Is it common to seek outside letters for the third-year renewal of an assistant professor?

Question

I often write promotion letters for faculty going up for tenure or promotion to full professor. For those who are unaware, this involves reviewing a candidate's entire portfolio including research statement, publications, teaching, funding, etc., and cannot really be done properly without reading several of the candidate's papers.

Recently I received a request of a new sort: I was asked to go through the entire process associated with a tenure letter, simply for a third-year review of a tenure track assistant professor at another institution. (If it matters, the request is from a good R1 school, but not a super-elite ivy or equivalent.)

To me this seems a terrible practice. It is already a ridiculous waste of time that some schools ask for 15 or more promotion letters. Figure that letter each takes a minimum of one day for a well-established senior professor to write. Could the marginal information provided by the 15th or even the 10th letter possibly be worth that much of the community's time? We are already suffocating under our peer review obligations; adding the huge additional burden of writing promotion letters for routine reappointments strikes me as ridiculous. Yet I'm loathe to refuse, lest I hurt the candidate.

Is this a practice that others are seeing in their fields, or is this some dean's stupid idea that is being forced upon a single unfortunate college?

Edit: If this is uncommon, we should nip in the bud. Bureaucracy, like entropy, is monotone increasing in this particular universe. Thoughts on what I should do would also be appreciated, though I suppose that's technically a separate question.

Answer 1

As in my comment, I've not heard of any such thing in mathematics, ... but hadn't really been worrying about it.

It appears a gross inflation of things, yes, and wasteful, and so on, as in other comments.

Yes, I fear a refusal could be used against the candidate, by anyone interested in pushing against them, despite the problems with this general direction.

It occurs to me that this grossly inflated situation could be occurring due to some political infighting at that other institution, so that some faction hostile to the candidate is "playing chicken" with the supporters of the candidate, and/or with the candidate themself. This is already a bad thing. So, yes, anyone's refusal to write a letter could be aggressively interpreted against the candidate (despite the usual convention that it is possible, in principle, to refuse to write a letter, due to other commitments... which could in an adversarial situation be aggressively re-interpreted...)

Is it possible to get some side-channel information from the other institution and department, without compromising yourself or the candidate? If so, a "what the heck is going on?" is irresistible to me. If you have no side channel available, I think you might have been "succesfully" extorted into writing a letter.

Sufficiently long after the letter, some systematic push-back should be harmless to the candidate, but would be informative, ...

Answer 2

I don't know whether it is common, but a version of it, a 4th-year review, exists (determined by department pattern of administration) at Ohio State, and it's actually useful. It gives the candidate a good feel for what the actual tenure review will be like the next year, and alerts them to problems that can be remedied. Letter writers are usually asked to update their letter for the real review (though not if they wrote a crappy letter for the 4th year review). Similar letter-inflation exists in Alaska, Vanderbilt.

I take the point that this is a form of bureaucracy- and service-inflation, but it actually gives reviewers a longer time to read the papers, in case they are not familiar with the candidate's work. The problem-detecting function is quite valuable, I would say.

Answer 3

If this is a request from outside your university, tell them no, and tell them why. If this is from inside your university, get with your department chair and go to the dean in question. You don't want to seem uncollegial, and you don't want to be seen as refusing to write a letter for this specific person, but I think you're right to want to cut this off now.

Answer 4

I have heard about this in math, and in fact believe that my department does it too (though only a small number of letters, if I do recall correctly).

Now, here's my (probably unpopular) opinion on letters in general. In applied mathematics, it is not usually very difficult to judge whether a candidate is good or bad just by looking at the basics: publications (where, how many, how often they have been cited), grant funding, impact in general. Realistically, I cannot name a case where letters were really necessary to make the case for or against a candidate. Certainly not within a department, but probably also not with the higher ups -- they, too, will be able to identify the strong and weak candidates just from their CV.

On the other hand, candidates in pure math oftentimes have relatively few publications and fewer external funds. Publications are also often not very well cited. All of this may come with the turf -- or maybe it doesn't and it really speaks to the candidates, I don't know. In any case, in such cases it sure helps to bring letters from Fields Medalists or similar luminaries to the table, in order to push a candidate beyond the finish line. Within the department such letters are hard to argue against. For the higher ups, they may sound reassuring.

The thing I find annoying that in pure math the letters are almost uniformly positive and do, in fact, not really help distinguish between candidates -- I could not name a case where the letters really helped me identify who really is very good and who is just ok (which, I will admit, is often good enough in my view to get tenure). All of these letters praise the impact of the work (which isn't backed up by citation counts), the fact that they have proved some deep conjecture (of which of course there are many), and that the mathematics is beautiful. The candidate is also invariably among the best -- at least among those between 35 and 45 working on cohomologies over fiber bundles of the projective space F_2/Z endowed with a nonstandard topology (i.e., the subfield is so small that there are likely only a handful of people in this age group anyway). These are all things I can't judge as an outsider to the field -- I simply have to believe it, and trust my colleagues who understand the issues better. In the end, however, I find that many of these letters are slightly dishonest in that they never really reveal how good a candidate really is because they are so uniformly outstanding (a sentiment I know many of my more applied colleagues share).

So the purpose of these letters in math, and their number, seems to me to be more as additional ammunition to prop up cases that by themselves (i.e., by just looking at the CV) do not look all that impressive. This propping up will likely help both within the department and upstairs: bring enough letters that all sound very good without really making a distinction, and the candidate's file looks pretty positive.

So there certainly is room for improving the process in our discipline. (And no, I'm not up for having this fight.)