Five Tips for Making Tenure
While the words “tenure track” make it sound like there’s a smooth set of rails that will take you from hiring through to a position on the permanent tenured faculty, “tenure obstacle course” might in fact be a better description.
Succession Planning for Academic Leaders
Every academic leader should have a succession plan. A good leadership succession plan provides a way for the college or university to reconsider how it performs core functions and maintains suitable progress while taking the steps necessary to secure its long-term future.
Five Recommendations to Advance Careers in Enrollment and Retention Management
Whether you are an entry-level admission officer or an assistant or associate enrollment manager, you will, at some point in your career, desire to move to the next professional level, either at your current school or at another college or university. These five recommendations may help you make a successful transition.
Developing a New Faculty-Evaluation System
At Georgia College & State University, each academic unit was tasked in 2011 with developing a new faculty-evaluation system. We were instructed to create an instrument that had both qualitative and quantitative components. It took a year of discussion, compromise, and eventual consensus, but we finally moved forward with a test run. After three years of using this evaluation instrument, it has been tweaked somewhat but has worked tremendously well. What follows is the process and product that came from our journey to develop a systematic evaluation instrument that would enable us to determine to what degree faculty performance aligned with the values of the academic unit.
After Promotion and Tenure: Maintaining Faculty’s Upward Trajectory
While a necessary and worthy milestone, earning promotion and tenure is not an end goal of an academic career. During the pretenure years, a faculty member is gearing up for growth in the areas (e.g., teaching, research and teaching) defined by the institution to meet the mark for tenure. Ideally, the latter part of the pretenure period is one where the quality of the work is on the rise, there is an emerging reputation, and the products (e.g., presentations, exhibitions, publications, proposals for/success in funding) of success are generated at an increased pace. At the time of dossier submission, there should be a record with a definitive upward trajectory. The challenge at this point is to capitalize on the momentum created to begin planning for the next step, the promotion to full professor. This, however, is not the way all cases proceed.
