Department chairs (if appropriate), then dean, then Office of Academic Affairs for final approval. You will receive a response acknowledging the extension and specifying your new review year.

The most common reasons for a tenure timeline extension are serious health problems, family formation, and unanticipated disruptions to research.

We predict that gaining the necessary six external letters might be more challenging than usual. We offer the following guidelines to hopefully ease this burden. The campus still expects six external letters^[1]. All must still be at arm’s length. But:

• Letters need not be on letterhead. They should originate from the same institutional email address that the chair has used to contact the referee.  
• External review forms can be typed but need not be ‘signed’ as long as the referee, using his or her institutional email, verifies their validity.  
• The chair should keep track of who was contacted and their response.  
• If six letters have not been received by September 1, chairs should contact the Office of Academic Affairs for assistance in contacting the same or additional reviewers, providing a list of people contacted, when, and responses.
• Review committees may choose to review a candidate even if not all six letters have yet been received, as long as they revisit their deliberations and votes once the letters are in, and all levels have a chance to incorporate this input before the dossier is due to campus (October 31).  

[1] Except for the already-established exceptions:  may be internal for promotion to senior lecturer; for 2020 cycle promotions to Teaching Professor, at least two must be external

We know it may be difficult or impossible to gather colleagues together physically to discuss these deliberations. Therefore, review committees may use Zoom to deliberate. Please make sure all participants ensure privacy on their ends of the connection. Confidentiality is still essential. No recordings are to be made. Avoid using telephone-only connections: use video to enhance engagement. The review letter must be affirmed by the committee members, but this can be documented via email rather than in person signatures. Finally, as always, committees still need a minimum of four votes. You may need contingency plans for timing of meetings or membership on these committees.  

Voting during this time will be more challenging especially since we advocate as much confidentiality as possible (see “Review committee deliberations”). Your committee may have already worked out a plan for voting. To assist you with this, the Office of Academic Affairs is offering to share a Qualtrics survey that your committee can use for each candidate that offers confidentiality. The survey is simple and you will be able to make a separate copy of the survey for each candidate. 

Instructions are provided here on how to access Qualtrics as an IU employee.

To download the QSF file to import into Qualtrics, visit this link. 

Note: This file should be saved to your computer and then imported into Qualtrics. The file cannot be opened outside of Qualtrics.

Then, follow these directions:

Instructions:

• After downloading the QSF file, this web page shares the steps of creating a survey from a QSF file in Qualtrics.
• You can now edit, name, and share this survey as you need. You can also copy this survey in order to create separate surveys for each candidate. To do this, click on the three dots to the far right of the survey and select, "Copy Project."
• You can edit the survey questions, expiration date, distribution, etc. by clicking on the name of the survey from your “Projects” screen.

Recommendations:

• Under “Survey Options,” you may find the following helpful:
  • Under “Survey Experience,” we have selected “Back Button” at the top of these options to allow respondents to be able to change their responses for each candidate – but you may disable this function if needed.
  • Under “Survey Protection,” you can select “Survey Expiration” to set up a time and date for the survey to end.

Contact the Office of Academic Affairs at ude[dot]iupui[at]aao for assistance with downloading the file and configuring it for your needs.