The Role Of Service In P&T Decisions

Abstract

Promotion and tenure are very important to faculty members, especially to faculty that are untenured or are in the lower academic ranks.  Typically, universities grant promotion and tenure (P & T) based on three components: research, teaching, and service.  Research is usually relatively well defined and is based on some combination of quality and quantity of presentations and publications.  Teaching effectiveness is typically evaluated using peer evaluations, student evaluations, and the ratings of administrators.  The third component, service, tends to be the least well defined of the three.   The reason for this may be that service is more difficult to quantify because its components tend to be numerous and vague.  This study investigates the perceived importance, what is, of service in the P & T decisions and how important service should be in those decisions.  Email questionnaires were sent to faculty across the nation to obtain their perceptions concerning the overall importance of service in the P & T process at their school.  The survey is designed to capture data regarding the perceived present importance of service in the promotion and tenure process, and what the importance of service in the promotion and tenure process should be.  The results indicate that service is considered to be between “slightly” and “moderately” important in obtaining promotion and tenure.  Respondents indicated that service should be at least “moderately important” in the P & T decision process.  These differences between how important service is and how important it should be are all statistically significant at the 1% level.  Overall, the results show that service is more important for the promotion to full professorship decision than it is for the promotion to associate and granting of tenure decisions.  In addition, analyses show that how important service is and how important it should be varies significantly with some of the demographic characteristics of the respondents’ schools.