Information below is intended for chairs or others who are advising faculty or prospective faculty on what activities count as “in rank” for what types of promotion or tenure decisions. There are three other resources that will be useful: 

• Early Application for Tenure: explains what happens when a candidate wishes to go forward sooner than their sixth year, especially when there was no explicit provision of credit-towards-tenure in the offer letter.
• Timeline Offer Conditions for Tenure Track Faculty. Or, “should you offer years of credit towards tenure” for candidates with pre-IUPUI faculty experience? This includes a brief discussion of what counts as “in-rank”. It is designed for chairs and deans to work through their options.
• Template: Explanation of In-Rank for New Hires. This informatoin is written with the audience of the prospective candidate, explaining for them what in-rank means in the IUPUI P&T system. 

For Promotion to Associate Professor (combined with request for tenure):

The key campus criteria for being deemed worthy of promotion to associate professor and being granted tenure are: 

• Quantity and quality of achievements, in the context of one’s discipline and area of excellence
• An emerging national reputation, rising trajectory, and promise of future accomplishments 

In their statements candidates are asked to talk about 3-5 key specific works.  

In this light, work accomplished before arriving at IUPUI becomes and is part of one’s reputation, trajectory, and promise, as one’s scholarly path is gradually built up. 

Work accomplished while at IUPUI shows a dedication to maintaining a desirable level of quantity and quality of achievements.  

People who are applying for tenure after a full five years at IUPUI will normally choose accomplishments done at IUPUI to be their three to five specific works. Prior accomplishments will usually be discussed in two ways: 

• Prior work can be shown to be the starting steps of a focused research agenda.
• Prior work has had time to garner citations; a candidate’s most-highly-cited material is likely to be the oldest material. These citations show that one’s scholarship has impact.

People who are applying for tenure prior to five years: 

• If they have been specifically awarded years of credit towards tenure that should be specifically mentioned, and those years are part of “in rank” work, treated the same as IUPUI work.
• If they have not, they should be careful to show how they have continued to work and improve during their time at IUPUI.

For Tenure, for those Hired at Associate Rank but Without Tenure:

Except in the McKinney School of Law, faculty hired at the associate rank are not obliged to apply for promotion (to full) by the time they apply for tenure.  

The most important consideration for the bestowal of tenure is trajectory and promise of future accomplishments.   

In this light, all work to date can be part of the trajectory, but candidates should be careful to highlight recent work, as showing continued growth.  

• ALERT: When units have quantitative expectations for productivity, candidates should assure that their work during their IUPUI probationary period meets those standards, on a work-per-year basis. 
• For example, suppose a unit says that “excellence” in research for promotion to associate professor requires at least five articles published in high-impact journals. Also, the normal pre-submission period is five years = one article per year. Candidates should be expected to show they have completed one article per year of service until they apply for promotion and tenure.  
• If someone has a parental leave, has received an extension due to uncontrollable problems, or is going up ‘early’, the standard would be the same “# articles per year” counting years of service and omitting any years where there is a formal extension or leave.
• ALERT: IUPUI criteria encourage consideration of quality over simplistic quantity. No candidate should rely solely on counts.  

For Promotion to Full Rank:

For promotion to full, the primary focus is on work accomplished while in rank, that is, work done as an associate professor.  

Candidates should: 

• Clearly mark on the CV items produced during or after the promotion to associate. One simple way is to show all prior work in light-grey type. This makes in rank work stand out.  
• If an item was not on the CV at the time of review for promotion to associate, it counts as ‘in rank’ for promotion to full. For example, if the candidate had submitted an article but it was accepted in December of the review year: that did not contribute towards their promotion to associate so it can count towards their promotion to full.  
• In the candidate statement describe earlier work that has contributed to an ongoing research agenda and which demonstrates a current national reputation. For example, an article published 10 years ago may now be cited widely.  

The most common minimum period between associate and full is five years.  

• Candidates with less than five years in rank should be careful to ensure that there is sufficient prominent work accomplished in rank.
• When candidates have many years in rank, they may wish to describe responsibilities that have affected productivity in the area of excellence, such as administrative contributions.

Special note for teaching professor: Because this rank was created only in 2019, special considerations are necessary for senior lecturers or lecturers to apply for this rank, because they may have achieved “Teaching Professor”-level accomplishments while lecturers. 

Reviewed and Revised: 7/30/2021