Continuing the discussion from The Scholarship Values Summit:
This recent report from HuMetricsHSS looks like it covers many issues similar to those that were brought up at the Scholarship Values summit last year.
… The interviews focused primarily on the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process. Interviewees outlined a number of issues to be addressed, including toxicity in evaluation, scholars’ increased alienation from the work they are passionate about, and a high-level virtue-signaling of values by institutions without the infrastructure or resources to support the enactment of those values. Based on these conversations, this white paper offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to address systematic injustice, erasure, and devaluation of academic labor in order to strengthen the positive public impact of scholarship.
Traditional processes of RPT do not support the values articulated in mission statements and hiring meetings. The research–teaching–service triangle is heavily imbalanced in favor of research — a certain number of publications in problematically determined “top” or “excellent” journals or university presses is considered a “threshold” for advancing toward or attaining tenure or promotion to full professor, only after which is teaching considered. “Service,” often defined only as participation on ponderous university-level committees, might be taken into account, if necessary. …
The academy must recognize these multiple levels of agency for it to be able to transform itself into what it professes to be. While there are endless ways to potentially bring about this change, this paper identifies a number of specific recommendations for broadening the definition of scholarship and for reducing harm to BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled faculty, students, and staff.
- Create a university-level committee to support the evaluation of emerging or underrecognized research approaches aligned with institutional values.
- Rethink expectations for tenure by aligning achievements with opportunity.
- Align clear expectations of faculty assignments (including job letters or hiring documents) with institutional values and with specific outcomes and indicators associated with the aspirations of the new member of the faculty.
- Develop a rubric to inform annual review conversations between chairs and faculty members.
- Reform the way external review letters are solicited, valued, and evaluated.
- Participate in values-based workshops at the unit level.
- Revise unit-level governing documents.
- Shift the categories of the tenure and promotion process from the means to the ends toward which they are directed.
- Collaborate with provosts to revise university-level statements on promotion and tenure.
- Increase opportunities for disciplinary leaders to experience evaluation practices and procedures from a wider diversity of disciplines across the mission of the university.
- Break down silos both intra- and inter-institutionally.
- Create better and more consistent ways to track what is now often invisible labor to ensure equity.
- Dedicate resources toward creating an inclusive, anti-racist campus climate.
