Quick Insight: Michael Dougherty on Reforming Promotion and Tenure
University of Maryland psychologist Michael Dougherty addresses some of the concerns around academic promotion and tenure, specifically how it doesn’t always align societal impact with career reward. He explains how a group he’s associated with, the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, is working to reform the system from within, aiming to find the sweet spot in the Venn diagram linking the values of the institution, societal impact, and an individual’s academic success.
A transcript of his talk appears below the Quick Insight video.
Hi, I’m Mike Dougherty. I’m a department chair in the Department of Psychology here at the University of Maryland. One of the things I’ve been working on over the last seven to 10 years has been reform efforts around promotion and tenure. The overarching goal of this work has been to correct what I would call a misalignment between what universities say is important and what they reward through promotion and tenure processes.
So what does this misalignment look like?
On the one hand, universities often tout that they are here to serve the public and to solve critical societal problems. I truly believe that is the case, and I truly believe that universities do that.
On the other hand, though, the very decisions that are critical for individual faculties careers are centered not around to what degree they’ve solved those problems, but rather to what degree have they developed a reputation in their field. And that reputation might come about through a number of citations that their work might garner, or where they published not what they published, but where they publish and to what degree that they have developed a international or national reputation in their field.
The problem with these historical markers of success is that there are well-known biases. Those who are well known, those who are already cited will tend to be cited more irrespective of the quality of their work or the impact of their work for addressing those societal challenges.
In the work that we’ve been doing over the last seven to 10 years, we’ve aimed to correct this misalignment by really drilling down into what are those core missions and how can we reframe promotion and tenure guidelines so that when people are sort of gaming the system, they’re doing so in a way that is in a pro social sense?
What do these efforts look like?
First, starting in my own department and in about 2017, we went through a pretty substantial reform effort where we overhauled our tenure and promotion guidelines, our hiring processes. We created award systems that would encourage people to think about their work in a new way. We wanted people to feel empowered to engage in community engaged research. We wanted people to feel empowered to ensure that their work was shared with communities who really care about it and who need to have that work. We wanted to, we wanted to include incentive structures that would encourage open sharing of data, research transparency, and research rigor.
And so we rebuilt all of our systems around these core principles, the things that we value. Psychology as a field has enormous potential for solving some of the world’s biggest problems, and yet the existing incentive structures in some ways undermine our ability to do that. We wanted to correct that misalignment so that people could really do the work that was going to address these grand challenges.
The second thing that we’ve done is we’ve created a set of principles that are useful for departments to use to help guide their own promotion and tenure modern modernization efforts. These are available on the [Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology] website, COGDOP.org.
If you’re interested in pursuing modernizations in your own department, please feel free to reach out to me personally or visit the COGDOP website, where we have a set of principles that you can use to help guide the processes of modernizing your own promotion and tenure processes.
