All Assistant Professors and Assistant Research Professors must undergo a Mid-Term Review, which should be done in the 3rd or 4th year of the Assistant Professor or Assistant Research Professor appointment. This evaluation is detailed and comprehensive and resembles a "mock" promotion review. The department review committee evaluates the faculty member’s performance in teaching, research/scholarship, service and clinical (if applicable).
Mid-Term dossier materials can only be submitted for review January 1st - March 31st each year.
Almost every discussion of promotion and tenure begins with the word “dossier.” All candidates for promotion and tenure at the School of Medicine must prepare a comprehensive dossier before promotion or tenure can be considered. A dossier is “a file containing detailed records on a particular person or subject.” A dossier may also be defined as “the accumulation of records, reports, miscellaneous pertinent data and documents bearing on an individual’s subject of study or investigations.”
A dossier is more complicated than a simple curriculum vitae; in fact, the CV is just one component of a complete promotion dossier. Dossiers also include internal and external letters of reference, promotion matrix tables and teaching evaluations. Most importantly, dossiers also include carefully assembled teaching, clinical and scholarship portfolios (as appropriate), which in turn must include narratives that explain the faculty member’s activities, effectiveness, and accomplishments as an educator, clinician, or scholar.
All final and complete dossiers are submitted electronically, using Interfolio, an electronic submission and routing platform.
Ideally, you should begin to prepare your dossier during your second or third year as Assistant Professor. Dossiers are unwieldy documents. Preparation requires time and is dependent upon careful documentation of your teaching, research, scholarship, service, and clinical activities over several years. Dossier preparation is, therefore, a continuous process, one that should begin early, with guidance provided by your chair, division or section heads and mentors.
Your dossier, even in its earliest stages, should be reviewed periodically by your mentor(s). Also, you should ask your department chair, division or section head or other academic supervisor to review your promotion dossier periodically, more frequently as you near promotion. Most important, for all Assistant Professors: Your draft promotion dossier must be presented and reviewed during your mid-term comprehensive review that takes place during your third or fourth year in rank.
The deadline for submission of all dossiers (appointments, promotions and tenure awards) to the Office of Faculty Affairs is October 31st of each year. However, each department has an earlier deadline for submission of dossiers for review by the Departmental Evaluation (Promotion and Tenure Review) Committee; these deadlines vary by department.
Ideally, your entire promotion or tenure dossier will not exceed 100 pages, excluding your curriculum vitae and your internal and external letters of reference. You should exceed this limit only if you feel that a more extensive dossier is necessary to ensure adequate consideration and evaluation of your accomplishments.
Depending on your academic focus, your dossier should include separate portfolios that summarize your work in teaching, clinical care and scholarship. Each portfolio, in turn, will include your narratives, promotion matrix tables, teaching evaluations and other relevant supporting documents.
Each candidate for promotion or tenure must provide a narrative summary of their accomplishments in teaching, research or scholarship and clinical practice or other service. While there is no minimum or maximum length for your narratives, we suggest preparing succinct narratives (which may include full paragraphs, charts or bulleted lists) of 3-6 pages for each area. In each area, your narrative should focus specifically on the scope of your activities, your accomplishments and successes, your leadership roles and the impact and importance of your work. Be sure to include a description of each of the major activities and accomplishments that you have listed as “bullets” in your personalized promotion matrix. If appropriate, provide links to supporting documents (such as curricula, journal publications, policy papers, or other relevant products of scholarship). For more information about preparing narratives, please refer to later sections of this Guide to Building a Dossier for Promotion and Tenure. Also, plan to attend a Promotion 101 workshop, which focuses on dossier preparation.
Each portfolio including portfolios for teaching, clinical service and scholarship must also include a personalized Promotion Matrix Table. The Matrix Table is designed to help you document “excellent” or “meritorious” performance in each area, according to the approved SOM promotion criteria.
For example, your Teaching Matrix Table will consist of a bulleted list of your teaching activities and accomplishments, presented and categorized according to the SOM’s criteria for “excellent” or “meritorious” accomplishments, as defined by the Rules of the School of Medicine. The completed Matrix Table helps reviewers understand and assess the range of your teaching activities and accomplishments and whether you have met the criteria for promotion.
The Matrix Tables include only bullet lists. Reviewers will refer to your narratives for information about the importance and impact of the activities listed in the Matrix Table.
Examples of teaching, scholarship and clinical matrix tables are on the website. Templates for building your personalized promotion matrices are available at https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/faculty-affairs/for-faculty/promotion-and-tenure/dossier-preparation.
Faculty members who are employees of the University of Colorado in the regular academic ranks of Associate professor or Professor are eligible for the award of tenure. Faculty members at affiliated institutions are not eligible for tenure but may be considered for the distinction of "tenure criteria." Details regarding tenure and tenure criteria may be found in the SOM Rules.
Tenure is handled in a different manner at the SOM, when compared with other colleges and campuses in the University system. At the SOM, promotion and tenure are separate processes, although they may occur concurrently. Furthermore, the standards for awarding tenure are higher in the SOM than elsewhere in the University system, and tenure awards are now infrequent at the SOM. For example, during the past three years (2002-2005), the School's Faculty Promotions Committee (FPC) approved 243 promotions to Associate professor or Professor. During this period there were only 39 applications for tenure; of these, 33 (85%) were approved. Currently (July, 2005), there are 295 University-paid Associate Professor; of these, just 36 (12%) are tenured. Among the 306 Professors, 70% hold tenure.
According to the SOM Rules, "The award of tenure is reserved for those faculty members who are among the best in the field of scholarly endeavor [and who are] widely recognized as outstanding and influential teachers . . . Excellence [the highest SOM standard] in both scholarship and teaching must be present before an award of tenure is made." In teaching, the faculty member must have "an outstanding record of demonstrated success in mentoring students, residents, fellows or less experienced faculty members."
The SOM employs a broad definition of scholarship, modeled after the work of Boyer. The School recognizes the scholarship of discovery, application, integration and teaching. To be considered for tenure, the candidate must demonstrate "excellence in scholarship, which has led to a national and international reputation." According to the SOM Rules, scholarship (in the context of tenure) means "the long, systematic study of phenomena or events . . . accuracy and skill in investigation . . . [and] the demonstration of powers of critical analysis in the interpretation of such knowledge."
At the SOM, the tenure salary obligation is limited to the "base salary." In accordance with the "Base-Supplement-Incentive" salary plan approved by the Board of Regents in 1995, the base salary is adjusted each year such that it equals 70% of the average salary during the prior year of all basic science faculty holding the rank.
The University of Colorado recognizes four types of faculty appointments:
Learn more about appointment types: Rules of the School of Medicine.
School of Medicine faculty members, in consultation with their mentors and chairs, must decide whether to seek promotion in the Regular Series, the Clinical Practice Series or the Research Professor Series.
This is the appropriate promotion pathway for the majority of School of Medicine faculty members, including basic scientists, clinician-scientists and clinician-teachers. Faculty members seeking promotion to Associate Professor must demonstrate excellence in one of the principal areas of accomplishment: teaching, research or clinical practice. Importantly, at least meritorious achievements (the lower standard) must be demonstrated in scholarship, teaching and clinical work or service. “Scholarship” is broadly defined and includes not only research (the scholarship of “discovery”), but also the scholarship of teaching, application and integration. All faculty members in the Regular Series, who are employed by the University of Colorado, are eligible for tenure.
This is an academic pathway designed for faculty members who focus the majority of their time on direct patient care and other activities related to improving health care quality (e.g., outcomes, access to care, outcomes, efficiency, patient safety or the health of populations). There is an expectation of greater clinical effort, and excellence in clinical work (as measured against the School of Medicine Promotion Matrix) is required. There is no requirement for written scholarship, although clinically-relevant scholarship is encouraged. Teaching (at least at the meritorious level) is required. Because scholarship is not required, faculty members in the Clinical Practice Series are not eligible for tenure.
Instructors, Senior Instructors and Assistant Professors may not be assigned to the Clinical Practice Series; rather, they will hold titles in the Regular Series. Prior to undergoing departmental review for promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, all faculty members who are clinicians, in consultation with their chair and mentor(s), must choose whether to seek promotion to Associate Professor in the regular or clinical practice series. Normally, they will make this election after undergoing a comprehensive mid-term review, based on their interests and accomplishments in clinical work, service, teaching and scholarship.
Faculty members who devote almost all their time to grant-funded research, with limited teaching and service responsibilities, may be appointed and promoted in the Research Professor Series. Faculty members in the Research Professor Series will be supported by funds from external grants and contracts. They may be independently-funded or collaborative scientists, as defined in the Rules of the School of Medicine. Faculty in the research professor series are at-will employees and are not eligible for tenure, in accordance with Colorado law and University of Colorado policies.
For more information about each of the promotion series, see Section II.G of the Rules of the School of Medicine.
PRiSM, or Performance Reviews in the School of Medicine, is a new, unified online system for faculty performance evaluations developed by the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Information Technology project team. PRiSM will be utilized for all university-based School of Medicine faculty members, beginning in January 2014. It replaces DOMINO, FIDO and the Family Medicine department’s version of DOMINO.
PRiSM is designed to help faculty document activities and accomplishments while updating information pertinent to the annual performance evaluation. PRiSM complements—but does not replace—the face-to-face performance review meetings between each faculty member and his or her division (or section) head or department chair or their designee.
You can access PRiSM via this link: https://som.ucdenver.edu. This link will take you to the SOM Portal, where you will be able to click on a link to PRiSM to begin your performance review and view and upload prior-year evaluations.
The review period encompasses activities and accomplishments that were completed during the calendar year (January 1 through December 31).
The deadline for completion of faculty evaluations is May 1st. Faculty members must submit their performance reviews by this date. May 1 is also the deadline for division heads, department chairs and other supervisors to complete their reviews. (Note: Most departments will establish department-specific, earlier deadlines for submitting performance reviews in PRiSM.)
As in past years, information that was contained in the last year’s review can be been uploaded into your review this year. However, some of the data and free text fields have changed. Therefore, some information from your prior-year review may “map” to a different field or section of PRiSM. It will be easy to cut and paste information within the system.
Your faculty appointment information, including academic rank and other information, will now be updated automatically using information contained in the Faculty Information Management System (FIMS), which is a database maintained by the Office of Faculty Affairs. This will minimize data duplication and increase data integrity, while also alleviating the need for administrative staff to add or manage faculty data within PRiSM.
Medical student teaching evaluations from the Office of Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) will be automatically uploaded into your review in February. You will also have the ability to upload additional teaching evaluations (for example, from residents or graduate students).
PRiSM includes some additional features that should make your work easier. Formatting text using rich text features is included, so you can easily underline, add bullets or bold text. Sections in which you summarize your accomplishments in teaching, clinical work, research and scholarship and community service have been redesigned to match the language of the promotion matrix (making later dossier preparation easier). Near the end of the PRiSM document, you will have an opportunity to upload other documents, such as letters from peers, mentees or grateful patients. And you can now automatically upload your publications directly from Pub Med.
For more information regarding the enhancements that have been made to PRiSM, click here.
Open information sessions will be held weekly to provide hands-on support during the performance review cycle. Sessions are scheduled every Tuesday from 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. in the Health Sciences Library Teaching Lab 1. Ongoing support will also be available by contacting SOMSupport@ucdenver.edu.
The SOM Rules state that Assistant Professors must be reviewed for promotion by the beginning of their seventh year in rank. Faculty members who are not promoted by the end of their seventh year will be given one-year's notice that their appointment will not be renewed. However, there is built-in flexibility. First, the time-clock is routinely extended (pro-rated) to account for periods of part-time employment. And if the faculty member, department chair and Dean all concur, extensions may be granted; valid reasons include illness, family obligations, changes in career focus or assignments or other circumstances indicating that additional time is needed before promotion. Extensions may be granted for 1, 2 or 3 years.
There is one additional requirement: Before requesting an extension to the promotion time clock, the faculty member must undergo a formal evaluation of his or her academic progress and readiness for promotion. This review is typically conducted by the department's promotions committee.
Requests for extensions should come from the Department Chair and should include an explanation of why the additional time is needed and how the time will be used to prepare the faculty candidate for promotion.
The University of Colorado Denver recently modified the schedule for providing notice of non-reappointment. These policies apply to non-tenured faculty members who hold limited or indeterminate appointments
Effective July 1, 2012: One year’s notice of non-reappointment is required for full-time faculty members holding limited term appointments, after three or more years of service to the university. Three months’ notice is required for faculty members in their first year of service at the University, and six months’ notice is required for those in their second or third year of service. Written notice of a chair’s intent not to renew a faculty member’s appointment can be provided at any time.
Similar notice must be provided to faculty members holding indeterminate appointments if their appointment will not be continued for reasons other than availability of funding (as outlined in the letter-of-offer).
Faculty members holding at-will appointments may see their appointments end at any time, without notice (although certain constitutional protections apply). In addition, as outlined in the university policy, “as a courtesy, university administrators may provide advance notice of non-reappointment to at-will employees, when feasible.”
Faculty members holding limited or indeterminate appointments may not be re-assigned to at-will appointments unless proper notice is provided.
For more information about the differences among tenured, limited, indeterminate and at-will faculty appointments; see the FAQ question "What are the different types of faculty appointments?".
When a faculty member terminates from the University, 100% of earned vacation leave is paid out, up to the maximum accrual of 44 days. The rules for sick leave are different. Upon retirement, 25% of accumulated sick leave is paid out, up to a maximum payment of 30 days.
Other variables which may influence the maximum sick leave earned prior to May 1, 2001, are best dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Payment of leave accruals is made from a central pool of money maintained by the UCD campus. Please contact Human Resources for additional information.
If your career focuses on research, you must submit a well-organized Investigator’s Portfolio as part of your promotion or tenure dossier. This is the section of your dossier where you highlight and explain your most noteworthy research discoveries, insights or advances. This is also the place where you can explain your unique contributions to multi-disciplinary (“team”) research programs. Your curriculum vitae (CV), which lists your grants, publications and other scholarly activities, is not enough to judge research excellence.
According to the Promotion Rules of the School of Medicine (SOM), “basic, clinical, translational, educational and other forms of research are highly valued by the School of Medicine.” The SOM also recognizes the importance of “inter-disciplinary science and the need for collaboration among investigators.” (See additional information below regarding research “independence.”)
As outlined in the SOM promotion matrix, “excellence” in research may be demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific publications, competitive grant funding, a national or international reputation, and other evidence of originality, creativity and independence as an investigator. Naturally, when it comes to evaluating the quality of your scientific work, the information you provide in the Investigator’s Portfolio will be supplemented by letters written by outside experts and peers in your field of study.
Basic Elements of a Well-Organized Investigator’s Portfolio
The old paperbound Faculty Handbook is gone. The new University of Colorado Faculty Handbook is now available only electronically. The Handbook still includes various policies, laws and procedures that apply to, and are of interest to, faculty members, including:
The School of Medicine Base, Supplement and Incentive (BSI) Plan, which was initially approved by the Board of Regents in 1995, describes the salary components and salary adjustments for full-time faculty members (Instructors and above who are at least 50% FTE) in the School of Medicine. Full-time faculty members in all three series (Regular Faculty, Research Professor and Clinical Practice) participate in the BSI Salary Plan. Regent Policy 11C governs the policies and procedures pertaining to salary adjustments.
The University permits salary adjustments for full-time faculty members once a year. Consideration of salary increases occurs in the spring, for salary changes that will take effect on July 1st. In recent years, the Regents have granted an additional opportunity to adjust salaries, which occurs in the fall (for salary adjustments that will take effect on January 1st). January 1st salary adjustments are permitted only for schools and colleges that have adopted a BSI compensation plan. Outside of these two opportunities, full-time faculty salaries are generally not adjusted at any other time during the year.
Salaries for all faculty members must be approved by the Regents. All salary recommendations are submitted to the Regents through a process managed by the individual Schools and Colleges. A “salary pool” is provided for use during the process, and all adjustments are required to fall within that pool. Typically, individual faculty salaries are based on merit and cost-of-living factors and cannot increase more than a pre-determined “threshold,” unless the department and the School of Medicine provides written justification. For example, a large salary increase may be denied unless it can be justified based on a substantial change in the faculty member’s responsibilities, market demands or equity considerations.
Decreases in a faculty member’s salary are occasionally recommended, and these adjustments follow the same processes and timelines. According to BSI guidelines, a faculty member’s salary cannot be lowered more than 15% in a given year without approval by the Dean and Chancellor. Faculty salaries cannot generally be decreased below the pre-determined School of Medicine Base.
Stipends for specific administrative duties (e.g., program director, assistant dean, department vice-chair) are handled separately; they can be processed at any time during the year and require development of a new letter of offer outlining the additional administrative responsibilities.