Suppose an AP is tenure track at Uni A and get outside offer with tenure from Uni B. Is it common for Uni A to make a matching tenured promotion offer without getting tenure letters and going through all the usual hoopla?
Are tenure letters always required?
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Suppose an AP is tenure track at Uni A and get outside offer with tenure from Uni B. Is it common for Uni A to make a matching tenured promotion offer without getting tenure letters and going through all the usual hoopla?
To a certain extent anything can happen, and its quite possible that has occurred. But the scenario is quite unlikely.
Schools don't generally like giving a tenured offer to someone who is untenured. It would almost have to involve a big step down in school rankings. Then one of two things would happen. Either there is some doubt about the candidate's tenure case where they are, in which case the school would not be willing to cut any corners in evaluating it. Or there is no doubt, in which case they wouldn't take the outside offer as a serious threat and they wouldn't feel the need to go to extraordinary lengths to retain them.
There is also the issue of administrative policies. Schools all have very explicit policies laying out tenure adjudication procedures. To a certain extent any policy can be overridden with sign-off at a high enough administrative level, but to override such a bedrock policy would take a whole lot of will. Will that is unlikely to be there for the reasons mentioned above.
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At my school the provost can give tenure to anyone he likes, subject to approval by the board. The school has a provision for “emergency tenure” when they want to retain someone who has an offer at a better school. My school’s governance is kind of a joke, so I’m not sure how common this policy is at other schools.
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They must be from respected people in your area of research (generally a better school or at least peer school, in other words). Generally, you provide a list of some names and your department picks some people and then the dean’s office or other administrator will make the final selections.
You never personally contact them, and you don’t see the letters. But it’s why it is important to be known in your area, not just publish some certain number of papers.
who to bother with tenure letters though? people from the same department?
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At my place there are several steps for outside tenured offers:
1. Candidate receives offer which is contingent upon the eventual tenure being granted.
2. Candidate is expected to accept offer.
3. If so, we will actually go out for letters and start the usual process.
Essentially, what happens is a forward contract. Outside tenure cases are rarely denied. In fact, I have never seen it happen.
In some cases we make tenured offers to untenured folks at a better ranked school (say HRM). It might be a candidate who's up for tenure at said HRM who is not sure if he/she will make tenure there. If so, our offer is usually not binding and it is understood that the candidate will stay at HRM if granted tenure there even after we have completed the tenure review, letters and all.
The reason why this forward contract is almost necessary is the cost involved in going through the whole process. It is not just the time involved for those who are involved internally, but also the implicit cost of asking folks for tenure review letters. We need to have some non-trivial subjective probability of success to start this process.
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Read The Undoing Principle by Michael Lewis for the story about how Stanford offered him tenure the day they heard he was on the market, and he didn’t even give the job talk until after he’d already been hired.
So, unless you’re him or have a similar story, you’ll need letters.
Amos Tversky was tenured at Stanford as an external hire with no letters. Unless you are at that level, don’t count on it.
I am 100% sure he got external letters.
letters for sure?