For faculty, tenure not easy to get

The bar has been raised for junior faculty hoping to win lifetime employment at Penn. A tenured professor has the rare luxury of guaranteed lifetime employment, and School of Arts and Sciences administrators are saying the status is harder to come by now than ever before. "The standards have gotten higher at Penn and at other first-rate universities," SAS Dean Samuel Preston said. In past years, College of Arts and Sciences Dean Richard Beeman said, a junior faculty member needed to have published just one book to earn tenure. Now, in some disciplines, the criteria have become far more stringent, requiring a faculty member to have published at least one book with a "substantial amount" of research done on a second. "The standard has been raised," Beeman said, speaking specifically of the History Department, where he serves as a professor. He added that Penn now evaluates three main criteria when making tenure decisions, which typically occur in an assistant professor's sixth or seventh year: publications and research work, teaching capability and service to the University community, "It's like triple jeopardy," Beeman said, noting that the University places the most emphasis on research. Both Preston and Beeman stressed that the University now pays more attention to teaching than in years past, while still requiring high-quality research. "We can demand both and should," Preston said. Currently, Preston said, around 40 percent of junior faculty achieve tenured status, while the remaining 60 percent either switch to another school or find a non-academic position at Penn. There are about 95 junior faculty members, also called assistant professors, at the University. He added that since Penn is a research university and not a college, the possibility exists that an excellent teacher could not win tenure if he or she is lacking in research. Conversely, the system allows poor instructors who have done a lot of research to get promoted to tenured positions. "It pains me," Beeman said. The one-year evaluation process -- conducted by the full professors in the professor's department, the SAS Personnel Committee and the Provost's Staff Conference, which is composed of several deans and makes the final decision in tenure cases -- considers several criteria in choosing who can stay in Penn's academic community and who must leave after his or her seventh year. Beeman also said that there is no rigid requirement in SAS for a certain number of publications across the board, adding that each discipline has a different standard. The English and Mathematics departments, for instance, conduct their own peer evaluations and place emphasis on teaching capability. Evaluating teaching capability also involves Student Committee on Undergraduate Education course ratings and letters from undergraduates and graduate students, Preston said. Beeman agreed that in the last 10 years, teaching has played a more influential role in gaining a permanent professorship. "No one should get tenure in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn who has not demonstrated excellence in research and teaching," Beeman said. He stressed that the University is careful with its tenure appointments. "The more cruel and heartless we can be, the better our faculty will be," Beeman said. Preston noted that standards for promotion are widely recognized, saying professors sometimes leave before they come up for review. "There is self-selection," he said. Junior faculty members from several departments say that the University places a value on both quality of teaching and works published. Mathematics Professor Tony Pantev, a junior faculty member in his third year, said that the department examines both classroom instruction and published research. He said that evaluators consider articles and the quality of the journals in which they are published -- not books. Economics Professor Nicola Persico, an assistant professor, said that the department usually inspects the "scholarly articles in top journals." Philosophy Professor Rahul Kumar, also a tenure-track faculty member, said that he is not following any type of set plan for achieving a promotion. "No one has handed me a checklist of things I have to do," Kumar said. "In Philosophy, some of the best people in our field have never written a book," he noted.