The mission of UAMS and its College of Medicine (COM) is to improve the health, healthcare and well-being of all Arkansans and others in the region, nation, and the world through the education of exemplary health care providers, the provision of standard-setting, comprehensive clinical programs, scientific discovery and research, and the extension of services to the State of Arkansas and beyond. This mission is accomplished through collegial work that manifests the institution’s core values of integrity, respect, diversity and inclusion, teamwork, creativity, excellence, and safety. The primary instrument by which this mission is executed for the College of Medicine is the Faculty. Their success significantly depends on a system that provides adequate recognition and rewards for their work in promoting the mission of the College.
The purpose of this document is to provide guidance for faculty development to all faculty members, including department chairs, by defining the criteria for promotion at a given rank and for granting tenure. These guidelines set high standards to ensure the success of the College in meeting its mission, and also to support the success of each individual faculty member. The expectations become higher and more stringent as one progresses through the ranks from Instructor to Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. The overarching expectation is that each faculty member will define a career characterized by continuous, creative contributions to his or her field(s) of work. The faculty must, through its representatives on the College’s Promotion and Tenure Committee, maintain high standards so that only faculty members who have made very substantial contributions are promoted to Associate Professor and those who have made outstanding contributions are promoted to Professor.
These guidelines are deliberately broad in scope because they are to be used throughout the College, in each of its departments and free-standing administrative divisions. The guidelines are intended to be used by departmental promotion and tenure committees and by the College Promotion and Tenure Committee in making decisions regarding promotion at each rank and the granting of tenure.
The categories of professional endeavors by which each faculty member will be assessed reflect the mission areas of the College: the teaching and mentoring of students and trainees in all programs for which the College and UAMS have educational responsibility, the provision of direct health care to those who seek care in any of the sites where faculty members practice medicine, pursuits of discovery carried out in any of the facilities where faculty members conduct research, and service to the work of the College, to the University, to the citizens of Arkansas, and to many national and international professional organizations and agencies that promote health. In addition, the guidelines specify the need to demonstrate the importance of one’s contributions to academic medicine which are the basis for one’s professional reputation, as assessed by experts in one’s field. The degree of excellence of a given individual’s academic contributions often cannot be exactly defined. However, an evaluation of the degree of excellence of contribution is a professional judgment which can best be made initially by members of the discipline itself, subject to a later broader faculty review by the College Promotion and Tenure Committee.
Scholarship and scholarly contributions are required for promotion on the Basic Scientist, Clinical Scientist, and Clinical Educator pathways. They are encouraged on the Clinical Attending pathway. These guidelines reflect the faculty’s appreciation of Ernest Boyer’s characterization of the four domains of academic endeavor: 1) the scholarship of discovery, which is consistent with traditional research, 2) the scholarship of integration, which makes connections across disciplines and places specialties in a larger context, 3) the scholarship of application, which demonstrates the vital interaction between research and practice, wherein the one continuously informs the other, and 4) the scholarship of teaching, which emphasizes the creation of new knowledge about teaching and learning in the presence of learners. [1] These domains are increasingly meaningful in this era of translational biomedical research. All areas of scholarship, in general, and for the purpose of supporting requests for promotion, require the “3Ps” of a product that is made public and is peer-reviewed.[2]
Contemporary academic medicine – at work in the laboratory, in the hospital and ambulatory practice settings, and in a myriad of educational settings – is undertaken collaboratively. The College values the contributions of collaborators who clearly demonstrate their critical importance to teambuilding and successful teamwork. Those individuals will merit recognition whether their participation is as a principal investigator, co-principal investigator, or co-investigator. To recognize appropriately and reward faculty members who assume collaborative roles in any or all of the mission areas of the College, the Promotion and Tenure Committee invites and welcomes evidence of collaboration and includes this as an important component in the assessment of a faculty member’s contributions. Documentation of collaboration may include and is not limited to participation in multidisciplinary grant proposals, research projects, clinical care teams that create innovations and/or improvements in care, educational activities, and manuscript production. It will be the responsibility of the faculty member to solicit and submit to the Promotion and Tenure Committee letters documenting collaborative activity from colleagues, relevant division chief(s), and department chair(s) to support their promotion and tenure requests. [3]
[1] Boyer EL. Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate 1990; the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Princeton, NJ.
[2] Glassick CD, Huber MR, Maeroff GI. Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate 1997; San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
[3] UAMS College of Medicine gratefully acknowledges the assistance in framing these Guidelines provided by the Policies, Procedures and General Guidelines for Promotion and Tenure of Oregon Health Sciences University.