2025–26 FASTAP Review Committee (ad hoc)
Committee charge
Yale’s FAS ladder faculty tenure standard reflects our aspiration that Yale should be the major research university that most values teaching, and that we attract faculty who are both excellent researchers and teachers. We require that candidates for tenure at Yale be “scholars who stand among the foremost leaders in the world in a broad field of knowledge…whose published work significantly extends the horizons of their discipline(s)” and who have “an ongoing and ambitious research agenda.” We also expect that candidates for tenure have “excellent teaching and engaged University and professional citizenship within and beyond a department or program.”
Yale’s FAS tenure system has been revised twice in recent years, in 2007 (“FASTAP 2007”) and most recently to the current system in 2016 (“FASTAP 2016”). These revisions made many important changes: clarifications to the tenure standard, the creation of a genuine tenure-track system, and adjustments to the total length of junior faculty contracts, leaves, time to review, and expectations and feedback in the mid-term AP review. Details of the current FASTAP 2016 system are available online. Because candidates hired under one system have the option to continue under that system, if they wish, the FAS faculty have in recent years come up for promotion under either FASTAP 2007 or FASTAP 2016.
In line with Yale’s practice of periodically reviewing major aspects of how we do things, the FAS Dean has appointed this faculty committee to conduct a review of how well the current FASTAP 2016 system is working and whether any adjustments are necessary. The committee, which has broad representation from across the FAS, and will be expected to consult widely with our faculty, will be asked to consider the following questions:
- How well is the current system working, in terms of the tenure standard, time to review, leaves, and the other most important aspects?
- Does the system reflect who we want to be as a faculty and a university?
- Can we learn lessons from our peers?
In considering these questions, the committee should recognize that any fundamental change to the key aspects of FASTAP 2016 would have significant costs—in particular the need to introduce a new FASTAP system to run concurrently with the previous system(s) for some time—as well as benefits.
Even if no major reform is necessary, the committee should consider whether the FAS could provide additional useful guidance, for professors coming up for promotion, for departments, and for the tenure and appointment committees and processes, on how to fulfil our expectations of world-class research, excellent teaching and engaged department, university and professional service.
The committee, chaired by Professor Christina S. Kraus, Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Classics, will be asked to consider these questions, and consult widely with the faculty, before submitting a report to the FAS in the spring.
Committee membership
Christina S. Kraus, Committee Chair | Thomas A. Thacher Professor of Classics
Sarbani Basu | William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Astronomy
Casey Dunn | Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Cajetan Iheka | Professor of English; Director, Whitney Humanities Center; Chair, Council on African Studies
Amit Khandelwal | Dong-Soo Hahn Professor of Economics and of Global Affairs
Tina Lu | Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures; Chair, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Hélène Landemore-Jelaca | Professor of Political Science and in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Scott Miller | Sterling Professor of Chemistry
Yihong Wu | James A. Attwood Professor of Statistics and Data Science; Chair, Department of Statistics and Data Science
Jason Zentz, Staff | Senior Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Administrative support for the committee: Daniel Oshiro, Senior Administrative Assistant 2, FAS Dean's Office