Institutions across the country are increasingly establishing or expanding post-tenure review mechanisms, often requiring tenured faculty to undergo comprehensive cyclical audits of their scholarship, teaching evaluations, and service allocations beyond the standard annual activity report. As these policies evolve from purely developmental check-ins toward high-stakes retention and compensation benchmarks, mid-career scholars face new challenges in sustaining ambitious, long-range research projects that may take years to yield major publications or external funding.
For those who have recently navigated post-tenure reviews or are sitting on evaluation committees establishing these standards, what specific strategies have helped document the impact of long-term, non-linear scholarly initiatives without compromising the academic risk-taking that tenure was originally designed to protect?
