Any account of our guidelines for promotion in English must begin by stressing that our commitment is above all to teaching excellence and to the broad education of our students. Our colleagues standing for promotion have necessarily dedicated their time and effort primarily to their teaching—new faculty especially.
Even though most arrive at Kenyon having proven themselves successful teachers in graduate school or at other institutions, new faculty members in the English department nearly always feel greater pressure to strive to improve their teaching than to publish more of their work. Our teaching is preeminently demanding. For example, although in most research-intensive English departments, even in liberal arts colleges, tenured and tenure-track faculty do not teach writing-intensive courses and only rarely encounter first-year students, we all involve ourselves extensively in general education. Our commitment to educational breadth, in the context of a residential college, generally requires that we have a significant involvement in our students' lives outside of the classroom and of required office hours. In many other ways, too, we dedicate ourselves mainly to meeting highly demanding standards of pedagogical excellence, and that commitment must frame any account of expectations for scholarly work.
We have no strictly quantifiable expectations for scholarly and/or creative productivity. Instead, we expect to see our Kenyon colleagues doing serious, productive high-quality work on substantial projects. We also recognize, however, the significant complexity involved in determining the value of academic scholarship today. A single article of great influence in a top journal might mean as much as a greater number of articles elsewhere. Work on a book might limit possibilities for publication of journal articles or short pieces of fiction. It is crucial to note that our individual and departmental letters will always make clear to the Tenure and Promotion Committee and the provost our views of the quality of the scholarly and creative work of our individual candidates for reappointment and promotion. We are a department in which individual cases can be carefully assessed on their own merits rather than being measured against abstract guidelines, and such assessment should carry the most weight in the evaluation process.
We define scholarly productivity according to various flexible measures. Ways our colleagues might meet our standards for promotion to appointment without limit include:
Colleagues achieving this level of productivity meet or exceed our standards for promotion to appointment without limit. Other standards are important as well. Colleagues should also try for other ways to present their work regularly in public beyond Kenyon, at conferences and other professional meetings. Scholarship on pedagogy counts just as much as any other kind. And faculty with tenure (as well as those who come to Kenyon with a record of publication) are expected to continue to work productively. Expectations for colleagues standing for full professor correspond to those listed above, though we must note that the years after tenure normally shift our attention to expanded service obligations (chairing the department; chairing standing committees; serving on the Tenure and Promotion Committee, among other commitments). Finally, English department faculty are not expected to co-author papers or articles with students.
Updated February 2019