The future of faculty affairs is digital

For university leadership, the tenure process can be fraught with a variety of challenges, including charges of inequity and unfairness. Those committed to the process of evaluating candidates take on what can seem like a thankless task — hours of committee meetings and materials review followed by uncomfortable challenges from those who did not make the grade. Some institutions are looking to new tools to streamline the process so they can make it more transparent, while giving their faculty the work-life balance they’re demanding.  

Take Elizabeth City State University. The historically Black university, which is the smallest of the affiliated institutions in the University of North Carolina system, serves more than 2,100 students in the northeastern part of the state. Dedicated to tenure as a means to retain top talent and encourage freedom and creativity, the university enthusiastically promotes from within. However, the demands placed on those evaluating candidates was draining.  

Whenever one of its 110-member faculty would go up for tenure, fellow professors and administrators would have to sign in and examine a series of heavy notebooks in the Provost’s conference room, alone, one at a time. “It was completely inefficient,” says Farrah Jackson Ward, Elizabeth City State’s Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. 

When the pandemic hit, the process became completely unworkable, as no one could physically enter the conference room on the closed campus. So Dr. Ward and her team cobbled together a makeshift system in Blackboard. “It was also inefficient,” she says. “That’s not what an LMS is built for.” 

Dr. Ward then remembered a demonstration she had seen for Interfolio’s Review, Promotion & Tenure (RPT) platform— which moves the entire process to a secure online system — and reached out to the company. 

A more streamlined, transparent system

After socializing the new program with ECSU faculty and staff, the wisdom of purchasing was abundantly clear. “We’re saving so much time using RPT,” Dr. Ward says, “Because faculty don’t have to drive across campus to my office, they can do the reviews wherever they want, whenever it’s convenient for them, whether that’s between 9:00 and 5:00 or at 2:00 am.” 

“The pandemic led to a greater awareness among faculty and administrators of the need for self-care,” Dr. Ward said. “Interfolio provided the flexibility that made this more obtainable. The additional time resulting from a more streamlined review process gave faculty some of their time back to focus on self-care and professional development.” 

With Interfolio’s RPT module administrators create templates for faculty candidates, showing them the types of documents needed in their dossiers. Those managing the faculty evaluations can also establish timelines and workflows, so it is clear which committees and individuals need to review specific dossiers at any given time. 

Meanwhile, academic candidates follow explicit instructions for uploading documents, including any they may have previously stored in their Interfolio Dossier accounts. Then, when it’s time to go up for review, they can preview the full packet, showing them the evaluators’ view. This allows academics to tell the full story of their work while making the process as transparent as possible. As Dr. Ward mentions, “Enabling transparency into the review process promotes faculty trust.”

Adapting RPT for multiple uses while battling burnout

For ECSU, the RPT module is proving useful for other functions as well. “Whether someone is on a tenure track or if it’s time for post-tenure review, an annual evaluation, or even teacher of the year evaluations, we use it for quite a lot,” she says. The university has even started using it for the certifications required to allow faculty to teach graduate-level courses. 

Dr. Ward also feels the system alleviates faculty anxiety about the overall review process. “Junior faculty are especially worried about going up for promotion or tenure,” she says. 

Faculty members, she says, also see the system as more transparent. “The integrity of the process is much more streamlined,” she says, noting that no one can simply add or remove items from the digital system, as they could with the notebooks. She notes it is also helpful in case of any disputes, as all of the documents, notes and comments are stored in one, centralized place.

Beyond that, the Interfolio system has been a major time saver. “I think I underestimated the amount of time individuals had to put into their portfolios and how much time they had to carve out to review them,” Dr. Ward says. This new system allows committee members to review the documents when it’s convenient for them. “If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I wouldn’t have realized how much of an inconvenience and a drain on faculty members’ time it was doing it the old way,” she says. That kind of time-saving is critical in this era of faculty burnout and resignation. “Now they have that time freed up to do other things.”

This custom content is sponsored by Interfolio and developed by Inside Higher Ed's sponsored content team. The editorial staff of Inside Higher Ed had no role in its creation.