Section II.7
POLICY ON PERIODIC REVIEW OF ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS
Proposed by the Policy and Development Committee on April 27, 1988
Adopted by the Faculty on November 10, 1988
Revised by the Faculty on November 7, 2002; April 2018
Any Associate Professor may request his/her primary department to consider the case for promotion to Professor, including the solicitation of external peer reviews of scholarly activities and formal review by the department, following the established procedures of the department under the broader review option stated in Provost's Communication No. 21, and in accordance with the criteria for promotion set forth in Provost's Communication No. 9.
Communication No. 21 requires that "every tenured or tenure-track faculty member should be reviewed annually" according to written procedures adopted by the unit. These procedures must comply with the requirements of Communication No. 21, including that units provide an "Option for Periodic Broader Review" which may be invoked by the unit executive officer or a faculty member from time to time, but no more frequently than once every five years. Communication No. 21 further states: "The broader review may be focused on the faculty member’s overall performance in teaching, research and public service or on a defined, significant subset of faculty roles and responsibilities. Invoking the broader review option, therefore, would typically be grounded in the results of at least the two immediately previous annual reviews, or grounded in a longer pattern that reveals a need for deeper scrutiny of the record. The goal is to more fully understand the faculty member’s performance or to ascertain whether the annual reviews have adequately assessed significant aspects of the record."
Associate Professors may ask to be reviewed for promotion every academic year, but departments need only solicit letters as part of an associate professor’s review every five years. The responsibility for weighing the merits of the case, and for deciding whether or not to recommend promotion, still rests with the department. That is, a department has no obligation to recommend promotion for an Associate Professor who has requested an evaluation. As noted above, the five-year interval applies only to the required evaluation: an Associate Professor may request an evaluation and his/her department may recommend promotion at any appropriate time. Any Associate Professor who is dissatisfied with the outcome of the departmental promotion process, including the decision on whether to put forward his/her case for promotion, may still bring his/her case to the Faculty Appeals Committee in the usual manner.