Continuance, Tenure, and Promotion (CTP) FAQs

Department chairs are required to attend the meetings in an ex officio capacity to convene the meeting. They should provide guidance on processes and answer questions about the facts of a colleague’s appointment. If the committee digresses from their task, it’s appropriate for the department chair to remind them about what the handbook requires them to do. Department chairs should not provide evaluative comments about the colleague at the meeting—they will provide an independent evaluation in their recommendation to the dean.

Not much. Performance reviews are about the department chairs review of ALL colleagues’ work (not just untenured colleagues) and should be a separate process. Department chairs should certainly be consistent in feedback across these media and sometimes they might duplicate relevant commentary across the processes to ensure consistency, but annual reviews are between individuals and the chair; continuance and tenure and promotion involve tenured peers and the department chair.

You should bring that issue to the dean, and the dean and/or leadership team should make a recommended decision about the interpretation. The dean should contact the Associate Provost for Faculty who will confirm with the Provost that the determination aligns with university practice/policy/precedent.

The colleague should make the request to the department chair in writing who should grant it and pass it up the chain to the dean. Deans have the authority to accept the revocation of the extension and should respond to the faculty member and cc the chair, provost@wku.edu, rob.hale@wku.edu for record-keeping. The Provost’s Office staff will add the change to the master spreadsheet and copy the note in the in the personnel file. Ideally, this should happen by July 1 in order to go up in the following October.

Here’s what the handbook says in IV.B. 3, “Continuance materials usually include, but are not limited to syllabi, examinations, SITE evaluations, activity reports, publications, creative works and evidence of service activities. The contents of any accompanying materials — for example a letter of appointment and workload assignments — used in the committee’s deliberations and of all materials accompanying its recommendation shall remain strictly confidential, except as they are conveyed to members of the faculty and administration whose duties require knowledge of the information. Submitted materials shall comply with the department’s continuance policy.” So, yes, departments can require for certain materials to be included in the continuance packet as long as they have a policy. It’s a best practice to recommend things like page lengths for reasons explained elsewhere.

Here’s what section IV.B.2 says, “The edition of the Faculty Handbook and the version of the College and Departmental guidelines on the employment starting date as indicated in the formal letter of appointment shall be included in the faculty’s permanent file in Academic Affairs. Faculty shall be reviewed for tenure under the standards in place on the employment starting date as indicated in the formal letter of appointment.” Even though procedures might change a bit from year to year, it’s important to use the same standards or criteria.

Here’s what section III.D.1 says, “As standards for promotion change, faculty seeking promotion to Associate Professor shall follow University, College, and Departmental standards on the employment starting date as indicated in the formal letter of appointment” (emphasis added). The handbook seems to deliberately exclude the jump from associate to full, so colleagues should use the current department, college, and handbook guidelines at the time of their promotion. Since the jump from associate to full is not triggered by a mandatory review year like tenure is, the faculty member has time to meet criteria regardless without threat of separation from the university. 

Yes. Section IV.B.3 of the Faculty Handbook says, “The department’s tenured faculty serves as the continuance committee.” The handbook does not draw a distinction between traditional track and pedagogical track faculty. III.E.2 says, “If there are candidates for promotion to the rank of Associate Professor/Pedagogical Associate Professor, the academic department establishes a Promotion Committee consisting of all tenured members of the department with rank higher than that of the candidate, excluding those ineligible to serve (see Section III.E.2.c below).” Pedagogical faculty will be able to listen to the conversation, ask questions, and apply the criteria to determine their vote.

Here’s what section III.A says, “The department chair/director and departmental faculty within each academic unit have the responsibility of developing specific criteria for determining what constitutes “sustained achievement” for each rank. These criteria must conform to the minimum University standards listed below and must be made publicly available in hard or e- copy form. Guidelines for all ranks must be recommended and approved by departmental faculty. Tenured and tenure-eligible faculty vote on all guidelines; continuing instructors vote only on instructor promotion guidelines; and clinical faculty vote only on clinical faculty promotion guidelines. Guidelines must also be approved by the department chair/director, dean, and the Provost, who has final approval. Approved guidelines will be signed and dated by chair/director, dean, and Provost.”

In almost every case, the answer is NO. The only exception is if faculty decide to go up for tenure and promotion early (before their mandatory review year)—in that case they should do continuance.

Yes. The limit is 40 MB. In Adobe Pro and the online version of Adobe, the Optimize function allows you to shrink files. There are also a number of free compression services on the web; ITS has recommended https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/compress-pdf.html as a relatively easy and reliable service.

If faculty accidentally submit an incorrect file into a workflow or errantly submit a file to the wrong workflow, they should follow these steps to delete the submission. Note: Faculty should not delete files from the continuance or tenure/promotion workflows AFTER a deadline. Instead, they should work with chairs to make the corrections within the workflow to ensure that there is a record that deadlines were met.