June 30, 2023
TO:
DEANS
DEPARTMENT CHAIRS
Updated and Consolidated Guidance on External Letters
Dear Colleagues:
Guidance on external letters has appeared across a number of communications over the past few years. This memo articulates new expectations for inclusion of letters from other UC campuses and provides consolidated guidance that has previously appeared in the 2022 CAP/EVC Memo, the 2021 CAP/EVC Memo, and the August 29, 2019 Memo on Campus Expectations for Solicited External Letters in Major Advancement Actions.
Letters from leading experts in the discipline remain one of the key means of ensuring that our academic personnel review process is rigorous and effective in providing a valuable assessment of our faculty. Campus policy on external letters is provided in CAPM 401.220 Instructions for Soliciting Letters. External letters are required for tenure, promotion to full, initial advancement above scale, appointment with tenure, and career equity reviews. External letters are not to be solicited for Step 6 reviews unless the review also includes a career equity review.
I would like to reinforce several expectations:
- Files with external letters should normally contain at least one letter from a faculty member at another UC campus. For a career equity review, there should generally be at least two letters from faculty at other UC campuses.
- The department should solicit external reviewers drawn from the candidate’s list of preferred individuals alongside the department’s own list of qualified individuals. (Appointment files do not require solicitation of candidate-suggested letters, see below.)
- The professional and/or personal relationship of letter-writers to the candidate must be clearly and accurately documented by the department and included in the file (confidential from the candidate). If no relationship is known, this detail should also be noted, so it is clear that this factor was considered by the department.
- It is essential that at least four of the external letters are from individuals independent of the candidate and with no close professional relationship. Department-suggested solicited letters should generally be from fully independent letter writers.
- Dissertation advisors, post-doc advisors, and/or ongoing co-PIs are not considered independent reviewers, and it is recommended that they not be asked to provide letters. If included, these letters should receive less weight in the assessment.
- Co-authors and collaborators may be acceptable, and if used must be a minority of letter-writers.
- If co-PIs, collaborators, and co-authors are from activities and connections four to five years or more in the past, they may be considered more distant from the candidate, with letters weighted more heavily than those from ongoing relationships.
- As a faculty member advances through the ranks, we expect the department and the candidate to increasingly rely on experts in the candidate’s fields of study and less, if at all, on collaborators, advisors, and mentors.
- Returning to the same letter-writers solicited for a candidate’s previous major action is permissible, provided this set of letter-writers constitutes a minority for the later major action and the later major action occurs at least 4 years after the previous major action.
- External reviewers should also be at a rank comparable to or higher than the candidate and the promotion rank under consideration; from academic or research institutions; and understand the qualifications for advancement in the professorial ranks (e.g. only full professors should be asked to write letters for promotions to full professor and merit to Above Scale). Reviewers from academic institutions should be tenured. The proviso about at a rank comparable to or higher than the candidate does not apply to merit to Above Scale.
- Departments should explain deviations from the expectations outlined above in their list of letter-writers.
- There is no set number of letters required by policy; 5-6 letters is a reasonable range for a typical ladder faculty review. Analytical letters, relying on evidence, from leaders in the discipline, are the most effective. As not all faculty who agree to write a letter may actually return a letter in time, it may be helpful to solicit additional letters.
- When expertise is needed from beyond traditional academic sources, for example in some public-facing scholarship, letters from non-academic sources should be in addition to the letters described above.
- For an appointment with tenure or security of employment, include a minimum of 3 department-suggested, independent letters, or however many letters are needed to make the case for appointment at the recommended rank, step, and salary. If the applicant is coming from an open search that included letters, those must be added to the appointment file. When there are no letters, either because the search did not require them or because there is a search waiver, there should be at least 3 department-suggested letters. Candidate suggestions for letters are never required for an appointment file.
- For a review of a teaching professor, a minimum of three letters is expected, of which at least one should be from the list of the candidate’s suggestions and two from the list of departmental suggestions. All three of these should be relatively independent reviewers. Where a non-independent letter is critical, for instance for a candidate who held a teaching position prior to coming to UCSC and would like a letter from their former institution, this can be in addition to the three independent letters. Letter writers should be selected for their ability to evaluate the candidate’s scholarly or professional activity and teaching portfolio. Because of the emphasis on teaching, writers may be at teaching-intensive institutions. One possible pool of letter writers includes teaching faculty at other UC campuses. Another pool are experts in the pedagogy of a particular field, g., those teaching in fields such as engineering or life sciences pedagogy. When a candidate has an active disciplinary research portfolio, one of the letters could be focused on the research, while the others should be more focused on teaching and pedagogical innovation.
Sample solicitation letters are posted online at https://apo.ucsc.edu/policy/capm/sample-solicitation-letters.html and also include a sample for Teaching Professor promotion cases. All solicitation templates have been updated to include language asking reviewers to acknowledge the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Please make sure your department is using the latest templates. These templates can be modified when there is a specific focus in the faculty member’s portfolio, such as community-engaged scholarship.
Lastly, please review the UC’s policy on confidentiality of letter-writers. Letters should be properly redacted for the candidate, and any reference to the external letters should rely on alpha-code in the department letter. There is no need to indicate the prominence of each reviewer in the department letter, as the confidential list of letter writers provided by the department should already contain this information.
Your role as department chair or dean is essential to maintaining the standards of excellence at our campus and the University of California. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to working with you this coming academic year.
Sincerely,
Lori Kletzer
Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor
cc:
Chancellor Larive
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Lee
Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Personnel McClintock
Committee on Academic Personnel
Department Managers
Divisional Academic Personnel Coordinators
