Updated Language for Referee Solicitations for Junior Faculty Tenure Decisions

Effective January 27, 2021, departments and schools should include the following language, approved by the Provost and Deans, for inclusion in solicitation letters to referees for junior faculty tenure decisions:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Stanford provided all untenured faculty with a one-year tenure clock extension. The university also regularly offers one-year extensions to new parents. These extensions reflect changed expectations about productivity: in the first case due to the unusual challenges of the global pandemic, and in the second case as a new parent. In writing your evaluation, we remind you to adjust your expectation of productivity per unit-time to reflect the presumption that a candidate’s capacity for research is significantly diminished during an extension year.