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Dean

Lead faculty hiring and tenure/promotion decisions

Enhances◐ 1–3 years

What You Do Today

Authorize faculty positions, guide search processes, and make or recommend tenure and promotion decisions. These are career-defining decisions for faculty and shape the college for decades.

AI That Applies

AI analyzes candidate research impact, teaching effectiveness data, and peer comparison metrics. Provides data to inform tenure discussions without replacing faculty judgment.

Technologies

How It Works

The system ingests candidate research impact as its primary data source. The processing layer applies the appropriate analytical models to the structured data, generating scored outputs that surface the most actionable insights. The output — data to inform tenure discussions without replacing faculty judgment — surfaces in the existing workflow where the practitioner can review and act on it.

What Changes

Tenure review data becomes more comprehensive and comparative. You have better evidence to support difficult decisions.

What Stays

Making tenure decisions — betting on a scholar's future trajectory, weighing different forms of excellence, and defending decisions to disappointed candidates — requires academic wisdom.

What To Do Next

This section won't tell you what your numbers should be. It will show you how to find them yourself. Every instruction below produces a real, verifiable result in your organization. No benchmarks, no projections — just the steps to build your own evidence.

1

Establish Your Baseline

Know where you are before you move

Before adopting AI tools for lead faculty hiring and tenure/promotion decisions, understand your current state.

Map your current process: Document how lead faculty hiring and tenure/promotion decisions works today — who does what, how long it takes, where the bottlenecks are. You need this baseline to measure improvement.
Identify the judgment points: Making tenure decisions — betting on a scholar's future trajectory, weighing different forms of excellence, and defending decisions to disappointed candidates — requires academic wisdom. These are the boundaries AI won't cross.
Assess your data readiness: AI tools for this area need data to work. Check whether your organization has the historical data, integrations, and data quality to support faculty activity systems tools.

Without a baseline, you can't measure whether AI actually improved anything. You'll adopt tools without knowing if they're working.

2

Define Your Measures

What to track and how to calculate it

Time per cycle

How to calculate

Measure how long lead faculty hiring and tenure/promotion decisions takes end-to-end today, then after AI adoption.

Why it matters

The most visible improvement is speed. If AI doesn't save time, question whether it's adding value.

Quality of output

How to calculate

Track error rates, rework frequency, or stakeholder satisfaction scores before and after.

Why it matters

Speed without quality is just faster mistakes. Measure both.

When to check: Check after 30 days of consistent use, then quarterly.
The commitment: Give new tools at least 30 days before judging. The first week is always awkward.
What NOT to measure: Don't measure AI adoption rate as a KPI. Adoption follows value — if the tool helps, people use it.
3

Start These Conversations

Who to talk to and what to ask

your department chair or principal

What's our time-to-fill for the roles that are hardest to source, and where in the funnel do we lose candidates?

They influence which ed-tech tools get approved and funded

your instructional technologist

How would we validate that an AI screening tool isn't introducing bias we can't see?

They support the tech stack and can show you capabilities you don't know exist

4

Check Your Prerequisites

Confirm readiness before you invest

Check items as you confirm them.