The Trickle-Down Effects of Tenure
A Message from Stacy Hartman as part of the Fall 2025 Edition of Building Blocks for a New Academy
The academic humanities are an ecosystem.
Yet we rarely act accordingly. In my fifteen years of change work in higher ed, I have seen many efforts to reform discrete parts of the system: undergraduate education, for example, to increase enrollments and majors; doctoral education, to make it more student-centered and encompass a broader range of career outcomes; faculty reward structures, to include digital and community-engaged scholarship.
These efforts have had isolated success, but they haven’t transformed the system. That’s because we have been treating parts of the system without acknowledging just how interconnected they are. Specifically, we have been trying to change the way we teach undergraduates and train graduate students without touching faculty tenure and promotion.
Undergraduates are taught by both graduate students and faculty; some undergrads will go on to graduate school, and some who go to grad school will become faculty members. Faculty shape curriculum, pedagogy, and expectations at every level, and their efforts are shaped by their own experiences as grads and undergrads – but also university policy, institutional culture, their own scholarly interests, and their sense of what will advance their careers in whatever way is meaningful to them. This means that tenure and promotion requirements have an enormous trickle-down effect on the rest of the system. The way we train doctoral students, including what is required for the dissertation, and the types of programs we offer undergrads, depend entirely on who is hired and promoted through the faculty ranks.
I have spent many years working for change in doctoral education, specifically. I am still doing so through the Mellon-funded Doctoral Futures initiative. But one of the significant challenges to making doctoral education more student-centered, with a greater range of celebrated outcomes, is the tenure and promotion system for faculty. It remains the presumption that the majority of doctoral students will eventually go through the tenure process, and they must therefore be trained for that process as we currently understand it. That means, among other things, a monographic dissertation.
It is not true, and has not been true for many years now, that the majority of doctoral students will eventually go through tenure. But attempts to decouple those systems from each other have not been successful. As long as faculty reward systems remain stagnant, we will struggle to meaningfully change any other part of the system.
Here I am going to highlight three case studies from the ACLS Innovation in Action series: Virginia Tech’s Humanities for Public Service Major; the University of British Columbia-Okanagan’s thematic interdisciplinary graduate degrees; and UC Santa Cruz’s recognition of community-engaged scholarship in tenure and promotion. These are three very different initiatives at three very different institutions, but they reveal how deeply interconnected these systems are and where meaningful change must begin.
Case Study 1: Virginia Tech’s Humanities for Public Service Major
Virginia Tech’s Department of Religion and Culture noticed their graduates consistently pursued public service careers—journalism, law, education, diplomacy. This led them to create a Humanities for Public Service major in 2019, building on their interdisciplinary strengths. The program shares core courses with their Religion and Culture major but adds applied courses cross-listed from other departments (Public History, Global Ethics, Arts Management) and requires field study or internship. Rather than creating dozens of new courses, they leveraged existing resources and willing collaborators across campus. The major now accounts for 55% of their department’s enrollment, demonstrating strong student demand for combining intellectual rigor with practical career preparation.
It is no coincidence this program was created in an amalgamated department by faculty who had migrated from other disciplinary homes. They were able to set aside disciplinary allegiance – which is systemically rewarded – to create something truly interdisciplinary. It is the sort of program that today’s undergraduates seem to be clamoring for: interdisciplinary, applied, intellectually rigorous and career-oriented. But what happens when undergraduates are drawn to applied or interdisciplinary programs, yet…
- Graduate programs remain based in traditional disciplines?
- Tenure systems don’t reward public or applied scholarship?
A mismatch emerges between the programs that undergraduates want, what graduate education expects, and what tenure rewards.
Case Study 2: UBC-Okanagan’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies
UBC-Okanagan couldn’t support standalone graduate programs in all disciplines due to its small size, so it reorganized graduate education into interdisciplinary “themes.” Each theme—including Community Engagement, Social Change, Equality (CESCE) and Digital Arts and Humanities—centers on a grand challenge and draws faculty from across campus. This structure replaced an earlier individualized approach that lacked cohesion and support. The reorganization provided students with necessary structure, community, and administrative guardrails while maintaining flexibility. The themed approach aligns with UBCO’s institutional ethos of interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship, turning the constraint of small size into a strength for innovative graduate education.
Students in UBCO’s programs have latitude in their doctoral projects; many combine the creative with the critical, blend genres, and cross disciplines. They’re prepared for job markets both in and beyond the academy – indeed, they must be, because the wider academic job market still hews closely to academic disciplines.
What happens when PhDs are trained for interdisciplinary and community-engaged work – the type of work that current undergraduates are drawn toward – but enter a job market in which…
- Departments remain organized along traditional disciplinary lines?
- Tenure requires a single-discipline monograph?
This risks creating a trained workforce without appropriate positions within the academy, thereby losing the very people who would be most able to teach in exciting undergraduate programs like Virginia Tech’s.
Case Study 3: UC Santa Cruz’s Community-Engaged Scholarship Guidelines for Tenure and Promotion
Despite UCSC’s 50-year history of community-engaged scholarship, official recognition in tenure and promotion only came in 2023. Faculty like Steve McKay, who developed Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER), struggled to gain advancement because their work didn’t fit neatly into research/teaching/service categories. Changes began in 2020 when multiple factors converged: new divisional leadership, participation in ACLS’s Luce Design Workshop, and faculty organizing. The Committee on Academic Personnel led a faculty-driven process with administrative support to create campus-wide guidelines, finally legitimizing the community-engaged scholarship many faculty had been doing for decades.
When faculty count community-engaged, digital or creative-critical scholarship as scholarship toward tenure and promotion, the trickle-down effect means that…
- Graduate students see that scholarship modeled and valued, and may pursue similar paths for their own dissertations.
- Undergraduates learn from faculty (and grad students) who do applied and community-engaged work.
- Diverse forms of scholarship gain legitimacy at all levels.
The impact of tenure and promotion on both undergraduate and graduate education cannot be overstated. What departments reward through tenure becomes what graduate students pursue – and what they teach as faculty and therefore what undergraduates experience. Conversely, what undergraduates need should shape what graduate students are trained to teach and what tenure and promotion reward. At the moment, these are wildly out of sync, and that is weakening the entire system.
Change often begins with reflection, followed by conversation. Your department probably has committees devoted to undergraduate education and graduate education, as well as one dedicated to tenure and promotion. What would happen if a meeting with all three committees was initiated to talk about how to better align these structures? What if a consortium of faculty members from different departments got together to talk about changes they would all like to make? What if that consortium went to a dean or group of deans to talk about those changes?
Culture often speaks louder than policy, and changing culture takes time. But it starts by recognizing just how tightly woven the current system is. Only then can we understand where and how true transformation can occur.
