In brief
- The faculty appointments and promotions process is being streamlined, effective in June.
- Moving certain decisions from the provost to deans is expected to save two to three months per case for a final decision.
- Decisions on tenure and continuing terms will remain with the Academic Council’s Advisory Board.
- The changes aim to streamline a process that, over time, has become inefficient, lengthy, and complex.
Stanford is making it faster and simpler to appoint, reappoint, and promote faculty by reducing paperwork and decision points in a process that many say has become overly cumbersome.
Each year, about 300 Stanford faculty are considered for roles ranging from fixed-term and temporary appointments to longer-lasting decisions, as when granting tenure.
These decisions shape careers and Stanford’s academic future, but preparing review files has grown increasingly complex. What once spanned a few dozen pages in the 1960s can now top 100 pages, with rare cases exceeding 400. Much of that growth stems from well-intentioned checks and balances, but also includes documentation that’s now easily verifiable online or redundant.
“The appointment and promotion process takes too long and has become frustrating and bureaucratic,” said former President Richard Saller. “To land and retain top scholars, we need an easier, simpler process for candidates, decision-makers, and the administrative staff who support this crucial work.”
Rethinking the appointments and promotions process is a component of the university’s simplification initiative, which Saller is leading with former Provost John Etchemendy and Vice President for University Affairs Megan Pierson at the request of President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez.
The review, which Etchemendy began during Saller’s presidency, included extensive consultations across campus, feedback that showed the appointments and promotions process to be one of the leading sources of frustration among faculty, and a close look at how the current system functions.
Their recommended changes, approved by the provost, take effect in June 2025 and are designed to:
Maintain decision-making for tenure and continuing terms with the Advisory Board of the Academic Council and provost.
Speed other decisions by shifting about 150 cases per year – primarily fixed-term appointments and promotions – from the provost to deans, potentially saving two to three months per case for a final decision.
Reduce required material in review files.
Improve staff software tools for producing, compiling, and processing those files.
In discussions and feedback sessions with Saller and Etchemendy that included the quarterly department chairs meeting, faculty and staff described an increasingly burdensome process:
Simple decisions bogged down by bureaucracy.
Multi-page requirements for details once covered in a few paragraphs.
Well-intentioned requirements that were overreactions to isolated incidents.
Tedious documentation about referees, the outside sources who evaluate a candidate’s expertise, that duplicates information available elsewhere.
Time-consuming reviews that lack flexibility when candidates face tight deadlines from competing offers.
“A thoughtful redesign could save many thousands of hours of faculty and staff time, and make Stanford more nimble without sacrificing quality in the least,” said Etchemendy.
Professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao summarized the frustrations with the faculty appointments and promotions process at Stanford in their book, The Friction Project (2024), listing the requirements for evaluating a professor in 2021.
The file totaled 113 pages, they wrote. “It included 27 recommendation letters that we solicited from scholars and past students. As well as thousands more words and numbers that we and Stanford administrators had to produce and edit over and over, to comply with a bewildering array of rules, traditions, and idiosyncratic preferences imposed by people who reviewed and approved the document. We attended perhaps a dozen meetings and sent at least 200 emails. And that was, as one colleague put it, ‘one of the easiest Stanford promotion cases in years.’”
Rao called the changes to the process “a long overdue decentralization – and a promising sign of a simplification movement that is key to investing in curiosity.”
What will stay the same?
Tenure and continuing-term promotions will still be reviewed by the Advisory Board and approved by the provost. These decisions will apply to faculty in the tenure and non-tenure categories.
Deans will continue reporting fixed-term actions to the provost’s office.
Medical Line appointments and actions granting continuing term will remain under provost review.
Final approval for appointments, reappointments, and promotions will continue to reside with the president.
What will change?
More decisions made by deans. Deans will now approve fixed-term appointments, reappointments, and promotions – cases that previously required provost-level review. This includes:
Waivers from national searches for time-sensitive offers to exceptional candidates, or qualified spouses of incoming faculty.
Fixed-term faculty actions, which already have defined start and end dates.
Promotion from associate to full professor for already tenured faculty, based on criteria set by each dean.
Slimmer files, clearer expectations. To ease preparation, Stanford will eliminate forms and steps no longer needed for sound decisions. Among the updates:
Summaries will replace full teaching or clinical evaluations (which will continue to be available for review as needed).
New conflict of interest guidelines will clarify when committee members should recuse themselves from a decision.
Information and formatting requirements for lists of referees will be streamlined.
Better tools for staff. New software features will help administrative staff work more quickly and efficiently:
A selection menu that routes users to the correct forms for each process.
A new homepage that clearly outlines evidence needed for each form, with links to relevant policies.
“I appreciate these long overdue changes,” said Bob Sutton, professor emeritus of management science and engineering, who chaired and served on a number of faculty promotion, search, and renewal committees. “These improvements in the appointment and promotion process are among so many other signs that we are getting better at serving as trustees of student, faculty, staff time. We have a long way to go. But we are traveling in the right direction.”
Writer
Chris Peacock
