A new study has found that Black and Hispanic faculty face disadvantages in the way their promotion and tenure dossiers are evaluated by their academic colleagues.
The paper, “Underrepresented Minority Faculty in the US Face a Double Standard in Promotion and Tenure Decisions,” accepted for publication in Nature Human Behavior, examined 1571 promotion and tenure cases at five universities to see if underrepresented minority faculty (URM) were evaluated differently than their non-minority peers even after the effects of scholarly productivity, discipline, and institution were accounted for.
At most research universities, promotion and tenure dossiers are subjected to a series of evaluations, beginning with senior faculty in the candidate’s academic department, proceeding to another level of review by a faculty committee at the college level, and culminating in a review at the institutional level by the provost, often with the input of a committee of other senior faculty.
The evaluations focus on the quality and impact of a candidate’s research, teaching and service, with most research universities placing a priority on research. A key piece of a candidate’s dossier is the set of external letters of evaluation, written by senior scholars in the candidate’s area of research.
In practice, unanimously favorable recommendations by promotion and tenure (P&T) committees are given special deference, while recommendations that contain any negative votes are usually treated as indicators of performance records that need closer scrutiny. The impact of one negative vote can be a poison pill, not only affecting the provost’s vote but also candidates’ impressions of how much their department or college values them as a colleague. In a similar fashion, one negative letter can offset the favorable impression conveyed by multiple positive letters and lead to promotion or tenure being denied.
In the Nature Human Behavior study, the research team, led by Christiane Spitzmueller, Professor of Psychology at the University of California Merced, and Juan Madera, Professor of Global Hospitality Leadership at the University of Houston, as well as Theo Masters-Waage (University of Houston), found that URM faculty received 7% more negative votes in committee decisions than their non-URM peers even after holding other variables that might have affected the votes constant. The effect was much stronger when it came to unanimously favorable votes by the committees with URM faculty 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes.
