History and Rationale
The SDC began formalizing the process of Tenure and Promotion mentoring committees in the mid-2010s with the addition of new faculty and placed a framework in writing with the creation of the SDC Policies and Procedures Manual in 2017. This framework, explained on pp. 3-4 of the SDC Tenure and Promotion Guidelines, offers generalities around committee makeup and report filing, but there are few suggestions regarding the mentoring committee-candidate relationship.
With respect to the SDC’s desire to promote equity, justice, and belonging and its culture of care, this document is intended to inspire faculty candidates of all ranks and titles eligible for tenure and/or promotion to feel part of the school’s collaborative spirit. The intent is to better prepare faculty for promotion. The presumption is that faculty seeking promotion would like to be afforded all the privileges, rights, and freedoms of their desired rank, and that they intend to be part of the SDC community for the foreseeable future. Although the mentoring committee advises (yet does not necessarily advocate) for candidates, the relationship between the mentoring committee and candidates ideally should be one of collaboration and exchange.
At the same time, these suggestions offer more clarity to the submittal process, for the final dossier(s) will eventually leave the hands of candidates (and mentoring committee) and be evaluated by tenured and/or promoted SDC faculty members, director(s), and dean(s), as well as tenure and promotion committees at level of the college and the provost. Director(s) and deans (or their designees) also must write letters that assess faculty performance as a case moves ahead. Members of review committees, meanwhile, often have little familiarity with a faculty candidate’s research, teaching, and/or service accomplishments. For all these reasons, dossiers (and CVs) must be as clear and concise as possible.
SDC Mentoring Spirit
There is a national push to recognize the inadequacies of top-down, traditional mentoring models in faculty promotion cases. For women and underrepresented faculty in particular, traditional, single mentor models are widely considered to be ineffective and studies have determined that they may hinder candidates’ opportunities for success.1 While the SDC has long had mentoring committees with at least three mentors to ensure that faculty candidates may benefit from a range of opinions, in some cases the multiple mentor model may be perceived as simply extending the number of overseers. We wish it to be the addition of new colleagues.
To support new models for faculty mentoring at Washington State University, in 2022 the provost’s office launched a grant application process called the Mentoring Innovations Initiative. This initiative permits units or faculty collaborators to propose, among other things, new mentoring models to assist in faculty retention. In the SDC, we further believe that new models should be explored to help our colleagues feel more invested in a school to which we all dedicate our time and energy. We also believe that an awareness of our mentor committee-candidate philosophy and process would be appealing to candidates for new faculty positions in the SDC, whether career track or tenure track. We wish also to ensure that our suggestions for mentoring are in line with those that may exist at the level of the college, university, professions, and/or industry.
Committee Philosophy and Responsibilities for Mentors (Chairs and members)
All members of the appointed three-person mentoring committee, two of which should be comprised of tenured and/or promoted faculty in the SDC, will have experienced this process before—either as mentors or candidates. The committee members should draw upon this experience to assist candidates in any way: helping package material in a clear and concise fashion; providing perspectives on research metrics and/or teaching strategies; offering general perspectives on work-life balance, and so on. All members ideally will share equally in these efforts.
The committee chair has the most time-consuming responsibilities for the committee: they serve as the point person for communicating details about the process for promotion and/or tenure and they compile the annual report. Moreover, the SDC Director likely selected the chair because the chair has more familiarity with a candidate’s research, discipline, background, and/or experience, and thus the chair may be consulted more frequently than other members of the mentoring committee. While the chair’s opinions should not hold any more influence or “weight” on a candidate’s direction than any other member of the committee, the SDC Director should look to provide more acknowledgement of mentoring chair roles in annual reviews and in general consideration of faculty responsibilities.
We hope that mentoring committee members would be available and willing to meet and chat with candidates at any time, either individually or as a group. One way of thinking about this is as an extended dissertation or syllabi exchange group, where all members could exchange drafts of work-in-progress and/or chatting about ideas related to the experience of being a faculty member in the SDC. As with the candidates, if at any time any mentoring committee members considers their presence on the committee either problematic or not useful for any reason, they should feel comfortable expressing this to their colleagues and the director without any concern about retribution. Mentors and candidates alike should be aware of any potential for conflict of interest, as well. While it is understood that committee members may have similar interests or strategies in research and teaching, for example, no member should use the committee as an opportunity to co-opt or profit from one another’s research or teaching efforts.
Specific Committee Responsibilities for Mentors:
- Meet with candidate at least once/year, ideally in mid-to-late fall semester (in-person meeting suggested).
- Ask candidate to submit CV prior to committee meeting.
- Allow candidates the opportunity to craft the format and setting in which they would like to hold the meeting; formal presentations (e.g., timed, power point presentations) are acceptable, but should be not required.
- Review candidate’s CV to see if it is clearly categorized and organized.
- Review candidate’s student teaching evaluations. If a candidate needs help to improve teaching, please work with the candidate to consider teaching institutes, workshops, or ideas from faculty who excel in this particular area.
- Ensure there is an adequate balance of teaching, research, and service vis-à-vis the faculty member’s appointment percentages, rank, or title. Keep in mind that tenure-track faculty seeking promotion to associate professor should focus on their research and teaching without excessive service; career-track faculty, whether scholarly or teaching, may have percentages that differ from those suggested in the faculty manual. Mentoring committees are urged to double-check with the director to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding candidates’ percentages or responsibilities prior to filing an annual report.
- Keep up-to-date with the provost’s overview for tenure and promotion to ensure that they are following procedure. The provost updates that overview annually in May.
- Draft annual report.
- The report should provide specific directives for improvement (if necessary) and the next report should refer to the previous report to help ensure progress. Chairs may request that committee members or candidates draft particular areas of the report, but divvying up the report should be kept to a minimum. It is ultimately the responsibility of the chair to draft and share the report.
- All parties must understand that specific directives for improvement are meant to help candidates succeed, and mentoring committees should not be hesitant to list them.
- The annual report need not be longer than a single-spaced page but may be longer if necessary. It should feature complete sentences (and paragraphs) but may have a few bullet points.
- Share the draft report with candidate to permit candidate input into report before finalizing. (Note: circumstances may arise where chairs/mentor committees wish to finalize the report and send to director before sending to candidate; there may also be instances where mentoring committees have different opinions about candidates’ suggestions, alterations, or additions to the report, and chairs/mentor committees shall retain the right to craft the report as they see best fit. Be advised, however, that the report eventually will be made available to the candidates and becomes a part of their permanent record and included with candidates’ intensive review, tenure, and promotion dossiers. Therefore, chairs/mentor committees may wish to consider the timeliness of the report’s release—especially if there are particular suggestions for candidate improvement that might be better communicated in writing earlier rather than later.)
- Chair finalizes draft and sends to SDC administrative manager by first day of spring semester.
- Work together, and with candidates, to determine the most appropriate faculty member(s) to provide peer reviews of teaching. (Refer to A.3 of Tenure and Promotion Guidelines for suggestions.)
Philosophy and Responsibility of Candidates
We hope that candidates for tenure and promotion in the SDC will feel comfortable with their committee. However, the SDC Director creates this committee (for new faculty candidates) within the first three months of their appointment, so circumstances may change over time. As we wish for the general spirit of the committee to be collaborative, we do want the candidates (and the committee) to feel comfortable requesting changes at any time. If candidates (or mentors) request changes, it is vital that all parties understand that such changes are in the interests of best advising candidates, whether tenure track or career track, toward tenure and/or promotion. Changes should not affect in any way the ultimate candidacy for tenure and/or promotion.
Specific Responsibilities for Candidates:
- Candidates are responsible for organizing the annual meetings with their committee, and may select a venue and format of their choice. The meeting should be in late fall.
- Prior to each annual meeting with committee, candidates should send along their CV and teaching evaluations to the committee (for all courses from the previous year).
- For the sake of clarity as the process moves through the ranks over time, candidates should format their CV as closely as possible to the checklist suggested in the provost’s guidelines for tenure and promotion—even if they would not normally format the CV that way within their discipline.
- As part of the CV, candidates should write a couple of sentences or a short paragraph about their research (if research responsibilities are part of their contract). These sentences could change over time depending upon shifts in research direction.
- Candidates also should endeavor to write a short paragraph about their research, teaching, and/or service plans for the upcoming year. This could be on a separate sheet of paper and may also be that which they write into their “Faculty Success” online database (formerly “Digital Measures” or “WORQS”) for annual reviews.
- Candidates (and mentors) should keep up-to-date with the provost’s overview for tenure and promotion to ensure that they are following procedure. The provost updates the annual letter in May.