Balloting to select faculty representatives for the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Promotion and Tenure begins Wednesday, Oct. 16, and runs through Friday, Nov. 1.
Elections are held annually and are administered by the University Senate Committee on Appointment and Promotions and the Agenda Committee. Results are tabulated by the Office of Institutional Research.
The committee has six vacancies this year. The positions are open to tenured full professors. Members serve two-year terms.
The committee was formed in spring 2014 to ensure that promotion and tenure processes are consistent. It also exists to ensure that the standards and procedures in the schools and colleges leading through approval by the vice chancellor, provost and chief academic officer, and to concurrence by the chancellor and Board of Trustees, are implemented similarly across campus.
Convened by the associate provost for faculty affairs, the committee’s membership includes the vice president for research (or another full professor designated by the provost) plus 12 faculty representatives from each of the schools and colleges. Committee members are charged with reviewing candidate cases and reading promotion and tenure files that the Office of Academic Affairs designates as containing substantive disagreements between layers of recommendation and that have a strong possibility of negative determination. Committee members then counsel the provost and offer advisory votes but do not issue a formal report or consider appeals.
Amber Anand
Committee member Amber Arnand, Edward Pettinella Professor of Finance in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, encourages participation in balloting as well as faculty service on the committee. “Promotion and tenure decisions are among the most consequential decisions made by the University,” he says. “The provost and the associate provost engage deeply with the committee. Because committee members review the entirety of a case, faculty voices are part of the deliberations close to the final decision-making. Serving on the committee comes with the additional benefit of learning about many initiatives designed to support early-career faculty at the University.”
Katherine McDonald
Katherine McDonald, senior associate dean for research and administration and professor of public health in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics, says her committee service has been gratifying.
“Serving on this committee is one of the most important things I have done at Syracuse University. Junctures when faculty are evaluated are among the more vulnerable times in our careers. Committee members carefully consider each dossier in its entirety, searching critically for evidence of accomplishments and the contexts that influenced them, then providing informed perspectives to the provost for consideration. I remain amazed at how much I have enjoyed being a part of this work,” she says.
All tenured and tenure-track faculty members are eligible to vote for representatives from their school or college. Eligible voters will receive ballot information via email from the University Senate on the first day of balloting.
