Checklist for Revising Department or School P&T Guidelines

Checklist for Schools and Departments to Revise P&T Standards 

 Procedurally:  

• You can send ideas and drafts for your revisions to Faculty Affairs (ude[dot]ui[at]rhdaca) for input. By policy, all finalized standards need to be reviewed by the Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for consistency with campus standards.  

• This is the link for the Office of Academic Affairs copies of your standards.    

• This is the link for campus standards. 

• This is a link to information about modifications made for integrative cases (2020-2021, 2021-2022).  This portion of our website is under revision, summer 2023.  Please ask if it is hard to find information.  

For the OAA posted copy, please include: 

• You may have different documents for types of faculty, or for departments within a school; they will be stored in one ‘area’. Or, you can have one document, but make sure it has a table of contents. OAA does not need to post department-only guidelines.   (New guidance summer 2023:  provide a copy in locked Word  format, or a link to your own site's Web  version.  We are moving away from posting pdfs because of accessibility issues.)

• The date of latest revision.

• Procedural descriptions (how committees work)—here or a reference to where they exist in the school bylaws.     

• Also, if applicable: long-term appointment review for NTT (the end of ‘probationary’ status); annual review if done by the P&T committee or equivalent; 3rd year review; annual review or evaluations for professors of practice.  

• Criteria descriptions. Note when there are separate sections for tenure-track, clinical, lecturer, and/or different areas of excellence.  

See model outline at the end of these notes; it is not prescriptive.    

Note:  

• OAA keeps only the latest or current standards.    

• Keep a copy of the standards in effect upon hire for every new tenure-track faculty member.  Faculty may choose to follow the original standards or any new revision.

Content: Do your standards include these?

Process   

• Procedure for constituting committees: elected, all-eligible, etc.  

• Procedures to be followed when there are fewer than 4 natural members. This is NOT required, but may be useful if you have small departments (fewer than 5 tenured faculty members besides the chair).

• Procedure for constituting committees for promotion to full (if your school anticipates frequent problems forming department or even school committees).

• If you have elected (not “all eligible”) committees, are you paying attention to forms of diversity?  

• For areas of scholarship that are unusual for the unit, consider special composition of committees or use of additional input.   

• Do non-tenure-track faculty (senior lecturer, associate or full clinical) participate/vote on NTT cases? Be specific.    

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  We suggest being very specific: lecturers to vote on lecturers; clinical on clinical, because of likely variations in experiences and expertise. For reviews of professors of practice, because their area of focus is teaching, suggest using senior lecturers as part of the evaluation process.

  
  
  
• Can administrators (associate deans, department chairs) attend?
• Can chairs vote (serve as ordinary members) for candidates from other departments (at the school level)?  

• How is the chair of the department or school committee chosen (should be elected by members?); how long is the term? What if a candidate comes up who has a relation with the P&T chair, if department chairs can participate as members or as chair of the P&T committee?  

• What is your process for revising standards? What is the role for the P&T committee itself, as well as the school faculty council?    

• Suggest building in regular “legislative” meetings, not just meetings to review candidates.   

• Does the department or school committee have a role in annual reviews?  Some do, some don’t. Suggest not adding it if you don’t have it already. Suggest revisiting if you haven’t discussed this in a while.    

• What materials are used for the third year review? (common: candidate statement and IU Indianapolis formatted CV; what else?)  In a full review, dossier contents are included to substantiate or provide details about what is in the candidate statement and CV. Suggest that at the 3rd year review you accept all statements (without substantiation); consider tailoring information about details to focus on areas of excellence; consider relying on the chair to provide information relevant to ensuring satisfactory performance.   Advise candidates that they will need fuller material for the full review.    The campus discourages the use of formal external letters at the third year review.    

• What additional forms of documentation are needed for school and department level review (that the campus standards do not include or leave ambiguous)?  Examples include: what level of specificity in student evaluation data? What specific forms of student learning outcome data? What documentation from others about roles in projects, committee work, or publications?    

• Do you describe preferred, acceptable, or allowable forms of scholarship? The campus focuses on the key elements of dissemination, peer-review, and evidence of impact.   As long as there is peer review, dissemination and some indication of impact, suggest language that explicitly allows for non-traditional forms of publication; avoid language that JUST lists “books and articles”.    

• Consider wording that also allows a candidate to make a case for something that does not already appear in your guidelines; this is a way to future-proof your wording while maintaining quality criteria.    

• Have you quantified your expectations? If you have several different categories of items (e.g. awards, articles, books), are you clear about which categories are essential and which are allowable?  

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  Possible wording: “At least 5 products selected from the following categories.”  Or, “At least the first two items [e.g. student evaluations and peer reviews] and three or more from the other items [e.g. course redesign, QM revisions, new program proposals…]” Or, “Generally a book will be considered the equivalent of three peer reviewed articles; however, a publication trajectory (not just one item) must be demonstrated.”  

  
  
  

• Clarify if publications ‘count’ if they are ‘submitted’ or ‘in press’ and the documentation required.    

• Third year and annual (chair) review feedback should explicitly address quantity and effort expectations and progress.    

• Do your standards differentiate between what is ‘excellence’ for clinical vs. tenure-track vs. lecturer?  

• At the campus level, teaching professors, but not senior lecturers, are expected to have dissemination for excellence, but not to achieve an emerging or sustained national reputation. Be sure to make expectations consistent with lecturer workloads.    

• Schools sometimes hold clinical faculty to tenure-track-like expectations in their area (teaching or service); be sure to differentiate between types of appointments.  

• Have you defined satisfactory levels of performance for TT’s non-area-of-excellence?    

• Suggest including common minimum expectations for teaching that reflect what students should receive from every instructor (adjunct, full time, TT, NTT): e.g. clear syllabi, reasonable responsiveness, peer reviews, continuing attention to teaching effectiveness.    

• Do you have some language for each area of excellence, for TT and clinical, to define expectations for “highly satisfactory” as needed for a binned-balanced case?  

• The Library and Medicine do not use balanced-binned cases. All other schools should address this.     

• Do you expect grant productivity? Applications? From all, or is it contingent on the type of scholarship?   

For you to think about:  

• Do you have sufficient guidance about community-based scholarship? 

• • Can you use IU Indianapolis experts for forms of scholarship that are unusual for your department?

• How do you handle student evaluations, given issues around embedded bias? Avoid having student evaluation scores be the only evidence of satisfactory or excellent teaching. 

• Do program directors or course coordinators assist faculty in documenting student learning outcomes?  

• Have you provided committees education in effective processes, such as recognizing implicit bias, organizing productive debate, and fairly assessing unusual forms of scholarship or evidence of impact?  

FYI:  Most information on the third-year review is in the  Faculty Guide. For questions about content, contact Faculty Affairs at ude[dot]ui[at]rhdaca; for posting standards, contact us at ude[dot]ui[at]aao.

Reviewed and revised: 8/2024.