Rewarding Design Faculty for Designing

In a 2016 rewrite of our program’s promotion-and-tenure/merit document, the faculty in the Design Division of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin codified two principles that at the time represented significant breaks from departmental tradition. First, to ensure that departmental and college reviewers would reward full-time faculty who were well qualified to train BFA and MFA students, we recognized that both self-initiated and client-based forms of professional practice could be meritorious. Second, we explicitly acknowledged that the realities of professional design practice often precluded peer review, and declared that we would accept metrics regarding views, clicks, downloads, sales, star ratings, dollars earned, etc.—in addition to design awards, juried exhibitions, and peer-reviewed publications—as evidence of the quality and impact of faculty work. Although it is too early to say whether adopting these new principles has increased design faculty’s odds of achieving promotion, anecdotal evidence suggests that these principles have made it easier for review committees to assign high merit ratings to faculty with thriving professional practices.