چکیده (انگلیسی):

Promotion and tenure are very important to faculty members, especially to faculty that are
untenured or are in the lower academic ranks. Typically, universities grant promotion and tenure
(P & T) based on three components: research, teaching, and service. Research is usu ally relatively
well defined and is based on some combination of quality and quantity of presentations and
publications. Teaching effectiveness is typically evaluated using peer evaluations, student
evaluations, and the ratings of administrators. The third component, service, tends to be the least
well defined of the three. The reason for this may be that service is more difficult to quantify
because its components tend to be numerous and vague. This study investigates the perceived
importance, what is, of service in the P & T decisions and how important service should be in those
decisions. Email questionnaires were sent to faculty across the nation to obtain their perceptions
concerning the overall importance of service in the P & T process at their school. The survey is
designed to capture data regarding the perceived present importance of service in the promotion
and tenure process, and what the importance of service in the promotion and tenure process should
be. The results indicate that service is considered to be between “slightly” and “moderately”
important in obtaining promotion and tenure. Respondents indicated that service should be at least
“moderately important” in the P & T decision process. These differences between how important
service is and how important it should be are all statistically significant at the 1% level. Overall, the
results show that service is more important for the promotion to full professorship decision than it is
for the promotion to associate and granting of ten ure decisions. In addition, analyses show that how
important service is and how important it should be varies significantly with some of the
demographic characteristics of the respondents’ schools