Beyond peer review: how flexible promotion and tenure guidelines benefit all faculty

When I initially interviewed for my current position, my first question to the Director was “can a practicing designer with no art background get tenure in this School?” I was relieved and delighted when the Director handed me a program-specific addendum to the school’s P&T document that stated that client-based design work was a valid part of designers’ P&T dossiers. The faculty in illustration, graphic, interior, and fabric design had created this document a few years earlier expressly to ensure that designers’ commercially-focused efforts received equal weight in the promotion and tenure process as studio art faculty’s commissions, sales, and gallery representations. More recently, in 2015, when the provost required us to update, streamline, harmonize, and—implicitly—increase the rigor of our unit-specific promotion and tenure guidelines, we had an opportunity to clarify what counted as acceptable and meritorious “research” in art and design, and to reconsider when it was (and was not) reasonable to demand traditional forms of peer review. We chose to state in our P&T documents that projects that are “solicited or commissioned” equate to those that are juried, curated, or peer-reviewed at “venues that are recognized within the discipline.” This revision benefits not only design faculty, but also studio arts and crafts faculty: it allows us to venture beyond traditional galleries and museums, and beyond traditional peer review, to pursue work that is collaborative, socially- and community-engaged, interdisciplinary, distributed digitally, ephemeral, and/or licensed for profit.