Are you using the best practices for promotion and tenure reviews?

This post is part of a series on contemporary best practices for promotion and tenure reviews in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our free best practices checklist, recently released.

What are the most successful practices for faculty promotion and tenure cases at universities today?

Faculty promotion and tenure decisions have an enormous impact on an institution’s identity and success, so it makes sense that evaluation processes would be universally complex and slow.

However, along with promoting careful review, most institutions’ processes also generate a morass of tedious and frustrating work separate from the actual activity of evaluation. Candidates, administrators, and reviewers waste hundreds or even thousands of hours every year on inefficient processes for submitting, distributing, and accessing materials—squandering time desperately needed for the staggering numbers of strategic imperatives newly critical to the survival and growth of higher education institutions.

Existing processes also often compromise the security of confidential documents, make it difficult to ensure the right processes are being followed for every candidate, expose the institution to legal risk, generate unnecessary costs, and leave institutional leaders without access to information critical for strategic planning.

Assess your school’s practices

Interested in improving promotion and tenure review at your institution? Use this free best practices checklist to see how your processes compare to what the most progressive colleges and universities are doing.

Are your promotion and tenure processes wasting your faculty’s time?

Today, how well is your college or university facilitating good use of faculty time?

Arguably, there are few types of faculty work more critical than thoughtful evaluation of cases for tenure and promotion. But along with driving the valuable work of file review and committee deliberations, processes at most institutions burn up large amounts of faculty time in tedious ancillary tasks.

Lugging binders

When P&T files are managed with paper, candidates must spend hours printing copies of their files and organizing those copies into binders. To read files, reviewers have to travel back and forth between their homes or offices and the locked room on campus where candidate files are stored—and they have to fit their work into the hours when the room is accessible and not occupied by another reviewer.

The distribution of low-value work across time and many different people makes it difficult to see this burden in its totality. But the cumulative amount of faculty time being wasted work is staggering. At one mid-sized university that we support, faculty and administrators were making an estimated 1,400 trips per year to locked rooms to review P&T files prior to switching to a digital system.

Insufficiency of ordinary desktop software

However, moving from paper to digital files is not a failsafe way to reduce no-value work. When institutions switch to electronic file management, they can end up replacing old ancillary tasks with new ones if their system isn’t designed well and matched to the unique demands of promotion and tenure review. Instead of wrestling with jammed copy machines and three-ring binder tabs, candidates may burn up hours figuring out how and where to upload their files and how get them into a specific file format. Instead of having to drive to campus on their one day to work from home, reviewers may end up wasting time trying to navigate through confusing web platforms to find and access the right files to review.

Administrative labor and equitable review

Digital systems can also reduce work for faculty but raise the burden falling on administrators to unsustainable levels and introduce a host of other problems. When P&T files are managed with standard file sharing platforms, for example, administrators must move electronic documents from candidates and internal and external reviewers to the right places for each case and manually change user access permissions at each step along different complex review workflows to protect confidential documents and maintain review protocols.

With so many users needing different permissions to different materials at different times in each candidate’s review, manually controlled digital systems present substantial risks to document security and consistent adherence to fair process.

Assess your school’s practices

Best practices: letters of recommendation for medical school

Interfolio has provided a platform for requesting, storing and sending letters of recommendation on behalf of pre-med, dental and other assorted undergrad studies since 1999. In the past 20+ years, we’ve learned a lot about our users, including what they expect from us and what we could add on to our service to make this process even simpler.

Below is a compiled list of best practices and informational resources related to the process of applying to medical school with a focus on letters of recommendation. Included are ways Interfolio’s Dossier Deliver subscription can be an irreplaceable component of the application process.

When do I request my letters?

On average, we know it takes approximately 12 days from when a letter is requested to when it is uploaded by a letter writer into our system. This is of course a general timing guideline—if your letter writer is providing letters for more than just one student, this length of time can expand to multiple weeks or months. Identify who you want to write your letters by spring vacation (mid-March) and submit your requests to them all by the beginning of April. Per the Student Doctor Network, “This will give them at least 2 months to compose and submit your letters before your AMCAS submission.”

What goes into picking a letter writer?

Assume that your peers applying to med school also have high GPAs, MCAT scores and a thorough resume of extra-curricular and community-based activities. What sets you apart? Who you choose to provide a letter or support may make the difference between early admission or being chosen above other applicants. Do you have a professor, mentor, community leader or even someone in the medical field that can warmly vouch for you?

Based on an article on the Student Doctor Network, “Most medical schools will require at least 3 letters from professors of undergraduate classes: 2 science & 1 non-science.” Outside of letters related to courses you excelled in, it’s also a best practice to have letters related to extracurricular or community-based activities you were involved in. It’s best to shoot for 4-6 letters of rec that span all avenues of your work and personal achievements.

How do I make the request?

At this point you have identified your 4-6 letter writers and now need to approach them with your request.

Assuming you know the person well and have a good relationship, ask them in person.
If you can’t ask them in person, send a well-outlined email including all the details of why you want them to write you a letter, what specific attributes you hope they include, as well as timing of when you need the letter.
Use Interfolio to request your letter.
- Create your free Dossier account
- Collect letters into your account by requesting recommendations
- Your letter writer will receive an email from Interfolio asking them to submit your letter to your account
- You will be notified once the letter has reached your account

How do I submit my confidential letters?

To keep a letter confidential and ensure it’s approved by AMCAS or another receiver, you should have your letters submitted one of 3 ways:

Directly to your school
Via AMCAS or a related health profession’s delivery service
Interfolio’s Dossier Deliver

If your institution’s pre-medical advising office provides a letter of evaluation service, you may be able to arrange to have all of your letters transmitted to AMCAS through that office. If you choose to use Interfolio you will receive with your account subscription:

A lifelong place to request and store your letters
A quality control check on all letters as they are scheduled for delivery including:
- Checking for a signature and official letterhead—so that you don’t risk the letter getting rejected by the schools where you’re applying.
- Making sure the file uploaded is in fact a letter
- Making sure the letter bears both your name and the letter writer’s name
- Making sure the letter is legible
Guaranteed letter content confidentiality for your letter writer, and for you
A customer service team ready to field all your questions

Whatever avenue you choose to deliver your letters, be aware of timing for the rest of your application and other related deadlines.

Resources

Interfolio support for medical and dental school applicants
Prospectivedoctor.com
Studentdoctor.net
AAMC.org
AMCAS

Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

Net neutrality and Interfolio’s work

We often say that Interfolio is a “faculty first” company, and that we believe faculty are the group most central to the success of higher education. That means that if an institution’s faculty aren’t supported, the institution will not prosper. Faculty members benefit from being able to access the information that they need, with as little barriers as possible.

Consistent with the observation of faculty’s centrality to the success of higher education is a vision of unfettered access to the Internet as a practical necessity for scholars to teach, research, and perform service for their community with intellectual integrity and rigor. Current legislation protects this Internet accessibility for faculty, students, and everyone under a concept called “net neutrality.”

As our readers may be aware, the federal net neutrality policy is under threat of dissolution. By virtually all accounts, to eliminate net neutrality would carry massive implications for individuals’ and organizations’ access to the Internet—including, many critics charge, the high risk of an anti-consumer and anti-equity environment.

What does “net neutrality” mean?

Net neutrality simply means that Internet service providers (ISPs) are legally prohibited from speeding up, slowing down, or blocking any online content, applications, or websites that you want to access. The policy affirms that every individual should have the ability to choose the websites they want to access, without that content being degraded or blocked by an Internet service provider (due to commercial interest, political interest, or otherwise).

Without net neutrality, an Internet service provider may then be able to add premiums, as well as set restrictions, for the consumer to be able to access a variety of websites, such as cloud storage sites, video or music streaming sites, or even online software services like Interfolio. Even today, in many communities, there may be only one or two ISPs—and in the future, in the absence of net neutrality protections, it may be very difficult or impossible to avoid these kinds of pricing structures.

Implications of net neutrality repeal

If net neutrality is eliminated, it’s not just individual consumers who may be affected—academic institutions of all types may suffer directly. In the last decade, institutions’ reliance on and investment in digital technologies and Internet access has grown immensely. Debates about the appropriate place of private enterprise in the academic information landscape (where credible knowledge is produced and shared) clearly intersect with the net neutrality question.

Faculty members’ ability to fulfill the mission of higher education is vastly influenced by their—and their students’—access to information. Many students are dependent on easy access to online educational resources via digital schools, and without it would not be able to complete their work. Following any pricing structure changes by Internet service providers, institutions that have yet to implement digital technologies would face an even greater financial hurdle before being able to offer their students digital learning opportunities comparable to those in wealthier, larger institutions.

The coming decision

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to make the official decision repealing net neutrality on December 14, 2017. It is not a popular vote—it is a policy decision to be made by a committee—but due to the concerns above, many individuals and organizations are applying various tactics to influence the decision. How higher education might navigate a world after the repeal of net neutrality remains to be seen.

Advancing faculty diversity via recruitment: identifying the highest-impact opportunities

This is one post in a series on contemporary strategies for increasing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education. For a fuller picture, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

At schools that have been successful in improving diverse representation of faculty members during the recruitment stage, where do diversity officers focus their attention?

Administrators with ownership for faculty diversity face a common challenge: how to actually view accurate institutional data that would reveal patterns in what is working and what isn’t.

There are a few key data points that the most progressive colleges and universities analyze annually, comparing them to trends across recent years:

Applicant pool diversity
The diversity of interview pools and diversity of candidates receiving offers—and how those compare to applicant pool diversity
How the offer acceptance rate for candidates from underrepresented groups correlates with the diversity of new hires

Having access to uniform and complete data for all faculty searches in all departments allows senior academic affairs leaders who are responsible for advancing faculty diversity to surface trends spanning the institution, set the most effective strategies, and direct scarce resources to the avenues with the greatest potential to impact change.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

Telling others about Metadata 2020, networking, and learning a lot along the way

This post originally appeared on the Metadata 2020 blog on Monday, November 20, 2017. Read more about Interfolio’s involvement in the Metadata 2020 group here.

We recently represented Metadata 2020 in a panel presentation in Washington, DC, at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s symposium, International Coordination for Science Data Infrastructure. The event was comprised of short talks and panels that explored existing and emerging efforts in sharing scientific research data and discussed issues related to the design and use of such systems.

The one-day symposium was a great opportunity to tell others about Metadata 2020 and to share how they could participate in the cause. Our presentation covered the following items:

Comments on the importance of improving the quality of metadata related to published research
Metadata 2020’s formation and its goal of facilitating richer, connected, and reusable metadata
Metadata 2020’s plans to identify challenges faced by stakeholder groups involved with the creation and management of research metadata—as well its desire to establish a “metadata maturity model” for evaluating and improving the quality of metadata
Details on the variety of organizations and individuals involved in Metadata 2020
Information on how the attendees could support Metadata 2020

Attending the symposium gave us the opportunity to network with experts in collecting and managing metadata and to gather insights helpful to Metadata 2020’s mission. We would like to share some of knowledge and advice we gained from the symposium, which includes the following items:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

One attendee noted that Metadata 2020 should do all it can to collaborate with other organizations so that it does not duplicate what is already out there. As an example of a useful model, several participants discussed the FAIR Data Principles (FAIR is an acronym for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-Usable) established to provide guidance for metadata and protocols related to research datasets. Because these principles have been heavily vetted for similar purposes, we should consider FAIR (and other tools created elsewhere) as we establish a data maturity model for collecting research metadata. That said, the broad representation of stakeholder communities from around the world that are active in Metadata 2020 bodes well for heeding this advice while making progress on the goals of the cause.

2. Incentivize contributors.

How can we motivate researchers to provide accurate and complete metadata? During the symposium, one NIH Project was noted as an example of increasing buy-in from researchers. During the funding application process, researchers can provide NIH access to their data, and the agency will pull, clean, and submit data on behalf of the applicants. And NIH will even return the cleaned data to the providers–thus giving value back to the researchers for their data contribution.

Metadata 2020’s various communities are considering ways to reduce the friction of providing metadata, while communicating the benefits researchers receive for providing accurate and complete metadata. Since contributors will be relied upon for the quality of metadata, their buy-in will be a key to success.

Note: Lili Zhang, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shared results from a survey that indicated why researchers did not provide metadata about their research data. The slide deck has been provided by the symposium sponsors–see below. This could provide information to help Metadata 2020 understand the motivations of researchers related to providing metadata.

3. Make interoperability a high priority.

A comment related to a common theme at the symposium was, “It all has to work, machine to machine, and we just help load it into the machines as data stewards.” Building a data ecosystem that supports ease of use, accessibility, and sharing (from one system to another and from one community to another) is a foundation to metadata management. Interoperability is a condition of connected metadata, and connected metadata supports richer and reusable data. As a result, technical advice will be important and needed from all communities involved in Metadata 2020’s efforts.

4 “Data maturity model” is a hot term!

Several attendees indicated that other models are out there or are in development. Resources mentioned include:

a. NOAA NOS Metadata Web Training–The NOAA NOS NCCOS CCFHR (Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research) is receiving metadata training on basic metadata, introduction to policy and standards, navigation and use of the Metadata Enterprise Resource Management Aid (MERMAid), and on Writing Quality Metadata for NOAA NOS. CCFHR are building records from scratch and wish to describe “fish transect data (excel spreadsheet style), habitat picture analysis, multi-beam data, hydro-acoustic data with fish biomass, GIS files, and the basic information that goes with an integrated assessment of an ecosystem.“

b. Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) has a maturity model.

c. NSF Data Maturity Model mentioned, but we could not locate it by press time.

So that we do not reinvent the wheel, as noted above, these potential examples should be considered in Metadata 2020’s efforts to create a data maturity model.

The final agenda and presentation slide decks from the symposium have been posted on the National Academies website.

About the Authors

Scott Wymer is Vice President of Academic Technologies at Interfolio while L. K. Williams is Vice President of Academic Engagement there. Scott and L.K. are members of both Metadata 2020’s Platforms and Tools group, as well as the Researcher Community group.

Building a culture of continuous recruiting for diverse faculty representation

How can academic leaders help faculty across the institution develop professional networks that will improve diversity and inclusion in future searches?

One of the biggest mistakes higher education institutions make, in their efforts to recruit faculty from underrepresented groups, is focusing primarily on activities of search committees filling open positions. To achieve the best results, colleges and universities need to approach inclusive excellence the way other large organizations do: sustaining institution-wide, ongoing efforts to network with talent from underrepresented groups to put the institution in a strong position to attract a strong and diverse pool of candidates when searches open up.

Most faculty members want to support diversity efforts—and will do so more effectively if the institution helps them keep the issue visible and urgent, and provides guidance on which efforts would have the highest impact for their department. One way to advance these goals is holding annual departmental debrief sessions in which all faculty hear an update on the institution’s and their department’s recruiting efforts.

Across the department’s recent searches, where is the greatest drop-off in diversity occurring—initial applicant pool composition, likelihood of accepting an offer, or some other point in the process? Where should faculty focus their ongoing networking efforts to build connections that could lead to talented applicants from underrepresented groups in future searches? Which graduate programs have produced strong candidates from underrepresented groups that applied to recent searches? Where did those candidates first learn of the position?

Focusing on questions like these helps faculty orient their efforts around those activities most likely to positively influence diversity, representation, and inclusive excellence at their institution.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

Filling gaps in faculty applicant pool diversity

Are you gathering enough data about your faculty applicant pool to accurately monitor the success of your faculty diversity initiatives?

If applicant pools aren’t diverse and well-represented, faculty searches won’t produce hires that represent the diversity of that academic field. Yet most institutions still use decades-old processes that reveal applicant pool diversity long after the deadline for submitting applications. And because only a small portion of candidates complete EEO surveys, the data that institutions do collect gives little insight into actual applicant pool diversity.

Institutions successfully tracking applicant diversity get 100% of candidates to submit EEO data by making the surveys a required step in submitting the online application. Candidates may select “prefer not to disclose” for any question, but fewer than 10% of candidates typically choose this response. The result is that institutions get an accurate picture of pool diversity as applications arrive.

Progressive colleges and universities also give search chairs the tools to monitor pool diversity during the submission window—not after it. Chairs can see the aggregate diversity of the pool in real time, which allows them to increase efforts to recruit candidates from underrepresented groups in time to impact the diversity of the final pool.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

Advertising strategies for a diverse faculty applicant pool

Do you have the best advertising strategy you could for influencing faculty applicant pool diversity?

Almost every department invests in advertising to bring faculty job postings to the attention of candidates from underrepresented groups. However, in most cases, departments use the same advertising strategy year after year without any indication whether spending actually generates applications or impacts pool diversity.

Now, growing numbers of progressive institutions are tracking the returns they are getting from different advertising channels and using this data to make more strategic decisions about where they invest their advertising dollars.

Institutions are first examining what share of views of job postings are being generated by each of the sources where the posting is advertised. That is, what specific website, job board, or advertisement did the user click to view the web page where the job description is located?
Next, institutions are looking at the immediate digital path to application—or how the candidates who actually applied for the position entered the application portal—as well as applicants’ answers to the question, “how did you first learn of this position?”
When EEOC surveys are embedded in the online application process, institutions can disaggregate this data by gender and racial and ethnic background while keeping candidates’ personal information protected. Then, at the beginning of the next search cycle, institutions can give each search committee a report showing which channels have been most effective in generating applications from candidates from underrepresented groups.

These practices are particularly valuable as colleges and universities begin testing the effectiveness of advertising faculty positions on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Linkedin. Those platforms allow institutions to direct their advertisements to the audiences they want to reach. More importantly, they allow schools to get their ads in front of desirable potential candidates who are not actively on the job market.

How does your institution compare?

To see how your school’s current practices lines up with contemporary leading strategies for advancing faculty diversity and inclusive excellence, take a look at our free best practices checklist.

Interfolio’s participation in Metadata 2020

At Interfolio, we deal with data about faculty and their research, day in and day out.

Much of the data that colleges and universities collect through our faculty activity reporting system is referred to as “metadata”—that is, data about data. For instance, the following fields are considered metadata about a published journal article: author names, article title, journal name, date published. Similarly, scholarly metrics about an article, such as times cited and journal impact factor, are also considered metadata.

There are numerous benefits to having metadata in a fielded format. Fielded faculty data is richer than unparsed data (for instance, information in a CV that’s in a .DOC or .PDF format) because it allows the information to be repurposed over and over to support the reporting needs of numerous stakeholder groups: faculty members, administrators, academic institutions, accrediting bodies, legislatures, and more. As an example of the variety of output options provided, the fielded faculty data collected in our platform can generate faculty members’ CVs, web profiles, and a structured table in an accreditation report—all from the same faculty data repository. Fielded metadata, coupled with the ability to collaborate with numerous data partners on the input side and output side, provides a very robust data environment.

At Interfolio, our appreciation of faculty data and its associated metadata, and our interest in the efficient and effective collection and use of faculty data, have prompted our participation in Metadata 2020 (www.metadata2020.org). Metadata 2020 is an organization launched last month, founded by Crossref and led by several associations, publishers, universities, technology vendors, and other supporters of the scholarly-data ecosystem.

As per its website:

“Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society.”

We find a solid congruency between the values of Metadata 2020 and ours. They support improved standardization in data collection, greater accessibility to the data collected, enhanced connectivity between systems, reduced duplication to enhance efficiency, and improved usefulness. And so do we at Interfolio.

Currently, we are involved in two subgroups within Metadata 2020, each with the mission to provide foundational structures that pertain to the processes, production, and dissemination of the metadata associated with scholarly work:

The Researcher Group is focusing on establishing and communicating the needs, responsibilities and processes of collecting and using metadata for the researchers who produce the scholarly works about which metadata is collected. Because this group is aligned with understanding the processes and needs of researchers, we are excited about what what we can learn from the members. Likewise, we have a great deal to contribute concerning the experiences of faculty members and academic institutions in collecting, validating, and using scholarly metadata. Interfolio may also support the organization because of our positive relationship with over a million scholars and hundreds of academic institutions.

The Service Providers Group will focus on the role, needs, and processes of organizations that provide services related to the production and dissemination of scholarly works, and related information. Identifying the “metadata pain points” within these processes will be a major focus. The members of this group are representatives from organizations that support scholarly publishing, and the collection and distribution of data about scholarly works. As a service provider ourselves, we believe Interfolio can contribute to the discussion based on our work with faculty members and academic institutions in the efficient collection of rich metadata through connectivity with scholarly data sources that are both providers and users of the metadata we collect.

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in the efforts of Metadata 2020. We believe Interfolio can help and can communicate the perspective and needs of faculty members and academic institutions to this committed group and this worthwhile cause.

Interfolio will be sharing Metadata 2020’s initiatives for the research and data communities at the upcoming National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s symposium, International Coordination for Science Data Infrastructure, on November 1, 2017, in Washington, DC.