This webpage is a copy of an original pdf document that you can get upon request by emailing academic@tcnj.edu.
Table of Contents
- Alignment with Key Institutional Documents and Values
- Categories of Accepted Scholarly/Professional/Creative Work
- Criteria to Evaluate Different Types of Scholarly/Creative/Professional Work
- Scope, Quality, Importance and Coherence of Scholarly/Professional/Creative Program
- Authorship
The attached disciplinary standards have been reviewed and approved by the Committee on Faculty Affairs, the Council of Deans, and the Provost.
To avoid creating a moving target for candidates for reappointment, the disciplinary standards in effect during a faculty member’s first year of employment will be used for reappointment and tenure applications. Candidates for promotion will use the disciplinary standards in effect in the year in which they apply for promotion.
The Department of Art and Art History will next review its disciplinary standards in Academic Year 2026.
1. Alignment with Key Institutional Documents and Values
In outlining our disciplinary standards for scholarship with regard to tenure and promotion, we note the following:
The Art History’s Disciplinary Standards are consistent with the Mission of the College and the School of Arts and Communication, and the Department of Art & Art History. We recognize that the College is a primarily undergraduate institution with no targeted Masters programs in Art History. We expect that our faculty members are accomplished and engaged teacher-scholars.
The faculty of the Department of Art and Art History embrace the model of a teacher-scholar who is an artist, designer, or scholar engaged in defining new directions for critical inquiry, shaping the arts and culture in the contemporary world, and communicating their importance to the broader community. Therefore, TCNJ art historians create works of scholarship that cross disciplines, publish works in venues of various types, curate exhibitions, and write grant proposals. They engage in scholarly activity while also meeting the mission of the college to serve as mentors to students as they become young scholars. This latter role, by definition, engages the faculty member as a teacher who also guides the academic efforts of students in the classroom and the field.
2. Categories of Accepted Scholarly/Professional/Creative Work
The Art History program recognizes a range of modes of scholarship, such as the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of pedagogy. Faculty scholarly activity informs instruction and service, contributes to professional development, and advances knowledge and creative expression. Art History encourages and promotes interdisciplinary work and recognizes that there are diverse paths to successful outcomes in a professor’s scholarship/professional/creative work. The achievements of each candidate should connect with the discipline in which the faculty member is teaching, but consideration should always be given for new endeavors, connections between disciplines, or areas of research that support the mission of the College as a whole. A period of research to develop new ideas is understood to be necessary in creating new work. We note that the range of scholarly outcomes recognized as significant in the discipline of Art History include—but are not limited to—the following 8 categories:
- Publication of books by academic or respected professional presses
- Publication of peer-reviewed articles, either in print or on a professional online site, invited essays and book chapters in edited volumes or exhibition catalogues, or articles published in conference proceedings, published by academic or respected professional presses
- Publication of edited volumes of essays and pedagogical materials such as a textbook or equivalent either in print or on a professional online site
- Curation of exhibitions in museums or galleries with significant accompanying written materials
- Publication of book reviews and encyclopedia entries either in print or on a professional online site
- Presentation of papers at professional meetings
- Receipt of international, national, or regional grants or fellowships
- Participation in archaeological fieldwork or archival research or other research activity that requires significant travel
3. Criteria to Evaluate Different Types of Scholarly/Creative/Professional Work
For both tenure and promotion (at all levels) the Art History program expects that a candidate exhibits excellence in producing a sustained and respectable body of scholarship. At the same time, in evaluating the strength of a candidate’s body of scholarship, we heed the following consideration outlined in the College Art Association Standards for Retention and Tenure of Art Historians (http://www.collegeart.org/guidelines/tenure.html):
Art history is an international discipline and American art historians routinely publish their work on other continents and often in other languages….In addition, the College Art Association observes that many journals published outside the United States have selection procedures that do not match the American system of peer review. This is true of even the most highly regarded and prestigious journals and does not by itself suggest that the journal is any less rigorous or selective than its American counterparts. In the absence of homogeneous procedures it is impossible to rank journals for the purpose of assessing the quality of scholarship published in them. The Association recommends that judgments of the quality of a candidate’s publications should be based on the assessment of expert reviewers who have read the work and can compare it to the state of scholarship in the field to which it contributes.
Additionally, the Art History program recognizes the necessity of maintaining foreign language skills and also notes the considerable time and expense required to secure reproduction rights for images to be included in publications. These factors must be considered in evaluating an individual’s scholarly activity.
As candidates increase in seniority, we expect that their work will secure them professional recognition, which could be expressed in a variety of ways. For example, a candidate’s work might be addressed or cited in scholarly articles or books, be the subject of a professional symposium or a session at a national conference, be used in undergraduate or graduate courses at other institutions, or in other ways recognized within the discipline of Art History. We encourage faculty members to present their scholarship to students and engage students in the production and dissemination of that scholarship as appropriate in the context of the College’s value of teaching.
Candidates for tenure and promotion may demonstrate scholarly excellence in a number of different ways. We illustrate this below by means of scenarios using the 8 categories listed in section B of this document. The aim of these scenarios is to indicate possible (but not exclusive) ways in which a candidate might satisfy minimum scholarship expectations. The specific numbers of publications in these scenarios will vary depending on the publication venue, with fewer publications being required if they appear in leading journals or book publishers. We do not intend these scholarship guidelines to be inflexible or so unrealistic as to preclude hiring a newly-minted Ph.D. However, we do expect that candidates, whether or not they began their scholarly career at TCNJ, will pursue an active program of scholarship whose productivity while at TCNJ is commensurate with the expectations for tenure and promotion outlined below.
Candidates will meet annually with the Art and Art History Promotion and Reappointment Committee for progress reviews prior to the tenure decision. The standards are to be interpreted as normally applying from date of initial appointment at TCNJ, but may include work completed elsewhere during the years granted towards promotion at the initial hire. Ordinarily, this is instructional experience at an accredited institution of higher education. Whether such experience will be included and to what extent must be negotiated at the time of initial appointment in a mutually acceptable agreement in writing between the faculty member and The College of New Jersey.
Pre-Tenure Reappointment Guidelines (unless different agreement made at time of appointment):
1st – 2nd year: Actively engaged in scholarly work that will lead to successful completion of some items in categories #1-8, indicating a potential direction for professional research
3rd year: Show clear research direction leading toward successful completion of some items in categories #1-8; including presenting at a regional conference
4th year: Continued successful completion of some items in categories #1-8; including presenting at a regional or national conference
5th year: Continued successful completion of more items in categories #1-8; including presenting at a regional, national, or international conference
Scenarios for Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor:
Scenario A: One item from category #1 and at least four other items from the scholarly activities listed in categories #2-8
Scenario B: Four items from the scholarly activities listed in categories #2-4 and at least four other items from the scholarly activities listed in categories #2-8
Scenarios for Promotion to Professor (these are in addition to the items used to count toward tenure/promotion):
Scenario A: One item from category #1and at least three other items from the scholarly activities listed in categories #2-8
Scenario B: Three items from amongst the scholarly activities listed in categories #2-4 and at least three other items from the scholarly activities listed in categories #2-8
4. Scope, Quality, Importance and Cohesiveness of Scholarly/Creative/Professional Program
Prestigious peer-reviewed journals in art history are generally international in scope and readership, as are books published in the field; the scenarios delineated above reflect that fact. The expected productivity articulated in these scenarios is intended to provide guidelines, not hard and fast numbers, and reflect how we expect the quality and coherence of a candidate’s program of scholarship to mature over time. Art History values and looks favorably on student engagement in a candidate’s scholarly work (e.g., in the publication of articles, in conference presentations), but does not regard it as essential for tenure or promotion. Since we are a small program and teach undergraduates only, candidates for tenure and promotion should demonstrate a breadth of scholarly interests commensurate with the needs of the program and compatible with the contributions that the program makes to liberal learning. At the same time, candidates should demonstrate that they are engaged in coherent programs of scholarship that are of importance to the primary discipline in which they teach.
When discussing both scholarly development and research outcomes, each candidate should make efforts to indicate this context through as much specificity as possible. These descriptions should appear in the Professional Development Essay as well as the Standardized CV for evaluation by the PRC, Dean, College Promotions Committee, and Provost.
5. Authorship
Art History recognizes different kinds of authorship patterns (e.g., single-author vs. multiple-author) in scholarly projects. Candidates who wish to count multiple authored works toward tenure or promotion should clearly articulate the proportion of the work and/or sections of the work (in those cases when a faculty member wrote a particular section of the text in a larger co-authored piece) for which they are responsible. We recognize that collaborative efforts may sometimes require as much or more effort as single authored projects, and therefore, as long as the faculty member’s contribution is at least 25% of the total project work, that publication or project may count fully towards the various scenarios listed on page 3-4. If it is less than that, then it will count only partially towards one of the scenarios listed.
We recognize interdisciplinarity as art history combines many academic fields. We acknowledge that candidates may benefit from collaborating with colleagues from other disciplines. Candidates who wish to collaborate and conduct research that crosses traditional boundaries to create new knowledge should address their role and contributions in the scholarship.