At most colleges and universities, the documentation that faculty members submit when applying for tenure or promotion is so massive as to be burdensome at the same time that it is often unhelpful to the review committee. For example, it is not at all uncommon at many institutions for applicants to submit three or more full binders of documentation for a promotion application, including internal and external letters of support, summaries of student course evaluations (sometimes the binders even include all the course evaluations submitted by every student in every course), syllabi for all courses, copies of all publications, evaluations made by supervisors and peers during all previous academic years, a complete set of annual reviews, an updated résumé, lists of committee assignments and service contributions performed, term-by-term teaching loads, grant proposals submitted, publication contracts for works not yet in print, and a wealth of other documentation. At some schools, faculty members will include in their portfolios all the thank-you notes and letters of congratulations that they have received from all of their supervisors, colleagues, and students.

The result of this practice is that candidates spend weeks or even months amassing materials, and then promotion and tenure committees have incredible masses of documentation to read. If you ask about this excessive documentation, most committees issue statements along the lines of “We read every single document submitted to us.” Nevertheless, even that response poses a problem. Either the committee is being disingenuous and not doing what it claims to be doing (thus probably missing important information as it skims through multiple volumes of material) or it actually is reading every word submitted to it (thus spending time reading thank-you notes, multiple copies of nearly identical course syllabi, and duplicates of information that already appears in the candidate’s curriculum vitae, when its members could be devoting that time to teaching and research). In other words, all too many tenure and promotion systems today require candidates to spend far too much time amassing far too much information for committees to review far too little in a process that is far too cumbersome. Is there any alternative?

Administrators can help inspire much-needed reform of the tenure and promotion processes at their institutions if they begin discussions of reducing the workload of both candidates and committees in the following three ways.

1. Institutions should never require candidates to supply information or documentation that can be readily obtained elsewhere. It should go without saying that forcing candidates to gather material that is easily available elsewhere is not the best use of the candidates’ time. But such a requirement is also detrimental to the committee’s work. For instance, committees may feel obliged to review documentation, not because it is particularly useful or informative, but simply because the candidate has gone to the trouble to collect it. Common examples of information that, at most institutions, candidates should not be asked to gather include aggregated student evaluation scores and term-by-term course loads. Where centralized sources of this information are available, these sources tend to be far more consistent in the way in which that information is presented; for instance, the office of institutional research is likely to calculate averages or median scores on student evaluations in a consistent manner for all faculty members, whereas individuals may use any number of methods, producing results that are misleading to the committee where they attempt to make comparisons.

2. Candidates should be asked to provide a sampling of material that reflects each candidate’s best contributions. When applicants for promotion or tenure submit large quantities of material, there tends to be very little distinction in their documentation between the extremely important and the relatively insignificant. In an attempt to provide the committee with everything that its members could possibly want, candidates run the risk of having their truly important material become lost in the sheer welter of their documentation. This problem can best be avoided if documentation guidelines are revised so that candidates provide a selection of their materials along with a justification of why those materials are important. For instance, candidates could be asked to list all the products of their scholarship (books, articles, presentations, performances, and the like), but also to submit documentary evidence of their three most important scholarly contributions, along with a statement about why those items are significant. Rather than submitting syllabi for all of their courses, candidates could be asked to provide the three best syllabi they have written, accompanied by a paragraph that explains why these particular examples are of high quality. Focusing requests in this way encourages candidates, not merely to “dump” everything that they have collected onto a review committee, but rather to reflect on what they believe to be important, why it is important, and what constitutes high achievement in their disciplines.

3. Candidates should be asked to supply fewer documents, but they should also be asked to annotate those documents. Another problem with reviewing multiple binders filled with unedited documents is that, although they contain a great deal of data, they do not always provide a great deal of information. For instance, unless a member of a review committee happens to be very familiar with the discipline in question, he or she is unlikely to know which journals in a field are really important, which conferences do not accept every proposal submitted, and which courses tend to evoke lower scores on evaluations primarily because students resent having to take them. For this reason, an annotated résumé—one that includes acceptance rates for each journal in which the faculty member has published, essential information about the conferences where the candidate has presented, and background about how the candidate’s courses fit into the overall curriculum of the discipline—can end up revealing far more to the committee than huge stacks of non-annotated documents. In a similar way, an annotated syllabus, describing how and why the instructor has improved the course over time, can tell the committee a great deal about the individual’s quality of instruction and can be much more helpful than all those notes from students reading “Good professor! I really liked this class.”

In other words, documentation for promotion and tenure applications can be significantly improved if those who are responsible for setting policies would begin asking, “What insight do we hope to gain from the supporting material provided by the applicant that we simply cannot obtain elsewhere?” This same question should be addressed whenever documentation is requested from any source. For instance, when contacting outside reviewers, it is less helpful to ask for a general letter of evaluation than to pose questions that cannot be answered internally. Thus, depending on the size of the program, you may need to ask external reviewers whether the faculty member has been active in the appropriate professional organizations for that discipline. You may need to inquire whether the candidate’s level of research seems suitable for that discipline and whether it is being submitted to the right publishers and in the right journals. Reviewers may not think of addressing these questions specifically in their letters, unless they are formally asked to do so. You can always include a question like “Is there anything else about this candidate’s professional performance that you would like to bring to the attention of the committee?” as a way of also soliciting a more general type of recommendation.

Most evaluation committees can give thorough attention to perhaps 50 to 75 pages of well-chosen documentation for each candidate they are considering for tenure or promotion. Rarely can committees master the thousands of pages that most applicants tend to gather into multiple binders. As a result, establishing policies so that they have candidates submit a far more focused but far more informative set of materials thus makes the process less burdensome for both candidates and committee alike, at the same time that it helps each candidate make the strongest case possible.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration and The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (forthcoming). (Both books are published by Jossey-Bass.)

This article first appeared in Magna Publications' newsletter Academic Leader. If you are an academic dean, provost, academic vice-president, department chair/head or have any role in academic leadership, then Academic Leader is for you! But don't take our word for it--try it free for 3 months and make the decision for yourself!