Resolution on Deadline for Submission of Promotion Packets

Background

For many years, academic departments at Rutgers in New Brunswick had to prepare promotion packets, for candidates to be considered in the normal annual faculty promotion process, and submit them to their respective dean's offices by the deadline of October 15th each year. Recently, due no doubt to pressure on the deans offices, various deans have pushed this deadline back to around September 27th each year to give their offices more time for their submissions to the higher administration and to the University Promotion Committee in December. The result has been that many departments, particularly the departments with several promotion candidates, have had considerable difficulty meeting these earlier deadlines with the best cases made for their recommendations and for the faculty candidates. Properly prepared faculty promotion packets are vital for insuring the strength and future of the University. Reasons for these difficulties at the department level include the following:

• Faculty reading committees and tenured faculty bodies have to meet several times to prepare, discuss, and vote on the cases, and faculty are often away from the campus on research projects, conferences, and vacations over the summer and generally not available until classes begin around the first of September. Moreover, early September each year is the time of Labor Day, and several religious holidays, further complicating the getting together of the faculty for these preparations and decisions.
• The tenured faculty generally need to wait until September to prepare, discuss, and vote on these decisions, because the letters of recommendations from outside referees, which are critical for these recommendations and decisions, are solicited each spring, and generally trickle in over the summer, often not arriving in total until the referees themselves have returned from their respective summer activities. Furthermore, the faculty candidates themselves often complete research projects, obtain grant funding, give important talks at conferences, and submit publications and grant proposals over the summer, which can be critical factors in the tenured faculty decisions and recommendations.
• Many departments ask faculty candidates for promotion to give seminars, colloquia, or public lectures on their most recent work. These are often best given in September just before the tenured faculty meet to make their recommendations. Such practices often lead to better analyses, decisions, and packets, but take time out of these precious few weeks in September.

Resolution

Be it resolved that the deadlines for all academic departments to submit packets and recommendations to their respective dean's offices regarding faculty promotions, during the regular promotion cycle each year, shall be no earlier than October 15th, so that adequate time is allowed for proper preparations of the best packets for their recommendations to the higher levels of the University.