The Promotion Process at VTC School of Medicine

Good afternoon everybody welcome to today's session it's good to see everybody here today or at least to see your names um so today's topic is on the promotion process at the school of medicine and this is this is always a a topic within the last few years that um is definitely needed and important because of the fact so since we've joined formally joined um virginia tech um it's even more important because the process has evolved a bit um for the promotion and it's important because we need to all stay up to date with it and be very comfortable with it because it's not as if you can learn and go through the promotion process but the promotion process and the appointment process isn't an ever evolving process so here to share with us today um the promotion process and details behind it is dr david music who is senior dean for faculty affairs and he is the individual um who knows the most about this at this point and um is always welcoming of questions that someone might have even between sessions um and uh as you're in the midst of the process so um please join me in welcoming dr david music thank you so much dr wicker i appreciate very much the opportunity to be here with you all today and to quote unquote see you online i do see some faces but feel free to uh if you're having any issues with your connectivity to stop your video because sometimes that helps i know i've had that problem myself depending on where i'm trying to access the presentation so it is a real pleasure to be here today to talk about the promotion process which as dr waker indicated uh seems to evolve from time to time so we'll we'll get into that momentarily i also want to ask your forgiveness in advance i'm struggling a bit with allergies i was outside some of the weekend and i tend to have allergies year-round so it doesn't tend to be worse or better any particular point in time but more recently my voice has sometimes almost run out before my slides have so if if that happens i beg your indulgence in advance also i hope this will be fairly uh participate participative in the fact that if we come to a particular point and you'd like to ask a question on that i believe mariah and or sandy and or sherry are all monitoring the chat feature it's a little bit difficult if you've done this on zoom to kind of monitor the chat box at the same time you're doing the presentation so i've asked them to to interrupt with any questions that somebody might enter into the chat box i want this to be as responsive as possible so with those caveats sorry dr whitaker were you going to jump in there i was i just wanted to say please feel free if if you do have to ask a question or you want to ask a question please feel free to unmute yourself and also um show your video if you prefer um and then that will signify that you're ready to ask a question or you can type something into the chat i also wanted to make sure that everybody remembers that sandy will be uh pasting information in the chat about um what you need to do to receive faculty development related to teaching and or um cme credits for this activity so take it away dr music awesome thank you so right off the bat i want to direct you to um our relatively new uh section of our website we've had this up and running probably for close to a year now maybe a little over a year but when i first came into the office of faculty affairs we didn't have much online available in terms of how this process worked other than our bylaws and so we've tried to design a one-stop shopping sort of web web source where you can go and find the answer to many of these questions so we've given you the link here and would invite you to go there and many times we find that at least some of the questions that people might have about the process you can find the answer to on this webpage and there you see a picture from our most recently recent faculty assembly back in the early part of 2020 of some of the folks who were recognized for being promoted during the previous cycle we try to do that now each year when we have our faculty assembly normally it's in uh mid to late february and people who are promoted we we furnish them with a nice framed certificate suitable for hanging in their office or their garage or wherever they feel like it's most appropriate and so that's a highlight of the year for us is recognizing those folks so hopefully by the end of this session today you'll be able to describe the general process of promotion for faculty members at the medical school perhaps to summarize at least some of the requirements for tracks and ranks particularly with reference to the category that you're in whether you're in a non-tenure or tenure to title track and the particular rank where you are in terms of seeking promotion explain the major components of a promotion dossier and then identify where you can find some assistance with the promotion process itself there are lots of places where you can get the assistance that you need and indeed our office of faculty affairs feels very strongly that that's our role is to help our faculty members be successful in the promotion process so anytime feel free to call upon me or another member of our faculty affairs team and we will do our best to help you now i'm not going to read this to you this is from our current bylaws it's kind of a summary statement that talks about promotion as being a manner in which we reward our faculty members achievements and the the reason i put this in here is that this language is a little bit dated in the fact that about the third line down there it talks about contributions to the education of medical students what we've done in the last couple of years is done a better job i think of recognizing that faculty members at our medical school do not just teach medical students and often not even just medical students from vtc som but may teach a variety of health professions learners so what we've tried to do is be a bit more inclusive there and say that for example if your clinician and you don't have much contact at all with medical students but perhaps you spend a great deal of time teaching residents or fellows that is making a contribution to teaching and so we just want to make sure that everybody understands that change that we've implemented over the last couple of years now the other prominent statement here that you see throughout the bylaws is this notion of progress we'll talk a little bit more about that later but generally speaking the flavor in the bylaws around promotion is that people will make significant progress and or achieve excellence in one of the mission areas of the medical school which again we'll go into in just a little bit a little bit further here so when we first set the medical school up we talked about how there are four areas of faculty activity i think i'll just go ahead and highlight put all of these up here so these are the traditional areas of faculty activity that you would find in most any medical school that is to say teaching clinical care most notably in the presence of learners service to the medical school the academic health center and the community and the scholarly activity or what some people would call research these are the traditional legs of the four-legged stool if you will what we said here from the beginning though is that if you want to be promoted you have to achieve significant progress or excellence in two of the four areas so i think that's an important thing to point out right from the beginning is that unlike other schools where you have to be kind of a superstar in all four of these areas at our school you can select two areas where you really want to concentrate your efforts and in particular i think and we say this during our faculty orientation it is particularly noteworthy that people here at our medical school can be promoted based on excellence in teaching i say that simply because i've been at some other institutions where that was not necessarily true teaching at some medical schools is considered to be more of a sideline or a hobby than anything else whereas at our medical school it's really emphasized a great deal so for example we frequently will look at promotion portfolios or dossiers of clinical faculty who are being promoted or being asked to be promoted on the basis of providing excellent clinical care in the presence of learners as well as being outstanding teachers and that's certainly the case and can be the case here now the difference here if you're a basic science faculty member one of the areas of concentration or one of the areas that you must focus on is scholarly activity and research so we do specify for basic science faculty that they do have to choose that as one of their two areas now we can talk about requirements for all promotions regardless of what track or what rank you're looking at and these are the requirements and i have some terms highlighted here you'll see as i mentioned you the bylaws require you to be active in all four of the domains that we just considered so if you go back here you do have to be active or involved in all four of these of course a basic scientist would not be involved in clinical care per se but you do have to show that you are active or involved in all four and then you again as i said concentrate into of your choice the reason i have these two terms highlighted significant progress and excellence is that literally our bylaws are right now being worked through in terms of some changes to the wording and these are the terms that i believe we're going to come out with on the other side if you look at our current bylaws right now with there there are a lot of different words that are used that i think has contributed to some confusion around this so what we're going to try to do is tighten up the the verbiage here in the bylaws and say for example in either one of the two major tracks tenure to title or non-tenure if you're trying to move from assistant to associate professor you'll have to demonstrate significant progress and if you're trying to move from the rank of associate to full professor you'll have to demonstrate excellence i think by doing this we will we will be able to standardize a bit around the expectations as well as the wording and eliminate some of the confusion so a lot a lot to be said about that and you'll be hearing more about this in the in the next few months as the revised bylaws come out but you do have to show activity and you have to show progress or excellence in two of the four domains all promotions actually have to have a letter requesting the promotion from the faculty member this is the university requirement you have to be both meet both your departmental and school guidelines for promotion you have to follow the timelines make sure you have your materials submitted in a timely manner and i'll show you the timeline in just a moment all promotion packets must have letters of support from either internal and or external reviewers again depending on particular track and rank and then all promotion dossiers have to have letters from the department chair endorsing the promotion as well as the departmental aprt committee which is a committee that reviews proposed promotions at the department level you have to have a statement from the departmental committee all right so generally what are the steps these are all summarized pretty well on the faculty affairs website that i showed you earlier you can link to that and find these requirements but just generally speaking we have a timeline here that that doesn't change very much we what we had to do when we integrated with virginia tech is we had to modify our prior timeline to fit the university timeline and so this is basically the timeline that we mirror from from virginia tech another big change in this regard you may have heard me say this but in the past before we were part of the university our medical school could promote people on a quarterly basis so what this meant was you could turn in your promotion dossier pretty much any time and within the period of three or four months it would be considered that's no longer the case now that we're part of the university so again this is the the general timeline there may be a day or two off every year depending on the calendar but for a given cycle it starts by an initial consultation with the chair the chair gives the person advice about whether she or he feels that the person is ready to be promoted the chair will then send these materials to the departmental committee the departmental committee has several duties that we'll talk about in more detail in just a moment but generally speaking they will review the materials solicit the support letters and then send back a formal recommendation to the chair about whether the departmental committee agrees with endorsement of the promotion the chair then reviews all of these materials and then conveys the opinion of both him or herself as well as the aprt committee to the candidate and typically sends the materials on to the school somewhere in the september to october time frame typically it's at the end of october where we is the sort of hard stop that the school has to have all promotion dossiers um turned in for a given cycle so for example right now we're in the midst of a promotion cycle and the deadline for people who are in the current cycle to turn in their completed dossier is october friday october the 30th too late for you to jump into the current cycle obviously but there's no reason for the next cycle that you couldn't that you couldn't start any time i mean you could go and talk to your chair as soon as early part of january if you wanted there's no reason to wait until actually february 1st if you're pretty sure you want to jump into the next promotion cycle i would encourage you to start talking with your chair anytime about this and trying to get ready for it so then once the materials receive are received by the school committee then they will review those make a recommendation to the dean that generally happens by the end of january the dean then has a month to review these materials and send his or her recommendation to the provost in blacksburg there's usually a hard stop right around anywhere from march 1st to the mid march date for that step typically the provost's office will review those fairly quickly and they will be sent to the board of visitors no later than april 1st or anywhere the first couple of weeks of april really as number seven says the board visitors only approves promotions one time per year so the board of visitors usually meets four or five times per year but they only consider promotions once per year and that's at their june meeting and then all the approved promotions are effective on july 1st that's the general flow of the process sometimes the provost's office will send an informal notification at about step six or seven there somewhere between april and the actual june board of visitors meeting they will sometimes send a a informal notice to either the office of faculty affairs or the dean that it looks like you know your promotions have been approved last year they actually sent an email directly to the individual candidates and saying congratulations uh pending the final approval of the board of visitors in june it looks like your promotion is going to be approved so that's always nice and they're they're trying to standardize some of those processes on main campus as well so here's the entire uh timeline sort of spelled out in stair steps uh with one exception there that i like to talk about this kind of shows the process as it as it lasts from approximately february to the following june or 17 months right now all of our promotions from the medical school go directly to the provost's office you'll see there where it goes from the dean to the provost we are the only college right now that does not take our promotions through the university pnt committee this was something that we negotiated at the time of integration with the university and we felt pretty strongly at that time that this would be important because and this is no knock on anybody at virginia tech but the fact is virginia tech has never had a medical school before and we wanted to have the opportunity to to maintain our ability to to send our promotions directly to the provost and at the same time educate our colleagues on campus about the finer points of being promoted as a member of a medical school faculty so we were successful in being able to carve out that exception if you will now an interesting question that comes up from time to time is how long will that exception remain in place uh it's hard to say i think in some ways it's it's kind of set that way permanently but the fact is if we were ever to get to the point where some of our faculty were going to be eligible for tenure to employment which is what they offer at the university then at that point that may be a requirement for those particular people to go through the university pnt committee but right now all of our promotions bypass that committee which i personally think is is a good thing let me pause there and see if there are any questions or any uh reactions to anything i've talked about so far before we kind of turn the corner a little bit and talk about the departmental committees any questions or anything in the chat box that anybody sees david nothing has come through on the chat yet just terrific thank you david this is milan do you have more specific guidelines about the scholarship section like what consists of priority of fairly tape versus a grain or something like that yes they're they're in the bylaws it's a really good question um i don't know how much detail i have in subsequent slides we will talk about this a little bit when we look at the particular types and tracks of faculty appointment but it is very thoroughly described in the bylaws with examples so i would recommend going right there to the bylaws for now and certainly we would be happy to to work with you on that if you have some individual questions around that generally speaking the category of scholarly activities here is defined very broadly so it would include the traditional things such as published articles and peer-reviewed journals as well as scholarly presentations at the local state regional or national or international level book chapters but also also includes things that we might consider in in alternative formats and it's interesting this comes up all the time in some of the faculty affairs discussions at university is how do we recognize people for their scholarship in what we might think of as non-traditional formats so for example it's quite common now for academic faculty to write blog blogs of some type or have other types of online things that they do and many times these are very scholarly works and so do we count those in the same way that we do other more traditional types of scholarship i think the answer at our school is that yes we do but i think you would also find some difference from from one college to the next at the university as far as how they look at this so does that help i hope that helps thank you so much appreciate thank you you're very welcome okay so i wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the role of departmental committees aprt committees it stands for appointment promotion review and tenure and um it's a requirement of the university that every department have their own departmental committee that is the initial uh review of candidates for promotion and in fact at the university as you see the statement here from dr finney who some of you may have met he has been to a couple of our annual assembly meetings and some other meetings wonderful to work with he's the associate provost for faculty affairs and it's just a wonderful resource for guidance and recommendations from the university university perspective on all of this but he talks about how the university really depends on the departmental committees to thoroughly vet candidates for promotion and or tenure what does that mean well what it really means is that in the university's culture the buck stops with the departmental committees not so much beyond that now in our school here for various reasons over the years the more the more in-depth review has often been done at the level of the school committee instead of the departmental committee a lot of reasons for that i think that we are making really good progress now with our departmental committees in terms of having numbers of senior level faculty who can serve on the committees which was difficult at first when the school first started we just didn't have that many committee members or that many faculty members i should say at a high enough rank to participate on these committees and also in terms of the departments really recognizing that they have to develop the unique guidelines that apply to people in their discipline so for example one one um thing that that we've talked about sometimes is the fact that in radiology i don't know if we have anybody online from radiology if we do feel free to speak up about this but i'm told that in radiology uh because it is such a visual discipline that that oftentimes um visual imaging uh or posters for example are viewed probably uh just as uh being as being is just as important as maybe even peer reviewed journal articles because at some of the meetings uh posters containing imaging are are really really hard to get accepted and so that's kind of a difference in that discipline compared to maybe some other disciplines where posters are not viewed as strongly so it you know there are a lot of disciplinary wrinkles to this and what we do is we depend on our departmental committees to be aware of those things for their particular discipline and to set the standards for their discipline so here's a little bit about the composition of the departmental committees our bylaws stipulate that the department chair cannot serve the reason for that is because we want the chair to be able to carry out her or his own independent assessment of the promotion dossier school if you're on the school apt committee you cannot serve on the departmental committee you have voting rights on the committee based on your rank the bylaws stipulate that you should have at least three full professors on the departmental committee uh they can be from either the tenure to title or the non-tenure track again early in our school this was a difficult uh standard to reach but we are getting there now that we've had more people promoted the chair of the committee should be a full professor and then of course you have to abstain from voting on any candidate that comes forward with whom a close personal relationship exists um and the tasks of these departmental committee again i've mentioned developing and updating department-specific criteria this is very important particularly since we've integrated with university there's an expectation that departments will have formal written criteria for all of the different types and tracks of appointment and that they will take these criteria very very seriously and also when they develop them do so with the input of their departmental faculty so i think we probably still have a little bit of progress ahead of us in terms of some of our departmental committees because i still occasionally will run across somebody who's interested in promotion and i will ask them are you familiar with your departmental committee and they will say no they're not familiar with that so there's an educational aspect of this that i think our departmental committees still have to do in terms of making sure that for example if you're looking at all of the department criteria in psychiatry then it's very very important that all the psychiatry faculty know what's in those department promotion criteria the other tasks are listed there probably pretty obvious once in a while but not frequently aprt committees will also weigh in on the initial appointment of a faculty member this would typically happen if the faculty member is going to be proposed for an initial appointment at a high rank so for example if you have someone who is coming from another institution and maybe they're already an associate or full professor there and they want to be a associate or full professor here when they arrive then sometimes the chair will consult with the departmental committee about this it's not really a requirement for the chair to do so but many times they will just to get a second opinion particularly particularly if there's any question about the qualifications etc the other major thing that the departmental committees do is sign off on maintenance of appointment it's primarily a function of the chair of the departmental committee but as you know your faculty appointment has to be renewed every three years there's a process you have to go through and typically we will ask the departmental committee to make sure that the faculty member has met all the requirements to have their appointment renewed here are some other things that the departmental committees are involved in i won't read these to you but they work very closely with the departments here and in particular the the second and third bullet points are important so when you're going through the promotion process the departmental committee is actually the entity that solicits the letters of support for promotion that go in the promotion dossier those letters are not solicited by the individual seeking the promotion they have to be solicited by the chair of the departmental aprt committee and then finally the committee i think i mentioned earlier they also write a letter summarizing the committee's deliberations about a particular promotion and send that to the department chair as part of the process so this is a very very busy committee it's it's a little bit of a thankless task i wish we had wish we had a better way to recognize the the really vital contributions that these departmental uh aprt committees make because they're really critically important to the promotion process and to the life of our school and i can't say enough to thank them and all their committee members for what they do on behalf of the school it is a lot of work especially during certain parts of the year and we greatly appreciate their efforts on behalf of our faculty okay i'm going to turn another corner here and talk a little bit more about the details of the promotion portfolio itself which hopefully will be useful to you so first of all let's talk about the the cv and the portfolio what is the difference between the two well generally a cv is a list of what you've accomplished whereas the portfolio could be viewed as evidence of those accomplishments so we talk a lot at the time of initial appointment and you know this if you've been through the appointment process about the need to put your cv in a particular format and the best way to do that is to use our online faculty productivity database called digital measures now digital measures the phrase digital measures evokes a number of different responses from faculty depending on where they are in this process if you're just getting started and trying to learn it and you have a lengthy cv digital measures might evoke a certain type of response generally sort of like rolling your eyes or i can't believe i have to do this and and i understand it's it's difficult the use of these software programs to track faculty productivity has actually has actually become quite common in recent years and so you see these different systems at different universities um i had one in my previous post and i haven't been there for uh eight years and i was there for nine years i used it almost the entire time i was there it was one called sedona i don't know if it still exists anymore it was very difficult to use 10 times harder than digital measures because it was not intuitive at all and once a year i had to log into sedona and update all of my information and it actually wouldn't let you do it except during certain times of the year which made it difficult what we encourage folks to do here of course is to keep this updated sort of on a continuous basis because it's really helpful not just in terms of populating your cv in your portfolio but as you know we we use the data in there for any number of other administrative and accreditation type reports so it's really important to to keep your information in there and up to date and as you know digital measures will kind of spit out your uh your cv in the required format automatically with minimal need for uh for editing on your part the portfolio then is viewed as the evidence of one's accomplishments and frankly this has been a bit loosely defined in the past now we have tried to tighten this up in our current guidelines so if you go online to the faculty affairs site where we talk about promotions you'll find some documents that really go into some detail about what needs to be in the promotion portfolio and the reason we had to do this was because when we were integrated with tech we found that they had some very specific requirements for what needed to be in a promotion dossier frankly the university doesn't really care that much about people's cv formats this has been one thing that that we've had to think about because we put a great deal of emphasis when we're independent from the university on the the uh requirement to have a standardized cv the university not so much they kind of leave it up to each college as far as whether they even want to have a a specific format for the cv but they do pay a very large amount of attention to these promo promotion portfolios right down to measuring the margins what size of font you can have what type of font it has to be that sort of thing the first time i read them i had a little bit of a post-traumatic flashback to when i was working on my dissertation years ago because it kind of made me feel the same way so the portfolio is much more important now we say you have to have an updated cv what exactly does that mean this comes up from time to time in the process particularly if we get a a cv that doesn't appear to be updated so make sure that you have everything in your cv first of all that you've done we do occasionally review a cv where because of a personal knowledge of somebody on one of the committees we know that some of their work is not included for example we reviewed a cv not too long ago of a person who we knew had a fairly significant grant that they had gotten funded within the last several months and for whatever reason it just wasn't showing up in their cv so make sure that everything that you have done lately is in there because that's very very important how recent does it need to be generally speaking the apt committee at the school level would like to see that the dossier has been updated within at least the previous six months now considering the fact that the promotion process lasts 17 months then this can be a bit of a problem if you start in january or february and then your dossier accident dossier actually doesn't come to the committee until the following fall and october november then it's been longer than six months so when this happens we typically will contact the person and and help them get that up to date and if that means you know we can work with him to actually do some of the entry we'll do that we just want to make sure that the dossier looks good before it goes to the university we don't want to send them a dossier that appears to have a cv that is obviously way out of date so within the previous six months is the general rule and we try to make sure that we pay attention to that what we've also been able to do is make sure that when you generate your cv now in digital measures you see up in the upper right hand corner here an example has my name and it will tell you the date both when you updated it as well as when you printed it out this was a new feature that we added about a year or so ago maybe a little over a year ago and this has been helpful as a reminder so that you'll see that on your cv and it will help you keep up with this again follow the promotion guidelines uh one of the newer requirements is this teaching philosophy statement this was a requirement of the university we used to not have this this has caused some people some anxiety so we created some samples on the web page and so go by that and it should be helpful to you single best piece of advice we can give you is to please stay on top of the process of keeping this up to date in digital measures again i don't want to be the dead horse here but this is very very important for you as well as for the school and invariably people will miss something or if they if they're if they wait too long to try to update it then they're going to miss something so we we just encourage people to try to stay on top of it and oh in case you don't know this we also have trained administrative support people in each of our departments who have been trained in digital measures we also have a user's group with those folks at least two or three times a year and we will bring them over to the med school we used to bring them over and feed them lunch we haven't been doing that lately obviously but we bring them over and have a little program and make them aware of the latest features and then just make sure that we are keeping them up to date on how to use digital measures so you do have some trained people in your department at your disposal if you're having a problem with this be sure and contact one of them also our member of our team brendall wolf who many of you may have met or seen her name brendol is our digital measures database specialist and her sole purpose in life is to make sure that that all of our faculty are using digital measures in an easy fashion and she will literally come and sit with you at your computer and work with you on any part of this that you may need support with so don't hesitate to call on her for that terms of organizing your portfolio here's some things to keep in mind now the university says our portfolios can be a maximum of 100 pages total so you've got to be careful when you put your portfolio together in terms of what you include and our team will work with you on helping you print that if you need some assistance be sure you included the updated cv now if you have a lengthy cv again you may have to abbreviate but because the university values the contents of the portfolio much more than the cv this is not really an issue the other thing that people will sometimes do is they will include things in their portfolio that take up a lot of space that they don't really need to so you don't need to put in your portfolio a copy of every powerpoint presentation that you've done in the last seven years you can choose some that are that you feel are your best or maybe one that was presented at a a prominent meeting a you know a regional meeting a national meeting pick those as opposed to the ones that you've done on the local level because they're uh perhaps representative of your work you can also compress those powerpoint presentations so you can put them in a handout for example that has the four slides on one page instead of a slide per page that sort of thing there are requirements in terms of submitting these portfolios in pdf format the best way to to make sure that you follow that is again to go back to the directions on the web page and look at those specific requirements and again our team is very versatile or well-versed to use pdf we will advise you about how to set up those bookmarks and divide your portfolio into different sections so that it's easy to review and fits the university's requirements again lots more information on the website all right so let's jump in then a little bit to the tracks and ranks all this you can find currently in our current bylaws in chapter six we will be making some changes to those so stay tuned so here are the categories of appointments you'll notice the red symbol over the secondary appointment there that's going to be a change that we make in our current bylaws and the fact that this category really doesn't make too much sense for us anymore now that we're part of the university so i can talk to you more offline about that if you have a secondary appointment but basically we're going to only have two categories regular primary appointment and then instructional faculty that can have either adjunct or instructional appointments so again here are the tracks and ranks that will be reflected in the revised bylaws uh you're probably familiar with that it's very important of course to know which one of these categories you are personally in when you consider getting ready to go up for promotion so the requirements for the tenure to title track again we talk a little bit about this at faculty orientation i won't spend a lot of time here we talk about how tenure to title is not the same as tenure to employment at the university when we think of traditional tenure to employment where people have a job pretty much guaranteed for life at the university if they achieve tenure to employment that's rapidly disappearing from medical schools very few schools have that in any shape or format now for various reasons so instead of tenure to employment we offer tenure to title this is not without meaning because it does recognize your accomplishment and academic activities it's also something that can be compared with other peer institutions and it does set the bar we've got a title there sorry the bar is a bit higher than for the non-tenure to title track i think also i alluded to this earlier we are going to see some changes in the future where perhaps we can begin offering tenure to employment for people who are employed who are on our faculty who are employed by the university that's not the case right now but we're hopeful that that will be the case in the next one to two years so in the tenure to title track specifically you must be active in all four domains again you concentrate in two of those domains if you're in basic science one of those has to be scholarly activity or research you have to show progress and advancement in your roles and responsibilities and there's a strong expectation of progress in terms of scholarly activity if you want to be promoted in this track from assistant to associate professor there's a seven year time frame you have a formal review of your progress at the end of year two and year four by your department chair or her or his designee and then the bylaws talk about anywhere from five to eight publications are expected this is flexible in terms of interpretation somebody will ask well does it matter for example the uh the journal that you're published in well yes of course if you have if you're in this category and you have a total of say four publications but all of them have an exceedingly high impact factor and they were all published in new england journal or nature or something like that that's going to carry a lot of weight so this five to eight publications is not a hard and fast rule it's just a guideline also in this track if you want to be promoted from associate to full professor you have a six to ten year time frame after the promotion to associate professor and 10 to 15 additional publications expected beyond those that you achieved at the time of your first promotion to associate professor again that is a very flexible requirement in terms of support letters in this track you have to have three all have to be external the letter writers have to be at the associate rank or higher this is for a promotion from assistant to associate rank in this track so that requires three letters you have to have the letters written by people who are at the associate rank or higher they have to have an academic appointment they must be external so all three of these letters must come from people who are outside of carilion virginia tech and or radford university virginia tech suggests that we approach people at our peer institutions but that's a bit of a quagmire in that there are probably three or four different lists of what virginia taxpayer institutions are depending on which one you look at some of them do and do not have medical schools so that's suggested but often doesn't work out that way now the candidate can suggest up to three letter writers but no more than two of these uh should come from the individual suggested by the candidate so got to have at least one letter from somebody that is not suggested by the candidate now still in the tenure to title track if you want to be promoted from associate to full professor this requires four letters all again have to be external have to be at the professor rank again outside of corellian virginia tech or radford and again the candidate can suggest up to four letter writers but no more than two of these can come from individuals suggested by the candidate so that's the tenure to title track in summary again a lot of details are in the bylaws and we'll consult with you every step along the way to make sure that that you don't miss anything in the non-tenure track similar you have to be active in all four domains concentrate concentration or as the new bylaws are going to say significant progress in two of the four domains and again one must be scholarly activity of your basic science faculty significant progress enrollment responsibility as well as scholarly activity if you want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor in the non-tenure track there is no specific time frame for promotion so unlike the tenure to title track where you basically have seven years to achieve this you can take longer than that period of time in the non-tenure track to be promoted from assistant to associate rank there is no minimum expectation in this track for the number of publications and again in the non-tenure track from associate to full professor there's no specific time frame for promotion there is a suggestion that you have six to twelve publications beyond those achieved at the previous rank but again this is flexible so it's not a hard and fast rule support letters for the non-tenure track again in the case of assistant to associate you have to have two letters one of which is internal one must be external have to be at the associate rank or higher again you have the stipulation there about what the external letters where they must come from and the candidate can suggest up to three letter writers but no more than one can come from individuals suggested by the candidate and in the non-tenure track from associate to the full professor three letters are required two internal one external same stipulations about rank and who can write the letters from which institution and how many the candidate can suggest so you see some differences uh pretty easily between the requirements for the tenure to title track and the non-tenure track at both the initial appointment or the initial promotion category of assistant to associate and then in the subsequent associate to professor promotion and rank now if you're in the one of the instructional tracks these are very similar to the process for non-tenure track appointments so if you don't have an academic appointment at another university you're basically not eligible for promotion we do have some people who are in the instructional track who do not necessarily have an affiliation with another uh university and that's fine but if that's not the case for you then promotion really doesn't apply um we don't have promotion for folks in this type of appointment who have titles of clinical preceptor senior instructor or instructor positions now if you're in one of those positions for example this happens sometimes people will have an instructor appointment and then they finish a successfully finish a doctoral training program then they can easily switch from the instructor to a more senior instructor or to an assistant professor type position we do not consider this a promotion this is simply a change in uh track so that's good i think that's what i just said actually that um that change really only requires an updated cv and a letter from the department chair to accomplish that so i'll put this slide in to kind of get you to think a little bit about what i like to call the art of promotion and this is a quote from the bylaws and it talks about how both the department committee and the school committee will judge each candidate on the totality of the portfolio sometimes people will say that our guidelines are too specific and sometimes other people will say they're not specific enough and you know there's an art there there's a there's a need to find a balance i think our current bylaws probably need to be tightened up a little bit in terms of some of the the language to eliminate some of this subjectivity but i don't think you can ever completely eliminate all of the the art from the promotion process you know the fact is we have a different apt committee that is elected every year there's often continuity from one year to the next but the longest anybody can serve on that committee is three years and so every year we have a bit of a different committee people come and go on the departmental committees and so sometimes people different groups can look at the same dossier and come to different conclusions i don't think there's any way around that really i think because it's inherently at least somewhat subjective it's hard to take all of that out so this is what i like to think of as the art of promotion where you really have to look at each individual candidate and judge whether they have met the criteria i hope that makes makes sense that may generate some some questions by some other issues related to this people will sometimes ask can you switch tracks yes there are guidelines in the bylaws that describe this generally can be done one time most often we will see that folks who are in the who start out in the tenure to title track and for whatever reason don't feel like they're going to be successful so they will switch over to the non-tenure track doesn't happen frequently but it doesn't happen but it does happen regularly and occasionally it will actually happen the other way where somebody will be in the non-tenure track but when you look at their record of accomplishment you kind of conclude that gosh they they really would be successful in being promoted in the tenure to title track and so sometimes it will be recommended that they switch over to that track yes um we have a question coming in from dr paulie she has a question about what the letter writers dr paulie can you um mute um dr music can you hear me i sure can how are you i'm good thank you um i just wanted to stop you if you didn't mind i had a question about the letter writer in the non-tenure track assistant to associate professor in um and i i wasn't sure if this was going to be applicable for the current cycle where the candidates submitted the names and you said that the candidate could submit um suggest up to three but no more than one of those could be used i was wondering uh is because i didn't see that exact specification in the current bylaws um yeah no it's a i i know exactly what you're asking i'm glad you brought that up so in essence we modeled this verbiage after the university requirements but the fact is the university has been somewhat lenient in this regard and in fact this is only a big deal when you're talking about tenure to employment type promotions at the university they would probably get really worked up at the university if somebody who was trying to achieve tenure to employment submitted a dossier where the letters were mostly from the people that the candidate recommended in our case because even our tenure to title track appointments are not associated with guaranteed employment like a tenure to employment type appointment is they've given us a great deal of latitude in this regard and i expect that will continue so i hope that helped it it's not been a big deal and particularly for a new school sometimes i mean it's really hard to find somebody to write a letter who is not known to the candidate particularly in some disciplines so we understand that and i think they give us some latitude in that regard does that help it does so in the current cycle if a portfolio has um predominantly the letters uh are the ones suggested by the candidate at this point in time that should be permissible yes it should be now you'll notice uh there's a cover sheet that we have to send to university with all of our dossiers and these cover sheets are posted on our website and one of the things that they have on that cover sheet is you have to declare uh who wrote the letters it's a little it's in a table format and so we've done that the last couple of years and in most instances you know we checked the box that indicated that the majority of the letters have come from people who are recommended by the candidate and so far they haven't pushed back or sent any of those back and i'm suspecting that as long as we're talking about non-tenure to employment type positions they're really not going to be that concerned about it but if we ever do get to the point where we can offer tenure to employment then i think they will be they'll make us abide by that pretty strictly and is is this um particular um document new is this in the proposed bylaws then or is this stated in our current bylaws the verbiage around uh the letters and and recommending the candidate yeah it's it's in our current bylaws and it will probably stay in our new bylaws okay thank you you're very welcome great question okay i'm gonna catch back up where we were yep so we talked about switching tracks the other thing that comes up we have a fair number of people who have appointments in more than one department so for example if you're double boarded in pediatrics and internal medicine you may have a primary appointment in internal medicine and a co-appointment in pediatrics so the question will come up if when i go up for promotion am i getting automatically promoted in both departments at the same time and the answer is no you have to submit your paperwork through both departmental committees and the reason for this is because there may be differences in expectations or requirements between the two disciplines so typically your primary appointment will go first if your primary appointment is in internal medicine your appointment is in pediatrics you would be promoted first in internal medicine then after that in pediatrics if you get everything ready and you want to send both of those through at the same time you can do that what typically will happen though is that somebody will do their primary appointment first and then they'll wait and let their co-appointment catch up that used to be not that big of a deal when we were doing our own promotions on a quarterly basis but now since promotions are only done once a year then if you don't get them both done at the same time then you're looking at a year's wait until you can get the co-appointment also promoted so we try to encourage people to to do this at the same time if they can at all if that applies to you be sure and consult with us early and we will help you get through that process what about appeals if somebody is turned down for promotion is there an appeal process yes there is we have never had any appeals at this point in time all appeals generally will end up with the dean there is some verbiage in the faculty handbook at main campus in blacksburg about appeals of promotion denials again most of that comes up in the realm of tenure to employment type um appeals where things can you know the stakes are pretty high and so people rightly want to know what their appeal process is so if we have a situation like this we will work very closely with the individual to make sure that we track and follow the university's guidelines in this regard but it hasn't happened yet other topics you can read about in the bylaws have to do with these things in the interest of time excuse me i won't go through all of these uh but they are covered in our bylaws and would apply to your i promotion that's all i have so i have a couple of minutes left for questions i hope this has been at least somewhat meaningful to you again let me stress the service nature of our office of faculty affairs we really do want our faculty who are going up for promotion who are considering it to be successful so we will consult with you every step of the way and uh please call upon us and allow us to help you in any way that we can david i was thinking a lot about that when um uh you brought up the screen about um the appeals process i it's my belief that if there is a possibility to make this successful your office work so closely with the faculty member to get them to where they need to be that that presents much less of a chance that there would ever need to be an appeals process there's a possibility that you're going to get there you guys work so closely with them to get them there right we do and and you know again sitting in some of the meetings at the university and hearing this talked about this almost becomes in some colleges unfortunately and and probably very occasionally it it it it takes on sort of adversarial overtones sometimes where people have felt like they were turned down for promotion and yet they weren't made fully aware of what the expectations were for that promotion and so there is a process in the faculty handbook if you go to the virginia tech office of the provost website you will find very elaborate appeals process spelled out there they have about 15 different categories of appointment and there's an appeals process for every one of them and so it can quickly sort of overwhelm you if you're trying to find the right one that applies to you needless to say if that were to ever happen i think you're right we would be on top of that and we try our best to uh to avoid something like that happening so sometimes for example somebody will call the office and say well i'm thinking about uh submitting my dossier for promotion but i'm not sure would you consult with me and take a look at my materials and we'll do that i'll give you a very candid uh review of your materials and advise you i think you're ready or you know i think maybe you need to wait a year and here's what you need to do to get ready in that year's time so that hopefully some unfortunate circumstances where somebody has to appeal a decision is not necessary but the procedures are there in case they're needed and i think that's good so thank you for bringing that up it's important other questions or comments well thank you so much for your time and again contact me offline if i can help you at all appreciate the opportunity thank you david so much this was very informative and just um from somebody who recently within the past couple of years has gone through the promotion process david's office works so closely with you and while this presentation can't uh have had the possibility to cover every possible situation it's covered a lot and the information online is super detailed for the process so again visit online if you have any questions contact our office and you should be in the right hands let me mention one more thing i almost forgot we actually do an annual promotion workshop each november started this last year so this november i think it's the first week of november we will be doing a a workshop where we invite anybody that's interested in promotion for the following cycle not the one that we're getting ready to to work on now with the october 30th deadline but the following one which would be very early come to this november workshop bring your questions i'll be there the chair of the apt committee will be there many of our departmental aprt committee chairs will be there you'll be getting notice of this fairly soon i think it's on a wednesday evening from like 5 30 to 7 or something like that so i would invite you to come to that and we go into this in more detail there another opportunity for you to learn about the process please remember in the chat sandy has posted the links to obtaining faculty development related to teaching and or cme credit for this session if you miss it if the session closes down before you have a chance to grab it just um email her or go to our website you can obtain that information there otherwise enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of your week have a great one.