Maximizing Value in the Evolving Landscape of Tenured/Tenure Track Faculty

Exploring Innovative Approaches to Evaluating and Supporting Faculty in Research Universities using ChatGPT

What does “tenure” mean at a research university? How does this create institutional and social value? How should tenure track faculty be evaluated — especially as understanding of what constitutes “scholarship” continues to evolve? And how can universities ensure that they retain productive faculty and get the most out of them?

For anyone working at a research university, these will be very familiar questions. However, the answers are rarely straight forward.

Growing concerns abound around academic elitism, anachronistic ideas of what tenure means, outmoded expectations for how tenure track faculty are evaluated, and fears that current systems reward unproductive and discriminatory behavior, have led many institutions to convene committees and working groups to rethink and even re-invent the nature of tenure.

However, these efforts usually lead to months and even years of intense discussion followed by muddled and convoluted outputs that rarely lead to progress.

Reflecting on this in an idle moment, I got to wondering what the latest…