School of Nursing: Appointment, Promotion, and Reappointment Committee (APR) Policies and Procedures

Title

School of Nursing: Appointment, Promotion, and Reappointment Committee (APR) Policies And Procedures

Introduction

Purpose

The Committee recommends fixed term faculty to the Dean for appointments, promotions, and reappointments.

Scope

Fixed term appointments include all fixed term professorial ranks in the School of Nursing and all title designations as outlined in the University Policy and Procedures.

Policy

1. Membership

The APR Committee is composed of Fixed-term faculty (Clinical or Research) to include: All Full Professors are lifetime members and participate on a rotating basis. Those with the longest tenure have the option to rotate off for a 2-year term should the committee be large enough to conduct its work without all the SON’s Full Professors participating. The rotation cycle is determined by the APR Chair in consultation with the members. In addition, two Associate Professors and two Assistant Professors will be elected to the group, with more being sought as the needs of the committee dictate.

Eligibility: All APR members must hold a full-time appointment (as defined by the School of Nursing) in the School of Nursing. Associate and Assistant members are elected to APR membership by the School’s Fixed Term faculty.

Term of Service of APR Members:

  • Fixed-term Full Professors: The term of service is continuous for Full Professors but operates on a 2-year, rotating basis (see above).
  • Fixed-term Associate and Assistant Professors are elected for a three-year term and may be re-elected for one additional successive term. After a gap, members who have served in the past are eligible to serve again. Occasionally, terms of service will be reduced to two years if the terms within the membership need to be staggered.

Those division heads who are responsible for faculty supervision of the promotion process are ex-officio members of APR. They do not vote on any business conducted by the APR Committee.

The Dean and Executive Senior Academic Associate Dean of the School of Nursing are ex-officio, nonvoting members and may attend all APR meetings in the role of observers.

2. Committee Chair and Chair-Elect

The APR Chair is elected by the committee from the Full Professor membership of the Committee.

Eligibility for the Chair role is limited to Full fixed-term professors who have served previously on the committee.

  • The two-year term usually begins July 1 and ends June 30.
  • If a Chair is unable to fulfill the duties of the office within their term, the APR Committee will elect another chair from the Full Professor APR members.
  • The Chair oversees the work of the APR Committee and mentors the Chair-Elect.
  • The Chair may serve a second, consecutive 2-year term. After stepping down, another term could be served in the future.
  • Suggested rotation pattern for the Chair and Chair-elect:
    • In the beginning of the APR Chair’s second year in office, (if they are not interested in, or are ineligible to run for another term), a chair-elect is chosen (from the full professor members) by the committee and serves as an orientee for the year before assuming the Chair role (sometimes, in unusual circumstances, the chair-elect, may serve two years before assuming the chair role). The immediate-past-chair serves for one year in an advisory role to new Chair.

3. Vacancies

If an Assistant or Associate Professor serving on the APR Committee is promoted, resigns from the committee or from the SON, they will be replaced by another elected Assistant or Associate Professor, usually in the same semester in which the vacancy occurs. The APR Chair will solicit a call to all fixed term faculty asking for volunteers to serve in the needed position. If there are more candidates than there are open positions, a ballot will then be distributed to all fixed term faculty, for vote.

4. Committee Meetings

  • The APR Committee will meet as often as necessary to complete the work of the committee. This work includes the timely promotion review of fixed term faculty candidates. Generally, the committee meets four times a semester.
  • All proceedings and review documents (materials, portfolios) of APR Committee meetings are confidential. All members are bound by the University expectation to keep in confidence all candidate information revealed to them as part of their role on the committee.
  • Members of the committee who themselves are seeking promotion will not have access to their own review materials and will not be made aware of the committee members who have been assigned as their primary and secondary reviewers.
  • The APR Chair or designee should communicate agenda topics to all APR Committee members, ideally one week prior to each meeting.
  • The agenda will list Committee business and will indicate materials to be reviewed.
  • All meeting materials for review by Committee members will be uploaded to an electronic, shared location to which all members have access. In general, materials will be available at least one week prior to each meeting.
  • APR members are expected to attend all APR Committee meetings and will notify the APR Chair at least 24 hours in advance if they are unable to attend. All members eligible to vote on a candidate’s promotion must be present for the entirety of the committee’s discussion of that candidate in order to exercise their right to vote. A vote by proxy is not permitted.
  • A quorum of APR Committee members is required to be present in order for the Committee to act on any business that requires a vote.
  • The APR Committee's quorum consists of one more than one-half of the voting members. If voting for promotion, the quorum must be reached by counting only those members at or above the rank that the candidate seeks.

5. Role of Division Heads at APR Committee Meetings

Division heads may attend, and participate in, APR meetings as ex officio members without voting privileges. An exception to this rule exists if a division head is a fixed term, full professor, in which case, they retain all voting privileges for the promotion of candidates for whom they do not provide immediately supervision. The division heads' primary purpose in attending APR committee meetings is to better understand APR policies, and, procedures, guidelines, and appointment/promotion/reappointment decisions so that they can more effectively advise and mentor their respective division faculty.

Guidelines:

  1. Division heads have access to all meeting materials; this includes access to faculty portfolios at or below the rank of the division head, as well as access to the portfolios of faculty in their division.
  2. When invited, division heads may participate in some discussions around general issues related to APR.
  3. Division heads who are not standing members of the committee may participate in discussions regarding faculty candidates in their division who are being reviewed and may be offered opportunities to clarify dossier information as directed by the APR chair.
  4. Division heads may participate in discussions regarding adjunct faculty appointments.
  5. If a division head is an APR committee member, they are ineligible to vote on faculty matters related to their division or department.

6. Voting

Eligibility of APR Committee Members to Vote on a Faculty Appointment or Promotion

The APR Committee operates from the University’s principle of “just scrutiny” where a candidate’s readiness for promotion is fairly and critically examined. Voting on promotions requires that eligible APR members be engaged in, and present for, the complete discussion of the candidate.

Only APR Committee members whose rank is equal to or higher than the rank to which a candidate is seeking appointment or promotion will:

  • Serve as primary or secondary reviewers.
  • Have access to the faculty's portfolio.
  • Be present for the entirety of a candidate’s formal promotion review, discussion, and vote.

If a real or perceived COI conflict of interest (COI) exists between the APR committee member who has been assigned as a primary or secondary reviewer and the promotion candidate, the assigned APR reviewer will request re-assignment to a different candidate.

If any APR member has a significant COI with a candidate being considered for promotion, then it is incumbent on that member to discuss this with the APR Chair and, if necessary, recuse themselves from the candidate's review process, including the discussion and vote. In some cases, this recusal may include being absent from the portion of the APR meeting when that candidate is reviewed.

APR members who are below the rank of the candidate being reviewed will not have access to the review proceedings or review materials, including the outcome of the vote, and will not attend or participate in discussion of the candidate.

When an internal/current member of the APR Committee is being reviewed, that Committee member will not be granted access to any materials that reflect the review proceedings, including the outcome of the vote.

All members of APR may review and vote on recommendation of appointment and reappointment of adjunct faculty regardless of rank.

7. Process of APR Appointment, and Promotion Reviews

a. Role of Division Heads in Developing Promotion Portfolio in the Review Process

The division head plays a key role in mentoring faculty in the faculty’s academic growth and advancement. Through annual reviews and other meetings as needed, division heads advise faculty on their career development, readiness for promotion, and on the promotion process itself and should refer to the Standard for Preparing a Promotion Portfolio for Fixed Term Faculty as a guide. Division heads work closely with faculty as faculty develop their promotion portfolios, and faculty are expected to consult regularly with their division head as they develop their promotion materials. In order to demonstrate sustained performance at their rank, it is generally recommended that a faculty member serves at least five years in rank before seeking promotion and, at the time of seeking promotion, be operating in a manner consistent with the rank being sought. However, while five years in rank is recommended, there is no specific time-in-rank requirement between promotions/appointments.

Other specific responsibilities of the division heads include:

For Promotion

  • Solicitation of peer teaching evaluations and ensuring they are completed, submitted, and included in the portfolio.
  • Composing and submitting a formal letter of review, addressed to the APR Chair, which is included in the candidate’s portfolio, and written after reviewing all materials, excluding external letters of review.

Communication

  • Communicating to the candidate, the outcome of APR review process after the dean has reviewed APR’s recommendation. Please note: It is customary for notification to occur in the latter half of spring semester, usually mid-May.

b. Process for Initial Appointments and Reviews

  • Division Heads may hire faculty for initial rank of instructor or assistant professor one-year appointments and temporary appointments (per leadership guidelines) without APR review.
  • All initial appointments at the rank of Associate Professor and Professor do require APR committee participation.
  • The process is as follows:
    • The Division Head collaborates with the Dean and APR Chair to discuss candidates who may meet requirements for rank at Associate or higher at time of interview. Those candidates will be presented by administration to the APR Chair who, with 2 additional members of the APR committee at or above the rank the candidate seeks (and selected by the APR Chair), will review the candidate’s application materials against the APR rank criteria, vote on the candidate’s readiness, and make a recommendation. The APR Chair will communicate with the dean. No formal written review of the candidate will be produced by any member of the 3-person APR sub-committee. The message to the dean is simply a report of the sub-committee’s discussion and the outcome of the sub-committee’s vote. As always, the dean may act in concert with, or not, the sub-committee’s recommendation.

c. Annual Steps of the Promotion Process

In May of each year the division heads put forward to the APR Chair, names of faculty who they consider candidates for promotion. The list is discussed, and the APR Chair develops a schedule for APR review for the upcoming academic year.

The APR Chair then assigns a timeline to the candidates and assigns APR committee members as primary and secondary reviewers.

The Human Resources representative or APR Chair sends a promotion timeline letter from the APR Chair to the faculty member-candidate providing information about the review process and outlining due dates for promotion materials. The candidate’s division head is copied on this message. The letter includes:

  • The date that the candidate’s APR portfolio is to be completed.
  • The date the candidate will be tentatively reviewed by the APR Committee.
  • List of materials to be submitted to the Committee based on the review criteria relevant to the rank the faculty member is seeking.
  • Timeline of the review process.

The master schedule of candidate reviews is developed by the APR Chair and shared with committee members.

d. Selection of APR Committee Members as Reviewers

  • Two APR Committee members are assigned as reviewers for each candidate by the APR Chair.
  • APR Committee reviewers will be at or above the rank being sought by a candidate for appointment or promotion.
  • A minimum of five full professors is needed for the recommending/voting process on any promotion to Professor.
  • APR may also request at any time additional tenured professor reviewers if warranted to provide expertise that may not be present on the APR committee.

8. Identification and Selection of External Reviewers of Faculty Seeking Promotion

a. The candidate for review or promotion will work with their respective division chair to compile a list of suitable external reviewers. This list is submitted by the division head to the HR representative for posting to the electronic APR site. (see also criteria for external reviewers as published in Section 5 of the APR Standard for Preparing a Promotion Portfolio for Fixed Term Faculty.)

Note: *Candidates who are seeking promotion from Instructor to Assistant Professor are not reviewed externally and therefore do not need to submit names of external reviewers (ERs) to APR.

  • Candidates should identify at least eight external reviewers (ERs) at the rank commensurate with, or higher than, the rank they seek.
  • Suggested reviewers should be fixed term faculty at Research 1 universities or could be tenured faculty at a less research-intense institutions. Emeritus faculty are eligible for consideration as ERs, provided their retirements were within the last 5 years. In unusual circumstances, at the promotion candidate’s request, a potential reviewer who is tenured at a research-intensive university will be considered. The external reviewer should be similar in either content expertise, teaching or research method, or equivalent characteristic to be a suitable match for candidate’s area of excellence or competence and not personally familiar with the candidate. For each suggested reviewer, the candidate should provide a rationale for their choices.
  • An external reviewer is defined as one who works outside of the base unit (i.e., the School of Nursing), but may include faculty within or outside of the university. External reviewers are most often sought from outside institutions.
  • External reviewers should not have collaborated with the candidate (e.g., co-investigators on research, co-teachers, co-authors, mentor, or friend) however service together on committees, boards and commissions is not considered a threat to the objectivity of the external reviewer.
  • External reviewers will be asked to confirm a lack of COI before agreeing to conduct the review. Reviewers can be referred to the University’s Policy on Individual Conflicts of Interest if needed.
  • The APR Committee will consider the candidate’s reviewer suggestions but is not obligated to accept the candidate’s recommendations.

The APR committee’s primary and secondary reviewers will also generate a list of at least eight potential reviewers and include a brief description of and rationale for the potential reviewer’s selection.

  • Contact information for each of the proposed reviewers should be included on the recommendation list.
  • The APR Committee reviews and approves the final list of potential external reviewers. In some cases, the reviewer list is rank ordered to indicate a sequence the Chair will try to follow in soliciting ER participation.
  • If the list approved by APR is exhausted, and more external reviewers are needed, the APR Chair will use their discretion to identify additional external reviewers, by collaborating with the assigned APR reviewers to identify suitable individuals.
  • The School of Nursing’s human resource representative maintains an ongoing list of reviewers, their contact information, and when they were last used as a reviewer. APR committee members should try to refer to this list when selecting reviewers to avoid overutilization of specific individuals.

b. Contact and Coordination between APR Committee and the External Reviewers

The APR chair is responsible for contacting the reviewers from the list approved by APR Committee.

  • Once the reviewer agrees to conduct the review, the human resources representative (or the APR Chair, if necessary) submits to the external reviewer the candidate's portfolio to include the promotion essay, CV, 2 SON peer reviews of teaching, and products of scholarship, the timeline for completion of the review and a copy of the APR Standard for Preparing a Promotion Portfolio for Fixed Term Faculty.
  • The APR Chair reviews the completed external reviews to ensure all components are appropriately addressed.
  • The APR Chair has the discretion to request additional review letters if an external reviewer’s letter does not address the key components of promotion as outlined in the Standard. External reviewer’s letters will then be posted to the candidate's electronic portfolio by the HR representative for review by the Committee.

9. Contents of the Portfolio

  • Promotion candidates will only submit the materials outlined in the Standard for Preparing a Promotion Portfolio.
  • Accomplishments included on the CV should be actual achievements and not potential ones. Examples of ineligible achievements include: nominations for an award or finalist status for a position. Any manuscripts cited as evidence of scholarship must be either published, in press, or accepted for publication in order to be included on the CV or as scholarly examples. Articles submitted, but not yet reviewed, are not acceptable.
  • The APR Committee will not accept APR portfolio materials after the due date stated in the APR Committee letter to the candidate.
  • The candidate’s APR portfolio will be posted in a password protected APR folder and will only be accessible to the APR committee members at the desired rank or higher.
  • APR Committee members must keep all review materials confidential.
  • For those candidates who are seeking promotion from Instructor to Assistant Professor the portfolio can be streamlined in the following manner:
    • Essay (two pages that can incorporate bulleted lists) that speaks to how the candidate meets the requirements consistent with an Assistant Professor based on the "APR Specific Examples of Evidence to Support Appointments and Promotions" document.
    • Essay should include candidate’s aspirations for continued advancement of their scholarly work. However, if the candidate desires, they can, but are not required to, provide products of scholarship, student evaluation data and peer reviews of their teaching.

10. APR Review

a. Procedure

The APR committee primary and secondary reviewers will independently review the candidate’s portfolio and each of them will provide a separate, written recommendation to the APR Committee. The primary reviewer will write a formal letter addressed to the APR Chair with an evidence-based recommendation, citing the APR template and addressing each criterion, while the second reviewer will compose a written summary of evidence highlights, using the promotion criteria from the APR template. Guidelines for constructing these documents are posted to the APR TEAMS site.

  • All APR members at the rank or higher of the candidate will also review the complete portfolio. The committee will then vote on a recommendation for promotion of the candidate.
  • The Dean will review the faculty member's portfolio and the APR Committee’s recommendation and decide whether to accept or reject the recommendation and sign the APR Chair’s letter, indicating the Dean's decision.
  • If the Dean rejects the recommendation of the APR committee, the Dean will prepare a letter to the candidate with rationale.
  • The Dean will inform the Division Head and copy the APR Chair of the Dean's decision usually within two weeks following receipt of the APR Chair’s letter.
  • The Dean's office will provide a copy of all signed letters to the division head, human resources representative, and APR Chair. The division head will notify the candidate of the outcome and will provide the candidate with a copy of the signed letter (redacted to remove the names of reviewers and any information about the committee’s vote).
  • If desired by the candidate, the Division Head and APR chair will meet with the faculty member, provide a copy of the APR Chair’s letter and discuss the outcome of the review and provide any suggestions for continued career development. The faculty member may request to meet with the Dean to discuss the review process.

b. Appeals

  • If a faculty member desires to review any portion of their portfolio, the faculty member should contact the SON Human Resources Manager to facilitate an appointment with the Office of the University Counsel.
  • The faculty member has the right to contact the University's Faculty Grievance Committee or the Faculty Hearings Committee at any time during the APR review process.
  • Other information regarding grievance procedures and the university's Faculty Grievance Committee may be found in The Faculty Code of University Government.

Citation List

  1. APR Committee Meeting Minutes, August 2021
  2. Add Meeting minutes for Dec 2024 (vote on expedited review for external hires)
  3. APR meeting minutes Jan 2025
  4. APR meeting minutes Sep 2025

Related Requirements

External Regulations and Consequences

Unit Policies, Standards, and Procedures

Contact Information

Theresa Raphael Grimm, APR Chair

Important Dates

  • Revised: Approved by APR Committee 9/8/2025, 6/6/2022, 8/2021; 9/28/2018; 8/24/2018; Significantly revised and approved by faculty vote: 3/19/2018; 4/2017; 4/2012; 7/2008; 1/2008; 11/2007; 8/2007; 5/2007; 4/2007; 11/2006; 10/2006; 9/8/2006; 2/10/2006; 1/30/2006; 10/24/2005.
  • Origination Date: 09/26/2005
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