The Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship Prospectus

National Co-Chairs

President and Chancellor Nancy Cantor
Syracuse University

President Steven D. Lavine
California Institute for the Arts

The Goal

The goal of the Tenure Team is to create a report for academic leaders that will help them to understand and value public scholarship, creations, and performances by faculty in the humanities and arts. The Tenure Team initiative is both a policy project and a persuasive project. The team will adapt useful existing practices, suggesting alternatives where they are needed. This approach will allow our member campuses to match different forms of publicly engaged scholarship and art making with evaluation strategies appropriate to them.

The Problem

Creative faculty members are calling for tenure and promotion policies that recognize and appropriately reward diverse forms of public scholarship and public culture-making. Academic leaders need coherent ways to value the intellectual and aesthetic contribution of these diverse activities, which include interdisciplinary and multi-partner enterprises, as well as individual ones.
When faculty members in the humanities, arts, and design pursue public scholarship and performance, they encounter either an absence of institutional guidelines for assessing the value and quality of this work or policies that are not well adapted to their fields. Where promotion and tenure policies do take public practice or community-based work into account, they typically measure exports—the “tech transfer” of knowledge. Thus the transformative intellectual impact of such work on the artistic and scholarly production of individual faculty members remains invisible.

Defining excellence in the cultural disciplines has never been easy, but tenure policies that respond to the nuances of creative cultural work are in place throughout American higher education. What counts as discovery for a literary critic? What counts as research for a choreographer? People have found—and are continually finding--answers to these questions, and have developed appropriate tenure and promotion policies for interdisciplinary humanities fields and for emerging aesthetic practices. We propose to do the same thing for public scholarship. Above all, we seek to recognize integration as a specific kind of excellence, as in the integration, within a single complex project, of all four of the university’s missions—teaching, research, service, and public engagement.

Available Models

In recent years, educational leaders have discussed several ways to recognize publicly-engaged work in the tenure and promotion process. These approaches constitute the starting point—the raw materials--for the work of the Tenure Team. They include:

  • Boyer’s “scholarship of engagement,” defined in terms of application and practice; other categories adapted from Boyer include discovery, integration, interpretation, teaching.
  • The “fourth portfolio,” used in, for example, architecture and urban planning programs in order to include community projects as part of faculty member’s scholarly output.
  • Peer review of public practice of the arts, including exhibition, performance and art in public spaces.
  • More rigorous assessment of professional service, for example, elevating the importance of developing and leading new programs.

Imagining America's Response: Tell a Bold Story

  • Key questions are: What is public scholarship and artistic practice, in theory and application? How do we evaluate knowledge that is co-created with non-academic partners? What are the criteria for excellence in public scholarship? How do we weigh the value of the multiple products of public scholarship? Who are the peers for peer review of public scholarship?

  • The Tenure Team effort is part of a broad effort to ‘name and claim’ the civic traditions of higher education. The Tenure Team project will help Imagining America’s member campuses, and many others, to respond to emerging forms of creative public work.

  • The current tenure and promotion system extracts a high price. It is costly to communities, because they aren’t getting access to educational partners. It is costly to students, because opportunities for significant public work often are not available through the curriculum. And it is costly to faculty artists and scholars, who have difficulty claiming public and community-based intellectual and artistic work in a way that counts at tenure time.

  • There need to be flexible but clear rubrics for public scholarship and artistic production to facilitate the development of a diverse faculty. Scholars who are working in rapidly changing multi-ethnic settings, and who are collaborating with diverse local and global communities are caught in a painful set of choices, as they are pressured to defer community-based research and civic collaboration