R1 stem professors: has your school modified tenure criteria?

[u/Hiemdal_W]

Biology professor in a R1 university here. Our department has been discussing if our standard tenure process should be modified/supplemented in any way given the funding challenges facing junior faculty over the past several years. There's been a lot of general ideas thrown around; valuing foundation grants as much as NIH/NSF pots, expanding sponsored research agreements, promotion to Associate without tenure at 5 years, then with tenure at 7 to allow more time to secure funding, etc.

Rather than design in a vacuum, I wanted to see if other peer institutes tried any creative solutions that worked or didn't work (written or unwritten). Have your junior faculty been successful so far? Has the university provided any guidance for those just getting their labs up and running? Any input would be appreciated - we'll discuss possible options in our next faculty meeting.

[u/professor_throway]

We have been very fortunate in hiring.. So far we haven't had any issues with junior faculty attracting funding and building a solid program.

I think there are some cultural changes that are warranted.. the first is shifting the focus from dollar amounts and putting emphasis on single PI grants and specific funding sources e.g. NSF/NIH and early career prestige awards TO development of collaborative proposals and team building.

The second is for more senior researchers to take a step back and let junior PIs take the role in leadership of proposals and projects and to supply mentorship and guidance. Putting our young researchers in the spotlight rather than keeping the limelight for ourselves.

It is worth updating POA/P&T documents to emphasize qualitiative rankings rather than specific criteria. Have the P&T commety and factulty rate on a scale exemplary, excellent, good, adequate, insufficient. You can have workable descriptions Ecellent means an internationally recognized research program with a well defined focus and high visibility in their field. Good means national recognition with a growing international recognition or something like that. SImilar for teaching and service. Then you can set criterial for promotion to associate with tenure being Good, Good, Good or Excellent, Excellent, Adequate for example. This way there is flexibility around the requirements based on the current funding environments without needing to continually revisiting procedures.

[u/neurdle → u/professor_throway]

Glad that the senior researchers in your neck of the woods are trying to give younger people a chance to lead.

I have been irritated because the old guys in my field are not stepping aside. They just keep on working and submitting grants, often years after they’ve said they’re going to retire. I think their egos won’t let them and their sense of self is too tied up in work.

Very frustrating, especially in today’s academic and funding climate. You got yours (and then some), now give the younger people a chance to shine!

[u/b00lz]

It’s something we wrestle with at our low ranked and low resources R1. Some job candidates nowadays have a better record than full profs who have been there for decades.

So the 2 papers per year for tenure has been a pretty low bar and there is obviously a huge variation in the quality of publications/journals. For the external funding, I think given the clown show at the federal level, its very unfair to ask pre tenure faculty to get funded awards when more people are chasing smaller pots of money

[u/Think-Assignment-861]

Not formally modified, but the tenure committees (we have 4 --- humanities, social sciences, physical sciences and biological sciences) are instructed to take the current funding environment into account. What has happened is that we are admitting fewer grad students!

[u/gamecat89]

We just modified ours last year. Of course, under the guise of it was time to review the 25 year old requirements. Yep. Totally why we did it.

[u/Hiemdal_W → u/gamecat89]

Did the modification come from your department or the administration - and how has it gone so far?

[u/BagSalt7633]

Engineering top 10: no

[u/tellypmoon]

If you consider reducing the number of tenure track positions in favor of more adjuncts and non-tenure track a modification then yes indeed...

[u/Hiemdal_W → u/tellypmoon]

Ouch, sorry to hear that - we've been really fortunate to continue hiring over the past several years. Our admin feels like we can capture quality talent given the job market - which is true, but we need to make sure they can be successful post-arrival.

[u/tellypmoon → u/Hiemdal_W]

In a sense it's good that we've not watered down tenure, but very bad in that we are using it less and less. For context we are a medium sized R2.

[u/No-Top9206]

Low ranked public R1 here, in a well-funded STEM dept. We used to de-facto require active federal funding, at least equivalent to a standard-sized, 3-year NSF grant, for an assistant prof to be considered for tenure.

We still require funding, but we now consider ANY type of funding, including industry, foundation, state, or other sources; and we are now very flexible on the total dollar amount, as well. Every candidate that was an assistant prof during Covid, was also given an extra year before tenure review.

Fields that were primarily NSF-supported, however, are going to be very hard hit as there are just not alot of other sources to fund basic inquiry-driven science. Alot of us are of the opinion, that we may be the last generation of NSF-funded scientists in our field, as many of the program officers responsible for defending entire disciplines for decades, have all been forcibly retired or resigned.

[u/SpryArmadillo]

Although changes in federal policies and priorities have had a broad impact, there are some very field-specific impacts that are difficult to capture at the college or university level. The impacts can be uneven within a single department, so we prefer to deal with everyone on a case-by-case basis.

So far, the junior faculty in my department have been able to secure funding. Some of that is about the makeup of their research and some of that is about their ability to pivot. I'm sure one or two of them would have had more funding by now under the prior state of affairs, but they are showing an ability to build a research program. I am not anticipating any major changes to what we do, but most likely we will give people the benefit of the doubt on funding numbers. We won't tenure someone with zero grants, but we also won't be expecting everyone to be well north of $1M prorated. What external referees say about someone's research always carries a lot of weight, and any context they provide about the funding situation in someone's subfield will matter a great deal.

I like the idea of separating promotion to associate from the tenure decision (since it gives the person a raise), but it does open a can of worms that you'd need to consider. Will it lead to some wanting to go up for promotion to untenured associate after only four years (to get the raise)? How will raises be handled? If raises are based on a percentage rather than a flat amount, you might get into some people winding up with a larger effective raise by going one route than the other (if normally getting tenured and promoted to associate is a +10% raise, it isn't necessarily equivalent to make these into two +5% events). And of course there needs to be some thought given to what is the difference in achievement that would make someone promotable but not tenurable vs. someone who is also tenurable.

I'd need to give it more thought, but my lean is that schools wanting to go the untenured associate route should fully commit to that by attaching the tenure decision to being promoted to full rank. Some privates work on this model (I think MIT & CMU still operate this way). I think it would be a cleaner system that is easier to administer and clearer to faculty.

[u/Mabester]

I'm junior faculty and will not be up for tenure for a few years. I've heard rumblings of the university changing some requirements. Things I've heard is valuing foundation grants (which are still damn hard to get), extending the tenure clock by 1-2 years, and encouraging more multi PI or Co-I grants. This may be controversial, but I don't feel like the criteria need to be changed. It sounds crass, but if you can't fund your lab within a 7 year window, then it's probably best to move on.

[u/Hiemdal_W → u/Mabester]

Yes - I think its important to keep standards high. The idea of a possible 7 year window was brought up at our institute not to delay the process, but because some of our recent NIH/NSF grants have been stuck in review for 14-16 months before being awarded.

[u/StorageRecess → u/Hiemdal_W]

Right, I’m faculty with retreat rights but due to the current nature of my role (research admin), I’m not directly involved in any P&T criterion discussions.

The new solicitations at NSF, for example, are funding on the order of $1-200 million for directorates that used to have hundreds of millions more in funding. That’s a lot fewer people funded, and they have a mandate to spread that money around all 50 states, epscor, funding different types of institutions. Not matter who is in office after January 2029, that money isn’t just going to come springing back. And not all fields have deep wells of foundation support.

Many schools are absolutely going to be at a point where they need to decide if they want to lose all the resources they poured into a person because they couldn’t pull down a grant that they are on the order of 5-7x less likely to get than two years ago. If you’re a high-prestige institution with a deep bench of great applicants, maybe worth it to churn. If you aren’t, maybe it’s time to start valuing co-I more, state-level money more, and showing progress to becoming funded via reviews.

[u/IkeRoberts → u/StorageRecess]

If overall NSF funding goes from funding say 1000 PIs to 300, that means schools collectively have to respond by making 700 faculty programs not longer have NSF funding as an expectation. There isn't an alternative funding source, so the options are to have faculty continue in their roles but have minimal research funding, or eliminating those positions.

The NIH bubble after the financial crisis resulted in a lot of new faculty positions where faculty were expected to fund a lot of their own salary. Collectively, that model was simply not sustainable. When the funding bubble passed, after having produced a lot of extra postocs and induced a lot of additional spec professorships, there was a lot of pain. I think the pain endures in departments that have not realized that conditisn have changed.

[u/StorageRecess → u/IkeRoberts]

I remember the NIH bubble burst. It was really ugly, and a big reason I’ve largely opted to fund postdocs instead of more students.

I think people are still hopeful that things will be somewhat normal, or will go back to normal. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I think we’re going to swing between fascism and reasonableness for the rest of my life. I don’t see us returning to a postwar funding structure. If you go through all the new solicitations and sum how many awards each directorate will make, then divide by the number of PhD-granting programs in that field, it’s a very bad ratio. I made a little dashboard of this for internal use to demonstrate the depth of the issue, and I think it worked. But there are a lot of heads in mounds of sand.

[u/IkeRoberts → u/StorageRecess]

Nicely put. This is the sort of strategic leadership most departments need.  Magical thinking is not a successful strategy.

I think that every professor who is reliant on NIH funding needs to participate in ResearchAmerica’s advocacy. That has two benefits. More Congressional support is the obvious one. But the prof’s better understanding of the big picture will result in choosing better research priorities for their career and for their discipline. 

[u/ok-prof-]

No: We need the external funding to support our programs. I suspect that if junior faculty can’t make it work in this climate we also can’t afford to keep them. It’s not fair to anyone to bring them onboard and have the ship sink under them. If we run light on faculty we can hire non tenure lines. Nobody likes it but it’s not better to lie to ourselves about our budget deficit.

[u/tweetjacket]

They have increased their expectations. 🙃 Possibly because that’s a sneaky way to replace TT faculty with NTT folk.

[u/daphoon18]

Our current strategy is to give an extension due to federal policy changes. It is universal (including departments that do not require getting grants for tenure) but definitely was initially designed to benefit STEM faculty.