This article is featured in the 2024 Freshman special issue.
For academics, tenure marks the end of a long road — for many, four years of undergraduate education, four to eight years of a doctoral program and six or more years as an assistant professor. While the process is trying, the end result is not a guarantee. As of 2023, 53% of Arts and Sciences faculty were tenured, while 14% were on the tenure track. Among tenured and tenure-track professors, success has historically been shared unequally by women and faculty of color — as of 2020, around 38% were women, while around 25% were people of color.
The Dartmouth consulted with Dean of the Faculty Elizabeth Smith and three faculty members to lift the veil on the tenure process — including recent moves to make the process more equitable.
Securing tenure
In short, professors who are granted tenure receive a lifetime of job security and freedom at a university. Tenure enables academics to research and write about ideas and topics that are controversial without fear of losing their job, as tenured professors are more difficult to remove.
Psychological and brain sciences professor Jeremy Manning wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that he has felt more “flexibility” since his promotion to associate professor with tenure in May.
“Having tenure means that I have more flexibility to pursue some of those longer-term, higher risk projects that I am most excited about,” he wrote. “It also means that my voice at Dartmouth and in the academic community more broadly will carry that much more weight.”
At Dartmouth, professors can either be hired on the “tenure track,” typically as an assistant professor, or can hold non tenure-track positions, typically as a lecturer. In 2022, there were 92 professors on the tenure track and 210 who were not on the tenure track.
Tenure track faculty typically hold the assistant professorship for six years, at which point a committee — composed of at least four tenured members of the individual’s department — reviews the professor’s record of research, teaching and service to the College, according to the faculty handbook. The committee then votes on whether it will advance the professor to the next stage, in which tenure appointments in the Arts and Sciences are discussed and agreed to by multiple institutional stakeholders, including the associate deans, the Committee Advisory to the President, the Dean of Faculty and the College President. After consultation with the CAP — a body composed of six professors and Smith — the Board of Trustees formally makes all tenure appointments.
The evaluation process, which is entirely confidential, also includes interviews with the faculty member’s current and former students, as well as “professionals outside of the College” — whom the faculty handbook does not define — to assess teaching.
After the process concludes, successful assistant professors are usually promoted to associate professor with tenure, according to the faculty handbook. Professors who are not granted tenure typically have one year before they have to leave their position, according to sociology professor Gregory Sharp, who was promoted to associate professor with tenure in May.
Disparities in the process
Several times in recent years, the College’s decision to not grant tenure to a woman of color has sparked controversy. In April 2023, the College denied tenure to geography professor Patricia Lopez, a decision that was criticized by faculty, students and alumni due to Lopez’s extensive research output, praise from students regarding her teaching and the College’s high departure rates for women and faculty of color. A report published in 2021 by the College found that for pre-tenure and tenure-track faculty, departure rates were highest for women and people of color.
In addition, the College’s decision to deny tenure to former English professor Aimee Bahng in 2016, despite the English department’s unanimous approval for her promotion, caused similar outrage.
The administration has “made progress,” however, toward making the tenure process more equitable, according to Smith.
“Dartmouth has made progress in diversifying tenure-track faculty over the past decade, and this work remains a major priority,” Smith wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.
Smith explained that the Dean’s office has “undertaken a number of efforts” since 2021 to make the tenure process more equitable. One of those efforts, Smith wrote, is simplifying policies for timeline extensions for tenure review for circumstances such as maternity and parental caregiving.
Physics and astronomy professor Elisabeth Newton, an assistant professor on the tenure track, however, said she does not find the tenure process at Dartmouth to be equitable and does not know if “anyone thinks the tenure process anywhere is equitable.”
“It’s probably relatively equal, in that there aren’t different standards — if anyone could define them — for different faculty,” Newton said. “But racism is a thing [and] so is sexism.”
Becoming a parent, for example, tends to impact women’s chances of gaining tenure more than men’s, according to a 2016 study by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Newton said she faced various struggles attempting to balance teaching, research and grant applications with pregnancy and early motherhood, including sometimes having difficulty finding childcare for her infant.
“I think the one thing I hadn’t anticipated was how much of an impact [pregnancy] would be,” Newton said. “…I’ve probably had a hit of probably a little over a year in terms of my personal ability to do work.”
In order to help address the impact of becoming a parent on a faculty member’s research output, Dartmouth allows a one-year tenure track extension per child as part of maternity or parental leave. While such a policy has the intention of making the playing field more equal, in practice it may hurt women, who face an unequal share of the burden of pregnancy and early childcare.
The 2016 study, which examined all untenured economists hired over the past 20 years at 50 universities, found that the implementation of tenure-extension policies decreased women’s chances of receiving tenure by 22%. In contrast, the policies increased men’s chances of receiving tenure by 19%.
Because men do not go through pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, they do not face the same societal pressures as women around parenting responsibility, according to the study. Therefore, men who become parents may have more opportunities during the extra year of their tenure-track extension to publish research, while women take on an unequal share of the parental responsibilities, the study’s authors concluded.
Additional challenges
In addition to gender and racial disparities, the tenure process poses additional challenges for many academics.
According to Sharp, the tenure process evaluates a professor’s contributions to the university unevenly. Sharp said he felt that the “majority” of the tenure decision is based on a faculty member’s research output. Prior to his promotion, Sharp said he was “under a lot of pressure to publish.”
“Even at schools like Dartmouth, research is the number one most important thing to getting tenure,” he said. “That’s the whole ‘publish or perish’ kind of thing — it’s stressful in that respect.”
Newton agreed, adding that the tenure process weighs a faculty member’s “research productivity” over their roles as teachers and mentors. She said she wished the process considered “a wider variety of things besides grant money brought in and publications.”
“What if somebody was a phenomenal teacher and a medium researcher? Why is that not something that is beneficial to the Dartmouth community?” Newton asked. “It’s a very capitalist perspective towards the value we have for the university.”
Manning also emphasized the importance of research, writing that he had “lost count” of the times he had been told to focus primarily on “incremental scientific projects that would bear fruit in the short term.”
“I can certainly see, from an evaluation standpoint, why regular publications are important,” Manning wrote. “At the same time, many of humanity’s greatest and most impactful discoveries came only after many years of frustrations with nothing to show for it. I often wonder how much we, as academics, are limiting ourselves through this unceasing pressure to publish consistently.”
According to the faculty handbook, the “qualitative assessment” of what a faculty member has published is considered more “consequential” than quantity when making tenure decisions. However, the handbook also adds that the “quantity of scholarly work must indicate significant progress and a sustained professional trajectory.”
In addition to research pressures, Sharp noted that the tenure process introduces stressors beyond the workplace. He said professors on the tenure track “tie [getting tenure] to our lives.”
“This is our livelihood, not just our jobs,” Sharp said. “You have families, you have kids and schools and school districts. You have friends, you have networks. The thought of losing those because you didn’t get tenure is really scary.”
Despite the challenges and pressures of the tenure process, Manning provided an optimistic perspective, writing that the best piece of advice about tenure he had received was to think of the process as “the most awesome 7-year postdoc ever.” Adopting that mentality helped him “appreciate the amazing freedom to do the best and most interesting science [he] could think up,” he added.
“I figured, if I’m doing what I love, and if I can stand by my work, then when the trial period is up I will end up somewhere good, whether it’s in a tenured position or somewhere else,” Manning wrote. “I think that freed me up to take more risks and do work that I’m really proud of, and that I’ve had a lot of fun working on.”
