The university, for tenure-track professors and others, can become an intellectual prison, an environment where you learn to follow the long-established rules in order to survive. This essay is a call to action, aiming to reach and mobilize learners in the academy who might feel alone and trapped in an institution that primarily rewards…

The "sink-or-swim" ideology is pervasive in the United States society. At research universities, for example, promotion and tenure are institutional waters in which faculty are forced to sink or swim with respect to publishing. Either they publish ("swim") or they perish ("sink"). In throwing faculty overboard,…

The need for educational administrators at all levels has been the subject of much attention for many years now. The shortage seems evident. The numbers of qualified applicants for principal and superintendent vacancies seems at an all time low according to local personnel departments and human resource officers. Where there previously had been 20…

In this article, the author talks about the tenure process of being a professor which can be gloomy for assistant professors as they share a common culture of the joyless quest for promotion and tenure. Life as an assistant professor has its bleak moments; however, the downbeat cosmology is, in the end, dysfunctional and hurts more than it…

Much of the current North American academic crisis of publishing, tenure, and promotion is both the cause and the effect of this fetishization dominant in the humanities: that of the grand narrative of knowledge-production, respectably bound with a spine. Short works will get one only so far, no matter how many of them one produces, or how well.…

Expresses reservations about the model for assessing creative activities in evaluating teachers for promotion. (PD)

Identifies ways in which arts administrators can prepare their artist-teachers for the process of tenure and promotion. (PD)

Discusses the author's experience in finding her current teaching position and her denial of tenure. Offers advice for educators pursuing tenure. Suggests that the Conference on College Composition and Communication could provide a much-needed service by gathering and disseminating both survey data and individual stories in an effort to determine…

A forthcoming Association for Curriculum Development Task Force on Merit Pay and Career Ladders report contends that all teachers can be paid decent salaries and that any implemented plan must have the support and involvement of those to be affected, must ensure due process, and must develop trust in the evaluators. (DCS)

Identifies six major techniques used to evaluate the creative work of theatre faculty. Explores major problems associated with each technique. (PD)

Warns about the phenomenon of reactivity: faculty members will change behavior to accommodate evaluative criteria for promotion. Cautions that evaluative criteria must be developed that do not produce unexpected and unwanted side effects. (PD)

Points out the merits of the model that assesses creative activities as analogous to scholarship in evaluating teachers for promotion. (PD)

Considers the model to validate the creative activities of theatre artists as limited, unworkable, and unacceptable. (PD)

If schools are to be renewed, as recommended by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, it will only be with the help of teachers and principals who head the nation's schools. The teaching profession can be strengthened in five ways, including raising standards and improving salaries. (CJH)

For tenure/promotion decisions involving forensic coaches, the author proposes that the effective coach should receive credit for the equivalent of at least one refereed published article. (PD)