UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s Promotion and Tenure Modernization Committee, charged in late fall 2024, has completed its review of Penn State’s current promotion and tenure process and delivered a final report with three formal recommendations to University leadership.
The committee, made up of faculty and administrators from colleges and campuses across the University, spent nine months gathering input through listening sessions with tenured and tenure-line faculty, collecting feedback through an anonymous survey and holding committee discussions with faculty experts from other universities.
The committee’s final report was presented to Penn State’s Academic Leadership Council on March 23. The full report is available on the Faculty Affairs website.
In it, the committee reports that faculty expressed broad confidence in Penn State's promotion and tenure process, citing its rigorous multi-level review structure, developmental checkpoints, and safeguarding of academic freedom and job security.
Faculty also provided feedback on the challenges they face in the system's current application. Expressed challenges include:
- narrow definitions of scholarship
- inconsistent and undervalued recognition of hidden labor such as advising, mentoring and diversity work
- unclear service evaluation criteria
- administrative inefficiencies
- inconsistent standards across units
- conflicting guidance and uneven access to feedback
- concerns about teaching evaluation bias and response rates
- perceived differences in teaching loads and resource access across campuses
Drawing on that feedback, the committee developed three formal recommendations.
The first calls on Penn State to broaden what counts as scholarship. Faculty across the University urged the committee to “widen the aperture” of recognized scholarly work beyond traditional publications to include innovation and entrepreneurship, applied and translational research, interdisciplinary and team science, public and policy-engaged scholarship, community-engaged research and open science practices. The committee emphasized that this expansion is intended to reflect the full scope of contemporary academic work — not to raise or lower existing standards.
The second recommendation asks the University to strengthen how advising and mentoring are recognized and evaluated in the promotion and tenure process. This would include recognizing advising and mentoring as core scholarly contributions, clarifying their placement within the dossier, emphasizing quality and developmental impact over volume, addressing workload inequities and recognizing research mentoring across undergraduate, graduate and creative work.
The third recommendation addresses service, which faculty described as essential to the functioning of Penn State's departments, campuses and University governance, yet frequently undervalued and evaluated without clear standards. The committee recommends that the University develop guiding language that affirms service as a mission-critical component of scholarly work, provide guidance to distinguish between routine and high-impact contributions, improve clarity and consistency in evaluations, address hidden labor and equity concerns and align service expectations with recognition and reward.
Committee chair Mallika Bose, associate dean for research, creative activity and graduate studies and professor of landscape architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture, said that these three recommendations capture the messages heard most consistently from faculty.
“When we recognize the full range of scholarship, value advising and mentoring for the essential role they play and bring greater clarity and fairness to service, we create a promotion and tenure process that is more equitable and truly aligned with Penn State’s mission," Bose said.
While not included in the formal recommendations, the committee also identified several recurring themes in faculty feedback that may warrant future attention from leadership: reducing administrative burden; improving clarity and transparency in expectations and feedback; clarifying expectations for tenure and promotion to full professor; addressing perceived inequities across campus contexts; and addressing questions around artificial intelligence and academic integrity.
Kathy Bieschke, senior vice provost and interim dean of Undergraduate Education, will work with academic leadership to determine next steps and establish an implementation committee to carry these recommendations forward.
“Faculty are the heart of every university and it’s critical that we create structures that recognize and promote their impact on achieving Penn State’s mission,” said Bieschke. “We are eager to get started on standing up implementation teams.”
The Promotion and Tenure Modernization Committee was charged by the Office of the Provost and supported by the Office of Faculty Affairs. Questions about the Promotion and Tenure Modernization Committee can be directed to p&tmodernization@psu.edu.