Addressing Challenges in Teaching-Track Faculty Promotion

Interest in teaching-track faculty positions has been steadily increasing as enrollments in computer science degree programs continue to trend upward. While departments have welcomed these new teaching-track faculty members, senior faculty, department chairs, and university committees often struggle with how to best evaluate these faculty members during the promotion process. In our experience, some universities try to use a "watered-down" version of the tenure-track promotion standards with the intent of uniformity. Other universities have created whole new processes, which may be better at capturing the differences in teaching-track positions, but also can create a "second-class citizen" status for the teaching-track faculty members.