MA3 Challenge awards grants to 6 universities to modernize promotion and tenure processes: Here’s the question of the day.

Why it matters:

It has been widely argued that universities should update promotion and tenure systems to better value activities that advance access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and especially strengthen public engagement with science (see Aurbach et al., 2023). But implementation has been slow and uneven. A new funding initiative is testing whether that can change.

What we know:

Six universities have each received $250,000 through the Modernizing Academic Appointment & Advancement (MA3) Challenge, led by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) with partners at the Aspen Institute Science and Society Program and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. They will implement reforms to “faculty hiring, evaluation, promotion, and tenure systems” and form a “community of practice” to share the lessons learned.

About the MA3 Awardees:

• Columbia Climate School will “modernize faculty review, promotion, and tenure” to better value “interdisciplinary climate scholarship, community partnerships, policy engagement, and public communication,” supported by new criteria, dossier templates, and training.
• Michigan State University will “integrate publicly impactful scholarship, innovation, engagement, and entrepreneurship into promotion and tenure systems,” using new guidance, rubrics, tools, and pilot programs across colleges.
• Philander Smith University will “build a sustainable culture of open science” by embedding “transparent and inclusive research practices into career advancement and annual review,” alongside incentives, mini-grants, and professional development.
• Stanford Medicine will advance “evidence-to-action research,” revising appointment and promotion processes to better recognize work that “translates knowledge into policy and practice,” while building infrastructure to support dissemination and impact.
• University of California, Santa Cruz will develop guidelines to evaluate “open science, open source software, science communication, and graduate mentoring” in merit and promotion, supported by faculty working groups and campus-wide engagement.
• University of Northern Colorado will revise evaluation criteria to recognize “High-Impact Practices such as interdisciplinary collaboration, open educational resources, community engagement, and student-centered teaching,” with department-level pilots and toolkits.

Keep in mind:

These are distributed, real-world experiments across institutions, each testing different approaches to changing academic incentive systems in practice. Rather than a single, centralized reform, this initiative is generating multiple, context-specific tests that may reveal what works, for whom, and under what conditions.

Question of the Day:

The initiative emphasizes that grantees will be part of a community of practice to “exchange experiences, troubleshoot challenges, and share lessons learned.” A related recommendation in the 2023 Association of Public and Land-grant Universities report by Aurbach et al. calls for institutions to “establish stronger reporting structures… [as] tracking and reporting on outcomes and impacts are powerful mechanisms” for evaluating progress and incentivizing change (Recommendation 4, p. 7). At the same time, the report notes that institutional change is inherently local and context-dependent.

With that in mind, this central question emerges for me: what data infrastructures and reporting systems will be used to systematically capture and synthesize the lessons generated across grantees, and which categories of insight—processes, outcomes, or models of practice—are expected to be transferable or generalizable beyond individual departments and institutions?

Fanuel Muindi

Fanuel Muindi is a former neuroscientist turned civic science ethnographer. He is a professor of the practice in the Department of Communication Studies within the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, where he leads the Civic Science Media Lab. Dr. Muindi received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and PhD in Organismal Biology from Morehouse College and Stanford University, respectively. He completed his postdoctoral training at MIT.