P&T Guidelines -- faculty are to be positive and courteous -- ?

[Golazo]

but there is no truly objective way of determining whether someone is doing great research.

But this can be done in a way that is a lot more objective than collegiality. For example, I have a forthcoming publication in a top 10 journal in my field. We can argue about if its number 7 or number 11 but it is clearly a good publication. There is nothing like this in collegiality. If I have four peer-reviewed publications, we can argue about the relative merit of them, but if I'm at a top R-1 and expected to produce 6-8 articles and a book, that's clearly not enough, unless the papers are all at the best outlets in my field, whereas at the 4-4 LAC, its very likely well over the bar even before an exploration of quality.

[darkstarrynight]

but there is no truly objective way of determining whether someone is doing great research.

But this can be done in a way that is a lot more objective than collegiality. For example, I have a forthcoming publication in a top 10 journal in my field. We can argue about if its number 7 or number 11 but it is clearly a good publication. There is nothing like this in collegiality. If I have four peer-reviewed publications, we can argue about the relative merit of them, but if I'm at a top R-1 and expected to produce 6-8 articles and a book, that's clearly not enough, unless the papers are all at the best outlets in my field, whereas at the 4-4 LAC, its very likely well over the bar even before an exploration of quality.

I am glad to know some R1s give expectations. No bylaws or mentors ever told me what numbers I needed in terms of scholarship for p&t. I hate that it is such a big mystery in many places.

As for citizenship and collegiality, my department has that as 5% of everyone's job load but it is not something the other departments in my college have. Thus, the college-wide decision making committee just ignores that - we do not submit that category for consideration (only teaching, research, and service are reviewed). Of course, collegiality/citizenship might be expressed through the departmental vote and statement from the chair, but otherwise that 5% for us involves showing up to meetings and posting office hours for students on our door. Since we rate everyone in our department on these categories, everyone gets "meets expectations" from me because my colleagues show up and do their job.

[fizzycist]

but there is no truly objective way of determining whether someone is doing great research.

But this can be done in a way that is a lot more objective than collegiality. For example, I have a forthcoming publication in a top 10 journal in my field. We can argue about if its number 7 or number 11 but it is clearly a good publication. There is nothing like this in collegiality. If I have four peer-reviewed publications, we can argue about the relative merit of them, but if I'm at a top R-1 and expected to produce 6-8 articles and a book, that's clearly not enough, unless the papers are all at the best outlets in my field, whereas at the 4-4 LAC, its very likely well over the bar even before an exploration of quality.

I am glad to know some R1s give expectations. No bylaws or mentors ever told me what numbers I needed in terms of scholarship for p&t. I hate that it is such a big mystery in many places.

rest assured: there are no specific metrics for research productivity in any of the Science/Engineering Depts at my R1 uni. When probed, senior ppl justify this as "we need to keep it necessarily vague so we can adapt to the sub-field". In practice what I have observed is that ppl largely defer to the opinions of the most influential ppl in the relevant sub-field within the Dept. And then they go with their gut about what is "good enough" research/teaching/service.

In other words, the system is ripe for bias and discrimination, and I have no doubt it occurs. But fortunately tenure denial is rare here and goes through multiple stages of review and appeal so that gross errors leading to tenure denial are very rare.

I struggle to see how weeding out the jerks wouldn't be subject to the same scrutiny and only conservatively applied to the worst cases.

And let's face it, the systems we have now in academia have not resulted in a demographically-representative faculty nor have they managed to exclude sociopaths and harassers. A non-jerk tenure criterion seems unlikely to significantly change the former but could have an impact on the latter.