MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY, in hopes of generating some more comments!
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A philosopher writes:
If your blog has not done so recently, I wonder if you would be willing to start up a discussion about the ethics of writing tenure letters. I would very much like to hear other people's opinions about this. I have heard that it can be held against a candidate if people decline to consider their tenure case. Is this true? Do people think it to be encouraged? I don't see why it should. How much pressure do people feel to not decline to consider a tenure case? Also, has anyone found a good solution to the question of how to be able to say that one has done this hard work without outing oneself a letter writer for a particular person?
Good questions, probably of interest to many. Here are my own impressions: (1) many schools want a reason if you decline to do a tenure review, usually because their Administration wants one--this is, I assume, because declining to do a tenure review is often (mis)interpreted as having a negative view of the candidate; (2) my own practice, which may well be idiosyncratic, is to only do tenure reviews in cases where I am interested to study the candidate's work more carefully--sometimes this has led to favorable reviews, sometimes not; (3) I simply list on the CV the names of schools that have asked me to do formal reviews for promotion; I don't list dates, though I suppose one could draw inferences about the candidates given the likely AOS for which I get asked to review candidates. But since in most cases there are multiple reviewers, I'm not sure this is especially revealing information.
No anonymous postings, and please post only once--comments may take awhile to appear.
