.
Tenure and promotion are massively important in the work-lives of UBC’s TTF colleagues. We know that these proposed corrections and clarifications of our tenure and promotion regulations will make for processes that are clearer, more consistent, speedier, and fairer, making collegial review the norm and recognizing the value of all parts of our work.
