Policies for Promotion and Tenure in the Writing Program

Revisions approved by the faculty, 03/25/13

I. Introduction
According to its charter (1987), “The Writing Program has responsibility for planning and implementing a comprehensive writing program for the university community. The goal of the program is to integrate writing with reading and critical thinking throughout the curriculum and to encourage continuing development of these abilities.” In addition, faculty in the department have program-related and individual responsibilities for scholarship and graduate education. The Writing Program is conceived as an intellectual community that makes the university writing curriculum (undergraduate and graduate, liberal and professional) a primary site for basic and applied research, theoretical studies, graduate training, and experimentation with innovative teaching practices.

Members of the Writing Program are diverse in their graduate training, disciplinary sources, topics and sites of research, methods, and academic affiliations. Some may be jointly appointed or affiliated with other departments, reflecting the multidisciplinary background of the faculty. But they are unified by their scholarly interest in written language as a complex social activity and medium for intellectual development and by their commitment to education for a creative and critical literacy. Unlike many fields, composition and rhetoric (the central discipline for the Writing Program) integrates the search for knowledge closely with its commitments to practice in school settings and the larger world. Both the mission of the program and the nature of the field shape how the department interprets the concepts of “scholarship,” “teaching,” and “service”--the usual categories of performance and achievement at a university. These guidelines provide that interpretation and account for the ways these categories may overlap and merge.

II. Policies and Procedures

This document states the policies adopted by the Writing Program for evaluating its faculty for promotion and tenure in accordance with standards in the profession, the mission of the program, and the guidelines provided by the College of Arts and Sciences and Syracuse University. A companion document, "Procedures for Promotion and Tenure in the Writing Program," outlines procedures governing promotion and tenure reviews. For a full statement of university and college policies and procedures, see "Policies and Procedures Regarding Tenure and Promotion" for the College of Arts and Sciences (2012).

III. Dimensions of Performance and Achievement
Candidates for tenure and promotion in the Writing Program are evaluated on two dimensions of performance and achievement that cut across the traditional categories of teaching, scholarship, and service.

A. Significant intellectual work

1.The University’s responsibilities for teaching, scholarship, and service all reflect its commitment to increase knowledge and make it available for personal and social use. Both its faculty and its students are participants in the processes of inquiry, discovery, critical examination, and rhetorical communication by which knowledge is created and applied.
Significant intellectual work refers to the various ways in which faculty at the University can contribute to these general goals respecting knowledge. These include, for example:

a. Creating new knowledge or understanding
b. Clarifying, critically examining, weighing, and revising the knowledge claims, beliefs, or understanding of others and oneself
c. Connecting knowledge to other knowledge
d. Preserving, restoring, and reinterpreting past knowledge
e. Arguing knowledge claims in order to invite criticism and revision
f. Making specialized knowledge publicly accessible and usable
g. Applying knowledge in significant or innovative ways
h. Applying aesthetic, ethical, political, or spiritual values to make judgments about knowledge and its uses
i. Creating insight and communicating forms of experience through artistic works or performance

The faculty of the Writing Program recognizes that such significant intellectual and creative contributions may occur in any arena of faculty activity: scholarship, teaching, and service of varied types. Often intellectual and creative accomplishment by faculty in the Writing Program is integrated across these categories. For example, a faculty member might design and teach an innovative course for a writing program (undergraduate teaching), present its theoretical basis in a conference talk or published article (scholarship), instruct and supervise a group of teaching assistants or writing instructors teaching the course (administration, graduate teaching), and act as consultant to other colleges and universities designing or evaluating similar courses (professional service). The quality and significant impact of the intellectual work is more important than its label. Candidates for tenure and promotion will differ legitimately in how they balance effort and achievement among the categories.

2. Intellectual work in a university setting may excel in various ways. Although not an exhaustive list, the following represent qualities that may distinguish respected intellectual work in any category of faculty effort: skill, care, rigor, and intellectual honesty; originality; coherence, consistency, and development within a body of work; diversity of contribution; thorough knowledge and constructive use of important work by others; the habit of self-critical examination and openness to criticism and revision; sustained productivity over time; high impact and value to a local community (e.g., program or college); relevance and significance to issues outside the university; effective communication and dissemination.

Depending on its scope and purpose, intellectual work of high quality may have concentrated impact on a broader front. In judging the work of its faculty, the Writing Program recognizes a wide range of possibilities for types of achievement and for the audience of intellectual work, which ranges from the esoteric, specialized, or local to the occasional breadth of a “public intellectual.” The Writing Program notes particularly a distinction between the way intellectual work disseminates in scholarship and in teaching. Whereas scholarship (even when collaborative) reaches a public outside the university immediately and directly, largely through the individual’s written products or creative artifacts, the impact of achievement in teaching and curricular work is indirect and more gradual. The products of teaching (and administration as well) are students and their work, on the one hand, and a curriculum or successful program on the other. This kind of intellectual work may be harder to demonstrate or evaluate, and is appreciated and nationally recognized only over a period of time. It is nonetheless valuable to the University and the society.

B. Academic and Professional Citizenship

1. Programs, colleges, universities, and professions are from one perspective social organizations that must count on their members for energy, time, and leadership to sustain and develop them as viable, effective systems. In this sense, faculty are citizens of these communities and share responsibility for their governance and advancement as communities. Faculty are evaluated for their constructive contributions to sustaining or leading the communities in which they do their professional work: program, department, or center; college; university; and disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or professional communities.

Such contributions have special significance for the Writing Program, where faculty are engaged in a joint project of program development and implementation. The program combines and integrates research and teaching functions through a collaborative social architecture within the program (faculty engage in professional development, mentoring, and cooperative projects with program teachers) and through interdisciplinary collegial connections with faculty and other units. In this respect the program operates more like a research center than a traditional department,

As in the case of intellectual work, academic and professional citizenship may be a dimension in any domain of faculty activity: for example, reviewing for a professional journal (scholarship); writing recommendations for students (teaching); serving on a Senate Committee (governance, institutional service); or managing a listserv or website for a disciplinary interest group or national professional organization (professional activities, organizational service).

2. The minimum requirement of academic and professional citizenship for Writing Program faculty is collegiality. Collegiality is a criterion for tenure. As defined here, collegiality includes: accepting professional duties and contributing to the intellectual life and ongoing work of the Writing Program; and helping to create an environment conducive to the intellectual and professional work of others, through guidance, help, and respect for one’s colleagues. Collegiality is evaluated only at the level of department or program.
In promotion decisions, achievement in academic and professional citizenship refers to effective, imaginative leadership or constructive contributions to projects or governance involving heavy responsibility and/or sustained investment of time, energy, and intellectual effort. Such achievement may equally valuably occur in the local environment (program or department, college, university), or in professional forums from regional to national to international settings.

3. In any review for promotion or tenure, distinguished accomplishment or promise in intellectual work carries primary weight. However, contributions as a citizen of academic and professional communities are also highly valued, especially in conjunction with intellectual work. Candidates in the Writing Program must meet more than minimum expectations in this dimension for tenure and promotion to associate professor, and distinguished contributions as an academic or professional citizen are an important consideration in weighing a candidate’s eligibility for promotion to full professor.

IV. Categories of Effort and Contribution

The Writing Program evaluates faculty members’ intellectual work and academic/professional citizenship in relation to the categories of effort and contribution specified by the College and University. These categories include teaching (interpreted for the College of Arts and Sciences as “contributions to the education of students”); creative and professional accomplishment (“contributions to scholarship beyond the university”); and service (“other service”).[1] In the following definitions, we specify and interpret these categories as appropriate for the departmental mission of the Writing Program and the standards of the field of composition and rhetoric.

A. Teaching

We understand teaching broadly as contributions to the educational enterprise, necessarily but not exclusively within the program and university. Activities under this heading include individual classroom teaching; tutoring and acting as a program writing consultant (to other writing teachers, classes, students, faculty in other disciplines); co-teaching with others; supervising independent study projects; advising; arranging and supervising internships; serving on graduate examination and thesis, dossier, or dissertation committees; mentoring other teachers; and leading or participating in workshops and co-curricular projects. In addition, teaching includes course and curriculum development work and the design and implementation of professional development for teaching assistants and professional instructors in writing. Finally, teaching includes an array of nontraditional roles in writing across the curriculum, for example, offering workshops or acting as an advisor to teaching assistants in other disciplines.

Some special considerations for evaluating teaching in the Writing Program, typical in the field of composition and rhetoric, are as follows:

1. Much of the “teaching” at the university by Writing Program faculty falls outside the traditional semester-long undergraduate or graduate course. Some of it takes nontraditional forms such as workshops, tutoring, or mini-courses, which may or may not be credited. Much teaching is in the form of professional development for Writing Program teachers and workshops or individual consultation for faculty colleagues, their teaching assistants, or their students.

2. In addition, the study and practice of composition often involves faculty in teaching or consulting in settings outside the institution in which they work. Such teaching is an intrinsic feature of the field as one that relates theoretical and applied knowledge, and that takes literate practices to begin in the home and to continue informally and formally throughout adult life. Part of the function of the writing specialists is to connect these settings to one another and to higher education. Faculty do so, for example, in special “outreach” programs to the public schools, through public lectures, through consulting for business, government, and professions like law, engineering, or medicine. They study (as ethnographers) and teach in prisons, in Appalachian homes, in institutions for old people, and in inner city projects. In some cases these activities constitute professional activities and services, but they also count as teaching if they fit into a general pattern of intellectual work on the teaching and learning of writing in non-university settings (for example, as a specialist in technical and professional writing).

3. In the Writing Program, individual teaching activities are embedded in the project of developing and sustaining a teaching community, in part through extensive oral and written exchanges and documents. There is a broad body of program writing, some of it circulated outside the university. Faculty in the Writing Program may demonstrate both intellectual work and citizenship through their writing and editing of program publications. Similarly, grant proposals from faculty may represent teaching initiatives.

B. Scholarship

Scholarship represents intellectual work that is produced in accordance with the standards of one or more disciplinary and professional communities and is published or disseminated to that audience for criticism, evaluation, and use. Such communities differ on whether they are accumulating a body of knowledge or producing alternate representations and interpretations of the world, but in either case scholarship aims to be taken seriously within a framework of current knowledge-making and exhibits an awareness of its traditions. Creative professional work, in the form of (for example) literature, computer software, or dramatic performance is also included in this category. However, creative professional work will be evaluated for tenure and promotion only if it is directly relevant to the candidate’s professional expertise in the study and teaching of writing and language.

Some special considerations for evaluating scholarship are as follows:

1. Research by Writing Program faculty reflects the diversity of training and multi-disciplinarity of the study of writing. Although the field of composition and rhetoric is the central discipline of the program, scholars appointed to the Writing Program, some of whom may be jointly appointed or affiliated with other departments, may work and publish in several disciplinary communities, using widely different methodologies and sources, both humanistic and scientific. The program recognizes that the existence and relation of such differences in approach and philosophy, along with the connections between composition and rhetoric and other disciplines, are a continuing theoretical issue in the field. It is expected that the bulk of a candidate’s work, broadly interpreted, fall within composition, rhetoric, literacy, or related fields, and that candidates for tenure will show promise of continued productivity in the area(s) for which they were hired, unless it is agreed otherwise by the department during the probationary period.

2. In the field of composition and rhetoric, activities like editing (journals and journal issues, research volumes, editions of a historical work) and work like book reviews, textbooks, and bibliographical essays are an important means for disseminating scholarship, which may in some cases constitute major intellectual contributions. Even internal documents in the institution (for example, a curriculum proposal) may occasionally be circulated widely and treated by others in the field as a scholarly contribution. Other important forms for dissemination of intellectual work are not published: conferences, workshops, literacy projects, and the like. The intellectual value of such work should be judged by the usual standards, and it should be looked at case by case to decide whether it qualifies as a contribution to scholarship, teaching, service, or more than one of these.

3. Research projects in composition and rhetoric are frequently collaborative ones among teams of scholars from this and related fields. The Writing Program puts jointly conducted research and collaborative writing on a par with individually conducted and authored research. Candidates for tenure and promotion should be prepared to explain and demonstrate their specific contributions to co-authored work.

4. In some instances, it is not clear whether published materials or other forms of dissemination fall primarily within teaching or scholarship. This point must be decided case by case, in many instances requiring an explanation of how the candidate’s intellectual work integrates several categories of effort. The general principle that differentiates scholarship from teaching in such publications is the degree to which the author is attempting to place personal or local teaching practices knowledgeably within the theoretical and historical contexts of a discipline and to make an argument or case in these terms to the professional community at large.

C. Professional Service

The traditional category of service encompasses a variety of rather disparate professional activities, which may range greatly in how they balance intellectual work with citizenship. Professional service falls into two broad categories: institutional and organizational service, whereby faculty members help to advance the goals of their institutions and professional organizations through governance and institutional support; and applied work, in which professional knowledge is developed and used for problem-solving and action, most often in external communities. Candidates in the Writing Program are evaluated only on professional activities or services that have a clear relationship to their professional role as a faculty member in a discipline or program.

In the Writing Program, professional service to the institution is an important role for all faculty, who share responsibility for implementing the teaching and service responsibilities of the program to the campus community and beyond. Such professional service may be tightly linked to accomplishing the program’s teaching mission: for example, contributing to the curricular development of the program; to professional development, evaluation, and supervision of teaching assistants and writing instructors; to innovative teaching projects like service learning or learning communities; and to implementing writing across the curriculum. Applied work, for instance, community literacy projects, consulting in professional and technical writing, or outreach to local schools may also contribute directly or indirectly to the program’s teaching mission (through connections to the writing curriculum or student research) as well as to scholarship on rhetorical practices. For these reasons, all candidates for tenure and promotion are evaluated carefully for the quality of their contributions in this category, with particular attention to those activities that enhance the ability of the department to perform its mission. In some instances, contributions of either type may constitute significant intellectual accomplishments and contribute new ideas or models to the profession. Typically in such cases the work is documented through publication and other forms of dissemination to wider teaching and scholarly communities. Where appropriate, candidates are encouraged to explain and document how intellectual work performed in the context of professional service also constitutes a contribution to scholarship or teaching in the field.

D. Integrating Writing Administration into the Categories

Administration refers here to leadership within an institution that requires taking responsibility for a project or group within the context of the goals of a larger unit, program or department, college, and university. It involves making important decisions, developing and articulating policy, directing the tasks and responsibilities of others, reporting to and working closely with institutional administrators, and maintaining communications among individuals and groups, mediating their goals and concerns. It does not include simply participating on a committee (which would be defined here as citizenship, contributing in the category of professional service). Examples of institutional administrative responsibilities for a faculty member in writing are directing a program or part of a program; chairing a committee or project group with major responsibilities for curriculum or policy; leading a cross-institutional task force; acting as an evaluator or supervisor for administrative staff and teachers; and designing, organizing, or supervising outcomes assessment or program evaluation. Each of these draws significantly on disciplinary and professional knowledge and can, depending on scope and quality, afford significant creative accomplishment.

Writing administration is recognized in the field of composition and rhetoric as an arena for rigorous scholarship and teaching innovation, as well as for professional service as described above. As such, it has its own specialized journals and professional organizations as well as subfields and related specializations, which include, for example, writing across the curriculum, writing in the disciplines, basic or developmental writing, professional and technical writing programs, and writing centers. In presenting cases to the College Promotion and Tenure Committee, where candidates have made significant contributions in writing administration, the candidate and Writing Program reviewers will explain how such accomplishments constitute intellectual work based on professional knowledge; determine how it fits into one or more of the categories of scholarship, teaching, or professional service (i.e., how it is distributed or integrated among them); provide evidence of its impact and dissemination in and beyond the institution; and, if possible and appropriate, request evaluation of the work by outside reviewers. For purposes of tenure and promotion, contributions through administrative practice (as distinct from published scholarship on the topic) are evaluated primarily during time in rank at this institution.

V. Expectations of Candidates

A. Criteria for Tenure

As described in the policy statement of the College of Arts and Sciences (Rev. 2012), tenure is a future-oriented decision, determined in large part on the basis of accomplishment. The Writing Program evaluates candidates for tenure in light of their promise of excellence and their demonstrated accomplishment in intellectual work in the categories of effort: scholarship, teaching, and service. The Program expects satisfactory or better performance as a citizen of academic and professional communities. The evidence must support the likelihood that the candidate has made and will continue to make high quality and valuable contributions in both teaching and scholarship. Candidates for tenure are evaluated, at the programmatic level only, for collegiality as an aspect of academic and professional citizenship.

For purposes of tenure, the Writing Program expects high quality in a substantial body of published scholarship. A candidate’s work should demonstrate an emerging pattern of productivity, which should include a single-authored book-length project, as well as other published work such as peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. The candidate should be able to articulate a sense of an intellectual project taking on weight, significance, direction, and authority. Such a project displays on the one hand sustained personal intellectual themes and on the other diversity and growth, perhaps including shifts in direction over time. This sense of a viable career project underway should be perceptible to outside reviewers even if the candidate’s work has not yet made substantial impact outside the university.

Thus expectations for scholarly accomplishments to earn tenure will vary; the Writing Program does not expect all candidates to show the same type of productivity. Candidates may show a significant impact on the field in a dossier composed of varying combinations of the following: a strong single-authored book, high quality articles and book chapters, an important edited collection, substantive digital publications, textbooks that are theoretically innovative. A successful dossier of high quality work may take a variety of forms, in accordance with the discipline’s breadth of scholarly production. The list above is illustrative and by no means exhaustive. The Writing Program expects significant and high-quality scholarly productivity, though such productivity can take a variety of forms.

B. Criteria for Promotion

Candidates for promotion in the Writing Program are evaluated for the merit of their intellectual work and academic/professional citizenship in the categories outlined above, which encompass but further define and distinguish the categories of “teaching, creative professional accomplishment, and service” described in the University’s Faculty Manual (1995). In the case of promotion to associate professor, the promise of high achievement is taken into account, as well as realized accomplishments.

The following statement of criteria for promotion attempts to specify for Writing Program faculty the notion of “balance” that has been proposed as a guiding principle for Syracuse University. This specification takes into account the special nature of composition and rhetoric as a field that theorizes practice and applies theory as its two central activities.
Two variables should be considered in assessing the total picture of a candidate’s effort and achievement for purposes of promotion. First, studies have shown that some faculty careers tend to have a “local” emphasis, while others are oriented more toward the profession at large. Both kinds of faculty are essential for an institution to be distinguished, since its reputation for excellence rests both on intellectually vigorous, well-run programs with fine teaching (both undergraduate and graduate) and on the national or international presence and individual achievements of its faculty members. In general, it is argued here that a “local” emphasis should help to qualify a faculty member for promotion if the work is high quality and has an important impact on the institution, strengthening its position in national terms and/or greatly affecting the undergraduate or graduate experience.

Second, individuals differ in the distribution and concentration of their strengths among the categories of effort and achievement. Some faculty are very strong in one area while being more than competent in others, while some, especially in composition and rhetoric, integrate their effort so fully across these categories that one cannot distinguish a primary area of achievement. To a certain extent, these two variables are linked, in that faculty members with a local emphasis tend to make their greatest contributions in teaching (including program development) and administration, strengthening the university through the intellectual quality they bring to its programs, the communities they build among colleagues and teachers, and their ability to create an environment in which undergraduate and graduate students can become active knowers themselves. Such contributions to the holistic quality and intellectual climate of an institution are part of what facilitates distinguished scholarly work and publication by individuals and teams.

Candidates for promotion to associate professor may present a balanced and integrated picture of their scholarship, teaching, and service, or they may claim either scholarship or teaching as a primary area for their intellectual work. In both cases they will be expected to demonstrate substantive accomplishments and the promise of intellectual excellence in at least one area, scholarship or teaching, and high quality and strength of intellectual contributions in the other.

All candidates in the Writing Program are expected to show high quality accomplishment in teaching and more than adequate accomplishment in its extensions (curriculum development, program leadership, advising, mentoring, etc.). In addition, they will be evaluated for academic and professional citizenship across these categories.

For promotion as for tenure, quantity should be judged in terms of the overall pattern of productivity and the way the individual’s choices make sense within a long-range plan: in many instances a smaller number of products of very high quality is more desirable than a large number of more routine ones. The body of work as a whole should, in the primary area, demonstrate substantive achievement and high quality of intellectual work. There should be evidence of dissemination and impact beyond the university, through channels such as publication, workshops and invited consulting at other schools, conference presentations, recognition and praise by important scholars and teachers, citations, and other means. In the case of teaching, impact may be demonstrated as a function of the strength of the program and its reputation beyond the university, as well as by publications, teaching materials, and other usual means

The Writing Program particularly values evidence that the candidate productively integrates intellectual work in different categories of effort.

Candidates for promotion to full professor must demonstrate distinction in their intellectual contributions to the university and/or profession. Such achievement may be distributed in different ways across categories, but accomplishments in both teaching and scholarship are expected to be of high quality. Candidates should also have a strong record of academic and professional citizenship, usually in more than one category.

Candidates for full professor whose distinction is presented in teaching and pedagogy must demonstrate not only intellectual substance and other qualities of excellence, but also either a major impact on the university and its students, or substantial recognition and importance outside the university, or both. Those who demonstrate distinction in scholarship are expected to present a substantive body of work respected by knowledgeable scholars outside the university. In either case, the candidate’s work should demonstrate a realized and continuing pattern of productivity sustained over a significant period of time. Candidates for full professor who claim intellectual excellence in their contributions to writing administration or in applied work should normally have a record of strong contributions and leadership over five years or more. (Service at other institutions will receive appropriate credit.) In the case of administrative excellence, they should show significant influence in the shaping of an academic program, department, division, the campus, the university, the community, or the profession, as indicated by substantial improvements in the institutional environment that can be traced to their leadership.

Alternatively, candidates claiming excellence in applied work outside the institution as an important part of their case may show that the skills they have employed to study or teach at the university are practiced at a level sufficiently high to have earned the candidate an established reputation in the relevant field. Ordinarily, such a reputation would be indicated by, for example, invitations to edit, write, or review for publications of national stature; frequent consulting opportunities with organizations in business, the professions, government, or education; and invitations to give seminars and workshops at conferences and on other campuses.

[1] Policies and Procedures Regarding Tenure and Promotion, College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse University, 2012.